(upbeat electronic music) >> Hello, and welcome to this Cube Conversation. My name is Dave Vellante, and we're here with Raj Gossain, who's the Chief Product Officer at Alation. We have some news. Hello, Raj. Thanks for coming on. >> Dave, it's great to be with you on theCUBE again. >> Yeah, good to see you. So, okay, we're going to talk about Alation Connected Sheets. You know, what is that? Talk to us about what it is, what it does, what it brings to customers. >> So we recognize, spreadsheets are really the dark matter of the data universe. And they're used by, over 78 million people use spreadsheets on a regular basis to drive critical business analysis. But there's a lot of challenges with spreadsheet usage. It brings risk to the organization. There's no visibility into where data comes from. And so we wanted to bring the power of the Alation Data Intelligence Platform to business users where they spend most of their time. And that's in a tool that they love, and that's spreadsheets. And so we're launching a brand new product next week called Alation Connected Sheets. >> So talk more about that. So yes, I get the lineage issue, like where did-- who did this, where's this data come from? I got different data. But talk more about the problems that Alation Connected Sheets solves, specifically for customers. >> Yeah, so the big challenges that we see when we talk to data organizations is how do they understand where the data came from? Is it trusted? Is it reusable? Should it be used in this format? And if you look at where most users that use spreadsheets get the data to power their spreadsheets, maybe it's a CSV download from a database, and then you have no idea where the data came from and where it's going. Or even worse, it's copying and pasting data from other spreadsheets. And so if you take those problems, how can we bring trusted data from governed sources like Snowflake and Redshift and put it in the hands of spreadsheet users, and give them the power and flexibility of Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel, but use trusted, reliable, well-governed data so that the data office feels great about them using spreadsheets and the end users, the business users, can take advantage of the tool that they know and love and do the work that they need to do quickly. >> So, okay. So I'm inferring from your comments there that you've got the ability to take data from you mentioned a couple, Snowflake and Redshift, other popular data warehouses. >> Yep. >> So talk about the key capabilities that you have, any specific features that we should know about. >> Sure. So, we built the leading data intelligence platform and the leading data catalog. And one of the benefits of that catalog is where you have visibility into all of the trusted, governed data sources that a data organization cares about, whether it's enterprise warehouses like Snowflake or Redshift, databases like SQL Server, Google BigQuery, what have you. So what we've done is we've brought the power of that data catalog directly into both Google Sheets as well as Excel. And the idea there is a user can log into their application, authenticate to Alation using the Alation Connected Sheets plugin into their spreadsheet tool, and browse those trusted data sets that are surfaced in the Alation catalog. They get trust signals, they get visibility into where this data came from. So lineage, insights, descriptive information. And then with one or two clicks, they can choose a data set from their warehouse, basically apply filtering conditions. So let's say I'm looking for customer data in Snowflake. I can find the right customer table. If I only want it for say, 2022, I can apply some filter conditions, I can reorder columns, push one button, authenticate to that data source. We want to maintain and ensure security is being applied, so only those users that have access to the warehouse can actually download that data set. But once they've authenticated, that data gets downloaded into their spreadsheet and there's a live connection that's maintained to that spreadsheet. So anytime you need to refresh the data, one push of a button and that data set gets updated. I can schedule the updates. So, you know, if I have to produce a report every Monday morning, I could have that data set refreshed at 8:00 a.m. Monday morning, or whatever schedule the user wants. And so it gives the user the data set they need, but the data organization, they can see where that data came from and they understand the lineage of the data as it is used in analysis in those spreadsheets themselves. >> So Raj, I know you're at the Super Bowl this week, a.k.a. re:Invent. >> Yes. >> And I know you got very close relationships with Snowflake, you've mentioned them a couple times with the data summit last spring. And I know you've done some integration work with those platforms and I'm sure others. So should we think of this as you're extending that sort of trust and governance out to spreadsheets, is that right? And stretching that out? >> That's exactly right. The way we talk about it is how do we bring data intelligence to business users in the tool that they know and love, which is the spreadsheet. And so, the data catalog and data intelligence platforms in general have really primarily been focused on servicing the needs of data users: data analysts, data scientists, data engineers. But you know, our vision, our aspiration at Alation is to really bring data intelligence to any business user. And so it's a big part of our strategy to make sure that the insights from the Alation catalog and platform can find their way into tools like Excel and Google Sheets. And so that's, what you highlighted, Dave, is exactly correct. We want to maximize the likelihood that a business user can have self-service access to trusted, governed data, do the work that they need to do, and ensure that the organization has a set of data assets in spreadsheets, frankly as opposed to liabilities, which is the way most data organizations look at spreadsheets is it's almost like a risk factor. We want to convert that risk, that liability, into an asset so that people can reuse data sets and they understand where this analysis is actually coming from. >> It's something that we've talked about for well over a decade on theCUBE. Is data an asset or is it a liability? >> Yeah, yeah. >> You obviously want to get value out of it, but if you can't share it, it's not trusted. So what people do is they lock it down and then that constricts value creation. >> Exactly. >> My understanding is this tech came out of an acquisition from a company, Kloudio. >> That's correct. >> Tell us about Kloudio. Why Kloudio? What's the fit there? >> Yeah, so Kloudio is a company, it's about five years old. We closed the acquisition of the company in March of this past year. And they had about 20 customers, 10 engineers. And we saw an opportunity with the spreadsheet tool that they'd created to really compliment our data intelligence strategy. And as you said, Dave, extend the value of data intelligence to business users. And so, we brought the Kloudio team into the fold. The thing I'm most excited about as a product guy, is within seven months of them joining Alation, we're actually shipping a brand new product that's going to drive revenue and meet the needs of tens of millions of users, ultimately. Like that's really our aspiration. And so, the tech they had was extremely modern. It reinforces the platform position that we have. You know, this microservices architecture that we've built Alation around, made it easy for that new team to come in and leverage existing APIs and capabilities from our platform and the tech that they brought into Alation to essentially connect the dots and deliver a brand new set of capabilities to an entirely new audience, to help our customers achieve their business objectives, which is really creating a data culture across their entire organization, inclusive of business users, not just, like I said, the data X users that are already taking advantage of solutions like Alation and cloud warehouses, et cetera. >> So I have two questions, follow up questions by me, and I think you might have answered the second one. The first one is what's the secret sauce behind Kloudio? How does the tech work? The second question is how does it fit into the Alation portfolio? How were you able to integrate it so quickly? Maybe that's the microservices architecture. But start with the secret sauce. What is it, what can you share with me? >> I think the thing that we saw with Kloudio that got us excited, and the fact that they, even though it was a small company, they had 20 customers, they were generating revenue, and they were delivering real value to business users, by really enabling business users to tap into the value of trusted, governed data, and frankly, get IT out of the way. You know, we almost refer to it as like smart self-service, which is, they could find a data asset and connect to that source, and just with a couple quick clicks, almost a low-code, no-code type of an experience, bring that sort of data into their spreadsheet so they could do the work that they needed to do. That opportunity, that tech that the Kloudio team had built out, the big gap that they had is, my goodness, what does it take to actually be aware of all the data sources that exist across an organization and connect to them? And that's what Alation does, right? That's why we built the platform that we built, so that we can basically understand all of a customer's data assets, whether they're on-prem or in the cloud. And so it was a little bit of, you know, that Reese's Peanut Butter Cup analogy. The chocolate and the peanut butter coming together. The Alation platform, the Alation catalog, coupled with the technology that Kloudio brought to us really was sort of a match made in heaven. And it's allowed us to bring this new capability to market that really is value-add on top of the platform and catalog investments that our customers have already made. >> Yeah, so they had this magic pixie dust, but it was sort of isolated, and then you've integrated it into your catalog. And that's the second part of my question. How were you able to do that so quickly? >> So, we've been on this evolution, enhancing the the Alation data intelligence platform. We've moved to a microservices architecture, we're fully multi-tenant in the cloud. And the fact that we'd made those investments over the past few years gave us the opportunity to make it easy for an acquired business like Kloudio, or you know, perhaps a future acquisition, or third party developers leveraging APIs that we expose to make it easy for them to integrate into the Alation platform. And so, I think it's a bit of foresight. We recognize that in starting with the catalog, the opportunity was much bigger than just providing a data catalog. We've added data governance, we've built out this platform and we recognize that more and more users can and should be benefiting from data intelligence. And so I think those platform investments have paid significant dividends and accelerated our ability to deliver Alation Connected Sheets as quickly as we have. >> Sounds like a great acquisition, like a diamond in the rough. I mean, I love big these big mega acquisitions 'cause the media company can write about 'em, but I really love the high, high return. You know, low denominator, high value. So, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Where can people learn more about this? Maybe play around a little bit with it? >> Yeah, so we're going to be demoing Alation Connected Sheets at AWS re:Invent next week. And it's going to be available starting next week, so the 28th of November. And obviously you'll see it online, on social media, on our website as well. But folks that are going to be in Las Vegas next week, come to the Alation booth and you'll get a chance to see it directly. >> Awesome. Okay, Raj. Hey, thanks for spending some time with us today. Really appreciate it. >> Great, thanks so much, Dave. Great to see you. >> Hey, you're very welcome. And thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm your host, Lisa Martin Rajko same joins me now the chief product officer at elation. Raj. Great to have you on the cube. Welcome. >>It's great to be here, Lisa. And I've been a fan for a while and excited to have a chance to talk with you live. >>And we've got some exciting stuff to talk about elation in terms of the success in the enterprise market. I see more than 25% of the fortune 100 doing great. There is customers elation and snowflake. Before we get into your exciting news. Talk to me a little bit about the evolution of the partnership. >>Yeah, no, absolutely. So, you know, we've always been a, a close partner and integrator with snowflake and last year snowflake became an investor in elation and they participated in our series D round. And the thing I'm most excited about beyond that is we were announced in the snowflake summit back in June to be their data governance partner of the year for the second year running. And so we've always had a closer relationship with snowflake, both at the go to market level and at the product level. And you know, the stuff that we're about to talk about is a Testament to that. >>Absolutely. It is. So talk to us before we get into the announcement. What you're seeing in the market as organizations are really becoming much more serious about being data driven and building a data culture. What are you seeing with respect to enterprises as well as those smaller folks? >>Yeah, no, it, it, it's, it's a great question. I mean, you, you hear the T tropes data is the new oil data is like water it's essential. And we're seeing that very consistently across every customer, every segment, every geo that we, that we talk to, I, I think the challenges that organizations are seeing that are leading to the amazing growth that we've seen at elation are there's so much data. They don't know where it resides. You've got silos or islands of knowledge that exist across the, the enterprise. And they need a data intelligence platform to bring it all together, to help them make sense of it and ultimately build a data culture that, you know, it lets their employees make data driven decisions as opposed to relying on gut. And so those are some of the macro trends that we're seeing and with the migration of data to the cloud and in particular snowflake, it seemed like a huge opportunity for us to partner even more closely with, with snowflake. And we're, we're excited about the progress that we've seen with them thus far. >>All right, let's get right into it. So first of all, define a data culture and then talk to us about how elation and snowflake are helping organizations to really achieve that. >>Yeah. You know, it, it's interesting. The, the company vision that we have at elation is to empower a curious and rational world. And you know, what that really means is we want to deliver solutions that drive curiosity and drive rational behavior. So making, making decisions based on data and insights, as opposed to gut, or, you know, the, the highest paid, you know, person's opinion or what have you. And so delivering a data culture, building a data culture, which is something we hear from all the CDOs that we talk to is, Hey, elation, help us drive data literacy across the organization, provide that single source of reference. So if anybody has a question about, do we have data that answers this, or, you know, what kind of performance are we seeing in this product area? Give me a starting point for my data exploration journey. And that's really where elation and our data intelligence solutions kind of come into the play. >>So unpack elation cloud service for snowflake. Talk to us about what it is, why you're doing it, what the significance of this partnership and this solution is delivering. >>Absolutely. So the elation cloud service for snowflake is a brand new offering that we just brought to market. And the intent really was, you know, we've had massive success in the global 2000. You mentioned the, the progress that we've had with fortune 100 customers, we see the need for data, culture, and data literacy and governance in organizations, you know, that are massive global multinational enterprises all the way down to divisions of an organization, or even, you know, mid-market and SMB companies. And so we thought there was a huge opportunity to really drive data culture for those organizations that are adopting snowflake, but still need that data intelligence overlay across the, the data that's in the snowflake cloud. And so what we did is we launched the elation cloud service for snowflake as a free trial, and then, you know, low cost purchase solution that, you know, can be adopted for less than a hundred thousand dollars a year. >>Got it. So tar from a target market perspective that lower end of the market for, of course, you know, these days, Raj, as we talk about every company, regardless of size, regardless of industry and location has to be a data company getting there and, and, and, and really defining and going on a journey to get there is really complex. So you're going now down market to meet those customers where they are, how will elation cloud service for snowflake help those customers, those smaller customers really become data driven and, and, and adopt a data culture. >>Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's a great question. I, I think the biggest goal that we had was making it really simple and easy for them to begin this journey. So, you know, we are now live in the snowflake partner connect portal. And if someone wants to experience the power of elation cloud service for snowflake, they just need to go to that portal, click the elation tile. And literally within less than two minutes, a brand new instance of elation is spun up. Their snowflake data is automatically being cataloged as part of this trial. And they have 14 days to go through this experience and, and get a sense of the power of elation to give them insights into what's in their snowflake platform, what governance options they can layer on top of their snowflake data cloud and how the data is transforming across their organization. >>So talk to me about who you're talking to within a customer. I was looking at some data that elation provided to me, and I see that according to Gartner data culture is priority number one for chief data officers, but for those smaller organizations, do they have chief data officers? Is that responsibility line still with the CIO? Who are you engaging with? >>Yeah, it's very, very, really great question. I, I think the larger organizations that we sell to definitely have a, a CDO and, you know, CDO sometimes is the chief data and analytics officer in smaller organizations, or even in divisions of big companies that, that, you know, might be target customers for ACS, for snowflake could be a, a VP of analytics could be head of marketing. Operations could be a data engineering function, so that might roll up into the it. And so I think that's, what's interesting is we, we wanted to take the friction out of the, the experience process and the trial process, and whoever is responsible for the snowflake instance and, and leveraging snowflake for, for data and analytics, they can explore and understand what the, a power elation layered on top of snowflake can provide for them. >>Okay. So another, another thing that I uncovered in researching for this segment is McKenzie says data, culture is decision culture. I thought that was a really profound statement, but it's also such a challenge to get there is organizations of all sizes are on various points in their journey to become data driven. What does that mean? How, how well, how do elation and help customers really achieve that data culture so that they can really have that decision culture so they can make faster, better data based decisions? >>Yeah, it, so I, I think a huge part of it, like if we think about our, our, our big area of focus, how do we enable users to find, understand trust, govern, and use data within snowflake in this instance? And so step one to drive data culture is how, how do you provide a single source of reference a, a, a search box, frankly, you know, Google for your, for your data environment, so that you can actually find data, then how do you understand it? You know, what's in there. What does it mean? What are the relationships between these data objects? Can I trust this? Is this sandbox data, or is this production data that can be used for reporting and analytics? How do I govern the data? So I know who's using it, who should use it, what policies are there. And so if, if we go through the set of features that we've built into ation cloud service for snowflake, it enables us to deliver on that promise result at the very end, resulting in the ability to explore the data that exists in the snowflake platform as well. >>Let's go ahead and unpack that. Now, talk to me about some of the key capabilities of the solution and what it's enabling organizations to achieve. >>Yeah, so, you know, it starts with cataloging the data itself. You know, we, we, we are the data catalog company. We basically define that category. And so step one is how do we connect to snowflake and automatically ingest all the metadata that exists within that snowflake cloud, as well as extract the lineage relationships between tables. So you can understand how the data is transforming within the snowflake data cloud. And so that provides visibility to, to begin that fine journey. You know, how, how do I actually discover data on the understand and trust front? I think where things get really interesting is we've integrated deeply with Snowflake's new data governance features. So they've got data policies that provide things like row level security and, and data masking. We integrate directly with those policies, extract them, ingest them into elation so that they can be discovered, can be easily applied or added to other data sets within snowflake directly from the elation UI. >>So now you've got policies layered on top of your data environment. Snowflake's introduced, tagging and classification capabilities. We automatically extract and ingest those tags. They're surfaced in inhalation. So if somebody looks for a data set that they're not familiar with, they can see, oh, here are the policies that this data set is applied to. Here are the tags that are applied. And so snow elation actually becomes almost like a user interface to the data that exists within that snowflake platform. And then maybe just two other things with the lineage that we extract. One of the most important things that you can deliver for users is impact analysis. Hey, if I'm gonna deprecate this table, or if I'm gonna make a change to what this table definition is, what are the downstream objects and users that should know about that? So, Hey, if this table's going away and my Tableau report over here is gonna stop working, boy, it'd be great to be able to get visibility into that before that change is made, we can do that automatically within the elation UI and, and really just make it easier for somebody to govern and manage the data that exists within the snowflake data cloud. >>So easier to govern and manage the data. Let's go up a level or two. Sure. Talk to me about some of the business outcomes that this solution is gonna help organizations to achieve. We talked about every company these days has to be a data company. Consumers expect this very personalized, relevant experience. What are you thinking? Some of the outcomes are gonna be that this technology and this partnership is gonna unlock. >>Yeah, no, I, I, I think step one, and this has always been a huge area of focus for us is just simply driving business productivity. So, you know, the, the data that we see in talking to CDOs and CDOs is the onboarding and, and getting productive the time it takes to onboard and, and get a data analyst productive. It, it can be nine to 12 months. And, you know, we all know the battle for talent these days is significant. And so if we can provide a solution, and this is exactly what we do that enables an organization to get a data analyst productive in weeks instead of months, or, or, you know, potentially even a year, the value that that analyst can deliver to the organization goes up dramatically because they're spending less time looking for data and figuring out who knows what about the data. >>They can go to elation, get those insights and start answering business questions, as opposed to trying to wrangle or figure out does the data exist. And, and, and where does it exist? So that's, that's one key dimension. I'd say the other one that, that I'd highlight is just being able to have a governance program that is monitored managed and well understood. So that, you know, whether it's dealing with CCPA or GDPR, you know, some of the regulatory regimes, the, the ability for an organization to feel like they have control over their data, and they understand where it is who's using it and how it's being used. Those are hugely important business outcomes that CIOs and CDOs tell us they need. And that's why we built the lation cloud service for snowflake >>On the first front. One of the things that popped into my mind in terms of really enabling workforce productivity, workforce efficiency, getting analysts ramped up dramatically faster also seems to me to be something that your customers can leverage from a talent attraction and retention perspective, which in today's market is critical. >>I, I so glad you mentioned that that's, that's actually one of the key pillars that we highlight as well is like, if you give great tools to employees, they're gonna be happier. And, and you'll be a, a preferred employer and people are gonna feel like, oh, this is an organization that I wanna work at because they're making my job easier and they're making it easier for me to deliver value and be productive to the organization. And that's, it's absolutely critical this, this, this war for talent that everybody talks about. It's real and great self-service tools that are empowering to employees are the things that are gonna differentiate companies and allow them to, to unleash the power of data, >>Unleash the power of data, really use it to the competitive advantage that it can and should be used for. When we look at, when you look at customers that are on that journey, that data catalog journey, they, you probably see such a variety of, of locations about where they are in that journey. Do you see a common thread when you're in customer conversations? Is there kind of a common denominator that you, you speak to where you, you really know elation and snowflake here is absolutely the right thing. >>Yeah, no, it, it, it's a good question. I would actually say the fact that a customer is on snowflake. I they're already, you know, a step up on that maturity curve. You know, one of the big use cases that we see with customers that is, is leading to the need for data intelligence solutions that, you know, like that elation can deliver is digital transformation and, and, and cloud migration, you know, we've got legacy data. On-prem, we know we need to move to the cloud to get better agility, better scaling, you know, perhaps, you know, reduced costs, et cetera. And so I think step one, on that, that qualification criteria or that maturity journey is, Hey, if you're already in snowflake, that's a great sign because you're, you're recognizing the power of a data cloud platform and, and, and warehouse like snowflake. And so that's a, a, a great signal to us that this is a customer that wants to, you know, really better understand how they can get value out of, out of their solution. I think the next step on that journey is a recognition that they're not utilizing the data that they have as effectively as they can and should be, and they're not, and, and their employees are still struggling with, you know, where does the data exist? Can I trust it? It, you know, it, who do I know tends to be more important than do I have a tool that will help me understand the data. And so customers that are asking those sorts of questions are ideal customers for the elation cloud service for snowflake solution. >>So enabling those customers to get their hands on it, there's a free trial. Talk to us about that. And where can the audience go to actually click and try? >>Absolutely. So, you know, we'll, we'll be doing our usual marketing and, and promotion of this, but what I'm super excited about, you know, again, I mentioned earlier, you know, this is part of our, our cloud native multi 10 and architecture. We are live in the snowflake partner connect portal. And so if you are logged into snowflake and are an admin, you can go to the partner connect portal and you will see a tile. I think it's alphabetically, sorted and elation starts with a so pretty easy to find. I don't think you'll have to do too much searching. And literally all you have to do is click on that tile, answer a couple quick questions. And in the background in about two minutes, your elation instance will get spun up. We'll we will have sample data sets in there. There's some guided tours that you can walk through to kind of get a feel for the power of snowflake. >>So policy center lineage, you know, tags, our intelligent SQL tool that allows you to smartly query the snowflake data cloud and publish queries, share queries with others, collaborate on them for, for greater insights. And there's, you know, as you would expect with any, you know, online free trial, you know, we've got a built in chat bot. So if you have a question, wanna get a better sense of how a particular feature works or curious about how elation might work. In other areas, you can, you know, ask a question to the chat bot and we've got product specialists on the back end that can answer questions. So we really wanna make that journey as, as seamless and easy as, as possible. And hopefully that results in enough interests that the customer wants to, to, or the, the trial user wants to become a customer. And, and that's where our great sales organization will kind of take the Baton from there. >>And there's the, there's the objective there, and I'm sure Raj folks can find out about the free trial and access it. You, you mentioned through the marketplace, more information on elian.com. I imagine they can go there to access it as well, >>A hundred percent elation.com. We're on Twitter, we're on LinkedIn, but yeah, if you have any questions, you know, you can just search for elation cloud service for snowflake, or just go to the elation.com website. Absolutely. >>All right. Elation cloud service for snowflake. Congratulations on the launch to you and the entire elation team. We look forward to hearing customer success stories and really seeing those business outcomes realize in the next few months, Raj, thanks so much for your time. >>Thank you so much, Lisa. It's great to talk to you. >>Likewise, Raj gin. I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you for watching this cube conversation. Stay right here for more great action on the cube, the leader in live tech coverage.

>>Hello, welcome back to the cubes coverage of Monaco, crypto summit presented by digital bits. It's a conference where a lot of the people using digital bits and the industry coming together around the future of crypto in the applicates got a great guest garage, rod cot, founder, and CEO of an innovative company. Love this co I love this company, Luke mogul, Rob, thanks for coming on the queue. Appreciate it. Oh, >>Thank you for having >>Us. Yeah. So I checked out what you guys are doing. You've got the sports metaverse angle going on with super valuable, cuz sports is super entertaining. Uh, people are engaged. There's huge fan base, huge online now, digital convergence going on with the physical, you know, you see all kinds of sports betting going on now everything's going digital. There's a whole nother consumer experience going on with sports and the game is still the same on the, on the field or so to, or the court. That's correct. Yeah. Now it's going to digital take a minute to explain what you guys are working on. >>Yeah, so yes, we are building out a sports ERs where we are bringing athletes, whether they're NBA stars, NFL stars, w N B a many of those athletes into meows giving them the ownership of the entire, um, meows commerce along with gameplay. So that's something from our perspective, this, uh, this is something that we're focused on. We're building out stadiums. Athletes can own stadiums. Athlete can create their own training centers, media hubs. Um, and imagine Lisa, Leslie for example, is building out a woman leadership sports academy, right? We have Michael Cooper building out defensive academy. So those are all the brands. We have 174 NBA w N B stars. And, um, and we are building out this, >>The brand is the brand, is the platform that's correct. That's the trend we're seeing. And it's, it's also an extension of their reach in community. So there's, they can convert their star power and athlete with owner's approval. If they probably write it on to the contracts, he, they can imagine all the complications, but they bring that online and extend that energy and brand equity yep. To fans and social network. Yeah. >>And many of these athletes are tremendous successful in their web two careers, right? Yeah. Um, some are current athletes, some are former athletes, but they have built such a brand persona where people are following them on Instagram. For example, Carlos Boozer. He has like almost 6 million followers between Twitter and Instagram and those kind of brands are looking or how do I give back to the community? How do I engage with my community and web three? And especially with our platform, we are giving that power back to the players. >>So you guys got some big names booers on there. You mentioned Carlos Boozer. You mentioned that Lisa, Leslie others among others, Michael Cooper throw back to the old Lakers, uh, magic. Johnson's kind actually here in crypto. We just saw him in the lobbies and in dinner and the other night, um, at Nobu, um, you got a lot of NBA support. Take a take, take, even explain how you're working this angle. Uh, you got some great traction, uh, momentum. Um, you got great pedigree, riot games in your career. Uh, you kind of get the world, the tech world, the media world, as it comes together. What's the secret sauce here? Is it the NBA relationship combination of the team explained >>It's really focusing on what, uh, we are building on me was focusing on players first, right? So players are literally, we call our platform as, uh, owned by the players, made for the players. Uh, and engagement is really all done through the players, right? So that's our key sauce. And when we worked out with NBA, we, we are part of the NBA BPA acceleration program for 2022 that is funded by a six Z, uh, and, and many others. Um, and our partnership with league is very critical. So it's not only partnered with player association partnered with leagues, whether it's NBA, w N B a NFL. So those are the venues. And this becomes almost a program, especially for athletes to really generate this lifetime engagement and royalty model because some of this famous athletes really want to give back to the communities. So like for example, I use Lisa Leslie a lot, but Lisa, Leslie really wants to empower women leadership, leadership, and really help, um, women in sports, for example. Right? So those are the angles that, um, that really people are excited about. >>Well, for the people watching that might not understand some of the ins and outs of sports and, and rod, your background in your team, it's interesting. The sports teams have been on the big day to train for many, many years. You look at all the stadiums. Now they've got mobile devices, they got wifi under the chairs. They use data and technology to manage the team. Mm-hmm, <affirmative> manage the stadium and venue and operations suppliers, whatnot. And then also the fans. So you, they, they got about a decade or so experience already in the digital world. This is not new to the, to the sports world. Yeah. So you guys come to the table kind of at a good time. >>Yeah. Especially the defi of the sports, right? So there's a defi of the finance, but this is the really, uh, a, a decentralization of the sports is something that there's a lot of traction. And there are many companies that are really focusing on that. Our focus obviously is players first, right? How do we give power to the players? Uh, and those are really driving the entire engagement. And also the brands >>How's the NBA feel about this because, you know, you got the NBA and you get the team, you got the owners. I mean, the democratization of the players, which I love by the way that angle kind of brings their power. Now's the new kind of balance of power. How is the NBA handling this? What's some of the conversations you've had with the, the organization. >>Yeah. So obviously there are a lot of things that, uh, people have to be careful about, right? They have existing contracts, existing, digital media rights. Um, so that's something that, uh, we have to be very tactful when we are working with NBA and NPA, uh, on what we can say, we cannot say. So that is obviously they have a lot of existing multimillion or billion dollar contracts that they cannot void with the web because the evolution of web three, >>You know, I love, uh, riffing on the notion of contract compliance when there's major structural change happening. Remember back in baseball, back in the days before the internet, the franchise rights was geographic territory. Mm-hmm <affirmative> well, if you're the New York Yankees, you're doing great. If you're Milwaukee, you're not doing too good, but then comes the internet. That's good. That's no geography. There's no boundaries. That's good. So you're gonna have stadiums have virtual Bo. So again, how do they keep up with the contracts? Yeah. I mean, this is gonna be a fundamental issue. >>That's >>Good. Good. And I think if they don't move, the players are gonna fill that void. >>That's correct. Yeah. And especially with this, this an IL deal, right. That happened for the players, uh, especially college athletes. So we are in process of onboarding 1.5 million college athletes. Uh, and those athletes are looking for not only paying for the tuition for the colleges, but also for engagement and generating this early on, uh, >>More okay. Rod, we're gonna make a prediction here in the cube, 20, 20 we're in Monaco, all the NBA, NHL, the teams they're gonna be run by player Dows. Yeah. What do you think? A very good prediction. Yeah. Very good prediction. Yeah. I mean you, I mean, that's a joke, I'm joking aside. I mean, it's kind of connecting the dots, but you know, whether that happens or not, what this means is if this continues to go down this road, that's correct. Get the players collectively could come together. Yeah. And flip the script. >>Yeah. And that's the entire decentralization, right. So it's like the web three has really disrupted this industry as you know. Um, and, and I know your community knows that too. >>Of course, course we do. We love it. >>Something from sports perspective, we are very excited. >>Well, I love it. Love talking. Let's get to the, to the weeds here on the product, under the hood, tell about the roadmap, obviously NFTs are involved. That's kind of sexy right now. I get the digital asset model on there. Uh, but there's a lot more under the coverage. You gotta have a platform, you gotta have the big data and then ultimately align into connecting other systems together. How do you view the tech roadmap and the product roadmap? What's your vision? >>Yeah. So the, the one thing that you had to be T full, uh, as a company, whether it's LUT, mogul or any other startup, is you have to be really part of the ecosystem. So the reason why we are here at Monaco is that we obviously are looking at partnership with digital bits, um, and those kind of partnership, whether it's fourth centric, centric are very critical for the ecosystem in the community to grow. Um, and that's one thing you cannot build a, another, uh, isolated metaverse right? So that's one thing. Many companies have done it, but obviously not. >>It's a wall garden doesn't work. >>Exactly. So you have to be more open platform. So one things that we did early on in our platform, we have open APIs and SDKs where not only you as an athlete can bring in your, uh, other eCommerce or web, uh, NFTs or anything you want, but you can also bring in other real estate properties. So when we are building out this metaverse, you start with real estate, then you build out obviously stadiums and arenas and academies training academies, but then athletes can bring their, uh, web commerce, right. Where it's NFT wearables shoe line. So >>Not an ecosystem on top of Luke Mo. So you're like, I'm almost like you think about a platform as a service and a cloud computing paradigm. Yeah. Look different, not decentralized, but similarly enabling others, do the heavy lifting on their behalf. Yeah. Is that right? >>So that's correct. Yes. So we are calling ourself as the sports platform as a service, right. So we want to add the word sports because we, uh, in, in many contexts, right. When you're building metaverse, you can get distracted with them, especially we are in Los Angeles. Right. >>Can I get a luxury box for the cube and some of the metaverse islands and the stadiums you're doing? >>We, we are working >>On it. We're >>Definitely working on, especially the, uh, Los Angeles, uh, stadium. Yeah. >>Well, we're looking for some hosts, anyone out there looking for some hosts, uh, for the metaverse bring your avatar. You can host the cube, bro. Thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate. What's the, what's next for you guys, obviously, continuing to build momentum. You got your playful, how many people on the team what's going on, give a plug for the company. What are you looking for share with the audience, some of the, some of your goals. Yeah. >>So, uh, the main thing we're looking for is really, um, from a brand perspective, if you are looking at buying properties, this would be an amazing time to buy virtual sports stadium. Um, so we are, obviously we have 175 stadiums in roadmap right now. We started with Los Angeles. Then we are in San Francisco, New York, Qatar, Dubai. So all those sports stadiums, whether they're basketball, football, soccer are all the properties. And, uh, from a community perspective, if you want to get an early access, we are all about giving back to the community. Uh, so you can buy it at a much better presale price right now. Uh, so that's one, the second thing is that if you have any innovative ideas or a player that you want to integrate into, we have an very open platform from a community engagement perspective. If you have something unique from a land sale perspective yeah. Or the NFD perspective plug, contact us at, at Raj lumo.com. >>And I'm assuming virtual team, you in LA area where where's your home. >>So, yeah, so I live in Malibu, um, and our office is in Santa Monica. We have an office in India. Uh, we have few developers also in Europe. So, uh, and then we are team of 34 people right now >>Looking to hire some folks >>We are looking for, what >>Are you, what are you looking for? >>So, uh, we are looking for a passionate sports, uh, fanatics. >>It's a lot, not hard to find. Yeah. >><laugh> who knows how to also code. Right? So from blockchain perspective, we are, uh, chain agnostic. Uh, but obviously right now we are building on polygon, but we are chain agnostic. So if you have any blockchain development experience, uh, that's something we, we are looking for. Yeah. >>RA, thanks for coming out. Luke Mo check him out. I'm John furry with the cube here in Monaco for the mono crypto summit presented by digital bits. We got all the action, a lot of great guests going on, stay with us for more coverage. Um, John furrier, thanks for watching.

>>Mm. Welcome back to the seaports in Boston City is abuzz. Bruins tonight, Celtics Tomorrow night. We're all excited. We're talking open source, which is a very exciting topic. Every company is using open source. I mean, it is the mainspring of innovation. I'm Dave along with my co host, Paul Dillon. And you're watching the cubes. Coverage of Red Hat. Summer 2022. Raj Raj Masinga is here. He's hybrid and emerging Platforms lead at Accenture and Ghetto Greber. Who's red hats? Business group lead eccentric. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. Thanks for coming >>on. Thank you. >>Thank you, Raj. We saw in the keynote up there today with Stephanie. She's coming on tomorrow. Rockstar Stephanie. Cheers. Also a Boston sports fan, and I have to work at it, but you can talk about the history with red hat. How long have you guys been at this? And give us a journey update. >>Well, first of all, thanks for having us here. Um, yes, we are big fans of Red Hat and especially Stephanie. I get to I had the pleasure of working with a very closely, um, our relationship with Red Hat goes many, many years, decades I think. And but Paul, come here will tell you that. You know, we've been focused a lot with the formation of our new business unit in Cloud. First around, migrating to the public cloud. But now, as we focus more and more around how our clients begin to operate in the public cloud in the cloud ecosystem hybrid is coming much more into focus. And Red Hat is very much a key client of a key partner of us. So we go way back. But this is all about us doubling down and increasing our partnership and deepening it with them. >>So, uh, you talked today about hybrid Cloud is everything. And it seems like a couple of years ago there was focuses more on moving to the public cloud and getting off of private infrastructure. Has there been a change in the ways in which customers are thinking, are they gonna be hanging onto their private infrastructure longer, perhaps, than was expected a couple of years ago? >>I think the first of all, it's a very different industry by industry. If you look at retail or consumer goods, I think there's a big movement in terms of percentages of workloads that are getting moved onto public cloud. If you look at industries like banking or utilities or government, more regular financial services, more regulated industries. I think we are finding a much larger percentage of their workloads because of regulatory reasons and security reasons, etcetera. Our need to remain either on premise or in private cloud. So I think it very much depends on the industry. But regardless the hype, you know, especially with the movement to edge now hybrid is going to be, you know, permeating everything. So I think by industry depends. But but the edges driving a whole new flywheel. >>You know, we started the Cuban 2010, so the cloud was, you know, modern cloud. Anyway, it was like, say, four years in into it and at the time, to your point Raj Financial Services, there was an evil word. No way we're ever going to the cloud. No, that's changed, obviously. But then, when the financial crisis hit, >>you >>had so initially it was a lot of tyre kicking experimentation. When the financial crisis hit, you had a lot of CFO saying, Okay, let's shift Capex to Apex and so that was sort of a bridge. And then after we came out, it was like this spate of innovation. And then we saw that during the pandemic, where cloud migration was a high priority and or it was the lifeline. And now it sounds like customers are kind of rethinking to your earlier conversation. What is cloud? It's that operating model. So I wonder if you could sort of Can you confirm that's kind of the journey that customers are taking? Where are they today? What does it mean? There? You know the the operating model. What do they consider cloud? >>Um, you actually, you see it? It's like it's really try forward to the cloud. Uh, but where it was in the beginning, If it doesn't hype about Public Cloud, they become more and more aware that it's hybrid because they have to bring the legacy system and process into the cloud as well. And it takes more time that actually they have fought before. So it's like there was a process of learning and also like in the steps moving forward to the operating model because they also understand I cannot operate a cloud like I was operating in the classical way like my old data centre and everything. It needs all the capabilities it needs, all the skills and especially if you go in a hybrid world. And it's a hybrid operation between the classic traditional but also the new ways of how you operate into a cloud. And you really see also the financial services. Now, uh, we had, uh I mean watch presented at keynote. We had a client in Germany. He made a decision, a very traditional financial services clients providing the service to chairman saving banks. And they did this decision and I would say, if you have spoken to them 10 years ago, they will not go into the cloud. But now they went to the cloud via private cloud, and now they got the confidence about how to operate in it. And now they move forward into a public cloud. But from a private cloud into the public cloud. Today, after security, they have up Skilling on skills and people and they understand the process and what's really required and needed in order to have such an environment. >>Generally, what's the strategy with regard to modernisation organisations? More building like an abstraction layer? Uh, with microservices and then connecting to the cloud. Or are they actually rewriting applications to make them cloud native? What are you What are you advising clients from a strategy standpoint, and I know it depends, but, you know, it's >>a It's a great question. I think the genesis to that strategy is how they view infrastructure, Right? So you know, everyone is, has this kind of, I don't know that this is almost mythical opinion out there with cloud. You don't need to worry about your infrastructure. All the providers will worry about it, and you just need to move it there. But the opposite is true. It's really critical what your infrastructure strategy is as you move to the cloud, because depending on what workload you have, you know it can be on any one of the continuum that you described. So the first thing is, where do you want to house your workload? Is the question and that will drive. How what do you want to do with your application? Whether you want to just maintain it the way it is, Do you want to simply modernise it, keeping where it is, or do you want to completely risk in it or even eliminated. So so I think the entire basically the answer to your question around. Do we? What do we do with the application? Is fundamentally driven by what is your infrastructure strategy and what that workload needs to do for you. >>So I know you want to jump in, but I got to follow up. You're saying hardware matters because we heard Paul Corvino today talking about this hardware renaissance. I'm actually I just ran a power panel called. Does hardware still matter? You're saying it matters? >>Yeah. And and it doesn't. And infrastructure doesn't always. I mean, now that you can do infrastructure as code, right? I mean, I was at the Del summit last time and read That is a huge partner of Dell now, right? Which, you know, uh, was much more, uh, partnered with VM ware. But I think the whole ecosystem is opening up, and even the hardware providers are looking at this in a much more nimble way. But yes, it's very much part of the conversation. They haven't gone away. >>During your keynote. You outlined sort of your strategy. Going forward is called cloud first. Yes. What does cloud first mean? >>Well, um, we we want to make sure that when we talk about transformation of business with our clients, So extension always goes with the idea of an industry lens of solving a specific problem for a client. What is the business problem we solve? And increasingly, what we want to message and drive to our clients is if you're thinking about, regardless of what the business is technologies absolutely critical to whatever transformation you're doing and when. When you look at technology, you have to think cloud first because that's where all the innovation is happening. That's where all the, um um, investments are being driven. Whether it's an I mean, it's a software vendor, but it's a hardware vendor with its uh, so you have to think cloud first when you think about transforming your business. >>Uh, what is How does modernisation play into that? You know, a lot of vendors are throwing a lot of resources that the modernisation market VM ware, Tanzania and IBM and such, uh, how interesting our customers really a Modernising legacy applications >>hugely right, because fundamentally, I think everything is now driven by our experiences. What we now are used to in terms of, uh, interfacing with applications are interfacing with function sets or interfacing with technology. So there is a lot of inherent, um, legacy technology that doesn't have that experience. So when you think about transforming, you have to come at it from an experience point of view. And when you think in those terms modernisation or even rebuilding the same, even if it's the same function set, uh, re skinning it and modernisation is critical for the purposes of engagement. >>What's the number one challenge that customers that you're working with face in terms of modernisation? Is it trying to figure out like Rogers sort of laying out the portfolio? What do I do with it? Do I modernise it? Do I retire it? Do I let it just die on the vine? What's their number one challenge? >>Uh, mainly it depends also on the industry, but it's, uh, I would say, for the highly regulated, certainly regulations. They always have an own interpretation of the regulations. Regulation means for them, but normally it's not really what they understand. But I think this is more and more coming to Annie's and more people understand what it really means, but it's also what we see a lot. They think first about technology, but not what kind of business problem they want, Uh, and they want to solve. So it's like, instead of having a technology neutral discussion is really do want to achieve, um, to have really start on this side and then having this discussion away, which, obviously it's one of the key, even because they start to the cloud even without having a strategy without having a vision. If you have a clear vision, if you have a clear strategy, you know where you want to go, and then you can make your business case. You can make you architecture and then you decide on technology. And then, of course, on this journey, all the things about security compliance coming to the plane, Yeah, and I think I think that's the easiest approach. But clients struggle to understand. Of course, I mean, the technology is changing rapidly. Even new products and release cycle new life cycles, the complexity of all the tools hardware we mentioned before network is changing new working coming up. It's really hard to keep pace or keep up with the base of the technology and what's happening even for us. And then you understand the complexity and bring this complexity back to simplicity, but not without losing. We have this also keynote the efficiency and, uh, flexibility for an engineer, because that's what he needs >>to your clients. Have the skill sets to do all that such a self serving question to you guys. But but no, do they? I mean, there's a skills shortage. There's a a battle for talent. So how are they >>dealing? I mean, it's obvious the battle for talent is here. I mean, everybody is looking for the best talent, and if we need, if you need a full stack. Engineer, for example, is very hard to get a full stack engineer on your ground. You call really cloud native. So you have to up skill people to re skilled people. There's also a change coming into it and the changes not to forget. So it's what we say most time. The technology is an easy part, but the change change the organisation, change up skilled organisation. That's the hard part because you need to change from from one mindset to another, and we know from the from the past. What change? People are not open to change in general, so we need to change the mindset. >>I wanna go back to Hybrid Cloud because we have Dani from Red Hat was on earlier and he said, Edges really redefining the definition of hybrid cloud. It's it's more complex architecture, and it's changing the nature of how we think about hybrid Cloud. Are you seeing that with your customers? Are they changing their thinking about what hybrid means in that context? >>Yeah, completely. You know, I was I was We did a bunch of, uh, research recently, and I had I just wanted to make sure I called this. I mean, there's a flexible report that came out that says 80% of all enterprises now are on hybrid 89% multi cloud redheaded. A report that said 80% of our businesses are expected to, um, uh, increase their use of open source. Right, So So, yes, hybrid is everywhere. Edge is driving it, but there's a There's another critical element to that movement. The complexity of our clients. Estates are increasing because whether it's hybrid or whether it's edge or whatever, they are now. You know, given if you're a C i or a C T o. Your estate is really complex now. So one of the things that we now need to do is how do we simplify that? So, you know, we think and we've been talking with red hat about this. We need to come up with a clean, you know, we keep calling it, you know, single pane of glass for a enterprise that allows them to look at their estate in a way that allows them to then simply make some innovative decisions across the entire state. So, yes, edges driving hybrid. But the key thing that we now need to overcome is how do we manage that complexity? >>We have new term. Uh, I call it Super Cloud, but the session is a better word. Medic cloud. That's gonna what I think of that century. I think of deep industry expertise. Of course, we have that, but with the partnership from redhead, it's a very it's horizontal in the sense that it can go anywhere. So how do you guys work in in terms of within Accenture plugging into your deep industry expertise? And how does that horizontal redhead >>fit. That's a really good question. So, you know, one of the things, you know. First of all, we came out with a announcement today about our expanded relationship with Red Hat. One of the key elements in that announcement is how we are looking and bringing in red Hat into our industry business motions. So we actually have decided to pick a certain number of industries. You know, financial services is one. Telco is another. We are thinking about utilities in Europe. Public health is a is another one that we are looking at. And as we come up with our offerings, you heard me and Stephanie talk about joint offerings earlier on the keynote. Um, these offerings are industry offerings, but in those offerings we have embedded and we are, they're powered by redhead technology. Um, that allows these industry solutions to drive innovation through their technology. Um, yes. Red hat can be, for the most part, a horizontal cross industry, you know, technology. But you have to really bring them into specific industrial solutions because of the way we go to market. And I think Red hat brings innovation, uh, in a way that these industries haven't seen before. >>So I mean, how do you stay out of their way? Because they have a services operation that they're trying to grow. And that's your business as well. So where the lines of demarcation >>back to your question? I I don't I don't think there is a limiting opportunity. Read? Had, you know Stephanie Me, Paul, we're all talking about How do we collectively increase both our armies? You know, I I Yes, there might be occasional overlaps in the trenches, but when you look at the bigger picture, it is not a problem at all. >>I wouldn't think so. I mean, the way you're describing Rogers exactly the way it should work. You lead with the business, figure out the business problem, how you're gonna solve that. The technology will take care of itself. Technologies come and they go. And you want to use modern technologies, obviously. But if you don't get the business piece right, forget no technology is gonna save you >>exactly, right. And and the complexities of what the businesses today are facing is getting more and more difficult. And I think actually, technologies like red hat, you know, they're the whole concept of open source, I think is very creative around driving innovations from the market. I >>want to ask you that because Paul Kermie is you know, the storey was sort of an homage to open source. How much do customers really care about open source >>customers care about innovation and and anything that drives innovation to their business, whether it's whether it comes from technology, whether it comes from crowdsourcing, whether it comes from, you know, uh, marketing doesn't matter. I think when you look at the key hunger for innovation and how open source drives innovation, it becomes part of the business conversation. And, uh and I think that's been one of the mantras that Paul has had from day one about how this is such a great platform for innovation. And I think that's >>something customers asked for. They say we must develop this using open source platforms and tool sets. >>Um, it depends. I think I think there are some technology CEO s R c T O s that are much more religious about what? Their technologies that needs to be there are others that are that are much more business oriented. Um, so yes, there are. You know, if it's more in telecom field, I think telecom or some of the more, uh, technology driven fields, they will ask for open source. In others, they we bring, bring it through as part of offering. >>Here's the nuance that I see and you mentioned Paul Cormier. Accenture, especially. I mean, you look at your ascendancy as a company, you for years would take known processes and codify them in software. And you made, you know, a lot of great innovations doing that. And people who made a lot of >>money >>today, this new normal, he calls it. I call it the new abnormal. You don't know what's around the corner. You have to build flexibility into your business, and that is something that open source enables. Uh, so that's sort of this, Really Not really. We don't want to speak about it too much. Business resiliency and flexibility is that that is the new normal. I don't see how you can do it without without open sources expertise. >>I completely agree that I and I think, um, it's actually an asset. So you know, in some ways, selfishly, by having open source in a solution stack some of the innovation gets them much more democratised, right? So? So it can come from a much broader sweet. So the load is not only an extension to come up with all the innovation we can, we can actually come up with a more democratised way of bringing that innovation in. So I think that's that's >>great. And it doesn't always go back to the community. I mean, Amazon built a $70 billion business on open source, but not all right, guys. Thanks so much for coming. Thank you very much for having a pleasure. All right, keep it right there. This is Dave Volonte for Paul Dillon. The Cubes. Continuous coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022 from the seaport in Boston. We'll be right back. >>Mm mm.

(upbeat rhythmic music) >> Everyone, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE here at Palo Alto on a remote interview for a special video interview. The EC2 15th birthday party celebration event. Raj Pai, who's the Vice President of EC2 Product Management AWS is here with me. Congratulations on Amazon Web Services, EC2 with the compute. What a journey. 15 years old. Soon we got the keys to the car at a couple more years. So Raj, great to see you. You guys have been doing great work. Congratulations. >> Thank you. It's great being here. It's super exciting for me too. I can't believe it's 15 years and you know that big, we're still at the very beginning as you know, that we often say. >> The building blocks that have been there from the beginning really set the table, and it's just been fun to watch the innovation on behalf of customers that you guys have done at AWS and more, and for entrepreneurs and for developers, it just continues to be great and the edge is right on the corner. Wavelength, all the great stuff. But let's talk about the specific topic here that I really want to drill into is that as you look at the 15th year and birthday for EC2, okay? You're looking at the future as well. You're looking at the past, present and future. And one of the things that's most compelling about recent re-invent was the Graviton performance numbers are amazing. You guys have been building custom silicon for a while. You also worked with Intel and AMD. What is it about? What's the huge investment for you guys? Where do you started to see some returns? Are you seeing returns? And then why did AWS decide to build its own processors? >> Yeah, now, that's a really good question. And I mean, like with everything else we do in AWS, it's all about innovating on behalf of our customers. And one of the things our customers are telling us, that they continue to tell us is they want to see better performance at lower prices. And we've been able to deliver that with our hardware partners for the last 15 years. But as we've understood the workloads that run on EC2 and AWS, we saw an opportunity. Like, what if we were going to go and design our own processor that was really optimized for the sort of workload that customers run on the Cloud? And make design decisions when designing the CPU and the system and the chip around the CPU that does things like bring a lot more core local cache and speed up the parts of the operations that really benefit real-world workload. So, this isn't about benchmarks. It's about how do real world workloads perform and how do we build systems that optimize that performance? And with Graviton, we were able to hit the nail on the head. We were also very pleasantly surprised when we got our first chips off the line. And we're seeing that a customer, like about 40% performance improvement at significantly lower cost. And that's super exciting. And that's one of the reasons we're getting so much interest from our customers. >> I got to say as a geek and a tech nerd, I love the silicon development. And there's benefits there, also the performance is there. The thing that also is pretty obvious that's happening is and the world seeing it is the shift towards ARM-based computing. What kinds of customers and use cases are you seeing adopt to Graviton? And what kind of workloads were they running on? What are the things that surprise you guys, that didn't surprise me. Did you guys always talk about the upcheck and how everyone's leveraging it? What are some of the examples? Take us through some of the customers, use cases, workloads. What's surprising you and what's going on with Graviton? >> Yes, so I think that the biggest surprise for us is how broadly applicable it's been. So one of the things we did, we launched with reinvent is like we have different form factors of compute. We have memory-optimized instances that are good for databases and in memory caches. We have compute optimized for HPC and workloads that really take advantage of the performance of the chip and then we have general purpose workloads. And we we introduced Graviton variants of all those instance families And we're actually seeing the same sort of performance benefits across workload. So, and it's one of the reasons why companies like Metrol, and Snap and SmugMug, they move one workload over, they see the performance benefit and before you know it, they're starting to move workloads and mass over across kind of that spectrum. So, I think that's one of the biggest surprises is that Graviton seems to do well across a wide range and we're going to keep on introducing it more and more of instance families, because we've seen this uptick well. >> You're seeing a lot of people move to the Graviton. You mentioned a few of those early adopters who were pushing the envelope, and they're always kind of trotted out there as examples at reinvent, which is always fun to see what they're working on next. And now is that people see the Graviton2 instances, okay, the architecture's different, higher performance. How much effort do our customers typically need to move to Graviton2 instances? And what are some of the benefits they're seeing on performance and price performance? Can you talk about that transition? Because that's natural evolution for them. >> Yeah. It's actually a lot less than they originally think. So, some of the hardest effort is just getting them over the line to try it. So, one of the things that we tell our customers who are considering Graviton is it just takes one or two developers take one workload and go off for a couple of weeks and just try reporting it to Graviton. And more often than not, they come back to us in four or five days. They're like, it works. And we just had to do some testing and verification, but we were able to afford it because, you know, the operating system support was there, the ISP support was there and the tools that they use, and they're using most cases, modern programming languages like Python or Go or Java or PhD where, you know, interpret the language and it just run. And so there's very little lift in comparison to what people think it's going to be. And that's one of the reasons that, you know, one of the big announcements we made in the last few weeks is what we're calling the Graviton challenge, right? So it's a set of blueprints for customers to essentially have best practices on how to in four days take, you know, a piece of code and piece of that workload and execute it and run it and migrate it to the Graviton. And we're seeing a lot of interest in that as people in the community realize how easy that actually is. >> What are some of the cool price performance things that are emerging? Obviously it makes sense if you don't really need it, don't pay for it, but you have that option. A lot of people are going there. Is there a wave you see coming that Graviton2 is going to be really set up for that you kind of see some early signals coming in, Raj? Because, I can see the 64 bit. I can see where Graviton fits today. Obviously, performance is key. Is it certain things that are emerging? What's the main problems that it solves? >> Well, I think anything that's a multi-threaded architecture is going to do really well in Graviton because of the, we have really densely packed 64 course. And so you're going to see things like microservices and containers and workloads that are more, that are able to take advantage of that parallel execution do really, really well. And so, we say 40% performance improvement, but like, when our customers have gone and tried this, they've seen upwards of 50% depending on the workload. So yeah, it's going to be more your multi-threaded application. There's some applications that may not be a fit, like it can give a legacy, you know, for example, like, there's some software that hasn't yet been moved over and we're going to continue to invest super heavily in our whole ecosystem of hardware, for the longterm. So I think that because there's a great option and we just encourage them to try it. And then they'll learn from their experience what works and what doesn't. >> Wow. 15th birthday. Still growing up and it's starting to get more mature. You're the VP of Product Management. You have the keys to the kingdom. So, you have wide-ranging responsibilities. Share with us if you can. I know that you really can't say much, but try to give a little bit of teaser. You got Wavelength. I can see the dots connecting at the edge. You got Outposts, so we see all that emerging. I can almost imagine that this is going to get stronger. What should people think about? Where's the headroom for EC2 with Graviton and Graviton2? >> Yeah, I know. I think like, a new architect (mumbles) yourself. But like, our goal is to have AWS kind of everywhere our customers are. And that means the full power of AWS. So, I think you're going to see more and more of us having EC2 in compute capacity, wherever customers need it. That could be in an Outpost. That could be on their 5G network. That could be in a city right next to them, right? And you're going to see us continue to offer the variety, the selection of instances and platforms in all those locations as well. So, I think the key for us is to be ubiquitous and have compute power everywhere our customers need it, in the form factors they need it. >> That's awesome. Congratulations. I love the power. You can't go wrong with sending computers where the data is, where the customers are. AWS, Amazon Web Services. Building their own custom silicon with Graviton2 processors. This is EC2 continuing to grow up. Raj Pai, Vice President of EC2 Product Management. Thank you for coming on and sharing the update and congratulations on the 15th birthday to EC2. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. It's been great. Have a great Friday. >> All right. Great. I'm Jeffrey with theCUBE. You're watching theCUBE coverage of EC2's 15th birthday event. Thanks for watching. (soft rhythmic music)

>>Mhm Hello, I'm jennifer with the cube. We're here at Rogers vice president of EC two Product Manager, NWS raj. Thanks for coming off its quick cube conversation. Um Congratulations on your 15th birthday of E C two. You get the keys to the kingdom of one of the hottest products. The most important product you look at. I look at our billets. Ec two is the highest, it's always the best everyone focuses on. It's the compute a lot of other goodness with amazon cloud. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you. Thanks for having me. >>So, can you break down the graviton two processor overview? Why is custom Silicon important and why should architects and developers understand the opportunity with graviton to these are the other opportunities within 80 bucks. What's the, what's the magic do it we should that they think about as the architect their cloud. >>Yeah. So, I mean, I think why it's important is what you said like so much uh the workloads that they're running at the end of the day is running on EC two, whether it's running on Ec two directly or running on one of the other AWS services that's built on a C two and when you have, when you're able to, when we're able to innovate and deliver a very significant price performance advantage, not just lowers their costs. So like there, It's hardly a day of industry where you're able to go and do a pretty simple migration and get a 40% price performance improvement and that's huge and I think that's why this is, you know, raising a lot of interest. Is that um, customers, I found it relatively easy to go and do this migration and get that benefit. >>That's awesome mirage. I gotta ask you ec two offers more than 400 instant types with different combinations of compute memory, networking and storage, which is obviously the backbone of the cloud. A lot of people that are coming in learning about clouds, what does it mean that there's all these instances that because it's just more combinations, different workloads, why 400 instance types? What does that mean for someone learning about clouds? Does it mean anything to you actually? Would you explain the difference of instance types of 400 of them? >>Yeah. So, I mean when you think about an instance type, it's essentially configuration of a virtual machine, there's a certain amount of memory, there's a certain amount of processing power. Uh there could be a certain amount of disk and workloads, uh, the different ratios of these uh, dimensions, these characteristics. So by offering selection across a wide variety of instances were really able to optimize the compute that particular workload needs. The customers could essentially uh, increase their performance and have a more optimized price for what they want to get done. So ultimately, that's what that's what it's about having the right form factor for a given workload and the more configurations that we have, the more we're able to tune for those workloads. >>It's like having a driver riding a car you want the driver type to match the road, match the engine. So the instance has to match the profile of the app, the workload and kind of, and is that kind of where you're getting at getting met? You can do that. >>Yeah. And you know, and one of the things that we're also investing in at the same time as tools to enable customers to realize and learn what the right instance is. So, you know, we launched about a year ago uh capability called compute optimizer that lets customers look at their workloads, you know, in flight essentially and make recommendations saying, hey, instead of this instance, you know, you could Move to um this other instance type and save 50% or you know, as an example. So, um, you know, part of it, creating the selection and the other part of it is creating the tools. So customers, do you know what the right fit is for them so that they can really optimize their thin >>Well Roger, I really preach this is going to ask me anything guru question, but here's the simple one. What is gravitas to, at the end of the day when someone asks you what is graviton too? >>Yeah. So I mean grandma can do is a processor, it's a chip, it's a CPU um and so what that means essentially is and it's an arm. Basic. So um, you know, with, with are just like you have intel and AMG processors, these are the, the circuitry and the computer that does the work. Right. And um with, with Gravitas on we support arm which is a different architecture set but one that has been around long enough and it's pretty ubiquitous across mobile devices and servers now. So the operating systems that you know, you know all the Linux operating system, the tools that you know, they all work and are able to run on Graviton too. So this means that when you have applications, you can very easily take it from the same AMG or intel X 86 platform and move it over and just get the efficiencies that gravity to offers with lower power envelope and higher performance >>there it is many master class here at raj. Pie Vice President Ec two product management laying down the graviton to knowledge and for folks learning about cloud and architects really want to know the difference. It's a 40% performance improvement, lower power envelope, 20% less than cost. I believe something those range about right about in the same territory there. So basically high performance, lower costs, better power. So for workloads that demanded you got the option raj. Thank you for sharing. Thank you. All right. I'm john for, with the cube Thanks for watching. Mhm mm

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the cubes. Continuing coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 Virtual the Cube Virtual. We're here covering the partner ecosystem and some of the new innovations coming from the reinvent community. Let's talk about something that anyone who drives a vehicle can relate to. Roadside assistance with me or Beth Davidson, chief marketing officer at a zero, and Raj borrows the vice president and c t o at zero folks, welcome to the Cube. >>Hello, nice to see you. >>So let's start with you. Maybe talk a little bit about your your mission, how you work with automakers. You've got, you know, a lot of good pipeline, their insurers and other others in the in the ecosystem. Tell us about the company. >>Absolutely. So for 50 years, we've been helping consumers with their cars. Um, that's what it comes down Thio. We know that one in three people has a roadside event every year on the way you think about that is, you know, if in three years you haven't had a roadside event, tick tock. You know, statistically, it's coming for you. We work with everybody. We work with the auto manufacturers. We work with the insurers. What we're trying to do is get closer to consumers. On the reason you may have never heard of a Gero is that's by design. Were white label. We work for our clients typically on. Do you know they trust us with their consumers? They trust us with their brands. Um, and we're just in the business of getting consumers back on the road. >>Thank you for that. So talk a little bit about how you approach this problem. I mean, you looked out roadside assistance, and you know, we can again all relate. Oh, am I up to date or at least the car? So there's gotta be some kind of 800 number in my glove compartment somewhere, right? So what was the state of roadside assistance before you guys got involved? And maybe we could get into sort of how you solve the problem. >>Yeah, I think that's a great question, Dave, as we look at roadside assistance, everyone things about picking up the phone number 800 number from the glove box compartment And over the years we have invested heavily on bringing a fully digital experience to our customers from insurance companies to AM. And when this Alexa opportunity came up earlier this summer, he said, Hi. How about taking that digital experience, adding, all the Alexa do goods goods about voice interaction, making it very interactive for the users to request that experience in a very normal consumer friendly, friendly were and brought that we integrated all those services got that whole uber like experience with for roadside assistance? >>Yeah. Now. So, Beth, you know, I reminded when, like the smart TV first came out, you had a type in right, and we're really getting spoiled now. It should be easy as a blink. Okay, so you're unveiling blink, you know, what's this service all about? >>So this service is about, you know, trying to get to consumers as easy as we can and getting removing the friction. Right? So what Rogers just talking about is again we asked consumers. We say, you know, imagine that tomorrow you went out and there was a flat tire on your car in your driveway. What do you dio? And universally, they pause and They're like, I don't know. I haven't thought about it, right. And then they start making up stuff. Like maybe I'm gonna go through the glove box. Maybe I'm going to go through my files. But wouldn't it be great if they could just kind of talked to the air and say, Alexa, what? Doe ideo and have it work for them, you know, And that's one friction. The second friction is consumers actually don't know their addresses or don't know it. Well, we joke around the office about the difference between saying you're on route one and Route one A is is the difference between 20 minutes of that tow truck getting to you in time. You know, these air points of friction that technology can help us with, you know, and then with payments even better, Right? So the fact that you can pay for this thing with Amazon pay and you don't have to worry about having cash for a driver or have a credit card. I mean, there's just so many points of friction that are reduced by using Alexa. >>Okay, so let's talk about the the integrations here in the technical aspects of how you put everything together and made it work, and we'll get into some of the cloud aspect >>Attack launched. We're asking users to tell what they want, and they can tell the whole address. They can get the address from the Alexa device. Or if it is Alexa Auto. The GPS will provide us the Latin belong. And we take that address and we get what kind of experience they want. Whether it is a flat tire, we're going to send somebody else to put despair. If it is a jump start, we're gonna put send somebody Thio jumps out the vehicle. So depending on that, we put pull all that information together, get this consent for the user to charge their an Amazon parrot card on profile, and then go So it's literally to come to sentences. And then we're on. We're on to sending you experience with some of the text messages that will allow you to truck tractor truck coming down to your driver. >>Now I'll show my age. So yeah, we've all I don't have all but I've been locked out of the car many times Now, in the old days, used to be able to get a coat hanger and pop it open. But so? So that people still get locked out of their cars. >>Yes, cars. More often than not, it's, you know, the key. Fob stopped working, right? Lost the battery of my key fob these days. But it's the equivalent. >>Alright, so All right, so right. What else do you guys do in the cloud? Do you use a W s for your own business? Maybe share with us some of >>the over the years. For the past 78 years, we have, uh, integrated and got all of our technologies into the AWS cloud. And we have now revamped and re innovated on top of those and create a new product lines. We have accident scene management. We do, um, handle automatic clash notifications for some of our partner customers. We dio dealer service appointments, so we do a lot of these things. And all of these are not possible without the amazing teams. 20 or so teams that we have across three continents working on 50 plus, uh, approved services on aws, uh, innovating around the clock, bringing these new innovations to our market. >>So, Beth, you were saying earlier that you, you know, want to reach out to the consumer. I mean, how do you market? Uh, you obviously go through through partners. And I'm curious system, What's your go to market and maybe how you're different from from others in the marketplace, >>right? Eso again because we're white label with most of the client side business that we do, we help our clients message better on DSO. We talked to them about how often you have to remind people that this isn't a one and done, um, on the skill store for Alexa. You know how we're different is you know, you don't aske much as I love the branding that we came up with blank roadside. You know, you don't actually have to use it. You don't have to say, Alexa, open my blank roadside. You could just say, Alexa, help me with my flat tire, which really helps cut out the fact that I actually need to market the brand like a traditional market or would have had Thio. But our biggest problem is how do you market something to someone in that moment of need, right? How do I How do I prime you to get you to think about it way, way before you ever actually have the problem. >>And how do you charge for the service? >>Eso It's it's a flat fee on did. It's better than what consumers would be able to get on their own. Or at least we believe so. But it is a flat fee for any kind of road service, so it's flat tire. It's dead batteries. It's winching you out. You know, it's it's all of those things. Um, that can happen to you that are just kind of those minor everyday mishaps. >>Okay? And so and so do I. How do I get it? Do I do I have tow hope that my you know, if I'm leasing a car that the auto has it, can I go direct? How doe I >>all direct? It's all direct. So you don't have to worry about an I d number membership number. You're just paying for it out of your Amazon account on. Do you know you don't have to worry about knowing your how many digit vin number. You know, none of that stuff. It's just one and done. >>Awesome. So, Raja, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your your scale. Um, maybe I don't know if you can share any metrics and what What factors? The cloud generally and a W s specifically has has played and enabling that scale. >>Yeah, we have amazing number of integrations with our Fortune 100 insurance companies. Um, over 35 insurance companies and we have 100 and 70 b two b clients today, Um, and we integrate with them were deeply, um, uh integrated into the building systems into their coverage systems. And all of that is to be able to provide that sub minute sub second experience to our customers when they're calling in, uh, when they need the service. Um, right now we do over a billion AP A calls. As a result of these transactions, all these integrations or for quarter and all of these, uh, our third parties, service providers who go around the on the roads and provide this location information today off the tow trucks to us, all of these 8 8000 or so trucks extreme that information to us almost on every hour. So we bring all that information together on the AWS platform, stream it back shaded back in a very secure private manner back to the customers, right at the moment of need. >>Yeah, So I mean, without the cloud, you'd be backing up. You know, the servers to the truck to the loading dock. And it would just take so much longer toe spin up new products. I would imagine that you guys have a lot of ideas about new data products or new services that you can you can provide. Um, you probably I'm sure you can tell us what they are, But but in terms of the time, it takes you to conceive toe to get to the market. That must be impressed with the cloud. >>Yeah, it's a fraction of what it used to take years ago when we were not in AWS, right? And it also allows us to not to spend all this time on worrying about the same thing that you used to worry about for every project. Now you can actually think about how, what how you let be able to leverage new innovations that are coming in and actually improve improve the experience with some kind of intelligence that is added on, which makes the experience much smoother for people. >>Well, Beth will give you last word. But first of all, thanks for helping us make our lives even even better and more convenient. But bring us home. What's the last word here? >>So the last word is, you know, we dio we do 12 million events a year right now, right? And if you if you like math, it's 35,000 day. It's 20 for every minute, you know. And the work that that Rajan team have done to make the scalable means we're ready to do the next 12 million on. Do you know we know. We know there are consumers out there having those events. We just want to be there for you, you know, take care of that frustrating event on get you back >>on the road. Well, it's just, you know, having you there and being able to push a button and talk to a device is just It's a game changer. So thank you guys for coming on the cube and sharing your story really interesting. Yeah. All right. Thanks for watching. Keep it right there. You're watching the cubes coverage of aws reinvent 2020. We'll be right back right after this short break

>>From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cute conversation. Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm Lisa Martin pleased to be joined once again by the co CEO of mem sequel, Raj Verma, Raj, welcome back to the program. >>Thank you very much, Lisa. Great to see you as always. >>It's great to see you as well. I always enjoy our conversations. So why don't you start off because something that's been in the news the last couple of months besides COVID is one of your competitors, snowflake confidentially filed IPO documents with the sec a couple months ago. Just wanted to get your perspective on from a market standpoint. What does that signify? >>Yeah. Firstly, congratulations to the snowflake team. Uh, you know, I've, I have a bunch of friends there, you know, John McMahon, my explosives on the board. And I remember having a conversation with him about seven years ago and it was just starting off and I'm just so glad for him and Bob Mobileye. And, and as I said, a bunch of my friends who are there, um, they're executed brilliantly and, uh, I'm thrilled for that. So, um, we are hearing as to what the outcomes are likely to be. And, uh, it just seems like, uh, you know, it's going to be a great help. Um, and I think what it signifies is firstly, if you have a bit technology and if you execute well, good things happen and there's enough room for innovation here. So that is one, the second aspect is I think, and I think more importantly, what it signifies is a change of thought in the database market. >>If you really see, um, and know if my memory serves me right in the last two decades or probably two and a half buckets, we just had one company go public in the database space and that was Mongo. And, um, and that was in, I think October, 2017 and then, uh, two and a half years. So three years we've seen on other ones and uh, from the industry that we know, um, you know, there are going to be a couple that are going to go out in the next 18 months, 24 months as well. So the fact is that we had a, the iron grip on the database market for almost, you know, more than two decades. It was Oracle, IBM that a bit of Sybase and SAP HANA. And now there are a bunch of companies which are helping solve the problems of tomorrow with the technology of the month. >>And, uh, and that is, um, that is snowflake is a primary example of that. Um, so that's a, that's good change. God is good. I do think the incumbents are gonna find it harder and harder going forward. And also if you really see the evolution of the database market, the first sort of workloads that moved to the cloud with the developer workloads and the big benefactor that that was the no secret movement and one company that executed in my opinion, the best was Mongol. And they were the big benefactor of that, that sort of movement to the cloud. The second was the very large, but Moisey database data warehouse market, and a big benefactor of that has been snowflake big queries, the other one as well. However, the biggest set of tsunami of data that's we are seeing move to the cloud is the operational data, which is the marriage of historical data with real time data to give you real time insights as, or what we call the now are now. >>And that's going to be much, much bigger than, uh, than both the, you know, sequel or the developer data movement and the data warehouse. And we hope to be a benefactor of that. And then the shake up that happens in the database market and the change that's happening there, isn't a vendor take on market anymore, and that's good because you don't then have the stranglehold that Oracle had and you know, some of the ways that are treated as customers and help them to run some, et cetera, um, yeah. And giving customers choice so that they can choose what's best for the business is going to be, it's going to be great. And me are going to see seven to 10 really good database companies in large, in the next decade. And we surely hope them secret as one of them of, we definitely have the, have the potential to be one of them. >>You have the market, we have the product, we have the customers. So, you know, as I tell my team, it's up to us as to what we make of it. And, um, you know, we don't worry that much about competition. You did mention snowflake being advantage station. We, yeah, sure. You know, we do compete on certain opportunities. However, their value proposition is a little more single-threaded than ours. So they are more than the Datavail house space are. Our vision of the board is that, uh, you know, you should have a single store for data, whether it's database house, whether it's developer data or whether it's operational data or DP data. And, uh, you know, watch this space from orders. We make somebody exciting announcements. >>So dig into that a little bit more because some of the news and the commentary Raj in the last, maybe six weeks since the snowflake, um, IPO confidential information was released was, is the enterprise data warehouse dead. And you just had a couple of interesting things we're talking about now, we're seeing this momentum, huge second database to go public in two and a half bigots. That's huge, but that's also signifying to a point you made earlier. There's, there's a shift. So memes SQL isn't, we're not talking about an EDW. We're talking about operational real time. How do you see that if you're not looking in the rear view mirror, those competitors, how do you see that market and the opportunities? >>Yeah, I, I don't think the data warehouse market is dead at thought. I think the very fact that, you know, smoke makers going out at whatever valuation they go out, which is, you know, tens of billions of dollars is, um, is a testimony to the fact that, you know, it's a fancy ad master. This is what it is. I mean, data warehouses have existed for decades and, uh, there is a better way of doing it. So it's a fancy of mousetrap and, and that's great. I mean, that's way to money and it's clearly been demonstrated. Now what we are saying is that I think that is a better way to manage the organization's data rather than having them categorized in buckets of, you know, data warehouse, data developer, data DP, or transactional data, you know, uh, analytical data. Is there a way to imagine the future where there is one single database that you can quit eat, or data warehouse workloads for operational workloads, for OLTB work acknowledge and gain insights. And that's not a fancier mousetrap that is a data strategy reimagine. And, uh, and that's our mission. That's our purpose in life right now and are very excited about it's going to be hard. It's not, it's not a given it's a hard problem to solve. Otherwise, if you can solve it before we have the, uh, we have the goods to deliver and the talent, the deliberate, and, um, we are, we are trying it out with some very, very marquee customers. So we've been very excited about, >>Well, changing of the guard, as you mentioned, is hard. The opposite is easy, the opposite, you know, ignoring and not wanting to get out of that comfort zone. That's taken the easy route in my opinion. So it seems like we've got in the market, this, this significant changing of the guard, not just in, you know, what some of your competition is doing, but also from a customer's perspective, how do you help customers, especially institutions that have been around for decades and decades and decades pivot quickly so that the changing of the guard doesn't wipe them out. >>Yeah. Um, I actually think slightly differently. I think changing of the guard, um, wiping out a customer is if they stick or are resistant to the fact that there is a change of God, you know, and if they, if they hold on to, as we said in our previous conversation, if you stick onto the decisions of yesterday, you will not see the Sundays of tomorrow. So I do think that, uh, you know, change, you have a, God is a, is a symbolism, not even a symbolism as a statement to our customers to say, there is a better way of doing, uh, what you are doing to solve tomorrow's problem. And then doesn't have to be the Oracles and the BB tools and the psychosis of the world. So that's, that's one aspect of it. The second thing is, as I've always said, you're not really that obsessed about, uh, competition. >>The competition will do what they do. Uh, we are really very focused on having an impact in the shortest period of time on our customers and, uh, hopefully a positive impact. And if you can't do it, then, you know, I've had conversations with a few of them saying, maybe be not the company for you. Uh, it's not as if I have to sort of, software's a good one. I supply to the successful customers in the bag to do the unsuccessful with customers. The fact is that, you know, in certain, certain places there isn't an organizational alignment and you don't succeed. However, we do have young, we have in the last 14 months or so made tremendous investments into really ease of use of flexibility of architecture, which is hybrid and tactile, and that shrinking the total time to value for our customers. Because if I, if I believe you, if you do these three things, you will have an impact, a positive impact on the customer, in the sharpest, uh, amount of time and your Lindy or yourself. And I think that is more important than worrying needlessly about competition. And then the competition will do what they do. But if you keep your customers happy by having a positive impact, um, successes, only amount of time, >>Customers and employees are essential to that. But I like that you talked about customer obsession because you see it all over the place. Many people use it as descriptors of themselves and their LinkedIn profiles, for example, but for it actually to be meaningful, you talked about the whole objective is to make an impact for your customers. How do you define that? So that it's not just, I don't want to say marketing term, but something that everyone says they're customer obsessed showing it right within the pudding. >>It's easy to say we are customer obsessed. I mean, this organization is going to say we don't care about our customer. So, you know, of course we all want our customers to be successful. How do you, that's easy, you know, having a cultural value that we put our customers first is, was easy, but we didn't choose to do that. What we said is how do you have an impact on your customer in the shortest amount of time, right? That is, that is what you have. I'm sequel and Lee have now designed every process in mem sequel to align with that word. If, if that is a decision that we have to make a B essentially lenses through the fact of what is in the best interest of our customer and what will get us to have an impact, a positive impact on the customer in the shortest amount of time, that is a decision, which is a buy decision for us to make. >>A lot of times it's more expensive. It's a, a lot duffel. It stresses the, um, the, the, the organization, um, and the people in it. But that's, uh, that's what you have to do if you are. Um, if you are, you know, as, as they say, customer obsessed, um, it is, it's just a term which is easy to use, but very difficult to put here too. And we want to be a tactic. It right to be, we are going to continue to learn. It's a, it's not a destination, it's a journey. And we continue to take decisions and refine our processes do, as I said, huh, impact on our customers in the shortest amount of time. Now, obsessiveness, a lot of times is seen as a negative in the current society that we live in. And there's a reason for that because the, they view view obsession, but I view obsession and aggression is that is a punishing expression, which is really akin to just being cruel, you know, leading by fear and all the rest of it, which is as no place in any organization. >>And I actually think that in society at large, nothing, I believe that doesn't have any place in society. And then there's something which I dumb as instrumentalists, which is, this is where we were. This is where we are. This is where we are going and how do we track our progress on a daily, weekly, monthly basis? And if we, aren't sort of getting to that level that we believe we should get to, if our customers, aren't seeing the value of dramas in the shortest amount of time, what is it that we need to do better? Um, is that obsession, our instrumental aggression is, is, is what we are all about. And that brings with it a level of intensity, which is not what everyone, but then when you are, you know, challenging the institutions which have, uh, you know, the also has to speak for naked, it's gonna take a Herculean effort to ask them. And, uh, you know, the, the basically believed that instrumental aggression in terms of the, uh, you know, having an impact on customer in the shop to smile at time is gonna get us there. And a, and B are glad to have people who actually believe in that. And, uh, and that's why we've made tremendous progress over the course of last, uh, two years. >>So instrumental aggression. Interesting. How you talked about that, it's a provocative statement, but the way that you talk about it almost seems it's a prescriptive, very strategic, well thought out type of moving the business forward, busting through the old guard. Cause let's face it, you know, the big guys, the Oracles they're there, they're not easy for customers to rip and replace, but instrumental aggression seems to kind of go hand in hand with the changing of the guard. You've got to embrace one to be able to deliver the other, right. >>Yeah. So ducks, I think even a fever inventing something new. Um, I mean, yeah, it just requires instrumental aggression, I believe is a, uh, uh, anchor core to most successful organizations, whether in IP or anywhere else. That is a, that is a site to that obsession. And not, I'm not talking about instrumental aggression here, but I'm really talking about the obsession to succeed, uh, which, uh, you know, gave rise to what I think someone called us brilliant jerks and all the rest of it, because that is the sort of negative side of off obsession. And I think the challenge of leadership in our times is how do you foster the positivity of obsession, which needs to change a garden? And that's the instrumental aggression as a, as a tool to, to go there. And how do you prevent the negative side of it, which says that the end justifies the means and, and that's just not true. >>Uh, there is, there is something that's right, and there's something that's wrong. And, uh, and if that is made very clear that the end does not justify the meanings, it creates a lot of trust between, um, Austin, our customers, also not employees. And when their inherent trust, um, happens, then you foster, as I said, the positive side of obsession and, um, get away from the negative side of obsession that you've seen in certain very, very large companies. Now, the one thing that instrumental aggression and obsession brings to a company is that, uh, it makes a lot of people uncomfortable, and this is what I continue to tell. Um, our, our employees and my audience is, um, you know, be comfortable being uncomfortable because what you're trying to do is odd. And it's going to take a, as I say, a Herculean effort. So let's, uh, let's be comfortable being uncomfortable, uh, and have fun doing it. If there's, uh, how many people get a chance to change, uh, industry, which was dominated by a few bears and have such a positive impact, not only on our estimates, but society at large. And, uh, I think it's a privilege. Pressure is a privilege. And, uh, I'm grateful for the opportunity that's been afforded to me and to my colleagues. And, uh, >>It's a great way. Sorry. That's a great way of looking at it. Pressure is a privilege. If you think about, I love what you said, I always say, get, you know, get comfortably uncomfortable. It is a heart in any aspect, whether it's your workouts or your discipline, you know, working from home, it's a hard thing to do to your point. There's a lot of positivity that can come from it. If we think of what's happening this week alone and the U S political climate changing of the old guard, we've got Kamala Harris as our first female VP nominee and how many years, but also from a diversity angle, from a women leadership perspective, blowing the door wide open. >>It's great to see that, um, you know, we have someone that my daughter's going to look up to and say that, uh, you know, yes, there is, there is a place for us in society and we can have a meaningful contribution to society. So I actually think that San Antonio versus nomination is, um, you know, it's a simple ism of change of God, for sure. Um, I have no political agendas, um, at all. Then you can see how it pans out in November, but the one thing is for sure, but it's going to make a lot of people uncomfortable, a change of God, or this makes a lot of people. And, and, uh, and you know, I was reflecting back on something else and in everything that I've actually achieved, which is, is something I'm proud of. I had to go through a zone, but I was extremely uncomfortable. >>Uh, Gould only happens when you have uncomfortable, um, girl to happens in your conference room. And, um, whether it's, um, you know, running them sequel, uh, or are having a society change, uh, if you stick to your comfort zone, you stick to your prejudices and viruses because it's just comfortable there, there's a, uh, wanting to be awkward. And, uh, and, and I think that that's that essential change of God. As I said, at the cost of repeating myself will make a lot of people uncomfortable, but I honestly believe will move the society forward. And, uh, yeah, I, um, I couldn't be more proud of, uh, having a California San Diego would be nominated and it's a, she brings diversity multicultural. And what I loved about it was, you know, we talk about culture and all the rest of it. And she, she was talking about how our parents who were both, uh, uh, at the Berkeley when she was growing up, we were picking up from and she be, you know, in our, in our prime going to protests and Valley. >>And so it was just, uh, it was ingrained in her to be able to challenge the status school and move the society forward. And, uh, you know, she was comfortable being uncomfortable when she was in that, you know, added that. And that's good. Maybe not. I think we sort of, uh, yeah, I, yeah, let's see, let's see what November brings to us, but, um, I think just a nomination has, uh, exchanged a lot of things and, uh, if it's not this time, it can be the next time, but at the time off the bat, but you're going to have a woman by woman president in my lifetime. Um, that's um, I minced about them, uh, and that's just great. >>Well, I should hope so too. And there's so many, I know we've got to wrap here, but so many different data points that show that that technology company actually, companies, excuse me, with women in leadership position are significantly 10, 20% more profitable. So the changing of the guard is hard as you said, but it's time to get uncomfortable. And this is a great example of that as well as the culture that you have at mem sequel Raja. It's always a pleasure and a philosophical time talking with you. I thank you for joining me on the cube today. >>Thank you me since I'm just stay safe, though. >>You as well for my guest, Raj Burma, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you for watching this cube conversation.

>> Announcer: From the CUBEs Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE Conversation. >> Welcome to this CUBE Conversation, I'm Lisa Martin. Today talking with the co CEO of MemSQL, Raj Verma. Raj, eelcome back to the CUBE. >> Thank you, Lisa. Good to see you again as always. >> You as well. So we're living in a really strange time, right? There is disruption coming at us from every angle we're used to talking about disruptors and technology as technology innovations like Cloud, for example, but now we've got this other disruption, this catalyst for more disruption with COVID-19. I wanted to ask you though, as we see so much changing in the business world for long storied businesses filing for chapter 11. What, why do companies get disrupted and how can they actually become... How can a company to become a disruptor? >> I think disruption is a tale of innovation, really, innovation from the incumbent or lack there off. And the fact that, you know, incumbents become a lot more inward focused. They become more about doing more of what got them to be successful, more process focused and outcome focused. And the disruptors are essentially again, all about innovation and all about solving the customer's problems for today and for tomorrow. So I do think disruption is at its very core, two tales of innovation, one cautionary and the other somehow legendary. And we see that in the Valley all the time. You see the favorite innovators of a decade ago, just limping along now and just being completely leapfrogged by the innovators of today. And that's really what the Valley is known for. I do think that a big part of being a disruptor or being disrupted, as I said, you know, two sides of the same sort of coin or a double edged sword really, I think for a disruptor, it's all about challenging the status quo and to be effectively able to challenge the status quo, you need a team which is United in purpose and in passion about waking up every morning and trying to, you know, as I said, challenge the status quo and not accept just because things were being done the way they were being done. And that's what tomorrow should be. I think that's really important. And I think there is a total elements to being disrupted or, you know, aiding the disruptors, which is a catalyst event of any sort that might be. You know, it was the internet for some, I mean, some really called itself, the network is a computer, one of my favorite companies and, you know, Scott G. McNealy, someone that I greatly admire and I've got to know over the years and they were preaching this gospel for 15 years and then the internet hit and they just went, they became a rocket ship and you know, Cisco, the same thing happened. A lot of companies and you know, one in particular that we even worked for together, at least I got completely disrupted and blindsided by the Cloud. I do believe that one such a disruptor right now, or one such catalyst, which will disrupt business. And you alluded to that a little while ago, is COVID-19 and the data deluge or the tsunami of data that our accompanies it you know, I was just talking to a friend and he said, you know, we are now living really in 2023, COVID-19, four months of living in COVID-19 as kind of ended up propelling us three years forward in terms of the problems that we had three years to solve, we need to solve it now. And I think, yeah, the innovation, a team that challenges the status quo and a catalyst is what disrupts companies and what aids disruptors. >> You brought up a really good point though, that there's such a huge component of the team to be able to not just react quickly, but be creative enough and confident enough to challenge that status quo. There's a lot of folks who are very comfortable in their swim lanes. memSQL has been a disruptor in the database space, but I think that team that you hit on is really essential. Without that, and without the right folks really focused together, the disruptors are going to be disrupted. >> I agree with you wholeheartedly. I think, I often say it town halls or in private meetings that we are in the talent business. We are only as good as our teams. No, if ands and buts about it. If not, you know, united in 4% in mission have immense diversity of thought and be okay to change our minds when presented with empirical evidence of something different, we will never succeed we will never disrupt. But I think a majority of majority of the population wakes up and it looks for evidence that further makes them comfortable in the prejudices and the biases that they have. And now whether that's in your professional life or in your personal life, that's majority of the population. That's why, you know, majority of the population does not innovate. If you have the courage to say that I was wrong, but the status quo is just not enough, there is a better way out there it's hard, but there is a better way out there. And that is going to add phenomenal value to our customer base, to the world at large. Now that's the kind of people that we are looking for. And we are very lucky to have. And if you are one of them, and if you really do want to make a dent in the database, universe, I know of a company. So give me a call (laughs) >> Well, challenging the status quo is hard, like you said. 'Cause getting up every day and just assuming things are going to be the same and align with your thought process, that's easy, but being willing to, as you said, be courageous is a whole other ball game. And as right now, data from yesterday is too late. You know, not only are we living in an on-demand culture, but now with the disruption, the microbial disruption data from yesterday, isn't good enough to help solve tomorrow's problems. Neither is yesterday's technology. How is memSQL helping your customers even, break the status quo? >> Lisa that's really most of the conversations I tend to have with CIO's and CEO's and given the digital work environment that we live in, there is a lot more availability because of lack of travel and other social obligations. So, you know, I have a number of these conversations with CEOs and CIOs on a weekly basis. And one of the things that most CEO's and CIO's ask for is large, how can I get the now, now? As I was saying that, you know, the COVID-19 crisis, so as to speak or event as really spurred and catalyzed, a lot of these digital innovations and something that could be for, you know, another year and another two years, maybe, or even three years needs to be done now. And the need for the now, has never been greater. Whether it be the responsiveness of your AI ML tools, or how close can we actually put a transaction? Do we, have AI ML Layer for near real time or other real, real time insights as to what's going on in the business? Because the one data point that you have, which can help you make informed decisions in this digital world is data. So how do you do it at speed? How do you do it at scale? How do you do it in a flexible environment? Is the need for the hour. Now, another aspect that they talk about is don't give me a fancier mousetrap as my CPO, the gentleman that we just hired from Google BigQuery is one of the founding members and head their engineering and product management even. And he actually put it really well. He said, you know, I, haven't come here to build a fancier mousetrap. I've come here to build in novel, new way of solving a customer's data problems and delivering the now when the customer needs us. As I said in the fastest, most economical, flexible, secure manner. That is in my opinion, the biggest need for the hour and someone who can deliver that, is going to be extremely successful in my humble opinion, because let me ask a question of any CIO or CEO or whoever is watching here. That if we could say that we would juice up your AI ML dashboard reports, you know, real time dashboards 4X in four weeks. How many of you are going to say no? How many of you are going to say that from a response time of 15 minutes, if he could give you subsecond response times like we've done for many of our vendors in the last three to four weeks, how many of the world would say, no, I stick to my slow dashboards. And that's what we are enabling Lisa, and that's why I am superbly excited about where we are and where we are headed. >> So companies that can work with innovative technology like memSQL, whether it be a retailer or a telco, for example, or healthcare organization, the companies that are going to be able to get the data, to get the now, now are those the next disruptors? >> Beyond doubt, beyond doubt. And we are already seeing like you and I were talking about defaulter show and we have you ever seen a lot of bankruptcies, amazing amount of bankruptcies for companies who did not have the infrastructure for delivering the now, now. And they essentially were feeding their own prejudices and biases by saying, oh no, I made the decision on our goal 15 years ago and I'm just going to stick by it because they're the biggest baddest database yet. But, they can solve the now problem. And guess what happened to your company? And those who were courageous enough to say, yeah, it's some of the problems of yesterday. If you had an unprecedented times and it would take a very hard and deep look and something which will shake up the status quo to be able to deliver the tomorrow for our company. For our company, to see the sunrise of tomorrow, we have to be courageous enough to question our prejudices and bias. And those are the companies which will not only survive, but they will thrive. We were talking to, you know, naturally I have a lot of conversations with investors here. You know, the SAS technology areas, is the new gold now, I mean, that's one segment of the market that's held up because that is what is enabling the courageous enterprises to deliver the tomorrow and help the employees and the customers see the sunrise of tomorrow. And those who don't, they just don't see the sunrise tomorrow. >> I know working and talking with customers is near and dear to your heart. How do you help businesses, like you mentioned a whole bunch of really big brands have filed for chapter 11 recently, brands that we've all known for decades and decades, maybe it's, you know, team, that's just not innovative enough. Like you said, Oracle, we're going to use it. How does memSQL come in? How do you, when you're talking with those customers who might be on the brink of not surviving, how do you help them from a, like a thought diversity perspective to understand what they need to do to not just survive but thrive? >> Yeah, you know, I would like to take too much of the credit here that we can be saviors of companies. The company, and the executive team needs to know their why, and we can deliver the how and we can deliver it faster, cheaper in a more secure fashion. But the courage of saying that if we don't change, we rather die and we will not see the sunrise of tomorrow has to come from the organizations. And I think that's the starting point. And we give them enough empirical evidence that there is a better way out there. And we were working with a very, very large electronic retailer. And for the retail telemetry as you pointed to, they could only get telemetry of their stores all over the world on a every day basis. I think I ran the report every 16 hours and that was just not enough of them. And they've got a very involved CEO. And they wanted sub-second response times. And the team actually taught it was not possible. And continue to say that to the executive team. Till they came across us and he showed that the 16 hour time difference was now 0.8 seconds and they jumped on it. And now their dashboards are powered by memSQL. And instead of running reports, every 16 hours, they run it every second. So you can query your retail telemetry every second. And those kinds of courageous asks and a team saying just because I made a decision two years ago now is the time actually for those teams to say, it was a different world. I made the right decision two years ago, but in the new world, there is a better way of doing things and better way of securing a future and delivering the now. And that's where we come in and we've helped a number of customers. And I actually urge a lot of the organizations who are looking for the now to have that introspective conversations internally. >> So how do you advise companies, whether it's your prospects or customers, or even memSQL to build a team that's poised for disruption? Is it generational? Is it more than that? >> I don't think it's generational at all. I don't think it's an age issue of, you know, seeing the future or having the ability to seek honors. I think it's ultimately, and I know I'm using this term a lot, it is... I've always found that very bright, intelligent self aware individuals have the ability to question their own prejudices and biases, and it requires courage and intelligence and all the rest of it. But I think that is the key that isn't that much more. And what greater impetus or reward would a company want than survival? Sometimes survival is a great impetus for innovation and we are seeing that happen a lot. And those that aren't, then don't do that. However, that said, teams which have focused from early on, on diversity of thought on, you know, different perspectives, just their DNA is more open to challenging the status quo. And that's where the organizations who've had the right cultural values of it's okay to question the status quo, it's okay to have diverse opinions, even though they drive a knife through your prejudices and biases at an organizational level and at an individual level, that DNA helps companies is coming in and paying off, you know, in spades because that cultural thought, you know, Think Tank is driving the new age of innovation and in doing so survival. So I do think that the companies that invested in the right cultural values, the right war shoes, that's being off in spades. And I think that those teams we are seeing, and those organizations with that kind of culture are jumping on the bandwagon of questioning the status quo, of using the technology of tomorrow to solve tomorrow's problems and not be steeped in heritage and even see those companies. And you can see who they will be actually I mentioned them, but they won't survive. And up here you're seeing a whole host of other companies who are so still sort of steeped in justifying that their original thought was the right thought, and I bet my bottom dollar, they don't survive. >> Next question for you, how have you been able to build your executive team at MemSQL? You've been able to build that diverse culture and how has it shaped your leadership style? >> Yeah, you know, I don't think we've... It's not as if we've gotten there, it's a constant journey and it's just something that starts off by saying, you know, we are not going to have a know-it-all culture, but we are going to have a learn-it-all culture. You know, we are going to listen and we are going to think, consider and respond. For me, diversity was a given, you know, I sort of grew up around diversity. Some of the influences of my life that have made me the person I am today came from a viewpoint of, you know, of women, you know, I had some very, very strong female influence in my life. And as I've said repeatedly, I wouldn't have been who I am or half the person I am today without that influence. So for me, it's a very natural sort of progression to have that diversity of thought and opinion as a, you know, weaved into the very fiber of any organization that I've been apart of. And we do that in a manner where we, it's not just good enough to say, we will hire the best team. I don't think that is the way that you are going to sort of address the historical imbalance, which has resulted in very single threaded thought cultures in organizations. We make it a point that at the top end of the funnel, of course, we, in our best candidate, right? However, at the top end of the funnel, we almost know legislate that there has to be X percentage of candidates who are, you know, diverse candidates. So candidates from minorities and then let the best, you know, candidates sort of get qualified. And also if there are two candidates who are equally qualified, then, you know, we encourage someone with a lot more diversity and, you know, to come onto the team. And ultimately that drives a lot of I've thought leadership in the organizations and helps us manage our blind spots a lot better. And I have so many examples of that. The amount of innovation that happens because of these working groups, which are very diverse working groups, is just, you know, unmeasurable. And we've been extremely clear about the fact of what candidates would survive, thrive, and enjoy being at memSQL. And those are the candidates who are here to build something build something for the ages, do right by each other and by the customer. You know, we don't accept the unacceptable challenge, the status quo, if you feel strongly about something stand up and your voice will be heard. You know, just because things were being done a certain way doesn't mean it has to be done the same way. And I'm very proud, very, very proud of the team that we have built and the one that we are building and, you know, it's a team that is united in purpose and very diverse in thought. And I have become a better person and a better professional with all the diversity of thought and the learnings that we have had as a consequence of that over the last a year and a half or so. And that is the cornerstone of what we are building here at memSQL and Lisa, you and I worked with one such individual, who's just made an unbelievable difference in our organization. And lastly, I think, you know, just on a personal note, the diversity angle becomes that much closer to my heart. I'm a father of two lovely girls and two lovely boys. And I just, you know, it's personal to me that if I can't leave the tech industry a better place for my daughters, then I found it, for that matter, even for my sons. But I think, you know, the daughters had their historical, you know, debts to pay. Then I don't think I would have really achieved the success that we all, as a team are hoping for. So yeah, this is extremely personal. >> And thank you for sharing all your insights. You tell a really interesting story. You know, we started talking about disruption, disruptors, how not to be disrupted, how to become a disruptor. And really some of the things that you talk about, it all really kind of comes down to the team, the DNA of the organization, and that thought diversity being courageous to break the status quo. Raj, I wish we had more time 'cause we could keep going on this, but thank you for sharing your insights. It's been really interesting conversation. >> Thank you, Lisa, it's been great to see you and stay safe and well. >> Likewise. For my guests, Raj Verma. I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching this CUBE Conversation. (soft music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE's studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm Lisa Martin. And today joining me is CUBE alumni, the co-CEO of Mem-SQL, Raj Verma. Raj, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you Lisa. It's great to be back, and it's so good to see you. >> Likewise. So since we last saw each other, a lot of changes going on everywhere. You're now the co-CEO of Mem-SQL. The CEO's role is changing dramatically in this year, and the last few months. Talk to us about some of those changes. >> Yeah. Where do I even start? I was just listening to something or watching something, and it said, in leadership one thing that they never tell you is, you don't find the event, the event finds you. And you know, it was four and a half, almost five months ago, we were at our SQL and if someone had said to me then that we'll be quarantined for five months following that, and most, more likely seven months, I probably wouldn't have believed them. And if I did, I would have gone and start crying. It's been sort of a lot of change for us. The one thing is for sure, as the CEO, I probably made more compelling decisions in the last four months than I probably made in the year prior to that. So there is a lot of decisions, important decisions that are being made now. I think the thing that's impressed me the most about just the human race per se in the last four and a half, five months is the resilience. The adaptability of just the community, and the race at large. There is a lot of goodness that we've seen happen. I think that is a greater appreciation for the life that we sort of had. And I think when everything does one day come back to normal, we would be a lot more appreciative and nicer just as individuals. Now as CEO, I think the first order of duty for me was to embrace our employees and my colleagues. It's a drawing set of circumstances for them, worrying about their health, the health of their aged parents, of their families well being, and whether they have a job or not, and how the economic environment would pan out. So I think it was just a ... My number one priority at the start and continues to be till today were our colleagues and the employees of Mem-SQL. And the first few decisions that we made were 100% employee centric. None of the big ones that was taking the pledge of no retrenchments or no workforce reduction for 90 days to begin with. And we've continued that. We haven't really reduced any employee headcount at all. The second was to go in turn embrace our customers and deliver to the promise that we had in normal times, and help them get back to as much of a normalcy as they could. And the third was to do whatever we could, to use our technology, our efforts, our resources, to help society at large. Whether it was to track and tracing projects that we did for a large telco or a telco in the Middle East, a telco in Asia. And we've put our resources there. Our aura is to just using our platform to heighten public awareness around Juneteenth, and other sort of social issues. Because I think in times of almost societal isolation, using your platform and being a voice for what you stand for is more important than ever before. And those were really the three things that stand out apart from just normal decisions, normal decisions that you make to make sure that you are well-capitalized, that you have enough cash to run your business, that all the fundamentals of the business are sound. So yeah. >> So lots of decisions on a massively accelerated scale, more than the last 10 years. But big strategic decisions made in a quick time period for employees, for customers, for how do we use our platform, what is the key that you need in order to make those decisions, as strategically as you can like that? >> Yeah, you got to lens it through, what is the why of your organization, Our advice is very simple, we want to be the platform of decision making, or what we call the platform of now. Where we can marry historical information with the real time operational data being streamed in to your organization, and be able to deliver up reports and insights that you need for quick decision making in other organizations. So delivering up the now. Internally, when sort of presented with options to make decisions, the lens that I've used is, what's in the best interest of our employees, what's in the best interest of our customers and what is in the best interest of our investors and stakeholders. And if you apply that lens, the decisions aren't actually that difficult. You will never have a 100% of the data that you need to make a decision. So, lensing it through your priorities becomes extremely, extremely important. The other aspect that having data though, having said that, having data now to make decisions is more important than ever before. Because you do not have the sort of physical cues to depend on or clues to depend on. I'm still finding it hard to read the digital clues on Zoom or Google Hangouts or Teams, or what have you. So you just have to have a very steeped-in data decision making, marrying it with, what is it that you stand for as an organization? And the third vector that we've put to this is very simple. We as an organization stand fort authenticity. We like to simplify rather than complicate. And we need to demonstrate courage over comfort. And those are the other vectors that we use to make the majority of our strategic decisions. >> So if data... For years, you've heard this all over the tech circuit, Raj, data's the new gold, data's the new oil. Now you're saying it's even more important than ever in this unprecedented time. How does Mem-SQL help customers get access to as much data as they can to make really fast strategic decisions. To not just survive in this mode, but thrive? >> Yeah, I think two questions, what is the data and the value of data? And you're absolutely right. The value of data now is more than ever before. And also the amount of data that is now being produced is more than ever before. So it's actually a pretty, pretty nontrivial issue to solve. And I think the first thought is that you can't solve the problems of tomorrow with the technology of yesterday. You cannot solve the problems of tomorrow, using a technology that was built for a different era, which was built 45 years ago, 25 years ago. And you know, some of the tenants of the technology are still steeped in. Let's just call it heritage. So first and foremost, the realization that the problems of tomorrow need the tools of now and the talent of now, and the management of now, and the leadership of now to solve it, is paramount. What we do as a technology company, and a lot of companies in our genre called hard tech is exactly that. It's hard tech. It takes a lot of talent, it takes a lot of time, resources, money, clarity of thought to build something which will solve the problems of today and of tomorrow. And today the challenges we actually have is, the real time nature of decision making of interactions, of experience, of security, of compliance, are more exaggerated than ever before. And how do you marry real time information with historical information in the cheapest, easiest to deploy flexible architecture is of paramount importance. And that's exactly what we do, Lisa. We give you a database that is arguably the fastest in the world from a query speed standpoint, the scale's more than any other database in our genre, it has data governance by virtue of us being sequel, it's hybrid multi-cloud so it doesn't lock you in, and it's a among the easiest to use. So, I don't know what the future would bring, Lisa, but one thing I can assure you is, there are five things which wouldn't change which is developers would prefer faster over slow, cheaper over fast, flexible over rigid, ease of use over complexity of use, and a secure, safe platform versus the alternative. And if you have those five tenants, I think you'd be pretty well-versed with solving the problems of today and tomorrow. >> You mentioned real time a minute ago, and that's, I think right now during the COVID-19 crisis, there's nothing that highlights the urgency of which we need information real time. It's not going to help us if it's 24 or 48 hours old. How does Mem-SQL deliver real time insights to customers, whether it's a telecommunications company looking to do contact tracing or a bank? >> Yeah. So let me start with a couple of examples, a very large telephone provider, telecommunication providers in the States, uses us for metric telemetry. So how many calls did Lisa make, how many texts did she send, what time? Without purpose, the privacy attached to it. When did she experienced a call drop, what's the coverage at her home, is the sort of a mobile tower close to her place going to go down, and what would be the inconvenience? All of that. So copious amounts of data required to really deliver a customer experience. And it's a hard enough problem because the amount of data as you can imagine is extremely, extremely, extremely large. But when COVID-19 struck, the data became that much more important, because now it was a tool that you could use as a company to be able to describe or follow cohorts of subscribers in hotbeds like New York at that time. And see which States they were actually, let's call it "fleeing" to or moving to. And to be able to do that in near real time was not good enough, because you had to actually do it in real time. To be able to track where the PPEs work in near real time was not good enough, it had to be real time. And to track where the ventilators were in near real time wasn't good enough. You just needed to do that. And I think that probably is one of the biggest examples of real time that we have in the recent past, and something that we are most proud of. How did we do that? We built this hard tech based on first principles. We didn't try and put a lipstick on a pig, we didn't try and re-architect a 45-year-old technology or a 15-year-old technology. We just said that if we actually had a plain sheet of paper, what would we do? And we said, the need of the future is going to be fast over slow, as I said, you know, cheap or expensive, flexible over rigid, safe over the other alternatives and ease of use. And that's what we've built. And the world will see the amount of difference that we make to organizations and more importantly to society, which is very near and dear to my heart. And yeah, that's what I'm extremely proud, and optimistic about. >> Talk to me about some of the customer conversations that you're having now. I've known you for many years. You're a very charismatic speaker. As you were saying a few minutes ago, it's hard to read body language on Zoom and video conferences. How are those customer conversations going, and how have they changed? >> A lot has changed. I think there are a couple of aspects that you touch upon. One is just getting used to your digital work day. Initially we thought it was two weeks and it's great. You don't have to commute and all the rest of it. And then you started to realize, and the other thing was, everyone was available. There's no one who was traveling. There were no birthday parties. There's no picking up a kid from baseball or school or swimming or whatever. So everyone was available. And we were like, "Wow, this is great, no commute, everyone's available. Let's start meeting and interacting." And then you realize after a while that this digital workday is extremely, extremely exhausting. And if you weren't deliberate about it, it can fill your entire day, and you don't get much done. So one of the things that I've started to do is, I don't get on a digital call unless of course it's a customer or something extremely, extremely important till 11:00 AM. That's my thinking time, it's just, you know, eight to 11 is untouched and people I want to call rather than my calendar describing what my priorities should be. And it's the same thing for our customers as well, in a slightly different way. They are trying to decide and come to terms with not only what today means to them, but what the realities of today means for tomorrow. I'll give you an example of a very, very large bank in the United States, a rich consumer bank, which is essentially believed in the fact that customer relations were the most and customer relationship managers were the most important role for them. They are thinking about moving to bots. So the fact that you would be interacting with bots when you reach your bank is going to be a reality. There is no if and and buts about it. A very, very large company providing financial services, is now trying to see, how do you make the digital platforms more responsive? How do you make analytics foster more responsive and collaborative? Those are really the focus of C-suite attention, rather than which building do we call after our company and add towers to it. Or what coffee machine should we buy for the organization, or should we have a whiskey bar or a wine bar in our office? Now the ... Just the mundaneness of those decisions are coming up. And now the focus is how do we not only survive, to your point, Lisa, but thrive in the digital collaboration economy. And it's going to be about responsiveness. It's going to be about speed. And it's going to be about security and compliance. >> At the end of the day, kind of wrapping things up here, COVID or not the customer experience is critical, right, it's the lifeblood of what your organization delivers. The success of your customers, and their ability to make major business impact is what speaks to Mem-SQL's capabilities. A customer experience I know is always near and dear to your heart. And it sounds like that's something that you have modified for the situation, that really Mem-SQL focused on, not just the customer experience, but your employee experience as well. >> That's exactly it. And I think if you do right by the employees, they'll do right by the customers. And I would any day, any day put the employee first lens to any decision that we make. And that's paid off for us in spades. We've got a family environment, I genuinely, genuinely care about every single employee of Mem-SQL and their families. And we've communicated that often, we have listened, we have learned, these are unprecedented times. There isn't a manual to go through COVID-19 work environment. And I think the realization that we just don't know what tomorrow would bring, it's actually very liberating because it just frees you from rinsing and repeating, and further feeding your prejudice and biases, to getting up every day and say, "Let me learn as much as I can about the current environment, current realities, lens it through our priorities, and make the best decision that we can." And if you're wrong, accept and correct it. Nothing too intellectual, but it's in the simplicity that sometimes you find a lot of solace. >> Yeah. Simplicity in these times would be great. I think you're ... I like how you talked about the opportunities. There's a lot of positive COVID catalysts that are coming from this. And we want to thank you for sharing some time with us today, talking about the changing role of the C-suite, and the opportunities that it brings. Raj it's been great to have you on theCUBE. >> As always Lisa. It's a pleasure. Thank you. >> For the co-CEO of Mem-SQL, Raj Verma, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE conversation.

>> Announcer: Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE covering VeeamON 2019. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to Miami everybody. This is Dave Volante with Peter Burris and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, and we're here at VeeamON 2019 in Miami at the Fontainebleau Hotel. Raj Perumal is here. He's the CIO of Ducks Unlimited, Canada-based wetland and waterfowl conservation. Great to have you on theCUBE, thanks. >> Thank you. >> The keynote yesterday was awesome. You guys were talking about some of things that you're doing. We're going to get into that. You made a great statement. You said "the wetlands are the kidneys of the world." >> Raj: Yes. >> You know, explain that. >> (laughs) Sure, so, most people are very familiar with the Amazon rain forest, right? When you think about saving the planet and saving the environment, that's where everyone's mind or eyes go to, right? Well, wetlands are Mother Nature's way of essentially filtering water, stopping overland flooding, and so on. So, that's why we say they are the kidneys of the earth. >> Yeah, and so talk a little bit about the trends in the earth. It's been very challenging, right? I mean despite the great work that you're doing, you're still fighting this battle which sometimes might feel unwinnable. But give us the data, yeah. >> Absolutely, urban expansion, right? At the end of the day, you know as humans we're going across the planet. We're constantly building more cities, more parking lots, more everything, right? So wetlands are getting replaced with various things. Same thing with various resource mining, et cetera. Wetlands go away. So what Ducks Unlimited likes to do is adopt a no net loss policy. So what we do is we work closely with governments in various provinces across Canada. So if someone destroys an acre of wetlands, we can try and restore maybe four or ten acres for every one destroyed. It's better not to destroy it in the first place, but if it's going to happen, restore it somewhere else. >> Dave: So, some of the stats I saw. You've done 12,000 projects since you started this in the 1930's. 163.5 million acres that you have preserved. And as I say, still the wetlands loss is enormous. Is it not regulated to the point where public policy can help? >> Raj: Well, there's policy and there's law. And when it comes to Canada, there's policy but there's always exceptions. So what ends up happening is, you have these policies that say you can't do this, but then there's exception, exception, exception, exception. And usually corporations can get a way through some various exception and actually get through. Ducks Unlimited helped pass a law in Quebec not too long ago, so we actually have it in law in Quebec where it is actually being supported. >> So, the old adage that if you can't measure it, it doesn't get done. >> That's right. >> One of the most amazing things about some of these digital transformations is satellite imagery, other types of weather and related data, are making it possible to track typology in unbelievable minute detail. >> Absolutely. >> Peter: Now that's got to help you, but at the same time, it's got to really dramatically require a greater focal point on things like data protection. Especially since operational time series for wetlands is not measured in nanoseconds. It's measured in years. >> That's right. >> So you got to be able to use this technology to both enhance your mission right now, but also be able to show over time how things are changing. Have I got that right? >> That's absolutely correct. With climate change as an example, and yes, that's a real thing. With climate change, you're measuring, We want to keep data like over 30 years. And that's where we actually see true change. We're just talking about five, ten years. That's just weather, that's not climate change, right? So we need to keep that data. So yes, we have a whole GIS department, Geographical Information Systems, where we have satellite imagery, drone imagery of Canada, going years and years and years back. We have to keep all of that data and we can never get rid of it. >> So what does this mission have to do with Veeam? >> Sure, absolutely. So with all of that data, GIS data is very imagery intense. So think of it like x-rays or CAD. So it takes up a lot of space. So we have to back up that data. Every map has layers and layers and layers, so it's almost like a Google Maps for the environment. You can think of it that way. We run something called the Canadian Wetland Inventory. It's the largest inventory of wetlands, mapping of wetlands, in Canada. And we leave that as open data, so anyone can access the data and use it. So we use Veeam to back all of that up, and also to maintain our disaster recovery and so on for all our different operations. That's just one aspect of our operations, another big part, and you talked about the 12,000 projects we were doing. We started a division called conservation technology which is all about using technology to monitor the wetlands. So putting internet of things sensors out in the wetlands, gathering that data automatically through satellite and cellular networks, analyzing it with artificial intelligence and machine learning. Once we have that, we can get those insights, give them to our scientists or PhDs where the big minds can go and crunch that and go and look at it and go, okay, this is what's happening in the world. We need to back that data up too. And once again, going back to what I said before, we need to keep that data over long periods of time so we can actually see patterns and figure out what's going on with our planet. >> Do you do video on the ground as well? I mean, you're right Peter. With satellite imagery, you can get pretty minute detail. But then, like the ground truth, sometimes you got to go on the ground. . Are you capturing video on the ground? >> A little bit, not a lot. >> Dave: The changes in flora and fauna? Do you see that as useful in the future? Or is it just too much data or not as useful to sort of deploy those kind of cameras? >> I would love to be able to capture all of that data real-time. The problem with that is in Canada, our internet infrastructure is quite poor in the rural areas. In some places, you have better-than-dial-up speeds. That's it. So unfortunately, we can't bring that data back. So a lot of the times, we can't capture the video. But where we can, we do. >> Dave: Okay, but so you are putting sensors there and so talk more about that data. What are you doing with that data? Does that come back into a cloud? Yes, so we pull that into the cloud, Microsoft Azure, where we analyze it and do that AI and machine learning, and then spit it out from there. So we are in the hybrid cloud. So we have some stuff internally, some in the public cloud. A little mixture of everything. That's where Veeam comes into play. >> So I had a couple questions. One is on the data source side and one is on the data sync side, starting with the data sync. Certainly, climate scientists and others, folks who are looking at geopolitics and other types of things, are taking this kind of information and they're using it as a source for even more complex and advanced applications. Are you seeing communities evolve and emerge and evolve in response to the availability of your data? >> Absolutely, people are clamoring for more though. Everyone wants real-time data. A lot of our data is manually gathered at this point. We have people driving out to a specific project in the middle of nowhere, gathering the data manually, driving back and then uploading it because that's the only way we can do it. So, absolutely, we are seeing people wanting more use of it and making use of that data, but they want it live. They want it right now. We kind of live in an instant-on society, right? But once again, the challenges of rural areas kind of tie our hands. >> Well that was my second question. Do you see an opportunity to do crowdsourcing of video or other types of information? >> Absolutely. >> So is that becoming a way and are you using artificial intelligence? Start taking an extended number of data sources as people go out and take pictures of ducks, or whatever else it is, and then ingesting that into your system. Does that become part of the flow? >> Yeah, absolutely, so that kind of takes us back to the 1930's when Ducks first started. We had the key men of old that actually kind of stewarded their local areas for conservation. So, absolutely, we can use crowdsourcing in this day and age, and it's something we want to explore. We're not doing it yet, but we're getting there. >> How is your data pipeline? 1930's, you know the data, the data model in 1930's is a lot different than it is today. The keynote speaker today talked about the sort of bending of the innovation curve and how the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years we're going to see more change than we've ever seen before. We'll see. But the data model that you guys are doing, I mean at least in the last 10 years you've seen new technologies come out, new processes. How are you evolving that data model? >> It's more like data models. (laughs) For the various line of business because we do so many different things, right? But essentially what we're trying to do-- >> The big thing is keeping it all connected. Keeping it all in sync. Implementing things like master data management. We're a big partner with Dell Boomi for example. So we leverage them to move our data back and forth between all our systems, et cetera, while Veeam backs it up. So I would say it's hugely important to be continually pushing the envelope and how you move data and how you synchronize data, how you authenticate that data and how you verify that data. Especially in science, you want to make sure that it's not being tampered with. You got to make sure that the data is consistent and true. >> Raj, how long have you been in this role? >> At Ducks Unlimited? A little over two years, but in the industry, over 25. >> So Veeam at Ducks preceded you, is that right? >> No, I brought it in. >> Dave: So you brought it in? Talk about that. Why did you bring it in and what was going on before? Maybe tell us a before and after. >> Sure, absolutely. So I actually used to be on the reseller side of the business. I used to be a CIO for one of the larger IT consulting companies in Canada. And during my time there, I brought Veeam into the province of Manitoba and spent a lot of time with various different customers, putting Veeam into various different projects and company types. So lots of exposure to the product. So when I came into Ducks Unlimited Canada, I already came in knowing what was possible, and gave the existing backup product a shot because I didn't necessarily want to rip and replace everything on my team with the CIO coming in day one. >> Dave: New sheriff in town! Ugh, who's this guy? >> But when it wasn't doing exactly what I needed it to do, we decided to bring Veeam in and the rest is basically history. >> Talk more about that. What was the business impact of bringing-- >> Oh sure, absolutely, so before Veeam, we were spending over 40 hours a week just administering backups. >> Peter: 40 hours a week? >> Yeah, easily. And we have large data sets, and so as I was talking about in the keynote, with those large data sets, if you're doing a backup or a restore, especially a restore, if it fails, you can blow a day trying to get that data back. And so you've lost a day. So that's how you easily end up losing that much time. Especially with an organization where you have 27 locations across Canada, and 500 staff, and 4,500 volunteers all accessing this data in some way, shape, or form. So by moving to Veeam, all those tasks that we used to do before, just worked. Veeam always says "it just works." It's true. And so what ended up happening is stuff that was taking the team a week, all of a sudden was taking them minutes. Like literally minutes. And it's unbelievable. That FT, that full-time equivalent staff member all of a sudden becomes freed up to do the work I was talking about in conservation technology and other areas of our business. We're directly impacting science on the planet, so a lot more fun that just supporting regular IT. >> So you have that 40 hours, was arms and legs of the team? And how large was the team? >> 16. >> So six, zero? >> Raj: 16. >> 16! Okay, so it was 16, pieces of 16. Which a lot of times, people hear that and they're like oh, it's going to reduce jobs. I don't want to talk about that. But these guys must have hated that. That job, the 40 hours-- >> Absolutely, they're doing mund-numbing work, right? >> Dave: It's interruptive and-- >> Yeah, and so now they're doing a lot funner stuff, right? >> What funner stuff are they doing? >> Absolutely, so once again being involved directly with conservation technology and our IOT play and all of that AI and machine learning research. All the sexy stuff in IT that's happening now, right? So they're very happy. >> You guys got a pretty interesting IOT use case. So how, I'm curious as to, you know we've been watching various companies come in and announce their grand IOT strategies and say "Okay we're going to bring this box to the edge." What are your thoughts on IOT, the edge, all those sort of buzz words. How do you look at it from a practitioner and a customer standpoint? >> It's very much like building a mobile app. So, you know everyone says we need an app for their company, right? They don't know why they need an app. They just say they need an app. And then they go and build that app and then nothing happens with it, right? And then it all fails. IOT is much the same way. Internet of things, AI, machine learning, it's all the buzz words. But then you need to understand what you want to get out of it in the first place. Like where are you trying to go? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to accomplish? And then if IOT fits that, AI, machine learning, if that fits that, then great. And if it doesn't, then don't waste your time. That's my thought. >> So, specifically, what's your IOT strategy? What can you accomplish with edge? >> Absolutely, if we can get instant live data streaming into the cloud and actively analyzing it on the fly using cloud services like Azure, AI, machine learning IOT et cetera, or even Amazon services, a lot of different services out there. If we can do that on the fly and feed that into the Canadian Wetland Inventory that I was talking about before, using open data initiatives, we can now feed data to the planet about what's happening real-time to academia, to governments, et cetera, so they can make decisions with evidentiary-based statistics, right? Right now it's very hard for, this is why the fight over climate change, people go "There is such a thing." Other people go, "No there isn't", and this happens because there's not enough data available to the general public, right? So by having this open data and making it available to the general public, not just the scientific communities, I think that would go a long way to helping get support for these causes. >> That's awesome, changing the world. What are the skill sets you need to achieve that vision? Is it data science-heavy? Can you sort of outsource some of that? Is the tooling simplified enough now? Talk about that. >> It's a little bit of networking, little bit of data science, a lot of GIS, and a lot of old fashioned networking and talking to people, right? So that's really what makes up the team and allows us to do what we do. >> Are you hiring data scientists? >> Not at the moment, no. We have everyone we need. >> But you have data scientists on staff. >> Yes, exactly. Because even before the IOT thing, we have scientists on staff that do just that, right? It's just in the traditional sense, before that. >> So did you sort of create that role? Take somebody who's good in math and computers and stats and say "Hey, you're the data scientist now. Go do some training and make it happen." Or did you actually hire in a data scientist? >> We actually created that role, so we have numerous people that feed different aspects of that, but the main man that's actually running that for me is our right hand man and your manager of IT. He started as a biologist that became a GIS guy that became my manager of IT. So he has a little bit of experience in all these different areas and he's like the perfect person to run the conservation technology division for us. >> Cool. >> And he's here today. >> Oh really? So what do you think of VeeamOn? Have you been to previous Veeam shows? >> Yeah, most of them actually. >> Dave: Really? >> It's great, yeah. >> Oh, that's awesome, seeing the CIO crowd hang out with all us backup wonks. So, thoughts from the show, takeaways? >> Sure, absolutely. Well, first of all, if anyone isn't using Veeam, they should be using it already. I got to say that right now. So many people waste their time picking and choosing and hemming and hawing. Just use it, it just works. So please do that. You won't regret it whatsoever. Veeam has done some really great things. I love the announcements with Orchestrator in version 2 there, and some of the good things that are coming with the restore plans and the scopes, et cetera. And that's fantastic. So I think there's a lot of great things that Veeam is bringing to data management and data availability. >> Yeah, so they made a big deal out of being able to do restores from the backup corpus. Not having to go to a replicated chunk of data. Why is that important for you, and will you take advantage of that? >> It's just the speed. It's just the speed, so I don't have to bring it back from another place, right? It's just instant. >> Yeah, okay, so then you're going to use that other place for disaster recovery or just a second copy for just in case? >> Yup! >> But you've got basically a local copy that you can bring back instantaneously. Okay, great. And I presume that supports your sort of compressed RTO and RPO. Which, as long as I've been in this business, they've shrunk and shrunk and shrunk. >> Yup, that's right. >> Shrunk the RPO. Great, okay, I'll give you final words. Cool stuff you're working on, things you'd like to see our industry do better, you pick it. >> Sure, cool stuff we're working on. So, talking about what we're doing at Ducks Unlimited with IT and really kind of changing the shape of IT and how it's involved in science, and I talked about Wetland Inventory, that live data, et cetera. If we can build a model like that here, imagine what we can do across the world, right? I'd love to take that model and take it to other countries where they can do the same type of work, so altruistically, and share that data, that whole open data initiative, so other people can go and save wetlands. If we can get everyone working together that way, I think we'll all be better off. >> That's awesome, Raj, thank you so much for coming to theCUBE, sharing your insights and experiences. Appreciate it. All right, keep it right there buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE live from VeeamON 2019 from Miami. We'll be right back.

>> from Washington, D. C. It's the queue covering science logic. Symposium twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Science Logic >> Hi, I'm student men and this is the Cubes coverage of Science Logic. Symposium twenty nineteen here at the Ritz Carlton in Washington, D. C. First of all, want Welcome back to the program. Roger Putnam, Who's the vice president of Global Solutions? That science logic Thanks for coming back and what with programme A first time Rob Gruner listed is this loosened architect from Telstra. But >> Rob, I actually had >> a chance to talk to some of your co ords there, they said. Arav robs a wizard. He's an engineer that does everything. So you know, solutions. Architect. Of course, we know that they're out there. They do a lot of different things and asleep, leased. Your peers say you're somebody that does quite a lot of different >> things. Did Jack of All trades master of none unfortunate >> way? It's all right, don't you know it is in vogue now to be, you know, a generalist. It's, you know, we've gone from specialties to well, oh no, it's it's platforms and everything's going to be everything, so I have plenty of background with Telstra, but maybe talk a little bit about you know, your role in the organization and what what kind of things you're involved in. Since you know some of those trades that you >> are jack of all, >> probably our spies have come into Telstra's an acquisition. So, you know, working for small company, you tend to do everything on. For some reason, I've been allowed to continue to do that on developing expertise around science logic. And that means I've been involved across a lot of areas of the business as we've been adopting science logic more widely, and it's been quite interesting. Process means eye contact, that expertise and then see how it's applied across the organization. So it's been quite interesting, >> awesome. One of things that's been interested in me and in talking to service Friday is talking to the enterprise customers is two. You know how many tools they had, how many they replaced with science logic, but also what things it's integrating with and working with. It was a big focus on the keynote this morning is, you know, integrations with Sam and you know all these various pieces, so maybe give us a little bit of kind of the scope. You know how long's tells me you've been using science logic, How broads the deployment and you know what? What? What does it do in? What does it tie into >> a tte? The mammoth is more enterprise focused. So on. That's the area. Tell Stur I come from so it's really around delivering services to her customers. Quite recently, we've seen then looking in deploying science logic across their carriage spokes and managing services there. That's quite a large deployment. You know, we're quite happy with that in terms of what is going to be doing for the business on the integrations, their endless. So Telstra, like a lot of large organizations, has a lot of different systems to talk to. A lot of different service dis, depending on the operational areas. So in service now is one of those. But it's a hollow of other stuff on, so that's a very challenging process. And sounds objects being pretty good at, you know, spreading itself around. Those >> give us a little insight as to you know, how fast things are changing. You know, hear Kafka and Streams and, you know, constantly moving I've been looking at the, you know, communities and container stuff that's happening, which is which is fast moving. So >> are definitely say it. And Telstra's trying as hard as akin to move as quickly as the market can allowed. So definitely it's virtual izing. ITT's automating II ops is a big component of what we're doing. It is extremely important for the business. >> Okay, so Alps is something you're doing have to We're not as mature as we'd like to video. I'm not sure if you saw the keynote this morning, but they put out a maturity models So would love for you to, you know, where are you when you look at that? They kind of had the three criterias there is. There's kind of the the machine learning, there's the automation and I'm trying to remember the third piece that was there, but you know where where are you today? You know, how'd you get there? And you know what? What's what's a little bit of the road map going forward? >> I think it might be probably our ambitions to be in that the upper end of the spectrum and into remediation, But that's an ambition and I think we've got a while to go with that. So, uh, more than that, I can't coming off >> its interests. So they have that The keynote tomorrow they're going. Jean Kim speaking on the deaf ops. And, you know, I'm a big fan of the Phoenix project and they talked about, you know, the jack of all trades that does it all. He could sometimes be the bottleneck in the system. Absolutely. Because you can't be up. I need something fixed. Well, we'LL go to Rob Rob all fix it. That's great. That fire floating mode. I know I've done that in my career, and it's one of those things. Oh, jeez, you're never going to move at this job because you're replaceable. It's like that's a dangerous place to be. >> It is s >> o. You know, we talk a little bit about, you know, you said, you know, science logic. You know that they position themselves as this is going to help you move that, you know, machine speed and keep up with that. Give us a little bit the reality of what you're seeing. How what does that impact your job? Your organization? >> Look, I think sounds logic has done a wonderful job within the organization. It's it's the legacy infrastructure within any organization, particularly tells her scale. That's really holding you back on. There's a lot of Well, I think people level with Intel Street. Move as quickly as we can, but we have such a large number of legacy systems to deal with. You know, we're looking at one deployment of Sands object. We were looking at IDing systems to kill, So it's a big task >> the wonderful technical death that we've all inherited. So So you know, Roger, you know, this something we hear from all customers. It'd be lovely if I had the mythical, you know, unicorn that, you know, start from the ground up and you know, he can start afresh. But we always have to have that mix and give it a little bit about what you're seeing. You know, about the Telstra in a little bit broader, You know, >> I think what tell us she has done really well with taking advantage of our technology was they didn't come in with this attitude of would rip out everything that we have and just have a magic easy bun. Software doesn't work that way. I think we've all learned the lessons of tough deployments when you try to stay out of fix everything. So they came in with a really gradual, phased approach of Get a couple pieces done where they had gaps. You start to fill those gaps. What's happening during the last few years as we've seen the shift greater change and they've taken advantage of the platforms, nationalities a hole as they go through their digitization efforts. And so as they digitize, they taking this step by step by step approach to you know what you were saying earlier with Rob does. He doesn't answer the question of being the one man band, but they did was they build it all process wise, using software to drive the automation. So once it's done one time, you're not stuck on the person anymore. And so I think when we look at our most successful customers like Telstra, it's because they've had this gradual, phased approach where they're using software rather than single person bottlenecks. And rather than having these tiger teams to try to solve problems and moving towards a better process to take advantage of the world, we're in today. So how >> do you measure success? You know, what are some of the business outcomes or, you know, k p I's that you understand how you're moving from kind of where you were to where you want to be. >> Uh, that's a difficult one to answer because particularly sounds, logic was used in so many different context. So for a certain part of the business, we might say, Are we monitoring the full stack? I were giving customers real value invisibility through the whole dynamic of the business. And then, in another context, we using sound subject. We were just saying, We just need to deploy its scale. We need two one board as quickly as possible. We need to keep the cost down to a minimum. We need to keep events that's allow as possible. Okay, so it's more about the efficiency argument, so it's really depends and way we're trying to use it and how we're deploying it. So >> how do you have visibility across how everybody is doing and getting trained on the latest things and keeping up to date and sharing best practices? How do you manage that internally, and how do you how do you do you network with your peers on some of that? >> Well, we've tried Teo really within. Tell us we have a concept of centre of excellence. So it's really about, you know, being recognizes the business experts in particular area and allowing the business to understand. That's that. That's where the expertise sits on a certain we've done a very good job with that and then allowing and communicating that after the business as well. So it's a very tough asked. It's a big business. We have thirty thousand people so often one person doesn't know about another person, another floor on the buildings, you know, to try and spread it across the biz, since we have fifty officers worldwide. So it's a process, you >> know? I mean, Roger just want one of things that here is, you know, science logic. It's not a widget, and it's, you know, can fit in a lot of different environments and a lot of different uses. You know, I heard of, you know, strong emphasis in into training had your CEO on where in his wizard tat for for for the that the learning knowledge that was gonna happen. So you know you talk a little bit about how science logic is looking to address this, especially for some you know, large customers like Telstra. >> You know, I think there's a general skills gap in is a whole beyond our technology beyond what's taking place in the world today. And you know, I've been in the business for quite a while, and we've long focused on training the operator on how to utilize the technology to solve their specific problems. And while that those aspects really powerful, some of the things we've done recently to go a step further is when we hear similar questions. We started record all of those so our customers could watch videos of how to solve problems instead of just going onto some form and let me type some question and hope somebody responds to in the future. You have read it for that. So we've got a look at a better mechanism and video based training handheld handling the customers we can build out these use cases drives the platform value, and what Telstra does it's really unique is they use the platform less so from a perspective of can I manage X y Z technology. But what can I build on top of it? How can I break the platform to some extend? And Rob is a mad scientist for us here. I mean, could jump into this more. But they've broken the platform to solve those business needs by addressing them individually. And what we've done is we've taken his best practices, and we rolled them back out to the rest of our customers. So with Robin, tell Hsia and a couple of other really great customers were driving a better community and sense of community so less question, answer form, less traditional support, more video, more community, more share ability. And that's where you're going to get additional quality. Coming out from the products are being delivered. Makes sense to you, Robert. Absolutely. >> Yeah, Rob. I mean, I love any commentary on that. You know, the network effect of software especially would talk about Sasser as a service type things, you know, that's what sales force really came out. It was like a weight one customer. Ask for something and wake everybody. You can take advantage of that or something similar. So are you seeing that kind of dynamics today with science logic and with others >> well, perfectly within the Telstra business. Absolutely so by building a capital into one area, you can share it across. And we found that we've been able to then sell the system internally, your internal stakeholders, so they appreciate the value of it and we can build on that. And then our customers, whilst we don't necessarily lady with the product they can. They see what's going on, and they basically then take it on as a service as well. So it's very, very interesting process. >> So one thing we haven't talked about yet, but you talk about data, you know, what's the role of data in your environment is something that you know key to the platform from science logic. How you leveraging it? How's that changing in your environment? One of the opportunities there. >> It's interesting questions. So as the telco, we collect a lot of data on DA. Obviously we have federal agencies who make that a requirement as well. So we have an existing data like initiative on that's very full of moment, and science logic is where we're looking at how we can add to that the value, valuable information and provides, but like everyone else, is a lot of data to collect, and it's an interesting process to try and make sense out of it and react accordingly. I mean, as a business, we were responding to millions and millions events of a day. So it's, you know, it's a difficult thing. >> Yeah, one of things. When we look at things like you know, anything that requires training like machine learning or the like, There's the balance between I want to learn from everybody. But you know, you're in a competitive marketplace. I don't want my competitors necessarily to get things. So you know the software products usually Well, I can isolate, and it doesn't have specific information. But how do you look at that dynamic of making sure that you gain from what the industry is doing, but that, you know, you could still stay competitive in ahead of your competition? >> Uh, >> no. I don't have a necessary can answer that. I suppose my head's tied into really what I could do with a platform and how I can then bring new technologies into the company's. So that's really are spies remind spaces on, Really, it's what I'm focused on. So you know what we do with the daughter probably is. He's not necessarily big concerns. How >> about that? There was quite a lot of announcements this week. The number of integrations as well as you know, update to the product. Anything specifically that you've been waiting for or that has caught your eye, >> the service now integration. I think it is far more advanced than has been in the past. On we have aspect of the business used thinks over quite heavily. So the fact that that's now matured and much more robust and you know which sort of offering that'LL have a lot of impact on the business. So I definitely mean the machine learning is another great thing on the question of then how that develops over time. So we'LL see how that goes. You >> know, Roger loves you know what? When I've been digging into some is the feedback you've been getting from customers and what's been leading toe, you know, some of the enhancement. So I would love, love your take on what you're saying. >> You know, I think one of the things that tell Sharpe pushed us towards a few years back was we're going to build. We already have a data like we don't need you to function. Is there Data Lake? So its multiple different Veda lakes And this concept of how do I move later From one day to lake to a different data Lake lakes within lakes ponds. Whatever the terminology is today the data ocean, our family perfect. And I'm getting to that data ocean from our lake. We have to go get streaming data. So now I'm going to extremes against really geographic here. But, you know, Rob really pushed us to make sure we could go right to Kaka buses and pushed data out. So what do you do with the data? And so tell Strip has been a, you know, an early adopter of a lot of our technology. And by being an early adopter, they've pushed us in a number of directions. So I think when you see a lot of the functionality that we've released this week and we've announced, it's been because of our customer base because of our partners like Telstra, that need to drive the business for further and forward, especially the industry like Telco World, where everything is mobile everything's moving so fast and aggressively. They're really like a good sounding board for where we need to go and how do we get there and and that drive And that partnership is What I think I'm most excited about working with tell sure is they demand from us to be excellent, and that gets great product coming out. And we see the results this week with all of our customers excitingly looking at stream treating capability that Rob was pushing us for well in advance of anyone else. >> Yeah, Robin, I want to give you the final word. You know, I can't help but notice you actually co branded shirts you've got tell star on your arm wither with science logic there. So, obviously, more than just a vendor relationship there, maybe close us out with you know how important science logic is. Two to your business >> job, Critical part of the business. I mean, particularly where we're looking at the commodity aspect of many services, you know, we can't survive unless we can provide quality, invaluable information where customers and really sounds. Logic has been the key platform for that. So in some respects, we're resting, you know, an aspect of the business entirely and Scientology's hands and we're hoping they'LL deliver >> well, Robin Raj, Thank you so much for joining us. Just sharing all the progress that you've made in. You know where things were going? Thanks so much, thanks to all right. And I'm student men. This is the Cube at Science Logic Symposium twenty nineteen. Thanks for watching.

live from San Francisco it's the cube covering micron inside 2018 brought to you by micron welcome back to San Francisco Bay everybody this is the cube the leader in live tech coverage my name is Dave Valentin I'm here with my co-host David Floria we're covering micron insight 2018 really bring it together memory storage and artificial intelligence talking about AI for good talking about changing the way in which we work new workloads Raj to Lori is here he's the senior vice president and general manager of microns a booming mobile business unit rise I think it's the fastest growing business unit at micron at least of XY's and Keith crescent is here is the senior vice a senior vice president at Qualcomm Keith welcome thank gentlemen thanks for coming on the cube okay thank you so right let's let's start with you what are the big trends that you see that are driving that at 60% growth rate in your business yeah I mean we are finding now that you know mobile phones and use of memory in mobile phones and this is DRAM and also use of storage in mobile phones this is where we actually you know like flash both are growing inside a mobile phone you know we've seen people launch you know four and six gigabyte phones and now we have our customers talking about 8 and 10 and 12 gigabyte phones in the future and one of the big reasons is the applications you know a lot of machine learning and AI applications from the phones and those are driving the need for a lot of increased both storage and memory so we talked about what's changing in your business over the last several years I mean mobile obviously exploded onto the scene but now people are talking about AI and mobile and and and just increase use cases and applications so what's going on from your perspective yeah I think my handset perspective there's been some visual changes right the screens got a little bigger the bezels get smaller phones get a little thinner and so you see some of the visual cues but really the excitement of what's going on underneath the visual cues so the amount of AI processing is accelerating at a rapid pace a lot of advanced cameras you know moving from two three four and now their phones with five cameras cameras to recognize depth perception there's a voice recognition so there's a lot of AI processing and a lot of capability getting into the phone for a variety of applications okay so voice recognition that makes sense you'd use AI for that but you're talking about AI in in visual and in in the handset talk more about that explain how that all works yeah so so actually I would argue that today imaging is probably the primary application of AI so cameras used to be just capturing pixels but now it's about much more than capturing pixels it's about understanding what those pixels are so are they recognizing objects or food or something else or is it facial recognition for things like payments and biometrics and so the cameras now are much more intelligent and with multiple cameras you're adding depth information so then you start to get to much higher levels of realism for things like avatar and gaming and other areas where the camera is capturing and also perceiving so not a hot dog for you fans of the show Silicon Valley so but Raj what does this all mean for the the memory and storage requirements yeah I mean eyes keep mentioned I think you know the mobile phone you know with the process from Qualcomm and and other processor vendors has really gotten to have a lot more camera applications and a lot more AI applications now there's a there's a difference when you actually drive applications that need AI and machine learning versus other applications and the difference is that the compute paradigm in AI and ml is different in the sense that these are like complex neural networks that need a load of lot of data very close to the processor to achieve the result so as more AI applications come in we are actually finding that the customers which are Qualcomm customers and our customers are asking for more processing from the airside but they're also asking for more higher speeds higher density memory to kite to couple tightly with the process so they can realize these AI applications for the consumers and also storage because sometimes you want to store a lot of the images and videos on the card so both storage and memory are increasing as applications come in but I'd like to ask about the gaming side of things and the ante AR that seems to me that is is starting to improve to a level which is frightening linear reality what do you have to do to get it to that stage where you can have true VR and have games for example which exploit that sure so maybe first I'll talk about gaming specifically gaming obviously continues to grow a lot of money in gaming gaming tournaments and so forth the gaming certainly is getting more realistic with better graphics and so forth better displays multiplayer gaming very hot right multiplayer gaming requires you know very fast connections very low latency connections to another source so play multiple players can play at the same time also many times for games you'll have a play with partners maybe you're on a team of five but now in coming soon maybe that team of five you don't need to find that fifth person or that fourth person maybe there's an AI engine that's running similar to the human capability and you're actually playing with a simulated player right from teams so there's in that require opens up a whole new area of processing for the games and then I think for AR and BR AR is a little further out than VR err requires some more advancements with respect to optics and so forth VR is taking you know high-end displays and AI and graphics kind of packaging it all into one to really change the paradigm of how you interact with the computer how does 5g change things is it is it as much of a game changer as people think or is there just so much data that it sort of allows us to keep pace I wonder if you can talk about 5g yeah so so you know every ten years or so there's a G transition 3G and 99 4G in 2009 now 5g in 2019 so it's not a ten-year cadence and every time when you have a G transition you couple that with a transition in computing and it changes the paradigm so what's gonna happen is 5g is gonna bring a lot more capacity a lot lower latency at the same time AI is coming in and that together is going to create a pretty powerful platform for applications for the future and then of course there's just so much more data now how do you guys keep because the you mentioned you know you've been talking to the to the street and you mentioned this morning that the the rate of bit density that is is moderating so how do you guys keep up where are your investments that allow you to keep pace yeah I mean we have a so just maybe a little bit of comment on 5g I think as the bandwidth to the device gets faster and faster there's more and more data that comes in that you can imagine for example one of the things people out of people like to do you know is to you know download content if you look at Netflix if you look at Amazon Prime if you look at even DirecTV and I have all of those you can actually download the content now and watch them offline so as it happens and that content gets to be 4k and an even higher frame rates the amount of storage that's needed to download that is getting more and more like you know you know my wife upgraded her phone the other day and the first thing she said is I want an entire Netflix season on my phone when I'm in the gym so so you know there's simple things like that I've changed a lot you know that's one of the reasons why the storage is getting so much now when you go to 5g and the download speed gets higher you can download like a 4k video really quickly now you got to put it somewhere after you downloaded so that's actually driving the need for this so before people wouldn't like download a 4k video because where would you put it so as we increase storage that kind of stuff comes really fast because you couldn't you know take a long time to download before so as the bandwidth gets higher the storage requirements the memory requirements are getting higher now what we are doing on that front is we're investing a lot you know as Sanjay and Scott talked earlier both in our fab capacity is both in our technology transitions we have a lot of new interesting technologies like new emerging memories they're actually like 3d crosspoint we talked about that kind of blur the line between storage and memory so there's a lot of new interesting technologies that will actually take advantage of that super exciting time so going back to the image processing side of that one of the trends it seems to me is that the processing is going further and further to the edge itself and going inside the camera itself do you talk a little bit about that and what it's going to take to to put that that your memory technology or bandwidth right inside the camera itself sure so so there's no doubt that you want to maximize the capability on the edge as a first step and then you want to reduce the late as much as possible to the cloud as a second step so on the edge you know if you had something for example if I'm taking a picture of you and I want face recognition I don't want to take every frame and send it up to the clouds I'm gonna waste bandwidth so on I want that capability on device and that's true for a variety of different applications you want to maximize the capability on device and then focus on the fast connection so the cloud and the device from a latency and bandwidth perspective are much tightly more tightly coupled you know you think about the evolution of computing you know obviously everything was centralized and then you know pcs the world was about pcs back then it was kind of the the centralization with it was a bit blip on the screen compared to the pcs was everything remember that and then of course mobile drove cloud through the roof and now with the edge and cloud and and mobile you're seeing just this ubiquitous capability that senses now you bring in AI you bring in machine intelligence it what do you guys envision for the for the next 10 years in terms of what the world looks like centralized decentralized distributed intelligent I mean it's just mind-boggling what's your vision well I think if you look at client devices client devices certainly generate a lot of data maybe we get a little bit of data from a sensor and a bridge but maybe we'll get a lot of data from the car traveling across that bridge and what you need to do is you need to make sense of that data locally and then transmit it back to the cloud so you want the cloud to have the most useful data or sorted data right data that can then improve you know automated driving or reduce traffic accidents and so forth but you don't want all the data sent there so what's gonna happen is on the edge there's literally you know a device is going from smartphones where there's about one and a half billion a year to billions even trillions of IOT connected devices any device that has a computing element also is can have a connectivity element also is going to have an AI element so it's gonna be a much more connected world as opposed to just connected people yeah I mean I think kids keep explained it very well you know you know if you step back a little bit I think that the history of technology and evolution has been very similar right in industry for a while but we all remember the times when we said we just did month one mainframe and everyone needs dumb terminals right then we went on to say hey you know what I think distributed computing with everyone having a pcs that I think you do now we are back to maybe we should have everything in the cloud and the edge devices so I actually think in a world goes cyclical and the more you do at the edge the more it drives the need for the cloud and we call it the virtuous cycle and I think the best way to think about it is you want the HD devices to send information not data which means they need to be for data needs to be processed with memory and compute to become information and then you send the information to the edge yeah I guess my point was that you know I've been around a while too and you're going to see the pendulum swing I feel like the pendulum is not swinging anymore it's just exploded inside it's really an exciting time in our industry guys thanks very much for coming thank you appreciate thank you all right keep right there everybody we'll be back at micron insight from the Embarcadero you're watching the cube right back [Music]

>> Live from the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, California. It's the Cube! Covering DevNet Create 2018. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. This is the Cube's live coverage here in Mountain View, California, heart of Silicon Valley, at the Computer History Museum for Cisco's DevNet Create. This is their developer eco-system for cloud natives, an extension to their popular and successful DevNet developer programs. A special event, really getting down and dirty on Kubernetes cloud native, and how to create real-time applications on the cloud. I'm John Furrier, my cohost Lauren Cooney, our next guest is Raj Krishna, who's the VP of Product Management with Cisco Meraki, doing some great things here, made a big announcement on stage. Welcome to the Cube, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having me, it's a pleasure to be here. >> So, before we jump into the speeds and feeds of some of the real impactful things that you've been doing, with this cool area in cloud, you just had some news on stage, you announced it. You guys are giving away a lot of Benjamins in product. Share the news. Yeah, we're going to be giving away 1.4 million dollars worth of our products, our cloud managed switches. And the reason why we're doing that is because we want to see the ecosystem, we want people to have access to our technology, because they're going to build all kinds of cool and interesting applications that we may not have thought of. So, by giving this gear away, we want to help evangelize, and help promote the ecosystem. >> You guys are creating a nice culture here, I got to say. I give you guys props, the second event you guys have done with DevNet create, where you're really looking at, and aligning with the cloud native developers. You've got things, you've got some hackathons, you've got some team-oriented camps here, but really it's about giving them the enablement, and the tooling to do things. You're not telling people "you need to develop this." You're not jamming stuff down their throat. Talk about the role of that, and what you guys are doing with your product, and how does that fit in? Because IoT comes right to mind for me. You know, new sensors, new things are happening, talk about specifically the things that you guys are offering from a tech standpoint, tools that you offer, and some of the things you expect that might happen. >> Most definitely. So, throughout the years as we've kind of built out a very large-scale cloud management platform, we've realized that the need for external orchestration tools, external monitoring tools, data aggregation tools, is paramount because people want to build not just interesting and cool applications, but they want to build security applications. They want to build data logging applications, analytics applications where they can take data from the infrastructure and then take data from their CRM, their customer resource management systems, and mix and match that data to be able to understand "hey, is there a pattern here, in terms of network traffic and foot traffic in my stores." So, as we've come to terms with this trend, we've been building out a very rich set of API's, that can help you aggregate data, that can help you visualize data, and we realized that that's not enough. So, that's why we've been investing heavily in the ecosystem play. That's why we've actually set up dedicated teams at Meraki. We have a brand new solutions architecture team that is hyperfocused and their sole mission in life is to enable developers. It's to go out and evangelize the technology, but then also have whiteboarding conversations with those developers, give them sample code, show them other sample applications. They've also stood up a brand new application app store where third party developers can have their apps featured, and they can have their apps purchased on their store. >> Take a minute to explain Meraki's role in this ecosystem, because it's a product, it's a switch, but it's not just hardware. Can you just take a minute just to lay it out, what is it, what does it do, and what does it enable? >> Yeah, so the reason why Meraki was so successful and acquired by Cisco was the cloud management aspect of it. The ability to roll out and provision and monitor, manage and scale a network, whether it's wireless, whether it's routing, whether it's switching, whether it's security, and to do that at a gargantuan scale where you have 10,000 sites or 20,000 sites, that was Meraki's bread and butter, but almost by accident what we realized was that would give you a large scale programmable platform, so we built these API's on top, and what we've learned through the years is that this is a massively programmable orchestration layer, right? For being able to program things, being able to extract data at scale-- >> Like what, like program what? >> So, let me give you an example. We have a service provider that we work with in Europe that services a million end customers. And what they do, is they're offering their services, their broadband connectivity services, their VoIP services, and they're also offering Meraki hardware in their web stores. I can go to their web store, and I can click "I want to buy a three year broadband contract, and I want to buy these widgets that come with it, one of those widgets is a Meraki widget." When they click Buy, it makes a series of API calls to the Meraki backend and everything gets provisioned automatically. Not just the Meraki services, but also the service providers own portfolio services, so it's enabled a seamless ordering experience where someone take Meraki, just as one part of the solution, and wrap a bunch of other services around it, and enable provisioning of that, at scale. >> Versus the alternative is ship a box, unpack it, connect to it-- >> Ship a box to a warehouse, unpack it, plug it in-- >> Login command line interface I mean, it's a nightmare, compared to what is is automated. >> Right >> Turnkey. >> Right, exactly. And the way that we really see ourselves fostering this ecosystem and our role in the ecosystem is we're just the platform, we are enabling the platform we want to make the platform easy to use, we want there to be rich documentation, we want there to be a set of API's, we want there to be scripts that we can make available, but really the creativity is going to come from those developers who come on board and solve unique customer problems that we may not have even thought of, so it's about working with those people, and making sure that they have the tools, the knowledge, the expertise and just enabling them. >> So, what would a traditional, kind of, Meraki developer look like? What kind of skills do they need? Do they have to have experience in networking, or app development, or what are you really looking at? >> Yeah, we're getting experience with an entire range of different types of application engineers, you know. People who are more mobile app centric, so we've seen mobile apps that are crafted, that integrate with Meraki beacons to trigger some kind of an action when I walk into a store, so very mobile app centric developers. We've seen a lot of interesting web-centric applications, you know, developers who are proficient in Java script, things like Ruby on Rails, building very rich, front-end visualizations of Meraki data, and then we've seen some even more hardcore networking engineers who really understand bits and bytes and the flows of data coming out of the network to, for example, take a NetFlow feed from our security appliance, and say "hey, this is a threat and I want to create, using this API call that tells me this is a threat, I want to have a tie-in with something like a lightbulb so that lightbulb goes off any time I see a network threat in my environment." So, what's kind of cool and interesting here is I have a range of different types of developers with different types of skillsets, and they're able to enable use cases and applications based off of their area of domain expertise. >> All right, I got to ask the hard question. This is the tough one. Increased surface area increases more potential security threats, malware, I mean there's lightbulbs out that that have, you know, connect to your WiFi, I mean they're basically a PC, you've got a processor in there, so great for malware, to attach to, sit there dormant, get inside the network, this is a huge concern. How do you guys look at the security paradigm for this? >> Yeah, absolutely. And that's why building a large scale network means having security first and foremost in your mind. So, we actually have a very rich set of security products that can help you secure your endpoints, and help you secure your network. So, just giving you an example here: We have a security appliance that actually integrates with Cisco's Talos threat engine. Cisco Talos is a team of hundreds of security researchers, and they're constantly staying up to date with the latest security vulnerabilities, security patches, trojans, malware, etc, etc. If you're running a Meraki security appliance, you have visibility into these real-time threats, and also you can extract that data and visualize it in a third party portal, or you can save it for logging. So, making sure that people are aware of the security threats, making rich tools available to our developer ecosystem that can help protect them against these threats, and then also having a privacy by design mindset when we're building and constructing API's. Let me give you an example. The upcoming laws in Europe, the GDPR laws, going into effect May 25th, we're actually building API's that will help you abide to these laws by letting you delete personally identifying information for a specific client. So, we want to help our customers and our developers be compliant with GDPR for their end users, so if their end users come to them and say "hey, I was connected to this network, but I want to be forgotten now, I want you to delete all my data," they can do that programmatically using an API. So, it's the kind of entire spectrum, right? It's building the awareness, building the product suite, as well as building the tools to help developers build privacy applications as well. >> That's definitely enabling the developer ecosystem, like we were talking about before. Now, what do you think is, when you talk about the industries that you're in, you know, I can see enterprises, retail, and manufacturing, and lots of different areas there, and there's probably service providers examples where they can make a lot of money, working with you guys and adding services to what they deliver to their customers. Where do you see kind of the most growth coming from, or the most interest? >> Yeah, we see the most growth coming from, kind of, a range of customers across the board, to be honest with you. Some of our traditional sweet spot verticals, that we were very strong in were distributed enterprise, retail and education because in these kinds of environments, you often have lean IT teams that want to do a lot more with a lot less. But what we've found is, our historic sweet spot was that kind of mid-market customer, you know, between 100 and 1000 employees, but over time we've been moving more and more up market, because we've been adding enterprise features, we've been really hardening and stabilizing the platform, so that can deliver enterprise networking at scale, and what we're finding now is increasingly more and more interest from that very high end premium segment of customer, you know, the Fortune 1000 companies who are saying "this is interesting for all my branch sites," or "hey, this is interesting for all my distribution centers or all my warehouses," so we're seeing growth across the board, which is why it's such an exciting time to be at Meraki. >> Raj, good luck with everything. Thanks for coming on the Cube, really appreciate it. What's next for you guys as this things evolves? More programmability, more automation? >> More of everything. We're going to be launching more products, we're going to be crafting more API's, we very recently released a new series of HD video surveillance cameras, and we're seeing a ton of very interesting IoT type of applications where those are being used in manufacturing or farming, we're getting interesting API requests for that. So, we're going to be continuing to invest heavily in our portfolio, build out more hybrid products, more software features, as well as more API calls. >> You guys are targeting the developers at the edge, on the cutting edge, pun intended-- [Raj] We hope so. >> Great stuff. IoT certainly a great opportunity for developers, you know, stuff that you couldn't do years ago are possible, certainly with the cloud and IoT, and Cisco's DevNet Create. I'm John Furrier. More live coverage here in Mountain View after this short break. (techno music)