>> Announcer: Live from San Jose, California, it's theCUBE, covering Big Data Silicon Valley 2017. (light techno music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Big Data SV, wrapping up with two days of wall-to-wall coverage of Big Data SV which is associated with Strata Comp, which is part of Big Data Week, which always becomes the epicenter of the big data world for a week here in San Jose. We're at the historic Pagoda Lounge, and we're excited to have our next two guests, talking a little bit different twist on big data that maybe you hadn't thought of. We've got Ravi Dharnikota, he is the Chief Enterprise Architect at SnapLogic, welcome. - Hello. >> Jeff: And he has brought along a customer, Katharine Matsumoto, she is a Data Scientist at eero, welcome. >> Thank you, thanks for having us. >> Jeff: Absolutely, so we had SnapLogic on a little earlier with Garavs, but tell us a little bit about eero. I've never heard of eero before, for folks that aren't familiar with the company. >> Yeah, so eero is a start-up based in San Francisco. We are sort of driven to increase home connectivity, both the performance and the ease of use, as wifi becomes totally a part of everyday life. We do that. We've created the world's first mesh wifi system. >> Okay. >> So that means you have, for an average home, three different individual units, and you plug one in to replace your router, and then the other three get plugged in throughout the home just to power, and they're able to spread coverage, reliability, speed, throughout your homes. No more buffering, dead zones, in that way back bedroom. >> Jeff: And it's a consumer product-- >> Yes. >> So you got all the fun and challenges of manufacturing, you've got the fun challenges of distribution, consumer marketing, so a lot of challenges for a start-up. But you guys are doing great. Why SnapLogic? >> Yeah, so in addition to the challenges with the hardware, we also are a really strong software. So, everything is either set up via the app. We are not just the backbone to your home's connectivity, but also part of it, so we're sending a lot of information back from our devices to be able to learn and improve the wifi that we're delivering based on the data we get back. So that's a lot of data, a lot of different teams working on different pieces. So when we were looking at launch, how do we integrate all of that information together to make it accessible to business users across different teams, and also how do we handle the scale. I made a checklist (laughs), and SnapLogic was really the only one that seemed to be able to deliver on both of those promises with a look to the future of like, I don't know what my next Sass product is, I don't know what our next API point we're going to need to hit is, sort of the flexibility of that as well as the fact that we have analysts were able to pick it up, engineers were able to pick it up, and I could still manage all the software written by, or the pipelines written by each of those different groups without having to read whatever version of code they're writing. >> Right, so Ravi, we heard you guys are like doubling your customer base every year, and lots of big names, Adobe we talked about earlier today. But I don't know that most people would think of SnapLogic really, as a solution to a start-up mesh network company. >> Yeah, absolutely, so that's a great point though, let me just start off with saying that in this new world, we don't discriminate-- (guest and host laugh) we integrate and we don't discriminate. In this new world that I speak about is social media, you know-- >> Jeff: Do you bus? (all laugh) >> So I will get to that. (all laugh) So, social, mobile, analytics, and cloud. And in this world, people have this thing which we fondly call integrators' dilemma. You want to integrate apps, you go to a different tool set. You integrate data, you start thinking about different tool sets. So we want to dispel that and really provide a unified platform for both apps and data. So remember, when we are seeing all the apps move into the cloud and being provided as services, but the data systems are also moving to the cloud. You got your data warehouses, databases, your BI systems, analytical tools, all are being provided to you as services. So, in this world data is data. If it's apps, it's probably schema mapping. If it's data systems, it's transformations moving from one end to the other. So, we're here to solve both those challenges in this new world with a unified platform. And it also helps that our lineage and the brain trust that brings us here, we did this a couple of decades ago and we're here to reinvent that space. >> Well, we expect you to bring Clayton Christensen on next time you come to visit, because he needs a new book, and I think that's a good one. (all laugh) But I think it was a really interesting part of the story though too, is you have such a dynamic product. Right, if you looked at your boxes, I've got the website pulled up, you wouldn't necessarily think of the dynamic nature that you're constantly tweaking and taking the data from the boxes to change the service that you're delivering. It's not just this thing that you made to a spec that you shipped out the door. >> Yeah, and that's really where the auto connected, we did 20 from our updates last year. We had problems with customers would have the same box for three years, and the technology change, the chips change, but their wifi service is the same, and we're constantly innovating and being able to push those out, but if you're going to do that many updates, you need a lot of feedback on the updates because things break when you update sometimes, and we've been able to build systems that catch that that are able to identify changes that say, not one person could be able to do by looking at their own things or just with support. We have leading indicators across all sorts of different stability and performance and different devices, so if Xbox changes their protocols, we can identify that really quickly. And that's sort of the goal of having all the data in one place across customer support and manufacturing. We can easily pinpoint where in the many different complicated factors you can find the problem. >> Have issues. - Yeah. >> So, I've actually got questions for both of you. Ravi, starting with you, it sounds like you're trying to tackle a challenge that in today's tools would have included Kafka at the data integration level, and there it's very much a hub and spoke approach. And I guess it's also, you would think of the application level integration more like the TIBCO and other EAI vendors in a previous generation-- - [Ravi] Yeah. >> Which I don't think was hub and spoke, it was more point to point, and I'm curious how you resolve that, in other words, how you'd tackle both together in a unified architecture? >> Yeah, that's an excellent question. In fact, one of the integrators' dilemma that I spoke about you've got the problem set where you've got the high-latency, high-volume, where you go to ETL tools. And then the low-latency, low-volume, you immediately go to the TIBCOs of the world and that's ESB, EAI sort of tool sets that you look to solve. So what we've done is we've thought about it hard. At one level we've just said, why can integration not be offered as a service? So that's step number one where the design experience is through the cloud, and then execution can just happen anywhere, behind your firewall or in the cloud, or in a big data system, so it caters to all of that. But then also, the data set itself is changing. You're seeing a lot of the document data model that are being offered by the Sass services. So the old ETL companies that were built before all of this social, mobile sort of stuff came around, it was all row and column oriented. So how do you deal with the more document oriented JSON sort of stuff? And we built that for, the platform to be able to handle that kind of data. Streaming is an interesting and important question. Pretty much everyone I spoke to last year were, streaming was a big-- let's do streaming, I want everything in real-time. But batch also has it's place. So you've got to have a system that does batch as well as real-time, or as near real-time as needed. So we solve for all of those problems. >> Okay, so Katharine, coming to you, each customer has a different, well, every consumer has a different, essentially, a stall base. To bring all the telemetry back to make sense out of what's working and what's not working, or how their environment is changing. How do you make sense out of all that, considering that it's not B to B, it's B to C so, I don't know how many customers you have, but it must be in the tens or hundreds. >> I'm sure I'm not allowed to say (laughs). >> No. But it's the distinctness of each customer that I gather makes the support challenge for you. >> Yeah, and part of that's exposing as much information to the different sources, and starting to automate the ways in which we do it. There's certainly a lot, we are very early on as a company. We've hit our year mark for public availability the end of last month so-- >> Jeff: Congratulations. >> Thank you, it's been a long year. But with that we learn more, constantly, and different people come to different views as different new questions come up. The special-snowflake aspect of each customer, there's a balance between how much actually is special and how much you can find patterns. And that's really where you get into much more interesting things on the statistics and machine learning side is how do you identify those patterns that you may not even know you're looking for. We are still beginning to understand our customers from a qualitative standpoint. It actually came up this week where I was doing an analysis and I was like, this population looks kind of weird, and with two clicks was able to send out a list over to our CX team. They had access to all the same systems because all of our data is connected and they could pull up the tickets based on, because through SnapLogic, we're joining all the data together. We use Looker as our BI tool, they were just able to start going into all the tickets and doing a deep dive, and that's being presented later this week as to like, hey, what is this population doing? >> So, for you to do this, that must mean you have at least some data that's common to every customer. For you to be able to use something like Looker, I imagine. If every customer was a distinct snowflake, it would be very hard to find patterns across them. >> Well I mean, look at how many people have iPhones, have MacBooks, you know, we are looking at a lot of aggregate-level data in terms of how things are behaving, and always the challenge of any data science project is creating those feature extractions, and so that's where the process we're going through as the analytics team is to start extracting those things and adding them to our central data source. That's one of the areas also where having very integrated analytics and ETL has been helpful as we're just feeding that information back in to everyone. So once we figure out, oh hey, this is how you differentiate small businesses from homes, because we do see a couple of small businesses using our product, that goes back into the data and now everyone's consuming it. Each of those common features, it's a slow process to create them, but it's also increases the value every time you add one to the central group. >> One last question-- >> It's an interesting way to think of the wifi service and the connected devices an integration challenge, as opposed to just an appliance that kind of works like an old POTS line, which it isn't, clearly at all. (all laugh) With 20 firmware updates a year (laughs). >> Yeah, there's another interesting point, that we were just having the discussion offline, it's that it's a start-up. They obviously don't have the resources or the app, but have a large IT department to set up these systems. So, as Katharine mentioned, one person team initially when they started, and to be able to integrate, who knows which system is going to be next. Maybe they experiment with one cloud service, it perhaps scales to their liking or not, and then they quickly change and go to another one. You cannot change the integration underneath that. You got to be able to adjust to that. So that flexibility, and the other thing is, what they've done with having their business become self-sufficient is another very fascinating thing. It's like, give them the power. Why should IT or that small team become the bottom line? Don't come to me, I'll just empower you with the right tool set and the patterns and then from there, you change and put in your business logic and be productive immediately. >> Let me drill down on that, 'cause my understanding, at least in the old world was that DTL was kind of brittle, and if you're constantly ... Part of actually, the genesis of Hadoop, certainly at Yahoo was, we're going to bring all the data we might ever possibly need into the repository so we don't have to keep re-writing the pipeline. And it sounds like you have the capability to evolve the pipeline rather quickly as you want to bring more data into this sort of central resource. Am I getting that about right? >> Yeah, it's a little bit of both. We do have a central, I think, down data's the fancy term for that, so we're bringing everything into S3, jumping it into those raw JSONs, you know, whatever nested format it comes into, so whatever makes it so that extraction is easy. Then there's also, as part of ETL, there's that last mile which is a lot of business logic, and that's where you run into teams starting to diverge very quickly if you don't have a way for them to give feedback into the process. We've really focused on empowering business users to be self-service, in terms of answering their own questions, and that's freed up our in list to add more value back into the greater group as well as answer harder questions, that both beget more questions, but also feeds back insights into that data source because they have access to their piece of that last business logic. By changing the way that one JSON field maps or combining two, they've suddenly created an entirely new variable that's accessible to everyone. So it's sort of last-leg business logic versus the full transport layer. We have a whole platform that's designed to transport everything and be much more robust to changes. >> Alright, so let me make sure I understand this, it sounds like the less-trained or more self-sufficient, they go after the central repository and then the more highly-trained and scarcer resource, they are responsible for owning one or more of the feeds and that they enrich that or make that more flexible and general-purpose so that those who are more self-sufficient can get at it in the center. >> Yeah, and also you're able to make use of the business. So we have sort of a hybrid model with our analysts that are really closely embedded into the teams, and so they have all that context that you need that if you're relying on, say, a central IT team, that you have to go back and forth of like, why are you doing this, what does this mean? They're able to do all that in logic. And then the goal of our platform team is really to focus on building technologies that complement what we have with SnapLogic or others that are accustomed to our data systems that enable that same sort of level of self-service for creating specific definitions, or are able to do it intelligently based on agreed upon patterns of extraction. >> George: Okay. >> Heavy science. Alright, well unfortunately we are out of time. I really appreciate the story, I love the site, I'll have to check out the boxes, because I know I have a bunch of dead spots in my house. (all laugh) But Ravi, I want to give you the last word, really about how is it working with a small start-up doing some cool, innovative stuff, but it's not your Adobes, it's not a lot of the huge enterprise clients that you have. What have you taken, why does that add value to SnapLogic to work with kind of a cool, fun, small start-up? >> Yeah, so the enterprise is always a retrofit job. You have to sort of go back to the SAPs and the Oracle databases and make sure that we are able to connect the legacy with a new cloud application. Whereas with a start-up, it's all new stuff. But their volumes are constantly changing, they probably have spikes, they have burst volumes, they're thinking about this differently, enabling everyone else, quickly changing and adopting newer technologies. So we have to be able to adjust to that agility along with them. So we're very excited as sort of partnering with them and going along with them on this journey. And as they start looking at other things, the machine learning and the AI and the IRT space, we're very excited to have that partnership and learn from them and evolve our platform as well. >> Clearly. You're smiling ear-to-ear, Katharine's excited, you're solving problems. So thanks again for taking a few minutes and good luck with your talk tomorrow. Alright, I'm Jeff Frick, he's George Gilbert, you're watching theCUBE from Big Data SV. We'll be back after this short break. Thanks for watching. (light techno music)