>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Like a marathon runner pumped up on adrenaline, UiPath sprinted to the lead in what is surely going to be a long journey toward enabling the modern automated enterprise. Now, in doing so the company has established itself as a leader in enterprise automation while at the same time, it got out over its skis on critical execution items and it disappointed investors along the way. In our view, the company has plenty of upside potential, but will have to slog through its current challenges, including restructuring its go-to market, prioritizing investments, balancing growth with profitability and dealing with a very difficult macro environment. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis and ahead of Forward 5, UiPath's big customer event, we once again dig into RPA and automation leader, UiPath, to share our most current data and view of the company's prospects relative to the competition and the market overall. Now, since the pandemic, four sectors have consistently outperformed in the overall spending landscape in the ETR dataset, cloud, containers, machine learning/AI, and robotic process automation. For the first time in a long time ML and AI and RPA have dropped below the elevated 40% line shown in this ETR graph with the red dotted line. The data here plots the net score or spending momentum for each sector with we put in video conferencing, we added it in simply to provide height to the vertical access. Now, you see those squiggly lines, they show the pattern for ML/AI and RPA, and they demonstrate the downward trajectory over time with only the most current period dropping below the 40% net score mark. While this is not surprising, it underscores one component of the macro headwinds facing all companies generally and UiPath specifically, that is the discretionary nature of certain technology investments. This has been a topic of conversation on theCUBE since the spring spanning data players like Mongo and Snowflake, the cloud, security, and other sectors. The point is ML/AI and RPA appear to be more discretionary than certain sectors, including cloud. Containers most likely benefit from the fact that much of the activity is spending on internal resources, staff like developers as much of the action in containers is free and open source. Now, security is not shown on this graphic, but as we've reported extensively in the last week at CrowdStrike's Falcon conference, security is somewhat less discretionary than other sectors. Now, as it relates to the big four that we've been highlighting since the pandemic hit, we're starting to see priorities shift from strategic investments like AI and automation to more tactical areas to keep the lights on. UiPath has not been immune to this downward pressure, but the company is still able to show some impressive metrics. Here's a snapshot chart from its investor deck. For the first time UiPath's ARR has surpassed $1 billion. The company now has more than 10,000 customers with a large number generating more than $100,000 in ARR. While not shown in this data, UiPath reported this month in its second quarter close that it had $191 million plus ARR customers, which is up 13% sequentially from its Q1. As well, the company's NRR is over 130%, which is very solid and underscores the low churn that we've previously reported for the company. But with that increased ARR comes slower growth. Here's some data we compiled that shows the dramatic growth in ARR, the blue bars, compared with the rapid deceleration and growth. That's the orange line on the right hand access there. For the first time UiPath's ARR growth dipped below 50% last quarter. Now, we've projected 34% and 25% respectively for the company's Q3 in Q4, which is slightly higher than the upper range of UiPath's CFO, Ashim Gupta's guidance from the last earnings call. That still puts UiPath exiting its fiscal year at a 25% ARR growth rate. While it's not unexpected that a company reaching $1 billion in ARR, that milestone, will begin to show lower, slower growth, net new ARR is well off its fiscal year '22 levels. The other perhaps more concerning factor is the company, despite strong 80% gross margins, remains unprofitable and free cash flow negative. New CEO, Rob Enslin, has emphasized the focus on profitability, and we'd like to see a consistent and more disciplined Rule of 40 or Rule of 45 to 50 type of performance going forward. As a result of this decelerating growth and lowered guidance stemming from significant macro challenges including currency fluctuations and weaker demand, especially in Europe and EP and inconsistent performance, the stock, as shown here, has been on a steady decline. What all growth stocks are facing, you know, challenges relative to inflation, rising interest rates, and looming recession, but as seen here, UiPath has significantly underperformed relative to the tech-heavy NASDAQ. UiPath has admitted to execution challenges, and it has brought in an expanded management team to facilitate its sales transition and desire to become a more strategic platform play versus a tactical point product. Now, adding to this challenge of foreign exchange issues, as we've previously reported unlike most high flying tech companies from Silicon Valley, UiPath has a much larger proportion of its business coming from locations outside of the United States, around 50% of its revenue, in fact. Because it prices in local currencies, when you convert back to appreciated dollars, there are less of them, and that weighs down on revenue. Now, we asked Breaking Analysis contributor, Chip Simonton, for his take on this stock, and he told us, "From a technical standpoint, there's really not much you can say, it just looks like a falling knife. It's trading at an all time low but that doesn't mean it can't go lower. New management with a good product is always a positive with a stock like this, but this is just a bad environment for UiPath and all growth stocks really, and," he added, "95% of money managers have never operated in this type of environment before. So that creates more uncertainty. There will be a bottom, but picking it in this high-inflation, high-interest rate world hasn't worked too well lately. There's really no floor to these stocks that don't have earnings, until you start to trade to cash levels." Well, okay, let's see, UiPath has $1.6 billion in cash in the balance sheet and no debt, so we're a long ways off from that target, the cash value with its current $7 billion valuation. You have to go back to April 2019 to UiPaths Series D to find a $7 billion valuation. So Simonton says, "The stock still could go lower." The valuation range for this stock has been quite remarkable from around $50 billion last May to $7 billion today. That's quite a swing. And the spending data from ETR sort of supports this story. This graphic here shows the net score or spending momentum granularity for UiPath. The lime green is new additions to the platform. The forest green is spending 6% or more. The gray is flat spending. The pink is spending down 6% or worse. And the bright red is churn. Subtract the red from the green and you get net score, which is that blue line. The yellow line is pervasiveness within the data set. Now, that yellow line is skewed somewhat because of Microsoft citations. There's a belief from some that competition from Microsoft is the reason for UiPath's troubles, but Microsoft is really delivering RPA for individuals and isn't an enterprise automation platform at least not today, but it's Microsoft, so you can't discount their presence in the market. And it probably is having some impact, but we think there are many other factors weighing on UiPath. Now, this is data through the July survey but taking a glimpse at the early October returns they're trending with the arrows, meaning less green more gray and red, which is going to lower UiPath's overall net score, which is consistent with the macro headwinds and the business performance that it's been seeing. Now, nonetheless, UiPath continues to get high marks from its customers, and relative to it's peers it maintains a leadership position. So this chart from ETR, shows net score or spending velocity in the vertical access, an overlap or presence in the dataset on the horizontal access. Microsoft continues to have a big presence, and as we mentioned, somewhat skews the data. UiPath has maintained its lead relative to automation anywhere on the horizontal access, and remains ahead of the legacy pack of business process and other RPA vendors. Solonis has popped up in the ETR data set recently as a process mining player and has a pretty high net score. It's a critical space UiPath has entered, via its acquisition of ProcessGold back in October 2019. Now, you can also see what we did is we added in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for robotic process automation. We didn't blow it up here but we circled the position of UiPath. You can see it's leading in both the vertical and the horizontal access, ahead of automation anywhere as well as Microsoft and others. Now, we're still not seeing the likes of SAP, Service Now, and Salesforce showing up in the ETR data, but these enterprise software vendors are in a reasonable position to capitalize on automation opportunities within their installed basis. This is why it's so important that UiPath transitions to an enterprise-wide horizontal play that can cut across multiple ERP, CRM, HCM, and service management platforms. While the big software companies can add automation to their respective stovepipes, and they're doing that, UiPath's opportunity is to bring automation to enable enterprises to build on top of and across these SaaS platforms that most companies are running. Now, on the chart, you see the red arrows slanting down. That signifies the expected trend from the upcoming October ETR survey, which is currently in the field and will run through early next month. Suffice it to say that there is downward spending pressure across the board, and we would expect most of these names, including UiPath, to dip below the 40% dotted line. Now, as it relates to the conversation about platform versus product, let's dig into that a bit more. Here's a graphic from UiPath's investor deck that underscores the move from product to platform. UiPath has expanded its platform from its initial on-prem point product to focus on automating tasks for individuals and back offices to a cloud-first platform approach. The company has added in technology from a number of acquisitions and added organically to those. These include, the previously mentioned, ProcessGold for process discovery, process documentation from the acquisition of StepShot, API automation via the acquisition of Cloud Elements, to its more recent acquisition of Re:infer, a natural language processing specialist. Now, we expect the platform to be a big focus of discussion at Forward 5 next week in Las Vegas. So let's close in on our expectations for the three-day event next week at the Venetian. UiPath's user conference has grown over the years and the Venetian should be by far be the biggest and most heavily attended in the company's history. We expect UiPath to really emphasize the role of automation, specifically in the context of digital transformation, and how UiPath has evolved, again, from point product to platform to support digital transformation. Expect to focus on platform maturity. When UiPath announced its platform intentions back in 2019, which was the last physical face-to-face customer event prior to COVID, it essentially was laying out a statement of direction. And over the past three years, it has matured the platform and taken it from vision to reality. You know, I said the last event, actually, the last event was 2021. Of course, theCUBE was there at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. But prior to that, 2019 is when they laid out that platform vision. Now, in a conjunction with this evolution, the company has evolved its partnerships, pairing up with the likes of Snowflake and the data cloud, CrowdStrike, to provide better security, and, of course, the big Global System Integrators, to help implement enterprise automation. And this is where we expect to hear a lot from customers. I've heard, there'll be over 100 speaking at the show about the outcomes and how they're digitally transforming. Now, I mentioned earlier that we haven't seen the big ERP and enterprise software companies show up yet in the ETR data, but believe me they're out there and they're selling automation and RPA and they're competing. So expect UiPath to position themselves and deposition those companies. Position UiPath as a layer above these bespoke platforms shown here on number four. With process discovery and task discovery, building automation across enterprise apps, and operationalizing process workflows as a horizontal play. And I'm sure there'll be some new graphics on this platform that we can share after the event that will emphasize this positioning. And finally, as we showed earlier in the platform discussion, we expect to hear a lot about the new platform capabilities and use cases, and not just RPA, but process mining, testing, testing automation, which is a new vector of growth for UiPath, document processing. And also, we expect UiPath to address its low code development capabilities to expand the number of people in the organization that can create automation capabilities and automations. Those domain experts is what we're talking about here that deeply understand the business but aren't software engineers. Enabling them is going to be really important, and we expect to hear more about that. And we expect this conference to set the tone for a new chapter in UiPath's history. The company's second in-person gathering, but the first one was last October. So really this is going to be sort of a build upon that, and many in-person events. For the first time this year, UiPath was one of the first to bring back its physical event, but we expect it to be bigger than what was at the Bellagio, and a lot of people were concerned about traveling. Although UiPath got a lot of customers there, but I think they're going to really up the game in terms of attendance this year. And really, that comparison is unfair because UiPath, again, it was sort of the middle of COVID last year. But anyway, we expect this new operations and go-to-market oriented focus from co-CEO, Rob Enslin, and new sales management, we're going to be, you know, hearing from them. And the so-called adult supervision has really been lacking at UiPath, historically. Daniel Dines will no doubt continue to have a big presence at the event and at the company. He's not a figurehead by any means. He's got a deep understanding of the product and the market and we'll be interviewing both Daniel and Rob Enslin on theCUBE to find out how they see the future. So tune in next week, or if you're in Las Vegas, definitely stop by theCUBE. If you're not go to thecube.net, you'll be able to watch all of our coverage. Okay, we're going to leave it there today. I want to thank Chip Simonton again for his input to today's episode. Thanks to Alex Morrison who's on production and manages our podcasts. Ken Schiffman, as well, from our Boston office, our Boston studio. Kristen Martin, and Cheryl Knight, they helped get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at SiliconANGLE that does some great editing. Thanks all. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis Podcasts. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, and you could email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @dvellante. If you got anything interesting, I'll respond. If not, please keep trying, or comment on my LinkedIn post and please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis. (gentle techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from New York, it's theCUBE, covering the IBM Machine Learning Launch Event, brought to you by IBM. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. >> Welcome back to New York City, everybody. We're here at the Waldorf Astoria covering the IBM Machine Learning Launch Event, bringing machine learning to the IBM Z. Bryan Smith is here, he's the vice president of R&D and the CTO of Rocket Software, powering the path to digital transformation. Bryan, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, Rocket Software, Waltham, Mass. based, close to where we are, but a lot of people don't know about Rocket, so pretty large company, give us the background. >> It's been around for, this'll be our 27th year. Private company, we've been a partner of IBM's for the last 23 years. Almost all of that is in the mainframe space, or we focused on the mainframe space, I'll say. We have 1,300 employees, we call ourselves Rocketeers. It's spread around the world. We're really an R&D focused company. More than half the company is engineering, and it's spread across the world on every continent and most major countries. >> You're esstenially OEM-ing your tools as it were. Is that right, no direct sales force? >> About half, there are different lenses to look at this, but about half of our go-to-market is through IBM with IBM-labeled, IBM-branded products. We've always been, for the side of products, we've always been the R&D behind the products. The partnership, though, has really grown. It's more than just an R&D partnership now, now we're doing co-marketing, we're even doing some joint selling to serve IBM mainframe customers. The partnership has really grown over these last 23 years from just being the guys who write the code to doing much more. >> Okay, so how do you fit in this announcement. Machine learning on Z, where does Rocket fit? >> Part of the announcement today is a very important piece of technology that we developed. We call it data virtualization. Data virtualization is really enabling customers to open their mainframe to allow the data to be used in ways that it was never designed to be used. You might have these data structures that were designed 10, 20, even 30 years ago that were designed for a very specific application, but today they want to use it in a very different way, and so, the traditional path is to take that data and copy it, to ETL it someplace else they can get some new use or to build some new application. What data virtualization allows you to do is to leave that data in place but access it using APIs that developers want to use today. They want to use JSON access, for example, or they want to use SQL access. But they want to be able to do things like join across IMS, DB2, and VSAM all with a single query using an SQL statement. We can do that relational databases and non-relational databases. It gets us out of this mode of having to copy data into some other data store through this ETL process, access the data in place, we call it moving the applications or the analytics to the data versus moving the data to the analytics or to the applications. >> Okay, so in this specific case, and I have said several times today, as Stu has heard me, two years ago IBM had a big theme around the z13 bringing analytics and transactions together, this sort of extends that. Great, I've got this transaction data that lives behind a firewall somewhere. Why the mainframe, why now? >> Well, I would pull back to where I said where we see more companies and organizations wanting to move applications and analytics closer to the data. The data in many of these large companies, that core business-critical data is on the mainframe, and so, being able to do more real time analytics without having to look at old data is really important. There's this term data gravity. I love the visual that presents in my mind that you have these different masses, these different planets if you will, and the biggest, massivest planet in that solar system really is the data, and so, it's pulling the smaller satellites if you will into this planet or this star by way of gravity because data is, data's a new currency, data is what the companies are running on. We're helping in this announcement with being able to unlock and open up all mainframe data sources, even some non-mainframe data sources, and using things like Spark that's running on the platform, that's running on z/OS to access that data directly without having to write any special programming or any special code to get to all their data. >> And the preferred place to run all that data is on the mainframe obviously if you're a mainframe customer. One of the questions I guess people have is, okay, I get that, it's the transaction data that I'm getting access to, but if I'm bringing transaction and analytic data together a lot of times that analytic data might be in social media, it might be somewhere else not on the mainframe. How do envision customers dealing with that? Do you have tooling them to do that? >> We do, so this data virtualization solution that I'm talking about is one that is mainframe resident, but it can also access other data sources. It can access DB2 on Linux Windows, it can access Informix, it can access Cloudant, it can access Hadoop through IBM's BigInsights. Other feeds like Twitter, like other social media, it can pull that in. The case where you'd want to do that is where you're trying to take that data and integrate it with a massive amount of mainframe data. It's going to be much more highly performant by pulling this other small amount of data into, next to that core business data. >> I get the performance and I get the security of the mainframe, I like those two things, but what about the economics? >> Couple of things. One, IBM when they ported Spark to z/OS, they did it the right way. They leveraged the architecture, it wasn't just a simple port of recompiling a bunch of open source code from Apache, it was rewriting it to be highly performant on the Z architecture, taking advantage of specialty engines. We've done the same with the data virtualization component that goes along with that Spark on z/OS offering that also leverages the architecture. We actually have different binaries that we load depending on which architecture of the machine that we're running on, whether it be a z9, an EC12, or the big granddaddy of a z13. >> Bryan, can you speak the developers? I think about, you're talking about all this mobile and Spark and everything like that. There's got to be certain developers that are like, "Oh my gosh, there's mainframe stuff. "I don't know anything about that." How do you help bridge that gap between where it lives in the tools that they're using? >> The best example is talking about embracing this API economy. And so, developers really don't care where the stuff is at, they just want it to be easy to get to. They don't have to code up some specific interface or language to get to different types of data, right? IBM's done a great job with the z/OS Connect in opening up the mainframe to the API economy with ReSTful interfaces, and so with z/OS Connect combined with Rocket data virtualization, you can come through that z/OS Connect same path using all those same ReSTful interfaces pushing those APIs out to tools like Swagger, which the developers want to use, and not only can you get to the applications through z/OS Connect, but we're a service provider to z/OS Connect allowing them to also get to every piece of data using those same ReSTful APIs. >> If I heard you correctly, the developer doesn't need to even worry about that it's on mainframe or speak mainframe or anything like that, right? >> The goal is that they never do. That they simply see in their tool-set, again like Swagger, that they have data as well as different services that they can invoke using these very straightforward, simple ReSTful APIs. >> Can you speak to the customers you've talked to? You know, there's certain people out in the industry, I've had this conversation for a few years at IBM shows is there's some part of the market that are like, oh, well, the mainframe is this dusty old box sitting in a corner with nothing new, and my experience has been the containers and cool streaming and everything like that, oh well, you know, mainframe did virtualization and Linux and all these things really early, decades ago and is keeping up with a lot of these trends with these new type of technologies. What do you find in the customers that, how much are they driving forward on new technologies, looking for that new technology and being able to leverage the assets that they have? >> You asked a lot of questions there. The types of customers certainly financial and insurance are the big two, but that doesn't mean that we're limited and not going after retail and helping governments and manufacturing customers as well. What I find is talking with them that there's the folks who get it and the folks who don't, and the folks who get it are the ones who are saying, "Well, I want to be able "to embrace these new technologies," and they're taking things like open source, they're looking at Spark, for example, they're looking at Anaconda. Last week, we just announced at the Anaconda Conference, we stepped on stage with Continuum, IBM, and we, Rocket, stood up there talking about this partnership that we formed to create this ecosystem because the development world changes very, very rapidly. For a while, all the rage was JDBC, or all the rage was component broker, and so today it's Spark and Anaconda are really in the forefront of developers' minds. We're constantly moving to keep up with developers because that's where the action's happening. Again, they don't care where the data is housed as long as you can open that up. We've been playing with this concept that came up from some research firm called two-speed IT where you have maybe your core business that has been running for years, and it's designed to really be slow-moving, very high quality, it keeps everything running today, but they want to embrace some of their new technologies, they want to be able to roll out a brand-new app, and they want to be able to update that multiple times a week. And so, this two-speed IT says, you're kind of breaking 'em off into two separate teams. You don't have to take your existing infrastructure team and say, "You must embrace every Agile "and every DevOps type of methodology." What we're seeing customers be successful with is this two-speed IT where you can fracture these two, and now you need to create some nice integration between those two teams, so things like data virtualization really help with that. It opens up and allows the development teams to very quickly access those assets on the mainframe in this case while allowing those developers to very quickly crank out an application where quality is not that important, where being very quick to respond and doing lots of AB testing with customers is really critical. >> Waterfall still has its place. As a company that predominately, or maybe even exclusively is involved in mainframe, I'm struck by, it must've been 2008, 2009, Paul Maritz comes in and he says VMWare our vision is to build the software mainframe. And of course the world said, "Ah, that's, mainframe's dead," we've been hearing that forever. In many respects, I accredit the VMWare, they built sort of a form of software mainframe, but now you hear a lot of talk, Stu, about going back to bare metal. You don't hear that talk on the mainframe. Everything's virtualized, right, so it's kind of interesting to see, and IBM uses the language of private cloud. The mainframe's, we're joking, the original private cloud. My question is you're strategy as a company has been always focused on the mainframe and going forward I presume it's going to continue to do that. What's your outlook for that platform? >> We're not exclusively by the mainframe, by the way. We're not, we have a good mix. >> Okay, it's overstating that, then. It's half and half or whatever. You don't talk about it, 'cause you're a private company. >> Maybe a little more than half is mainframe-focused. >> Dave: Significant. >> It is significant. >> You've got a large of proportion of the company on mainframe, z/OS. >> So we're bullish on the mainframe. We continue to invest more every year. We invest, we increase our investment every year, and so in a software company, your investment is primarily people. We increase that by double digits every year. We have license revenue increases in the double digits every year. I don't know many other mainframe-based software companies that have that. But I think that comes back to the partnership that we have with IBM because we are more than just a technology partner. We work on strategic projects with IBM. IBM will oftentimes stand up and say Rocket is a strategic partner that works with us on hard problem-solving customers issues every day. We're bullish, we're investing more all the time. We're not backing away, we're not decreasing our interest or our bets on the mainframe. If anything, we're increasing them at a faster rate than we have in the past 10 years. >> And this trend of bringing analytics and transactions together is a huge mega-trend, I mean, why not do it on the mainframe? If the economics are there, which you're arguing that in many use cases they are, because of the value component as well, then the future looks pretty reasonable, wouldn't you say? >> I'd say it's very, very bright. At the Anaconda Conference last week, I was coming up with an analogy for these folks. It's just a bunch of data scientists, right, and during most of the breaks and the receptions, they were just asking questions, "Well, what is a mainframe? "I didn't know that we still had 'em, "and what do they do?" So it was fun to educate them on that. But I was trying to show them an analogy with data warehousing where, say that in the mid-'90s it was perfectly acceptable to have a separate data warehouse separate from your transaction system. You would copy all this data over into the data warehouse. That was the model, right, and then slowly it became more important that the analytics or the BI against that data warehouse was looking at more real time data. So then it became more efficiencies and how do we replicate this faster, and how do we get closer to, not looking at week-old data but day-old data? And so, I explained that to them and said the days of being able to do analytics against old data that's copied are going away. ETL, we're also bullish to say that ETL is dead. ETL's future is very bleak. There's no place for it. It had its time, but now it's done because with data virtualization you can access that data in place. I was telling these folks as they're talking about, these data scientists, as they're talking about how they look at their models, their first step is always ETL. And so I told them this story, I said ETL is dead, and they just look at me kind of strange. >> Dave: Now the first step is load. >> Yes, there you go, right, load it in there. But having access from these platforms directly to that data, you don't have to worry about any type of a delay. >> What you described, though, is still common architecture where you've got, let's say, a Z mainframe, it's got an InfiniBand pipe to some exit data warehouse or something like that, and so, IBM's vision was, okay, we can collapse that, we can simplify that, consolidate it. SAP with HANA has a similar vision, we can do that. I'm sure Oracle's got their vision. What gives you confidence in IBM's approach and legs going forward? >> Probably due to the advances that we see in z/OS itself where handling mixed workloads, which it's just been doing for many of the 50 years that it's been around, being able to prioritize different workloads, not only just at the CPU dispatching, but also at the memory usage, also at the IO, all the way down through the channel to the actual device. You don't see other operating systems that have that level of granularity for managing mixed workloads. >> In the security component, that's what to me is unique about this so-called private cloud, and I say, I was using that software mainframe example from VMWare in the past, and it got a good portion of the way there, but it couldn't get that last mile, which is, any workload, any application with the performance and security that you would expect. It's just never quite got there. I don't know if the pendulum is swinging, I don't know if that's the accurate way to say it, but it's certainly stabilized, wouldn't you say? >> There's certainly new eyes being opened every day to saying, wait a minute, I could do something different here. Muscle memory doesn't have to guide me in doing business the way I have been doing it before, and that's this muscle memory I'm talking about of this ETL piece. >> Right, well, and a large number of workloads in mainframe are running Linux, right, you got Anaconda, Spark, all these modern tools. The question you asked about developers was right on. If it's independent or transparent to developers, then who cares, that's the key. That's the key lever this day and age is the developer community. You know it well. >> That's right. Give 'em what they want. They're the customers, they're the infrastructure that's being built. >> Bryan, we'll give you the last word, bumper sticker on the event, Rocket Software, your partnership, whatever you choose. >> We're excited to be here, it's an exciting day to talk about machine learning on z/OS. I say we're bullish on the mainframe, we are, we're especially bullish on z/OS, and that's what this even today is all about. That's where the data is, that's where we need the analytics running, that's where we need the machine learning running, that's where we need to get the developers to access the data live. >> Excellent, Bryan, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. >> Bryan: Thank you. >> And keep right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from New York City. Be right back. (electronic keyboard music)

>>Okay, welcome back everyone. It's the cubes coverage here in Seattle, Washington for Amazon web services, marketplace seller event. Really the big news here is the combination of the partner network with marketplace to one organization called the Amazon web services partner organization. Again, great news. Things are coming together, getting simplified and I'm John furry host of the cube. You've got a great guest here. Trish TRO head of worldwide Alliance at Wiz the fastest growing software company in history. Congratulations. Welcome to the cube. >>Thank you so much. And thanks for having us. >>So we were talking on camera. You had a little insight to a AWS. You jumped on this company. Oh my God. Amazing team. Take us through the story real quick. It's worth noting Wiz the company fastest growth. We're seeing take us through the quick soundbite. >>Sure. So the quick soundbite. So I was at AWS and my husband shared an article with me on cnbc.com about Wiz. They just done a big funding raise and he's like, you really have to read this. And I read it. And I said, oh my God, every single customer that I've met with the last year and a half has this problem. I have to find a way to be there. I don't care if I have to sweep the floors, lucky enough, they needed someone to run channels and alliances. So I did not have to sweep the floors, but for me, you know, when I think about our success, it's really this convergence of a series of things it's it's right time. Right? COVID forced everybody to the cloud, probably a little faster than they were ready to, you know, right market. And we have this convergence of the incredible product market fit, helping customers accelerate their cloud journey securely. And then I can't say enough about the team. You know, I thought it was fascinating, you know, as great as our product is when I got on board, everyone kept telling me, you know, they bought our product because of the team. And I was like, okay, cool. What about the product? And then I met the team and I understood. So jumped >>On one off one rocket ship. Yeah. To go onto another one. Yeah. You like the rocket, you like to ride those big, fast growth companies. You >>Know, I, I wish I was the kind of person where, you know, I just, I need excitement. Right? I'm I love to build. And I've had really good luck that I've always been able to find myself in a place, whether it's at a massive company or a startup to find myself as a builder, which has always been awesome. >>Well, tr it's great to have you on the cube. And a little fun fact is your sister was interviewed here on the cube in 2019 by myself. And so we have the first sisters, both cube alumni. Congratulations. >>I think that's, you know, honestly of all the accomplishments in my career, that's definitely one. I gotta make sure I get a plaque for that. You >>Will get a VIP sticker too. Yes, we, we all >>Sticker. Let's not get crazy now. >>All right. We'll designate in the front page. We'll have a very big story. L fund all good. We'd love the queue. We'd love to get the insight. So I wanna get your thoughts. Okay. You you've seen the Amazon side. You've been on that side. Now you're another side of the table with a partner growing. We're here to seller our conference. Big mission here is let's make things simpler and easier to procure software since you're already fast growing, what's in it for the customer to work through AWS, to get Wiz. Obviously you guys got a lot of demand. Yeah. A lot of money flowing through. You guys have a direct sales force. Are you going through the marketplace? What's the relationship between Wiz and Aish marketplace. >>So huge, honestly, and it's been a huge contributor to our success. We were lucky because we're, we were born during COVID, we're born in the cloud company. We got to build it from the ground up. This wasn't something that we had to go and figure out how to integrate into our existing ecosystem. Our ecosystem is actually built around the marketplace motion. You know, it's, it's interesting as you know, coming from AWS and now being on the other side, you know, something we really put a focus on is, you know, I see a lot of the companies that I was working with, you know, cloud was very much this thing. That's kind of in a silo and it's its own box and it competes internally. And really when you, you get deeper and deeper into the marketplace, it becomes about how do I use the cloud to really accelerate what I'm doing and to integrate it across my different channels. And for us, you know, AWS is our deepest relationship on the partner side. We invested heavily early and often, and it's been amazing. You >>Know, tr I was talking one of the data brick guys as well, and other companies that are big successes. This is a unique time here at the marketplace. We're on the ground floor. You can see here, we're at the, there's no stage. It's the smaller Q small venue, very intimate event. But it reminds me of 2013 when reinvent was starting to get traction second year, small, intimate, little bit bigger, obviously, but this is gonna feel like it's gonna explode. And you mentioned that you guys are building emotions around the ecosystem of the marketplace because you were born, born in the cloud. And COVID, so it's almost like if you're a startup today, why wouldn't you be in the marketplace first? Why even have that motion? So reminds me of the old days of you're a startup. Why not use the cloud? Why build a data center? >>No, and I think that's a really great analogy, you know, at least from what I've seen, it's, it's super interesting as a startup, because part of when you come out with a new technology in a perfect world, customers would already know what you were gonna make and have funding allocated for it. And we would all have this much easier sales cycle. That's not how it works. The customers, you know, as much as they might wanna get your solution, they have real things like budgets to deal with. And so it's really cool because when you work with the marketplace, it's a pool of funding that the customer has allocated on the customer side. It burns down their commit with the, with their different contracts. So that's usually powerful for them, right? Being able to consolidate your it, spend, reduce your overall total cost of ownership is, is usually powerful to the customer. And it on our side is a startup. So not only are they the financial benefits, it also helps you elevate the conversation. You know, a lot of times in the security industry, it's really all about like speeds and beads. That's how we sell cyber crime is 300% on the rise and stuff like that. Right. But being able to kind of get above that and help the customer, you know, have that financial conversation is, is really helpful too. >>So if I'm a startup, I'm a company, what would be the playbook for me and say, you know what, I'm gonna go all in, in the marketplace, I'm just gonna build the best kick ass product. Okay. I got product market fit. I'm gonna focus all my creative energy on building the best tech with the best, best team. All my friends and colleagues, and none of this non says go to market direct Salesforce, go all in on AWS. I know the product market fits there. What's the playbook. What do I do? Do just list it. >>So list, I think this is one of the mistakes that a lot of companies make when, when they first start out with the marketplace, right? They're like I will get to the marketplace and then AWS will sell my solution. I'm done the marketplace really? >>Where's the money back up the truck, come on. >>Exactly. Right? Like they have all these customers, they should just all come to me. Right. And I think that's one of the mistakes that organizations stumble on initially, cuz they go to the marketplace and then AWS is not selling their solution for them immediately. And they're like, the marketplace is a failure and it's really not. It's just the beginning of that. Being able to go into the marketplace, being able, honestly, to set expectations internally and understanding the journey that really comes into play here. You know, building, you know, one of the things that I talk to a lot about my team with is like building success within the sales reps and helping them be big advocates and champions for the marketplace. And the other thing is like, don't assume people know, I can't tell you. I feel like my, my real job at Wiz is I'm like the marketplace evangelist and cheap cuz that's all I do is talk about why they should use the marketplace and how it can solve all these different problems. Don't assume that people know how to do these things. Like you have to keep reiterating the message. You have to find sellers that are ready for it. And then you have to really, you have to teach them how to do it and then align your sales process accordingly. Like confidentiality come up a whole bunch at this conference today. It's important. You need it. >>It's huge. How big is your sales force right now? >>On >>The direct side. >>On the direct side, I think we're like a hundred or something like >>That. So you have, you have people out there on the streets knocking on doors selling. How's that comp decision go internally as you guys have that, what's the, what's the uptake in the marketplace for you guys right now? Is it high? Is it it's >>Been really high honestly. Yeah. It's and we've been really great. We have some incredible champions internally who are really great about sharing their experience, helping other sellers understand like we've, we've honestly had amazing co-sell stories at AWS where they've been so supportive and helpful. And it's amazing. Like we've had so many sellers that have done their first marketplace transaction ever. And now it's like for some of our sellers, they're at the point where they're like, I don't wanna, I don't wanna not do a marketplace transaction. It's just, it's so much easier. Take us >>For the procurement benefits. Take, walk me through what happens on the procurement side. What's the benefits for using the marketplace as you, as the procurement process goes through? >>Oh, from a, from a procurement side, right? It's like, it's simple, right? Like you, you essentially click a button and it's done like from the seller's side, like imagine not having to like chase down 15 different signatures and make sure nobody's on vacation. Right? So it just takes this really convoluted ti process that they would normally deal with. It makes it a lot simpler on the customer side. Right. Being able to have one consolidated is super powerful, burning down against commit, super powerful. And I think that's something that's really helped. Our sellers too, is being able, like we, we spend a tremendous amount of resources on educating our sellers. Not only about how it's gonna help them, but also how it's gonna help the customer too, >>Too. So good internally for you guys frictionless easier, better, better. Sounds like a better path >>On that. Oh, I won't say frictionless. I mean we're, we're about a year into this, but it wasn't so much frictionless, but it's not a hassle itself. Right. It's not a hassle. And it's all about >>On scale one to 10, 10 being frictionless. Would you get a, an eight or >>I'd say like an eight. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Cool. But it's important for organizations to understand that, right? Like that just because there's a little bit of friction at first. Like the most important thing I told my team is they were like, look like, well, why doesn't everybody wanna do this? This is so easy. And a, a good seller will take the hard time every way when they know what the defined outcome is. Yeah. The marketplace to them feels like a shortcut at first. Yeah. So a very much helps them become like, Hey look, this isn't a shortcut. This is gonna help you. Like, this is a good thing. And once you get that adoption like that, that's where the primary friction is. They almost go, is this, is this too good to be true? This can't be real. >>It, it, it almost sounds too good to be true when you think about, okay, so lemme take, I'm gonna put them a sales rep for a second. Like I'm selling WIS and I go and knock on a door and there's a company and I get an, a champion inside the company and says, oh, I love this product. I wanna buy it. I gotta get my PO approved and I gotta go get, I tell my boss about it. Does it go through that kind of normal kind of normal sales motion where you got buy in and now they gotta commit and close and get contract or they just go to the person who runs the account, click the button, like, like, is there, I mean, I'd like to see that shortcut happen. Like so on the customer side, what, what do you see as the process? Is it just go to the console and hit by and >>You know, depends on the customer honestly, and kind of where they are in their cloud journey. You know, really mature customers tend to have a little bit more of a mature process, you know, earlier customers, it tends to be a little less, let's say structured, but no, it's definitely not. The customer just clicks the button and it's done. That would be quite nice. We're just not there yet, but it's definitely a much simpler process cuz you know, you think about it on the customer side when they decide they wanna buy something, especially something new, they don't have allocated funding for us. They have to go build all this justification for funding. They still have to do that. Right. But then now there's a pot of money that they can go to and be able to retire against. There, there, it does help in that sense. A >>Lot. Chris, Chris grew has talked about on his keynote, the buyer journey survey. That seems to be on the, on the customer side. Yeah. Having those processes where they can forecast against it, they kind of know what they're getting. That's that's that's sounds like a great thing that's happening. I wanna get back to this comp issue again. Cause this came up. I heard that a lot. We talked with Chris about the competing thing. That's not an issue in my mind, but I think the factor to me, if I'm looking at this is that if you get the comp right, they can sell it at Amazon. You get comped, your sales people get comped goes through the marketplace. How do you look at that? How do company her look? How do they look at the comp what's what's the deciding factor or is it a non-issue what's the, what's the core. >>So I'm opportunity. I'm gonna be honest. I think I got a little lucky because I think the getting alignment at the executive level that this was something we should do to be totally honest here. Wasn't wasn't super hard. When we presented a clear plan, how we were gonna do it, what other companies were doing, what it did for their business to our executives. We do, we get some pushback. Sure. Healthy questions. Sure. But like it, it really >>Was it margin related or more like operational costs. >>It wasn't even margin related. It was again, more of like, is this, this feels too good to be true kind of thing. So it was more like proving it to them. Like no, like it really can be that easy. Yeah. And then on the, the comp side, right. For us, we look at it as like cost of sales. So yeah. You know, we, we treat it the same way. We treat all other channels and we wanted to make sure for our reps that, you know, when we think about the channel, whether, you know, from, especially with marketplace, like it can't be harder for them to do a marketplace transaction or less incentive for them to do that than a direct one that doesn't incentivize the right behaviors. >>So it's more of an indirect channel play. >>Yeah. So it's all for us. It was about aligning the right incentives to drive the right behaviors. It wasn't, it actually was a pretty short discussion on the confidentiality. Everyone was like, no, this, this makes sense. We should do that. >>Yeah. I mean, I think it's, I think it's an easy, easy, but you have to be organized for it. Like, like Chris said, don't put the toe in the water. Right. Put your flagship offering in there, make it valuable. And then the flag wheel gets going, the Amazon sales people can sell it. Right. They get calm. That's always a good thing. >>Yeah. And I think that's something that was really interesting. Like when we started on the marketplace journey, like I said, it's not just, you get in a marketplace and you're done, you know, Chris talked a lot about ISV accelerate and you know, how you elevate yourself within that program, doing things with ACE, like putting in different opportunities to, to start to essentially build that groundswell to drive co-sell it's, it's gets that first step into it. But there's so much more that, that we're still discovering and learning today is we're building it >>Out. And you said you had some good co-sell examples. >>Oh yeah. So we've had some great Cosell. >>What's your best one. Best one to >>Share. Oh, so my favorite one, I won't say the customer name, but we were in the final stages and a customer was really like, oh, like this is a lot of money. I'm really nervous. And the, they, I think what's crazy is that at AWS you have a different relationship with customers. Like you are truly a trusted advisor and rightfully so. Yeah. AWS really does a great job with making sure their account teams do what's best for the customer. And so an AWS seller or technical resource on an account says, Hey, no, this is the right thing for your business. That is huge for the customer. So we at Wiz actually spend a lot of time investing in enabling and educating the AWS account teams. So they feel comfortable when they get into that situation where the customers nervous of being saying like, no, this is you need to do this. This is >>Gonna be, you carry a lot of weight with the customers. >>Absolutely. >>And so you almost have to treat them like a lunch and learn, get 'em up, find, share. So it's kind of like an indirect relationship for you, but for them it's a part, you know, this is basically a channel. >>Yeah. And I think that's the thing that, that really is something we we've really heavily invested in is, is building. I like call the ground game within AWS. Right? Yeah. Making sure we spend time with enabling their reps. We enable their technical teams lunch and learns, right? Like there's so much energy at AWS to really invest in technical solutions that help their customers. Awesome. Which you don't always find that a lot of partners honestly. >>Well, Trish, great. Great to have you on sharing the AWS relationship story with WIS, gotta ask you, what's it like to be working for the fastest growing startup? What's it like? It's, it's, it's pretty fun. >>You know, it's, let's say I don't ever wake up on a day and say, man, I just wish I had more things to do. No, it's, it's been an incredible journey. The people, you know, my favorite part of a startup is, you know, getting to do this with a bunch of really incredible, awesome people. It's, it's the most fun thing in the world. We've, I've learned more in the last, you know, we like to joke that we're a five year old company and a one year old company at the exact same time. Yeah. And what's cool is we get to learn and, and I I've learned so much this year. >>When was the company officially >>Formed? It was officially formed before. Like, so it was officially formed in February, 2020. We started officially operating in the January following 21. So 21. Yep. >>Yeah. So one and a half years, >>One and a half years. Isn't that crazy? Great. >>And a hundred million ARR already. Yeah. Hitting that. >>Yep. It's been a, a wild journey. I I'll put it that way >>Is the, what's the success of the businesses? It, the onboarding the, is it the business model of freemium? What's the product market fit dynamic. Why is so fast? I mean, that's the needs there? Pandemic fresh, clean piece, piece of paper doing it, right. What's the, why is it? Why is that going so fast? >>Well, I think about this, I've been in the security industry for too many years. And when you think about normal security products, like there's so much time to value, you have to deploy all this infrastructure and then you gotta wait till something happens that you find that's scary, that will excite the customer. Right? It's, it's, it's a lot of time to show value. What blew my mind is the way that we approach our, the problem that we're solving is essentially immediate time to value. So the customer connects within minutes, they're immediately presented with here's your, your top risks. And then they can take action on them. Right? Like it's not just, here's these big threats and detecting, it's actually giving, empowering the customer to go and, and fix things. That's that's powerful for them. Yeah. Yeah. >>So, and the renewals are there coming in, people like the product, >>I mean, we've only been around for a year and a half, so there aren't that many renewals yet, but let's say we have extremely strong renewal rate from our customer base. >>Yeah. I mean you can have when you have a great product. Yeah. Well, thanks for coming on sharing. What's your assessment so far of the database marketplace kind of reorg with APN partner network to have one organization. What does that mean to the, to the market? What does that what's that tell you? >>So I was really excited. So we're actually built this way. So I run both our channels and alliances organization and it was, it was great because it allows these two things to work together and, and very well. And AWS, I think, is realizing the power of bringing those two groups together. So when I saw that, I was like, that's gonna be great. It's gonna make it simpler, easier. And at least for us, it's been really powerful. >>Awesome. Thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate it. We'll get you that plaque shortly. >>I thought I was getting a sticker too. >>Don't forget the sticker. Oh, the sticker definitely guaranteed. And we'll give you a VIP icon on our cube alumni network. All >>Right. I like that. >>Thanks for coming out. Alls great stuff. Thanks. Awesome. Thanks for having all best growing company history here on the cube, bringing all the action again, the new flywheel is gonna be procured through the marketplaces. This is obvious how it all kind of works and forms. It's kind of happening in real time. Cube's got you covered on the ground floor here in Seattle with more coverage after the short break.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this CUBE Power Panel where we're going to talk about application modernization, also success templates, and take a look at some new survey data to see how CIOs are thinking about digital transformation, as we get deeper into the post isolation economy. And with me are three familiar VIP guests to CUBE audiences. Tony Bear, the principal at DB InSight, Doug Henschen, VP and principal analyst at Constellation Research and Sanjeev Mohan principal at SanjMo. Guys, good to see you again, welcome back. >> Thank you. >> Glad to be here. >> Thanks for having us. >> Glad to be here. >> All right, Doug. Let's get started with you. You know, this recent survey, which was commissioned by Couchbase, 650 CIOs and CTOs, and IT practitioners. So obviously very IT heavy. They responded to the following question, "In response to the pandemic, my organization accelerated our application modernization strategy and of course, an overwhelming majority, 94% agreed or strongly agreed." So I'm sure, Doug, that you're not shocked by that, but in the same survey, modernizing existing technologies was second only behind cyber security is the top investment priority this year. Doug, bring us into your world and tell us the trends that you're seeing with the clients and customers you work with in their modernization initiatives. >> Well, the survey, of course, is spot on. You know, any Constellation Research analyst, any systems integrator will tell you that we saw more transformation work in the last two years than in the prior six to eight years. A lot of it was forced, you know, a lot of movement to the cloud, a lot of process improvement, a lot of automation work, but transformational is aspirational and not every company can be a leader. You know, at Constellation, we focus our research on those market leaders and that's only, you know, the top 5% of companies that are really innovating, that are really disrupting their markets and we try to share that with companies that want to be fast followers, that these are the next 20 to 25% of companies that don't want to get left behind, but don't want to hit some of the same roadblocks and you know, pioneering pitfalls that the real leaders are encountering when they're harnessing new technologies. So the rest of the companies, you know, the cautious adopters, the laggards, many of them fall by the wayside, that's certainly what we saw during the pandemic. Who are these leaders? You know, the old saw examples that people saw at the Amazons, the Teslas, the Airbnbs, the Ubers and Lyfts, but new examples are emerging every year. And as a consumer, you immediately recognize these transformed experiences. One of my favorite examples from the pandemic is Rocket Mortgage. No disclaimer required, I don't own stock and you're not client, but when I wanted to take advantage of those record low mortgage interest rates, I called my current bank and some, you know, stall word, very established conventional banks, I'm talking to you Bank of America, City Bank, and they were taking days and weeks to get back to me. Rocket Mortgage had the locked in commitment that day, a very proactive, consistent communications across web, mobile, email, all customer touchpoints. I closed in a matter of weeks an entirely digital seamless process. This is back in the gloves and masks days and the loan officer came parked in our driveway, wiped down an iPad, handed us that iPad, we signed all those documents digitally, completely electronic workflow. The only wet signatures required were those demanded by the state. So it's easy to spot these transformed experiences. You know, Rocket had most of that in place before the pandemic, and that's why they captured 8% of the national mortgage market by 2020 and they're on track to hit 10% here in 2022. >> Yeah, those are great examples. I mean, I'm not a shareholder either, but I am a customer. I even went through the same thing in the pandemic. It was all done in digital it was a piece of cake and I happened to have to do another one with a different firm and stuck with that firm for a variety of reasons and it was night and day. So to your point, it was a forced merge to digital. If you were there beforehand, you had real advantage, it could accelerate your lead during the pandemic. Okay, now Tony bear. Mr. Bear, I understand you're skeptical about all this buzz around digital transformation. So in that same survey, the data shows that the majority of respondents said that their digital initiatives were largely reactive to outside forces, the pandemic compliance changes, et cetera. But at the same time, they indicated that the results while somewhat mixed were generally positive. So why are you skeptical? >> The reason being, and by the way, I have nothing against application modernization. The problem... I think the problem I ever said, it often gets conflated with digital transformation and digital transformation itself has become such a buzzword and so overused that it's really hard, if not impossible to pin down (coughs) what digital transformation actually means. And very often what you'll hear from, let's say a C level, you know, (mumbles) we want to run like Google regardless of whether or not that goal is realistic you know, for that organization (coughs). The thing is that we've been using, you know, businesses have been using digital data since the days of the mainframe, since the... Sorry that data has been digital. What really has changed though, is just the degree of how businesses interact with their customers, their partners, with the whole rest of the ecosystem and how their business... And how in many cases you take look at the auto industry that the nature of the business, you know, is changing. So there is real change of foot, the question is I think we need to get more specific in our goals. And when you look at it, if we can boil it down to a couple, maybe, you know, boil it down like really over simplistically, it's really all about connectedness. No, I'm not saying connectivity 'cause that's more of a physical thing, but connectedness. Being connected to your customer, being connected to your supplier, being connected to the, you know, to the whole landscape, that you operate in. And of course today we have many more channels with which we operate, you know, with customers. And in fact also if you take a look at what's happening in the automotive industry, for instance, I was just reading an interview with Bill Ford, you know, their... Ford is now rapidly ramping up their electric, you know, their electric vehicle strategy. And what they realize is it's not just a change of technology, you know, it is a change in their business, it's a change in terms of the relationship they have with their customer. Their customers have traditionally been automotive dealers who... And the automotive dealers have, you know, traditionally and in many cases by state law now have been the ones who own the relationship with the end customer. But when you go to an electric vehicle, the product becomes a lot more of a software product. And in turn, that means that Ford would have much more direct interaction with its end customers. So that's really what it's all about. It's about, you know, connectedness, it's also about the ability to act, you know, we can say agility, it's about ability not just to react, but to anticipate and act. And so... And of course with all the proliferation, you know, the explosion of data sources and connectivity out there and the cloud, which allows much more, you know, access to compute, it changes the whole nature of the ball game. The fact is that we have to avoid being overwhelmed by this and make our goals more, I guess, tangible, more strictly defined. >> Yeah, now... You know, great points there. And I want to just bring in some survey data, again, two thirds of the respondents said their digital strategies were set by IT and only 26% by the C-suite, 8% by the line of business. Now, this was largely a survey of CIOs and CTOs, but, wow, doesn't seem like the right mix. It's a Doug's point about, you know, leaders in lagers. My guess is that Rocket Mortgage, their digital strategy was led by the chief digital officer potentially. But at the same time, you would think, Tony, that application modernization is a prerequisite for digital transformation. But I want to go to Sanjeev in this war in the survey. And respondents said that on average, they want 58% of their IT spend to be in the public cloud three years down the road. Now, again, this is CIOs and CTOs, but (mumbles), but that's a big number. And there was no ambiguity because the question wasn't worded as cloud, it was worded as public cloud. So Sanjeev, what do you make of that? What's your feeling on cloud as flexible architecture? What does this all mean to you? >> Dave, 58% of IT spend in the cloud is a huge change from today. Today, most estimates, peg cloud IT spend to be somewhere around five to 15%. So what this number tells us is that the cloud journey is still in its early days, so we should buckle up. We ain't seen nothing yet, but let me add some color to this. CIOs and CTOs maybe ramping up their cloud deployment, but they still have a lot of problems to solve. I can tell you from my previous experience, for example, when I was in Gartner, I used to talk to a lot of customers who were in a rush to move into the cloud. So if we were to plot, let's say a maturity model, typically a maturity model in any discipline in IT would have something like crawl, walk, run. So what I was noticing was that these organizations were jumping straight to run because in the pandemic, they were under the gun to quickly deploy into the cloud. So now they're kind of coming back down to, you know, to crawl, walk, run. So basically they did what they had to do under the circumstances, but now they're starting to resolve some of the very, very important issues. For example, security, data privacy, governance, observability, these are all very big ticket items. Another huge problem that nav we are noticing more than we've ever seen, other rising costs. Cloud makes it so easy to onboard new use cases, but it leads to all kinds of unexpected increase in spikes in your operating expenses. So what we are seeing is that organizations are now getting smarter about where the workloads should be deployed. And sometimes it may be in more than one cloud. Multi-cloud is no longer an aspirational thing. So that is a huge trend that we are seeing and that's why you see there's so much increased planning to spend money in public cloud. We do have some issues that we still need to resolve. For example, multi-cloud sounds great, but we still need some sort of single pane of glass, control plane so we can have some fungibility and move workloads around. And some of this may also not be in public cloud, some workloads may actually be done in a more hybrid environment. >> Yeah, definitely. I call it Supercloud. People win sometimes-- >> Supercloud. >> At that term, but it's above multi-cloud, it floats, you know, on topic. But so you clearly identified some potholes. So I want to talk about the evolution of the application experience 'cause there's some potholes there too. 81% of their respondents in that survey said, "Our development teams are embracing the cloud and other technologies faster than the rest of the organization can adopt and manage them." And that was an interesting finding to me because you'd think that infrastructure is code and designing insecurity and containers and Kubernetes would be a great thing for organizations, and it is I'm sure in terms of developer productivity, but what do you make of this? Does the modernization path also have some potholes, Sanjeev? What are those? >> So, first of all, Dave, you mentioned in your previous question, there's no ambiguity, it's a public cloud. This one, I feel it has quite a bit of ambiguity because it talks about cloud and other technologies, that sort of opens up the kimono, it's like that's everything. Also, it says that the rest of the organization is not able to adopt and manage. Adoption is a business function, management is an IT function. So I feed this question is a bit loaded. We know that app modernization is here to stay, developing in the cloud removes a lot of traditional barriers or procuring instantiating infrastructure. In addition, developers today have so many more advanced tools. So they're able to develop the application faster because they have like low-code/no-code options, they have notebooks to write the machine learning code, they have the entire DevOps CI/CD tool chain that makes it easy to version control and push changes. But there are potholes. For example, are developers really interested in fixing data quality problems, all data, privacy, data, access, data governance? How about monitoring? I doubt developers want to get encumbered with all of these operationalization management pieces. Developers are very keen to deliver new functionality. So what we are now seeing is that it is left to the data team to figure out all of these operationalization productionization things that the developers have... You know, are not truly interested in that. So which actually takes me to this topic that, Dave, you've been quite actively covering and we've been talking about, see, the whole data mesh. >> Yeah, I was going to say, it's going to solve all those data quality problems, Sanjeev. You know, I'm a sucker for data mesh. (laughing) >> Yeah, I know, but see, what's going to happen with data mesh is that developers are now going to have more domain resident power to develop these applications. What happens to all of the data curation governance quality that, you know, a central team used to do. So there's a lot of open ended questions that still need to be answered. >> Yeah, That gets automated, Tony, right? With computational governance. So-- >> Of course. >> It's not trivial, it's not trivial, but I'm still an optimist by the end of the decade we'll start to get there. Doug, I want to go to you again and talk about the business case. We all remember, you know, the business case for modernization that is... We remember the Y2K, there was a big it spending binge and this was before the (mumbles) of the enterprise, right? CIOs, they'd be asked to develop new applications and the business maybe helps pay for it or offset the cost with the initial work and deployment then IT got stuck managing the sprawling portfolio for years. And a lot of the apps had limited adoption or only served a few users, so there were big pushes toward rationalizing the portfolio at that time, you know? So do I modernize, they had to make a decision, consolidate, do I sunset? You know, it was all based on value. So what's happening today and how are businesses making the case to modernize, are they going through a similar rationalization exercise, Doug? >> Well, the Y2K era experience that you talked about was back in the days of, you know, throw the requirements over the wall and then we had waterfall development that lasted months in some cases years. We see today's most successful companies building cross functional teams. You know, the C-suite the line of business, the operations, the data and analytics teams, the IT, everybody has a seat at the table to lead innovation and modernization initiatives and they don't start, the most successful companies don't start by talking about technology, they start by envisioning a business outcome by envisioning a transformed customer experience. You hear the example of Amazon writing the press release for the product or service it wants to deliver and then it works backwards to create it. You got to work backwards to determine the tech that will get you there. What's very clear though, is that you can't transform or modernize by lifting and shifting the legacy mess into the cloud. That doesn't give you the seamless processes, that doesn't give you data driven personalization, it doesn't give you a connected and consistent customer experience, whether it's online or mobile, you know, bots, chat, phone, everything that we have today that requires a modern, scalable cloud negative approach and agile deliver iterative experience where you're collaborating with this cross-functional team and course correct, again, making sure you're on track to what's needed. >> Yeah. Now, Tony, both Doug and Sanjeev have been, you know, talking about what I'm going to call this IT and business schism, and we've all done surveys. One of the things I'd love to see Couchbase do in future surveys is not only survey the it heavy, but also survey the business heavy and see what they say about who's leading the digital transformation and who's in charge of the customer experience. Do you have any thoughts on that, Tony? >> Well, there's no question... I mean, it's kind like, you know, the more things change. I mean, we've been talking about that IT and the business has to get together, we talked about this back during, and Doug, you probably remember this, back during the Y2K ERP days, is that you need these cross functional teams, we've been seeing this. I think what's happening today though, is that, you know, back in the Y2K era, we were basically going into like our bedrock systems and having to totally re-engineer them. And today what we're looking at is that, okay, those bedrock systems, the ones that basically are keeping the lights on, okay, those are there, we're not going to mess with that, but on top of that, that's where we're going to innovate. And that gives us a chance to be more, you know, more directed and therefore we can bring these related domains together. I mean, that's why just kind of, you know, talk... Where Sanjeev brought up the term of data mesh, I've been a bit of a cynic about data mesh, but I do think that work and work is where we bring a bunch of these connected teams together, teams that have some sort of shared context, though it's everybody that's... Every team that's working, let's say around the customer, for instance, which could be, you know, in marketing, it could be in sales, order processing in some cases, you know, in logistics and delivery. So I think that's where I think we... You know, there's some hope and the fact is that with all the advanced, you know, basically the low-code/no-code tools, they are ways to bring some of these other players, you know, into the process who previously had to... Were sort of, you know, more at the end of like a, you know, kind of a... Sort of like they throw it over the wall type process. So I do believe, but despite all my cynicism, I do believe there's some hope. >> Thank you. Okay, last question. And maybe all of you could answer this. Maybe, Sanjeev, you can start it off and then Doug and Tony can chime in. In the survey, about a half, nearly half of the 650 respondents said they could tangibly show their organizations improve customer experiences that were realized from digital projects in the last 12 months. Now, again, not surprising, but we've been talking about digital experiences, but there's a long way to go judging from our pandemic customer experiences. And we, again, you know, some were great, some were terrible. And so, you know, and some actually got worse, right? Will that improve? When and how will it improve? Where's 5G and things like that fit in in terms of improving customer outcomes? Maybe, Sanjeev, you could start us off here. And by the way, plug any research that you're working on in this sort of area, please do. >> Thank you, Dave. As a resident optimist on this call, I'll get us started and then I'm sure Doug and Tony will have interesting counterpoints. So I'm a technology fan boy, I have to admit, I am in all of all these new companies and how they have been able to rise up and handle extreme scale. In this time that we are speaking on this show, these food delivery companies would have probably handled tens of thousands of orders in minutes. So these concurrent orders, delivery, customer support, geospatial location intelligence, all of this has really become commonplace now. It used to be that, you know, large companies like Apple would be able to handle all of these supply chain issues, disruptions that we've been facing. But now in my opinion, I think we are seeing this in, Doug mentioned Rocket Mortgage. So we've seen it in FinTech and shopping apps. So we've seen the same scale and it's more than 5G. It includes things like... Even in the public cloud, we have much more efficient, better hardware, which can do like deep learning networks much more efficiently. So machine learning, a lot of natural language programming, being able to handle unstructured data. So in my opinion, it's quite phenomenal to see how technology has actually come to rescue and as, you know, billions of us have gone online over the last two years. >> Yeah, so, Doug, so Sanjeev's point, he's saying, basically, you ain't seen nothing yet. What are your thoughts here, your final thoughts. >> Well, yeah, I mean, there's some incredible technologies coming including 5G, but you know, it's only going to pave the cow path if the underlying app, if the underlying process is clunky. You have to modernize, take advantage of, you know, serverless scalability, autonomous optimization, advanced data science. There's lots of cutting edge capabilities out there today, but you know, lifting and shifting you got to get your hands dirty and actually modernize on that data front. I mentioned my research this year, I'm doing a lot of in depth looks at some of the analytical data platforms. You know, these lake houses we've had some conversations about that and helping companies to harness their data, to have a more personalized and predictive and proactive experience. So, you know, we're talking about the Snowflakes and Databricks and Googles and Teradata and Vertica and Yellowbrick and that's the research I'm focusing on this year. >> Yeah, your point about paving the cow path is right on, especially over the pandemic, a lot of the processes were unknown. But you saw this with RPA, paving the cow path only got you so far. And so, you know, great points there. Tony, you get the last word, bring us home. >> Well, I'll put it this way. I think there's a lot of hope in terms of that the new generation of developers that are coming in are a lot more savvy about things like data. And I think also the new generation of people in the business are realizing that we need to have data as a core competence. So I do have optimism there that the fact is, I think there is a much greater consciousness within both the business side and the technical. In the technology side, the organization of the importance of data and how to approach that. And so I'd like to just end on that note. >> Yeah, excellent. And I think you're right. Putting data at the core is critical data mesh I think very well describes the problem and (mumbles) credit lays out a solution, just the technology's not there yet, nor are the standards. Anyway, I want to thank the panelists here. Amazing. You guys are always so much fun to work with and love to have you back in the future. And thank you for joining today's broadcast brought to you by Couchbase. By the way, check out Couchbase on the road this summer at their application modernization summits, they're making up for two years of shut in and coming to you. So you got to go to couchbase.com/roadshow to find a city near you where you can meet face to face. In a moment. Ravi Mayuram, the chief technology officer of Couchbase will join me. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. (bright music)

>>mhm Yes, everyone, welcome back to the cubes coverage of dr khan 2021. I'm john for your host of the cube. Got a great segment here. One of the big supporters and open source amazon web services returning back second year. Dr khan virtual Deepak Singh, vice president of the compute services at AWS Deepak, Great to see you. Thanks for coming back on remotely again soon. We'll be in real life. Reinvent is going to be in person, we'll be there. Good to see you. >>Good to see you too, john it's always good to do these. I don't know how how often I've been at the cube now, but it's great every single time your >>legend and getting on there, a lot of important things to discuss your in one of the most important areas in the technology industry right now and that is at the confluence of cloud scale and modern development applications as they shift towards as Andy Jassy says, the new guard, right. It's been happening. You guys have been a big proponent of open source and enabling open source is a service creating business models for companies. But more importantly, you guys are powering, making it easier for folks to use software. And doctor has been a big relationship for you. Could you take a minute to first talk about the doctor, a W S relationship and your involvement and what you're doing? >>Yeah, actually it goes back a long way. Uh you know, Justin, we announced PCS had reinvented 2014 and PCS at that time was very much managed orchestration service on top of DACA at that time. I think it was the first really big one out there from a cloud provider. And since then, of course, the world has evolved quite a bit and relationship with DR has evolved a lot. The thing I'd like to talk to is something that we announced that Dr last year, I don't remember if I talked about it on the cube at that time. But last year we started working with DR on how can we go from doctor Run, which customers love or DR desktop, which customers love and make it easy for people to run containers on pcs and Fergie. Uh so most new customers running containers and AWS today start with this Yes and party or half of them and we wanted to make it very easy for them to start with where they are on the laptop which is often bucket to stop and have running services the native US. So we started working with DR and that that collaboration has been very successful. We want to keep you look forward to continuing to work on evolving that where you can use Docker compose doctor, desktop, doctor run the fuel that darker customers used and the labour grand production services on the end of your side, which is the part that we've got that on. So I think that's one area where we work really well together. Uh, the other area where I think the two companies continue to work well together. It's open source in general as some of, you know, AWS has a very strong commitment to contain a. D uh, EKS our community service is moving towards community. Forget it actually runs all on community today and uh, we collaborate dr Rhonda on the Ocr specification because, you know, the Oc I am expect is becoming the de facto packaging format idea. W S. This morning we launched yesterday, we launched a service called Opera. And the main expected input for opera is an Ocr image are being in this Atlanta as well, where those ci images now a way of packaging for lambda. And I think the last one I like to call out and it has been an amazing partnership and it's an area where most people don't pay attention is amid signing. Uh, there's a project called Notary. We do the second version of the Notary Spec for remit signing and AWS Docker and a couple of other companies have been working very closely together on bringing that uh, you know, finalizing no tv too, so that at least in our case we can start building services for our customers on top of that. You know, it's it's a great relationship and I expect to see it continue. >>Well, I think one of the themes this year is developer experience. So good. Good call out there in the new announcements on the tools you have and software because that seems to be a great developer integration with Docker question I have for you is how should the customers think about things like E C. S and versus E K. S. App, Runner lambda uh for kind of running their containers. How do they understand the difference is, what's there? What's the, what's the thought process there? What's >>that? It's a good question actually been announced after. And I think there was one of the questions I started getting on twitter. You know, let's start at the very beginning. Anyone can pick up a Docker container and run it on easy to today. You can run it on easy to, we can run a light sail, but doc around works just fine. It's the limits machine. Then people want to do more complex things. They want to run large scale orchestrated services. They won't run their entire business and containers. We have customers will do that today. Uh, you know, you have people like Vanguard who runs a significant portion of the infrastructure on pcs frg or you have to elope with the heavy user of chaos, our community service. So in general, if you're running large scale systems, you're building your platforms, you're most likely to use the csny Chaos. Um, if you come from a community's background, you're, you're running communities on prem or you want the flexibility and control the communities gives you, you're gonna end up with the chaos. That's what we see our customers doing. If you just want to run containers, you want to use AWS to its fullest extent where you want the continue a P I to be part of the W A S A P. I said then you pick is yes. And I think one of the reasons you see so many customers start with the CSN, Forget is with forget to get the significant ease of use from an operational standpoint. And we see many start ups and you know, enterprises, especially security focus enterprises leaning towards farming. But there's a class of customers that doesn't want to think about orchestration that just wants. Here's my code, here's my container image just run my service for me and that's when things like happen, I can come and that's one of the reasons we launched it. Land is a little bit different. Lambda is a unique service. You buy into an event driven architecture. If you do that, then you can figure our application into this. That's they should start its magic. Uh, the container part, there is what land announced agreement where they now support containers, packaging. So instead of zip files, you can package up your functions as containers. Then lambda will run them for you. The advantage it gives you with all the tooling that you built, that you have to build your containers now works the land as well. So I won't call and a container orchestration service in the same sense of the CSC cso Afrin are but it definitely allows the container image format as a standard packaging format. I think that's the sort of universal common theme that you find across AWS at this point of time. >>You know, one of the things that we're observing at this at this event here is a lot of developers Coop con and Lennox foundations. A lot of operators to kubernetes hits that. But here's developers. And the thing is I want to ease of use, simplicity experience, but also I want the innovation. Yeah, I want all of it. When I ask you what is amazon bring to the table for the new equation, what would you say? >>Yeah, I mean for me it's always you've probably heard me say this 100 times. Many 1000 times. It's foggy fog. It's unique to us. It takes a lot of what we have learned about operating infrastructure scale. The question we asked ourselves, you know, in many ways we talk about forget even before belong pcs but we have to learn on what it meant and what customers really wanted. But the idea was when you are running clusters of instances of machines to run containers on, you have to start thinking about a lot of things that in some ways VMS but BMS in the car were taken away capacity. What kind of infrastructure to run it on? Should have been touched. Should have not been back. You know, where is my container running? Those are things. They suddenly started having to think about those kind of backwards almost. So the idea was how can we make your containerized bundles? So TCS task or community is part of the thing that you talk to and that is the main unit that you operate on. That is the unit that you get built on and meet it on. That's where Forget comes in and it allows us to do many interesting things. We've effectively changed the engine of forget since we've launched it. Uh, we run it on ec two instances and we run it on fire cracker. Uh, we have changed the forget agent architecture. We've made a lot of underneath the hood, uh, changes that even take the take advantage of the broader innovation, the rate of us, We did a whole bunch more to launch acronym trans on top of family customers don't have to think about it. They don't have to worry about it. It happens underneath the hood. It's always your engine as as you go along and it takes away all the operational pain of managing clusters of running into picking which instances to use to getting out, trying to figure out how to bend back and get efficiency. That becomes our problem. So, you know, that is an area where you should expect to see a Stuart done more. It's becoming the fabric of so many things that eight of us now. Uh, it's, you know, in some ways we're just talking a lot more to do. >>Yeah. And it's a really good time. A lot more wave of developers coming in. One of the things that we've been reporting on on Silicon England cube with our cute videos is more developers keep on coming on, more people coming in and contributing to the open source community. Even end users, not just the normal awesome hyper scholars you're talking about like classic, I call main street enterprises. So two things I want to ask you on the customer side because you have kind of to customers, you have the community that open source community and you have enterprise customers that want to make it easier. What are you seeing and hearing from customers? I know you guys work backwards from the customer. So I got to ask you work backwards from the community and work backwards from the enterprise customer. What's going on in their environment? What's the key trends that they're riding? What's the big challenges? What's the big opportunities that they're facing and saying for the community? >>Yeah, I start with the enterprise. That's almost an easier answer. Which is, you know, we're seeing increasingly enterprises moving into the cloud wholesale. Like in some ways you could argue that the pandemic has just accelerated it, but we have started seeing that before. Uh they want to move to the cloud and adult modern best practices. Uh If you see my talk agreement last few years, I've talked about modernization and all the aspects of modernization, and that's 90% of our conversation with enterprises, I've walked into a meeting supposedly to talk about containers, whatever half a conversation is spent on. How does an organization modernize? What does an organization need to do to modernize and containers and serverless play a pretty important part in it, because it gives them an opportunity to step away from the shackles of sort of fixed infrastructure and the methods and approaches that built in. But equally, we are talking about C I C. D, you know, fully automated deployments. What does it mean for developers to run their own services? What are the child, how do you monitor and uh, instrument uh, your services? How do you do observe ability in the modern world? So those are the challenges that enterprises are going towards, and you're spending a ton of time helping them there. But many of them are still running infrastructure on premises. So, you know, we have outpost for them. Uh, you know, just last week, you're talking to a bunch of our customers and they have lots of interesting ideas and things that they want to do without both, but many of them also have their own infrastructure and that's where something like UCS anywhere came from, which is hey, you like using Pcs in the cloud, You like having the safety i that just orchestrates containers for you. It does it on on his in an AWS region. It will do it in an outpost. It'll do it on wavelength, it'll do it on local zone. How about we allow you to do it on whatever infrastructure you bring to us. Uh you want to bring a raspberry pi, you can do that. You want to bring your on premises data center infrastructure, we can do that or a point of sale device, as long as you can get the agent running and you can connect to an AWS region, even though it's okay to lose connectivity every now and then. We can orchestrate a container for you over there and, you know, the same customer that likes the ease of use of Vcs. And the simplicity really resonated with that message really resonates with them. So I think where we are today with the enterprise is we've got some really good solutions for you in eight of us and we are now allowing you to take those a. P. I. S and then launch containers wherever you want to run them, whether it's the edge or whether it's your own data center. I think that's a big part of where the enterprise is going. But by and large, I think yes, a lot of them are still making that change from running infrastructure and applications the way they used to do a modern sort of, if you want to use the word cloud native way and we're helping them a lot. We've done, the community is interesting. They want to be more participatory. Uh that's where things like co pilot comes from. God, honestly, the best thing we've ever done in my order is probably are open road maps where the community can go into the road map and engage with us over there, whether it's an open source project or just trying to tell us what the feature is and how they would like to see it. It's a great engagement and you know, it's not us a lot. It's helped us prioritize correctly and think about what we want to do next. So yeah, I think that's, that >>must be very hard to do for opening up the kimono on the road map because normally that's the crown jewels and its secretive and you know, and um, now it's all out in the open. I think that is a really interesting, um, experiment and what's your reaction to that? What's been the feedback on the road map peace? Because I mean, I definitely want to see, uh, >>we do it pretty much for every service in my organization and we've been doing it now for three years. So years forget, I think about three years and it's been great. Now we are very we are very upfront, which is security and availability. Our job 000 and you know, 100 times out of 100 at altitudes between a new feature and helping our customers be available and safe. We'll do that. And this is why we don't put dates in that we just tell you directionally where we are and what we are prioritizing Uh, there every now and then we'll put something in there that, you know, well not choose not to put a feature in there because we want to keep it secret until it launches. But for the most part, 99% of our own myself there and people engaged with it. And it's not proven to be a problem because you've also been very responsible with how we manage and be very transparent on whether we can commit to something or not. And I think that's not. >>I gotta ask you on as a leader uh threaded leader on this group. Open source is super important, as you know, and you continue to do it from under years. How are you investing in the future? What's your plan? Uh plans for your team, the industry actually very inclusive, Which is very cool. It's gonna resonate well, what's the plans? Give us some details on what you're investing in, what your priorities? What's your first principles? >>Yeah, So it goes in many ways, one when I I also have the luxury also on the amazon open source program office. So, you know, I get the chance to my team, rather not me help amazon engineers participate in open source. That that's the team that helps create the tools for them, makes it easy for them to contribute, creates, you know, manages all the licenses, etcetera. I'll give you a simple example, you know, in there, just think of the cr credential helper that was written by one of our engineers and he kind of distorted because he felt it was something that we needed to do. And we made it open source in general, in in many of our teams. The first question we asked is should something the open why is this thing not open source, especially if it's a utility or some piece of software that runs along with services. So they'll step one. But we've done some big things also, I, you know, a couple of years ago we launched Lennox operating system called bottle Rocket. And right from the beginning it was very clear to us that bottle Rocket was two things. It was both in AWS product. But first it was an open source project. We've already learned a little bit from what we've done at Firecracker. But making bottle rocket and open source operating system is very important. Anyone can take part of Rocket the open source to build tooling. You can run it whatever you want. If you want to take part of Rocket and build a version and manage it for another provider. For another provider wants to do it, go for it. There's nothing stopping you from doing that. So you'll see us do a lot there. Obviously there's multiple areas. You've seen WS investing on the open source side. But to me, the winds come from when engineers can participate in small things, released little helpers or get contributions from outside. I think that's where we're still, we can always have that. We're going to continue to strive to make it better and easier. And uh, you know, I said, I have, you know, me and my team, we have an opportunity to help their inside the company and we continue to do so. But that's what gets me excited. >>Yeah, that's great stuff. And congratulations on investing in the community, really enjoys it and I know it moves the needle for the industry. Deepak, I gotta ask you why I got you here. Dr khan obviously, developers, what's the most important story that they should be paying attention to as a developer because of what's going on shift left for security day two operations also known as a I ops getups, whatever you wanna call it, you know, ongoing, you get server lists, you got land. I mean, all kinds of great things are going on. You mentioned Fargate, >>um >>what should they be paying attention to that's going to really help their life, both innovation wise and just the quality of life. >>Yeah, I would say look at, you know, in the end it is very easy developers in particular, I want to build the buildings and it's very easy to get tempted to try and get learn everything about something. You have access to all the bells and whistles and knobs, but in reality, if you want to run things you want to, you want to focus on what's important, the business application, that and you the application. And I think a lot of what I'll tell developers and I think it's a lot of where the industry is going is we have built a really solid foundation, whether it's humanity, so you CSN forget or you know, continue industries out there. We have very solid foundation that, you know, our customers and develop a goal of the world can use to build upon. But increasingly, and you know, they are going to provide tools that sort of take that wrap them up and providing a nice package solution After another great example, our collaboration, the doctor around Dr desktop are a great example where we get all the mark focus on the application and build on top of that and you can get so much done. I think that's one trend. You'll see more and more. Those things are no longer toys, their production grade systems that you can build real world applications on, even though they're so easy to use. The second thing I would add to that is uh, get uh, it is, you know, you can give it whatever name you want. There's uh, there's nuances there, but I actually think get up is the way people should be running the infrastructure, my virus in my personal, you know, it's something that we believe a lot in homicide as hard as you go towards immutable infrastructure, infrastructure, automation, we can get off plays a significant role. I think developers naturally gravitate towards it. And if you want to live in a world where development and operations are tightly linked, I think it after the huge role to play in that it's actually a big part of how we're planning to do things like yes, anywhere, for example, a significant player and that it would be a proton. I think get up will be a significant in the future of proton as well. So I think that's the other trend. If you wanted to pick a trend that people should pay attention. That's what I believe in a lot. >>Well you're an expert. So I want to get you a quick definition. What is get Ops, how would you define it? Because that's a big trend. What does it, what does that mean? >>Electricity will probably shoot me for getting this wrong. I tell you how I think about it. Which is, you know, in many cases, um, you when you're doing deployments are pushing a deployment getups is more of a full deployment. When you are pushing code to get depository, you have a system that knows that the event has happened and then pulls from there and triggers the thing as opposed to you telling it take I have this new piece of code now go deployed everywhere. So to me, the biggest changes that Two parts one is it's more for full mechanism where you're pulling because something has changed. So it needs systems like container orchestrators to keep them, you know, to keep them in sync. And the second part of the natural natural evolution of infrastructure score, which is basically everything is called the figures code. Infrastructure as code, code is code and everything is getting stored in that software repo and the software repo becomes your store of record and drives everything. Uh So for a glass of customers, that's going to be a pretty big deal. >>Yeah, when you're checking in code, that's again, it's like a compiler for the compiler, a container for the container, you've got things for each other. Automation is ultimately what we're talking about here. And that's to me where machine learning kicks in. So again, having this open source foundational fabric, as you said, forget out the muck or the undifferentiated heavy lifting. This is what we're talking about automation, isn't it? Deepak? >>Yes. I mean I said uh one thing where we hang our hat on is there's such good stuff out there in the world which we like to contribute to, but the thing we like to hang our hat on is how do you run this? How do you do it this in ways that you can uniquely bring capabilities to customers where there's things like nitro or things are nitro open stuff. Well, the fact that we have built up this operational infrastructure over the last in a decade plus or in the container space over the last seven years where we really really know how to run these things at scale and have made all the investments to make it easy to do. So that's that's where we have hanger hard keeping people safe, helping them only available applications, their new startup, that just completely takes off in over the weekend. For whatever reason, because, you know, you're the next hot thing on twitter and our goal is to support you whether you are, you know, uh enterprise that's moving from the main train or you are the next hot startup, that's you know, growing virally and uh, you know, we've done a lot to build systems help both sides and yeah, it's >>interesting if you sing about open source where it's come from, I mean I remember that base wouldn't open source wasn't open, I would be peddling software, there's a free copy of Linux, UNIX um in college and now it's all free. But I mean just what's changed now. It used to be just free software, download software. You got it now, it's a service. Service now can be monetized quickly. And what you guys are offering with AWS and cloud scale is you've done all these things as I don't have to have a developer. I get the benefits of the scale, I can bring my open source code to the table, make it a service integrated in with other services and be the next snowflake, be the next, you know, a company that could scale. And that is that's the that's the innovation, right? That's the this is a new phenomenon. So it also changes the business model. >>Yeah, actually you're you're quite right. Actually, I I like one more thing to it. But you look at how a lot of enterprises use containers today. Most of them are using something like this year, Symphony or GS to build an internal developer platform and internal developer portal. And then the question then becomes this hard to scale this modern and development practices to an entire organization. What is your big bank that's been around as thousands and thousands of ID stuff That may not all be experts are running communities running container is when you scale it out different systems that proton come into play. That was actually the inspiration is how do you help an organization where they're building these developer Portholes and developer infrastructure, developer platforms, How do you make it easy for them to build it? Be almost use it as a way to get these modern practices into the hands of all the business units, where they may not have the time to become experts at the modern ways of running infrastructure because they're busy doing other things. And I think you'll see the a lot more happening that space that's not happening in the open source community. There's proton, there's a bunch of interesting things happening here and be interesting to see how that evolves. >>And also, you know, the communal, communal aspect of not just writing code together, but succeeding, right, building something. I mean, that's when you start to see the commercial meets open kind of ethos of communal activity of working together and sharing a big part of this year's. Dakar Con is sharing not just running and shipping code but sharing. >>Yeah, I mean if you think about it uh Dockers original value was you build run and shit right? You use the same code to build it, you use the same code to ship it, the same sort of infrastructure interface and then you run it and that, you know, the fact that the doctor images such a wonderfully shareable entity uh that can run every girl is such a powerful and it's called the Ci Image. Now I still call him Dr images because it's just easier. But that to me like that is a big deal and I think it's becoming and become an even bigger deal over the years. I came from something before, Amazon has to work in The sciences and bioinformatics and you know, the ability to share codeshare dependencies, package all of that up in a container image is a big deal. It's what got me one of the reasons I got fascinated with container 78 years ago. So it will be interesting to see where all of systems. >>It's great, great stuff. Great success. And congratulations. Deepak, Great to always talk to you got a great finger on the pulse. You lead a really important organizations at AWS and you know, doctor has such a huge success with developers, even though the company has gone through kind of a uh change over and a pivot to what they're doing now. They're back to their open source roots, but they have millions and millions of developers use Docker and new developers are coming in dot net developers are coming in. Windows developers are coming in and and so it's no longer about Lennox anymore. It's about just coding. >>Yeah. And it's it's part of this big trend towards infrastructure, automation and and you know development and deployment practices that I think everyone is going to adopt faster than we think they will. But you know, companies like Doctor and opens those projects that they involved are critical in making that a lot easier for them. And then you know, folks like us get to build on top of that orbit them and make it even easier. >>Well, great testimony the doctor that you guys based your E C. S on Docker Doctor has a critical role in developing community. I run composed in their hub with dr desktop and we'll be watching amazon and and the community activity and see what kind of experiences you guys can bring to the table and continue that momentum. Thank you Deepak for coming on the >>cube. Thank you, john. That's always a pleasure. >>Okay. Mr cubes. Dr khan 2021 virtual coverage. I'm john for your host of the cube. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat techno music) >> From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of Postgres Vision 2021. Brought to you by EBD. >> Hello everyone, this is David Vellante, for the CUBE. And we're here covering Postgres Vision 2021. The virtual version, thCUBE virtual, if you will. And welcome to our power-panel. Now in this session, we'll dig into database modernization. We want to better understand how and why customers are tapping open source to drive innovation. But at the same time, they've got to deliver the resiliency and enterprise capabilities that they're used to that are now necessary to support today's digital business requirements. And with me are three experts on these matters. Abdul Sheik, is Global CTO and President of Cintra. Young Il Cho, aka Charlie, is High Availability Cluster Sales Manager, at Daone CNS. And Alan Villalobos, is the Director of Development Partnerships, at IBM. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Dave, nice to be here. >> Thank you, Dave. >> All right, let's talk trends and frame the problem. Abdul, I want to start with you? Cintra you're all about this topic. Accelerating innovation using EDB Postgres helping customers move to modern platforms. And doing so, you got to do it cost-effectively but what's driving these moves? What are the problems that you're seeing at the organizations that you serve? >> Oh, so let me quickly introduce, Abdul Sheik, CTO. I'll quickly introduce Cintra. So we are a multicloud and database architecture MSP. And we've been around for 25 plus years. Headquartered in New York and the UK. But as a global organization, we're serving our SMB customers as well as large enterprise customers. And the trends we're seeing certainly in this day and age is transformation and modernization. And what that means is, customers looking to get out of the legacy platforms, get out of the legacy data centers and really move towards a modern strategy with a lower cost base, while still retaining resiliency and freedom. Ultimately, in terms of where they're going. The key words that really I see driving this, number one is choice. They've been historically locked into vendors. With limited choice with a high cost base. So choice, freedom to choose in terms of what database technologies they apply to which workloads and certainly EDB and the work that has been done to closely marry what enterprise RD platforms offer with EDBs in a work that they've done in terms of filling those gaps and addressing where the resiliency monitoring performance and security requirements are, are certainly are required from an enterprise customer perspective. Choice is driving the move that we see and choice towards a lower cost platform that can be deployed anywhere. Both on-prem modernization customers are looking to retain on premise platforms or moving into any multi clouds whether it's an infrastructure cloud play or a platform cloud play. And certainly with EDBs offering in terms of, you know the latest cloud native offerings also very interesting. And lastly, aside from just cost and the freedom to choose where they deploy those platforms the SLA, the service level model where is the resiliency requirement where the which system is going to bronze, silver, gold? Which ones are the tier one revenue platform revenue generating platforms which are the lower, lower utility platforms. So a combination of choice, a combination of freedom to deploy anywhere and while still maintaining the resiliency and the service levels that the customers need to deliver to their businesses >> Abdul that was a beautiful setup. And, and we've got so much to talk about here because customers want to move from point A to point B but getting there and they, they need help. It's sometimes not trivial. So Charlie Daone is a consultancy. You've got a strong technical capabilities. What are you seeing in this space? You know, what are the major trends? Why are organizations considering that move? And what are some of the considerations there? >> Well, like in other country in South Korea or so our a lot of customers, banking's a manufacturing distributor. They are 90, over 90%. They are all are using Oracle DB and a rack system. But as the previous presenters pointed out, a lot of customers that are sick of the Oracle and they have to undergo the huge cost of a maintenance costs. They want to move away from this cost stress. And secondly, they can think about they're providing service to customer on their cloud base which is a private or the public. So we cannot imagine running on database, Oracle database running on the cloud the system that's not matches on this cloud. And first and second, and finally the customer what they want is the cost and they want to move away from the Oracle locking. They cannot be just a slave at Oracle for a long time and the premium for the new cloud the service for the customer. >> Great. Thank you for that. Oh, go ahead. Yeah. Did you have something else to add Charlie go ahead and please. >> No that's all. >> Okay, great. Yeah, Allen, welcome to theCUBE. You know, it's very interesting to us. IBM, you, you, of course, you're a big player in database. You have a lot of expertise here. And you partner with EDB, you're offering Postgres to customers, you know, what are you seeing? Charlie was talking about Oracle and RAC. I mean, the, the, the thing there is obviously, we talked about the maintenance costs but there's also a lot of high availability capabilities. That's something that IBM really understands well. Do you see this as largely a cloud migration trend? Is it more modernization? Interested in what's IBM's perspective on this? >> I think modernization is the right word. The points that the previous panelists brought up or are on point, right? You know, lower TCO or lower costs in general but that of agility and then availability for developers and data scientists as well. And then of course, you know, hybrid cloud, right? You know, you want to be able to deploy on prem or in the cloud, or both in a mixture of all of that. And I think, I think what ties it together is the customers are looking for insights, right? And, you know, especially in larger organizations there's a myriad of data sources that they're already working with. And, you know, we, you know we want to be able to play in that space. We want to give an offering that is based on Postgres and open source and be able to further what they're strong at at and kind of, you know on top of that, you know, a layer of, of of need that we see is, is seamless data governance across all of those different stores. >> All right, I'm going to go right to the heart of the hard problem here. So if, I mean, I want to, it's just that I want to get from point A to point B, I want to save money. I want to modernize, but if I'm the canary in the coal mine at the customer, I'm saying guys, migration scares me. How do I do that? What are the considerations? And what do I need to know that I don't know. So Abdul, maybe you could walk us through what are some of the concerns that customers have? How do you help mitigate those? Whether it's other application dependencies, you know freezing code, you know, getting, again from that point A to point B without risking my existing business processes how do you handle that? >> Yeah, certainly I think a customer needs to understand what the journey looks like to begin with. So we've actually developed our own methodology that we call Rocket Cloud, which is also part of our cloud modernization strategy that builds in and database modernization strategy built into it starts with an assessment in terms of current state discovery. Not all customers totally understand where they are today. So understanding where the database state is, you know where the risks lie what are the criticality of the various databases? What technologies are used, where we have RAC or we don't have RAC but we have data God, where we have encryption. And so on. That gives the customer a very good insight in terms of the current state, both commercially and technically that's a key point to understand how they're licensed today and what costs could be freed up to free the journey to effectively fund the journey. It's a big, big topic, but once we do that, we get an idea and we've actually developed a tool called rapid discovery. That's able to discover a largest stake without knowing the database list. We just put the scripts at the database servers themselves and it tells us exactly which databases are suited to be you know, effectively migrated to Postgres with in terms of the feature function usage in terms of how heavy they are, would store procedures in the database amount of business logic use of technologies like RAC data guard and how they convert over to to Postgres specifically. That ultimately gives us the ability to give that customer an assessment and that assessment in a short sharp few weeks and get the customer view of all of my hundreds of databases. Here are the subset of candidates for Postgres and specifically than we do the schemer advisor tool the actual assessment tool from EDB, which gives us a sense of how well the schema gets converted and how best to then also look at the stored procedure conversion as well. That gives the customer a full view of their architecture mapping their specific candidate databases and then a cost analysis in terms of what that migration looks like and how we migrate. We also run and maintain those platforms once we're on EDB. >> Thank you for that again, very clear but so you're not replacing, doing an organ transplant. You may, you're you're, you know, this is not I don't mean this as a pejorative, but you're kind of cherry picking those workloads that are appropriate for EDB and then moving those and then maybe, maybe through attrition or, you know over time, sun-setting those other, those other core pieces. >> Exactly. >> Charlie, let me ask you, so we talked about RAC, real application clusters, data guard. These are, you know kind of high profile Oracle capabilities. Can you, can you really replicate the kind of resiliency at lower costs with open source, with EDB Postgres and how do you do that? >> It's my turn? >> yes, please. >> Quite technically, again, I go on in depths and technically the RAC, RAC system is so-called is the best you know, best the tool to protect data and especially in the Unix system, but apart from the RAC by the some nice data replication solution we just stream the application and log shipping and something and then monitor Pam and, and EFM solution which is enterprise failover manager. So even though it be compared to Apple the Apple RAC versus with EDB solution, we can definitely say that RAC is more stable one, but after migration, whatever, we can overcome the, you know, drawbacks of the HA cluster system by providing the EDB tools. So whatever the customer feel that after a successful migration, utilizing the EDB high availability failable solution they can make of themselves at home. So that's, that's how we approach it with the customers. >> So, Alan, again, to me, IBM is fascinating here with your level of involvement because you're the, you guys are sort of historically the master of proprietary the mainframes, VCM, CICF, EB2, all that stuff. And then, you know IBM was the first I remember Steve Mills actually announced we're going to invest a billion dollars in open source with Linux. And that was a major industry milestone. And of course, the, the acquisition of red hat. So you've got now this open source mindset this open source culture. So we, you know, as it's all about recovery in, in database and enterprise database and all the acid properties in two phase commits, and we're talking about, you know the things that Charlie just talked about. So what's your perspective here? IBM knows a lot about this. How do you help customers get there? >> Yeah, well, I mean the main, the main thrust right now IBM has a offering called IBM cloud Pak for data which from here, which runs EDB, right? EDB, Postgres runs on top of cloud Pak for Data But the, you know I think going back to Abdul's points about, you know migrating whatever's needed and whatever can be migrated to Postgres and maybe migrating other things other places, we have data virtualization and autoSQL, right? So once you have migrated those parts of your database or those schemes that can be, having, you know a single point where you can query across them and by the way, being able to query across them you know, before, during and after migration as well. Right? So we're kind of have that seamless experience of layer of SQL. And now with autoSQL of spark SQL as well, as you're, as you're migrating and after is, I'd say, you know, key to this. >> What, what's the typical migration look like? I know I'm sorry, but it's a consultant question but thinking about the, you know, the average, in terms of timeframe, what are the teams look like? You know who are the stakeholders that I need to get involved? If I'm a customer to really make this a success? maybe Abdul, you could talk about that and Charlie and Alan can chime in. >> Well, I think, well, number one you knew the exact sponsors bought into it in terms of the business case, supporting the business case an architect has got a big picture understanding not only database technology but also infrastructure that they're coming from as well as the target cloud platforms and how you ensure that the infrastructure can deliver the performance. So the architect role is important, of course the core DBA that lives within the scope of the database understands the schema of the data model the business logic itself, and the application on it. That's key specifically around the application certification testing connectivity and the migration of the code. And specifically in terms of timeline just to touch on that quickly. I mean, in our experience so far and we're seeing the momentum really really take off the last 18 months, a small project with limited business logic within the database itself can we migrate it in a couple of months but typically with all the testing and rigor around that you typically say three months timeline a medium-sized complexity projects, a six month timeline and a large complex project could be anything from nine months and beyond, but it really comes down to how heavy the database is with business logic and the database and how much effort it will take to re-engineer effectively migrate that PLC code, business logic into EDB given the compatibility level between Oracle and EDB it's relatively certainly an easier path than any other target platform in terms of options. Yeah. Not perspective. That's certainly looks like the composition of a team and timeline >> Charlie or Alan, anything you guys would add. >> Yeah. So, so I think all those personas make sense. I think you might, on the consumer side of the consumer the consumer of the data side the data scientists often we see, you know during migrations and then obviously the dev ops, I think or any operations, right, have to be heavily involved. And then lastly, you know, you see more and more data steward role or data steward type persona, CDO office type type person coming in there make sure that, you know, whatever data governance that is already in place or wants to be in place after the migration is also part of the conversation. >> Why EDB? You know, there's a lot of databases out there you know, it's funny, I always say like, you know, 10, 15 years ago databases were kind of sort of a boring market, right? It was like, okay, you're going to work or whatever. And now it's exploded. You got open source databases, you got, you know not only sequel databases, you got graph databases you know, you get cloud databases, it's going crazy. Why EDB? You wonder if you guys could address that? >> Allan why don't you go first this time? I'll compliment your answers. >> Yeah. I mean, again, I think it goes back to, to the, the I guess varying needs and, and enterprises. Right. And I think that's, what's driven this explosion in databases, whether it's a document store like you're saying, or, or new types of RDBMS, the needs that we talked about at the beginning, like lower TCO, and the push to open source. But you know, the fact of the matter is that that yes, there is a myriad, an ecosystem of databases, pretty much any organization. And so, yeah, we want to tap into that. And why EDB? EDB has done a great job of taking Postgres and making it enterprise ready, you know, that's what they're, they're good at and that, you know fits very nicely with the IBM story obviously. And, and so, you know, and they've they've worked with us as well. They have an operator on, on the runs on red hat OpenShift. So that makes it portable as well but also part of the IBM cloud Pak for data story. And, and yeah, you know, we want to break down those silos. We realized that that need is there for all of these, you know, there's this ecosystem of databases. And so, you know, we're, we see our role as being that platform, whether it's red hat OpenShift, or IBM cloud Pak for data that, that unifies, and kind of gives you that single pane of glass across all of those sources. >> And Charlie, you're obviously all in, you've got EDB in your background. Why EDB for you? >> Before talking about EDB you asked about the previous question about how the migration was different from Oracle to EDB. We had a couple of success story in Korea telecom and some banking area, and it was easier. So EDB provide MTK tool as a people know but it was an appropriate, like a 90%. So we are the channel partner of the EDB for four years. So what we have done was to hire the Oracle expert. So we train Oracle export as as EDB expert at the same time so that they can approach customer and make it easy. So you have no worry about that. Just migrating EDB, Oracle to EDB. There is a no issue. Those telltales include all the tasks, you know Stratus test and trainee, and a POC that we there. So by investing that Oracle expert that we could overcome and persuade the customer to adopt EDB. So, why EDB? Simply I can say there, is there any database they can finally replaced Oracle in the world? Why is the, it's the interoperability between Oracle to EDB as the many experts pointed out there is no other DBE. They can, you know, 90, 90% in compatibility and intercooperability with EDB. That's why, of course, there's the somewhat, you know budget issues or maintenance issue cost the issue escape from Oracle lock-in. But I think the the number one reason was the interoperability and the compatibility with database itself, Oracle database. That was a reason, I guess >> Great Abdul we've talked about, we all know the, as is, you've got a high maintenance costs. You got a lot of tuning, and it's just a lot of complexity. What about the 2B maybe you could share with us sort of the outcome some of the outcomes you've seen what the business impact has been of some of these migrations? >> Sure. I mean, I'll give you a very simple example then just the idea of running Oracle on prem a lot of customer systems teams, for example will drive a virtualization VMware strategy. We know some of the challenges of running Oracle MBM where from a license perspective. So giving the business the ability where I want to go customer in the financial services market in New York, heavy virtualization strategy the ability for them to move away from Oracle on, you know expensive hardware on to Postgres EDB on virtualization just leverage existing skillsets, leveraging existing investment in terms of infrastructure, and also give them portability in AWS. The other clouds, you know, in terms of a migration. More from a business perspective as well, I would say about some of the Allan's points in terms of just freeing up the ability for data scientists and data consumers, to, you know, to consume some of that data from an Postgres perspective more accessibility spinning up environments quicker less latency in terms of the agility is another key word in terms of the tangible differences, the business, lower cost agility, and the freedom to deploy anywhere at the end of the day. Choices, I think the key word that we could come back to and knowing that we can do that to Charlie's point specifically around maintaining service levels. And as architects, we support some of the big, big names out there in terms of airlines, online, cosmetic retailers, financial services, trading applications, hedge funds, and they all want one thing as architect: for us to deliver that resiliency and stand behind them. And as the MSP we're accountable to ensure those systems are up and running and performing. So knowing that the EDB is provided the compatibility but also plugged the specific requirements around performance management, security availability that's fundamentally been key. >> [Dave I mean, having done a lot of TCO studies in this area, it's, it's it Oracle's different. You know, normally the biggest component of TCO is labor with Oracle. The biggest component of TCO is licensed and maintenance costs. So if you can virtualize and reduce those costs and of course, of course the Oracle will fight you and say we won't support it in a VMware environment. Of course, you know, they will, but, but you got to really, you got to battle. But, so here's my last question. So if I'm a customer in that state that you described you know, a lot of sort of Oracle sprawl a lot of databases out there, high maintenance costs, the whole lock-in thing. I got to choices. I, you know, a lot of choices out there. One is EDB. You guys have convinced me that you've got the expertise If I can partner with firms like yours, it's safer route. Okay, cool. My other choice is Oracle is going to, The Oracle sales reps is going to get me in a headlock and talk about exit data and how their Oracle cloud, and how it's, they've invested a lot there. And they have, and, I can pay by the drink all this sort of modern sort of discussion, you know, Oracle act like they invented it late to the game. And then here we are. So, so help me. What's the pitch as to, well, that's kind of compelling. It's maybe the safe bet they're there. They're working with my CIO, whatever. Why should I go with the open source route versus that route? It sounds kind of attractive to me, help me understand that each of you maybe take me through that. Abdul, why don't you start. >> Yeah. I'd say, you know, Oracle's being the defacto for so many years that people have just assumed and defaulted saying, high availability, RAC, DR. Data guard, you know, and I'll apply to any database need that I have. And at the end of the day customers have a three tier database requirement: the lowest, less critical, bronze level databases that really don't need RAC or a high availability, silver tier that are departmental solutions. That means some level of resiliency. And then you've got your gold revenue producing brand impact databases that are they're down. And certainly they won. You see no reason why the bronze and silver databases can be targeted towards EDB. Admittedly, we have some of our largest customers are running platforms, are running $5 million an hour e-commerce platform or airlines running large e-commerce platforms. And exit data certainly has a place. RAC has a place in those, in those scenarios. Were not saying that the EDB is a solution for everything in all scenarios, but apply the technology where it's appropriate where it's required and, you know, generally wherever Oracle has being the defacto and it's being applied across the estate, that's fundamentally what's changed. It doesn't have to be the only answer you have multiple choices now. EDB provides us with the ability to probably address, you know more than 50% of the databases' state, and comfortably cope with that and just apply that more expensive kind of gold tier one cost-based but also capability, you know from the highest requirements of performance and availability where it's appropriate. >> Yeah. Very pragmatic approach. Abdul, thank you for that. And Charlie. Charlie, what's your perspective? Give us your closing thoughts. >> Well, it has been, Oracle has been dominating in Asia in South Korea has market or over many years. So customers got tired of this, continuous spending money for the maintenance costs and there is no discount. There is no negotiation. So they want to move away from expensive stuff. And they were looking for a flexible platform with the easygoing and the high speed and performance open source database like a possibly as career. And now the EDB cannot replace a hundred percent of existing legacy worker, but 10%, 20% 50% as time goes on the trend that will continue. And it will be reaching some high point or replacing the existing Oracle system. And it can, it can also leading to good business chance to a channel partner and EDB steps and other related business in open source. >> Great. Thank you, Charlie and Allen, bring us home here. Give us your follow up >> I think my, co- panelists hit the nail on the head, right? It's a menu, right? That's as things become more diverse and as people make more choices and as everybody wants more agility, you have to provide, I mean, and so that, that's where that's coming in and I liked the way that Andul I kind of split it into gold silver and bronze. Yeah. And I think that that's where, we're going, right? I mean you should ask your developers right? Are your developers like pining to start up a new instance of Oracle every time you're starting a new project? Probably not reach for their Postgres right? And so, because of that, that's where this is coming from and that's not going to change. And, and yeah, that that ecosystem is going to continue to, to thrive. And there'll be lots of different flavors in the growing open source ecosystem. >> Yeah. I mean, open source absolutely is the underpinning you know, the, the bedrock of innovation, these days. Gentlemen, great power panel. Thanks so much for bringing your perspectives and best of luck in the future. >> Thank you, next time we'll try and match our backgrounds >> Next time. Well, we'll up our game. Okay. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for theCUBE. Stay tuned for more great coverage. Postgres vision, 21. Be right back. (upbeat techno music)

(upbeat techno music) >> From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of Postgres Vision 2021. Brought to you by enterprise Enterprise DB. >> Hello everyone, this is David Vellante, for the CUBE. And we're here covering Postgres Vision 2021. The virtual version, thCUBE virtual, if you will. And welcome to our power-panel. Now in this session, we'll dig into database modernization. We want to better understand how and why customers are tapping open source to drive innovation. But at the same time, they've got to deliver the resiliency and enterprise capabilities that they're used to that are now necessary to support today's digital business requirements. And with me are three experts on these matters. Abdul Sheik, is Global CTO and President of Cintra. Young Il Cho, aka Charlie, is High Availability Cluster Sales Manager, at Daone CNS. And Alan Villalobos, is the Director of Development Partnerships, at IBM. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Dave, nice to be here. >> Thank you, Dave. >> All right, let's talk trends and frame the problem. Abdul, I want to start with you? Cintra you're all about this topic. Accelerating innovation using EDB Postgres helping customers move to modern platforms. And doing so, you got to do it cost-effectively but what's driving these moves? What are the problems that you're seeing at the organizations that you serve? >> Oh, so let me quickly introduce, Abdul Sheik, CTO. I'll quickly introduce Cintra. So we are a multicloud and database architecture MSP. And we've been around for 25 plus years. Headquartered in New York and the UK. But as a global organization, we're serving our SMB customers as well as large enterprise customers. And the trends we're seeing certainly in this day and age is transformation and modernization. And what that means is, customers looking to get out of the legacy platforms, get out of the legacy data centers and really move towards a modern strategy with a lower cost base, while still retaining resiliency and freedom. Ultimately, in terms of where they're going. The key words that really I see driving this, number one is choice. They've been historically locked into vendors. With limited choice with a high cost base. So choice, freedom to choose in terms of what database technologies they apply to which workloads and certainly EDB and the work that has been done to closely marry what enterprise RD platforms offer with EDBs in a work that they've done in terms of filling those gaps and addressing where the resiliency monitoring performance and security requirements are, are certainly are required from an enterprise customer perspective. Choice is driving the move that we see and choice towards a lower cost platform that can be deployed anywhere. Both on-prem modernization customers are looking to retain on premise platforms or moving into any multi clouds whether it's an infrastructure cloud play or a platform cloud play. And certainly with EDBs offering in terms of, you know the latest cloud native offerings also very interesting. And lastly, aside from just cost and the freedom to choose where they deploy those platforms the SLA, the service level model where is the resiliency requirement where the which system is going to bronze, silver, gold? Which ones are the tier one revenue platform revenue generating platforms which are the lower, lower utility platforms. So a combination of choice, a combination of freedom to deploy anywhere and while still maintaining the resiliency and the service levels that the customers need to deliver to their businesses >> Abdul that was a beautiful setup. And, and we've got so much to talk about here because customers want to move from point A to point B but getting there and they, they need help. It's sometimes not trivial. So Charlie Daone is a consultancy. You've got a strong technical capabilities. What are you seeing in this space? You know, what are the major trends? Why are organizations considering that move? And what are some of the considerations there? >> Well, like in other country in South Korea or so our a lot of customers, banking's a manufacturing distributor. They are 90, over 90%. They are all are using Oracle DB and a rack system. But as the previous presenters pointed out, a lot of customers that are sick of the Oracle and they have to undergo the huge cost of a maintenance costs. They want to move away from this cost stress. And secondly, they can think about they're providing service to customer on their cloud base which is a private or the public. So we cannot imagine running on database, Oracle database running on the cloud the system that's not matches on this cloud. And first and second, and finally the customer what they want is the cost and they want to move away from the Oracle locking. They cannot be just a slave at Oracle for a long time and the premium for the new cloud the service for the customer. >> Great. Thank you for that. Oh, go ahead. Yeah. Did you have something else to add Charlie go ahead and please. >> No that's all. >> Okay, great. Yeah, Allen, welcome to theCUBE. You know, it's very interesting to us. IBM, you, you, of course, you're a big player in database. You have a lot of expertise here. And you partner with EDB, you're offering Postgres to customers, you know, what are you seeing? Charlie was talking about Oracle and RAC. I mean, the, the, the thing there is obviously, we talked about the maintenance costs but there's also a lot of high availability capabilities. That's something that IBM really understands well. Do you see this as largely a cloud migration trend? Is it more modernization? Interested in what's IBM's perspective on this? >> I think modernization is the right word. The points that the previous panelists brought up or are on point, right? You know, lower TCO or lower costs in general but that of agility and then availability for developers and data scientists as well. And then of course, you know, hybrid cloud, right? You know, you want to be able to deploy on prem or in the cloud, or both in a mixture of all of that. And I think, I think what ties it together is the customers are looking for insights, right? And, you know, especially in larger organizations there's a myriad of data sources that they're already working with. And, you know, we, you know we want to be able to play in that space. We want to give an offering that is based on Postgres and open source and be able to further what they're strong at at and kind of, you know on top of that, you know, a layer of, of of need that we see is, is seamless data governance across all of those different stores. >> All right, I'm going to go right to the heart of the hard problem here. So if, I mean, I want to, it's just that I want to get from point A to point B, I want to save money. I want to modernize, but if I'm the canary in the coal mine at the customer, I'm saying guys, migration scares me. How do I do that? What are the considerations? And what do I need to know that I don't know. So Abdul, maybe you could walk us through what are some of the concerns that customers have? How do you help mitigate those? Whether it's other application dependencies, you know freezing code, you know, getting, again from that point A to point B without risking my existing business processes how do you handle that? >> Yeah, certainly I think a customer needs to understand what the journey looks like to begin with. So we've actually developed our own methodology that we call Rocket Cloud, which is also part of our cloud modernization strategy that builds in and database modernization strategy built into it starts with an assessment in terms of current state discovery. Not all customers totally understand where they are today. So understanding where the database state is, you know where the risks lie what are the criticality of the various databases? What technologies are used, where we have RAC or we don't have RAC but we have data God, where we have encryption. And so on. That gives the customer a very good insight in terms of the current state, both commercially and technically that's a key point to understand how they're licensed today and what costs could be freed up to free the journey to effectively fund the journey. It's a big, big topic, but once we do that, we get an idea and we've actually developed a tool called rapid discovery. That's able to discover a largest stake without knowing the database list. We just put the scripts at the database servers themselves and it tells us exactly which databases are suited to be you know, effectively migrated to Postgres with in terms of the feature function usage in terms of how heavy they are, would store procedures in the database amount of business logic use of technologies like RAC data guard and how they convert over to to Postgres specifically. That ultimately gives us the ability to give that customer an assessment and that assessment in a short sharp few weeks and get the customer view of all of my hundreds of databases. Here are the subset of candidates for Postgres and specifically than we do the schemer advisor tool the actual assessment tool from EDB, which gives us a sense of how well the schema gets converted and how best to then also look at the stored procedure conversion as well. That gives the customer a full view of their architecture mapping their specific candidate databases and then a cost analysis in terms of what that migration looks like and how we migrate. We also run and maintain those platforms once we're on EDB. >> Thank you for that again, very clear but so you're not replacing, doing an organ transplant. You may, you're you're, you know, this is not I don't mean this as a pejorative, but you're kind of cherry picking those workloads that are appropriate for EDB and then moving those and then maybe, maybe through attrition or, you know over time, sun-setting those other, those other core pieces. >> Exactly. >> Charlie, let me ask you, so we talked about RAC, real application clusters, data guard. These are, you know kind of high profile Oracle capabilities. Can you, can you really replicate the kind of resiliency at lower costs with open source, with EDB Postgres and how do you do that? >> It's my turn? >> yes, please. >> Quite technically, again, I go on in depths and technically the RAC, RAC system is so-called is the best you know, best the tool to protect data and especially in the Unix system, but apart from the RAC by the some nice data replication solution we just stream the application and log shipping and something and then monitor Pam and, and EFM solution which is enterprise failover manager. So even though it be compared to Apple the Apple RAC versus with EDB solution, we can definitely say that RAC is more stable one, but after migration, whatever, we can overcome the, you know, drawbacks of the HA cluster system by providing the EDB tools. So whatever the customer feel that after a successful migration, utilizing the EDB high availability failable solution they can make of themselves at home. So that's, that's how we approach it with the customers. >> So, Alan, again, to me, IBM is fascinating here with your level of involvement because you're the, you guys are sort of historically the master of proprietary the mainframes, VCM, CICF, EB2, all that stuff. And then, you know IBM was the first I remember Steve Mills actually announced we're going to invest a billion dollars in open source with Linux. And that was a major industry milestone. And of course, the, the acquisition of red hat. So you've got now this open source mindset this open source culture. So we, you know, as it's all about recovery in, in database and enterprise database and all the acid properties in two phase commits, and we're talking about, you know the things that Charlie just talked about. So what's your perspective here? IBM knows a lot about this. How do you help customers get there? >> Yeah, well, I mean the main, the main thrust right now IBM has a offering called IBM cloud Pak for data which from here, which runs EDB, right? EDB, Postgres runs on top of cloud Pak for Data But the, you know I think going back to Abdul's points about, you know migrating whatever's needed and whatever can be migrated to Postgres and maybe migrating other things other places, we have data virtualization and auto-sequel, right? So once you have migrated those parts of your database or those schemes that can be, having, you know a single point where you can query across them and by the way, being able to query across them you know, before, during and after migration as well. Right? So we're kind of have that seamless experience of layer of sequel. And now with auto sequel of sparks sequel as well, as you're, as you're migrating and after is, I'd say, you know, key to this. >> What, what's the typical migration look like? I know I'm sorry, but it's a consultant question but thinking about the, you know, the average, in terms of timeframe, what are the teams look like? You know who are the stakeholders that I need to get involved? If I'm a customer to really make this a success? maybe Abdul, you could talk about that and Charlie and Alan can chime in. >> Well, I think, well, number one you knew the exact sponsors bought into it in terms of the business case, supporting the business case an architect has got a big picture understanding not only database technology but also infrastructure that they're coming from as well as the target cloud platforms and how you ensure that the infrastructure can deliver the performance. So the architect role is important, of course the core DBA that lives within the scope of the database understands the schema of the data model the business logic itself, and the application on it. That's key specifically around the application certification testing connectivity and the migration of the code. And specifically in terms of timeline just to touch on that quickly. I mean, in our experience so far and we're seeing the momentum really really take off the last 18 months, a small project with limited business logic within the database itself can we migrate it in a couple of months but typically with all the testing and rigor around that you typically say three months timeline a medium-sized complexity projects, a six month timeline and a large complex project could be anything from nine months and beyond, but it really comes down to how heavy the database is with business logic and the database and how much effort it will take to re-engineer effectively migrate that PLC code, business logic into EDB given the compatibility level between Oracle and EDB it's relatively certainly an easier path than any other target platform in terms of options. Yeah. Not perspective. That's certainly looks like the composition of a team and timeline >> Charlie or Alan, anything you guys would add. >> Yeah. So, so I think all those personas make sense. I think you might, on the consumer side of the consumer the consumer of the data side the data scientists often we see, you know during migrations and then obviously the dev ops, I think or any operations, right, have to be heavily involved. And then lastly, you know, you see more and more data steward role or data steward type persona, CDO office type type person coming in there make sure that, you know, whatever data governance that is already in place or wants to be in place after the migration is also part of the conversation. >> Why EDB? You know, there's a lot of databases out there you know, it's funny, I always say like, you know, 10, 15 years ago databases were kind of sort of a boring market, right? It was like, okay, you're going to work or whatever. And now it's exploded. You got open source databases, you got, you know not only sequel databases, you got graph databases you know, you get cloud databases, it's going crazy. Why EDB? You wonder if you guys could address that? >> Allan why don't you go first this time? I'll compliment your answers. >> Yeah. I mean, again, I think it goes back to, to the, the I guess varying needs and, and enterprises. Right. And I think that's, what's driven this explosion in databases, whether it's a document store like you're saying, or, or new types of RDBMS, the needs that we talked about at the beginning, like lower TCO, and the push to open source. But you know, the fact of the matter is that that yes, there is a myriad, an ecosystem of databases, pretty much any organization. And so, yeah, we want to tap into that. And why EDB? EDB has done a great job of taking Postgres and making it enterprise ready, you know, that's what they're, they're good at and that, you know fits very nicely with the IBM story obviously. And, and so, you know, and they've they've worked with us as well. They have an operator on, on the runs on red hat OpenShift. So that makes it portable as well but also part of the IBM cloud Pak for data story. And, and yeah, you know, we want to break down those silos. We realized that that need is there for all of these, you know, there's this ecosystem of databases. And so, you know, we're, we see our role as being that platform, whether it's red hat OpenShift, or IBM cloud Pak for data that, that unifies, and kind of gives you that single pane of glass across all of those sources. >> And Charlie, you're obviously all in, you've got EDB in your background. Why EDB for you? >> Before talking about EDB you asked about the previous question about how the migration was different from Oracle to EDB. We had a couple of success story in Korea telecom and some banking area, and it was easier. So EDB provide MTK tool as a people know but it was an appropriate, like a 90%. So we are the channel partner of the EDB for four years. So what we have done was to hire the Oracle expert. So we train Oracle export as as EDB expert at the same time so that they can approach customer and make it easy. So you have no worry about that. Just migrating EDB, Oracle to EDB. There is a no issue. Those telltales include all the tasks, you know Stratus test and trainee, and a POC that we there. So by investing that Oracle expert that we could overcome and persuade the customer to adopt EDB. So, why EDB? Simply I can say there, is there any database they can finally replaced Oracle in the world? Why is the, it's the interoperability between Oracle to EDB as the many experts pointed out there is no other DBE. They can, you know, 90, 90% in compatibility and intercooperability with EDB. That's why, of course, there's the somewhat, you know budget issues or maintenance issue cost the issue escape from Oracle lock-in. But I think the the number one reason was the interoperability and the compatibility with database itself, Oracle database. That was a reason, I guess >> Great Abdul we've talked about, we all know the, as is, you've got a high maintenance costs. You got a lot of tuning, and it's just a lot of complexity. What about the 2B maybe you could share with us sort of the outcome some of the outcomes you've seen what the business impact has been of some of these migrations? >> Sure. I mean, I'll give you a very simple example then just the idea of running Oracle on prem a lot of customer systems teams, for example will drive a virtualization VMware strategy. We know some of the challenges of running Oracle MBM where from a license perspective. So giving the business the ability where I want to go customer in the financial services market in New York, heavy virtualization strategy the ability for them to move away from Oracle on, you know expensive hardware on to Postgres EDB on virtualization just leverage existing skillsets, leveraging existing investment in terms of infrastructure, and also give them portability in AWS. The other clouds, you know, in terms of a migration. More from a business perspective as well, I would say about some of the Allan's points in terms of just freeing up the ability for data scientists and data consumers, to, you know, to consume some of that data from an Postgres perspective more accessibility spinning up environments quicker less latency in terms of the agility is another key word in terms of the tangible differences, the business, lower cost agility, and the freedom to deploy anywhere at the end of the day. Choices, I think the key word that we could come back to and knowing that we can do that to Charlie's point specifically around maintaining service levels. And as architects, we support some of the big, big names out there in terms of airlines, online, cosmetic retailers, financial services, trading applications, hedge funds, and they all want one thing as architect: for us to deliver that resiliency and stand behind them. And as the MSP we're accountable to ensure those systems are up and running and performing. So knowing that the EDB is provided the compatibility but also plugged the specific requirements around performance management, security availability that's fundamentally been key. >> [Dave I mean, having done a lot of TCO studies in this area, it's, it's it Oracle's different. You know, normally the biggest component of TCO is labor with Oracle. The biggest component of TCO is licensed and maintenance costs. So if you can virtualize and reduce those costs and of course, of course the Oracle will fight you and say we won't support it in a VMware environment. Of course, you know, they will, but, but you got to really, you got to battle. But, so here's my last question. So if I'm a customer in that state that you described you know, a lot of sort of Oracle sprawl a lot of databases out there, high maintenance costs, the whole lock-in thing. I got to choices. I, you know, a lot of choices out there. One is EDB. You guys have convinced me that you've got the expertise If I can partner with firms like yours, it's safer route. Okay, cool. My other choice is Oracle is going to, The Oracle sales reps is going to get me in a headlock and talk about exit data and how their Oracle cloud, and how it's, they've invested a lot there. And they have, and, I can pay by the drink all this sort of modern sort of discussion, you know, Oracle act like they invented it late to the game. And then here we are. So, so help me. What's the pitch as to, well, that's kind of compelling. It's maybe the safe bet they're there. They're working with my CIO, whatever. Why should I go with the open source route versus that route? It sounds kind of attractive to me, help me understand that each of you maybe take me through that. Abdul, why don't you start. >> Yeah. I'd say, you know, Oracle's being the defacto for so many years that people have just assumed and defaulted saying, high availability, RAC, DR. Data guard, you know, and I'll apply to any database need that I have. And at the end of the day customers have a three tier database requirement: the lowest, less critical, bronze level databases that really don't need RAC or a high availability, silver tier that are departmental solutions. That means some level of resiliency. And then you've got your gold revenue producing brand impact databases that are they're down. And certainly they won. You see no reason why the bronze and silver databases can be targeted towards EDB. Admittedly, we have some of our largest customers are running platforms, are running $5 million an hour e-commerce platform or airlines running large e-commerce platforms. And exit data certainly has a place. RAC has a place in those, in those scenarios. Were not saying that the EDB is a solution for everything in all scenarios, but apply the technology where it's appropriate where it's required and, you know, generally wherever Oracle has being the defacto and it's being applied across the estate, that's fundamentally what's changed. It doesn't have to be the only answer you have multiple choices now. EDB provides us with the ability to probably address, you know more than 50% of the databases' state, and comfortably cope with that and just apply that more expensive kind of gold tier one cost-based but also capability, you know from the highest requirements of performance and availability where it's appropriate. >> Yeah. Very pragmatic approach. Abdul, thank you for that. And Charlie. Charlie, what's your perspective? Give us your closing thoughts. >> Well, it has been, Oracle has been dominating in Asia in South Korea has market or over many years. So customers got tired of this, continuous spending money for the maintenance costs and there is no discount. There is no negotiation. So they want to move away from expensive stuff. And they were looking for a flexible platform with the easygoing and the high speed and performance open source database like a possibly as career. And now the EDB cannot replace a hundred percent of existing legacy worker, but 10%, 20% 50% as time goes on the trend that will continue. And it will be reaching some high point or replacing the existing Oracle system. And it can, it can also leading to good business chance to a channel partner and EDB steps and other related business in open source. >> Great. Thank you, Charlie and Allen, bring us home here. Give us your follow up >> I think my, co- panelists hit the nail on the head, right? It's a menu, right? That's as things become more diverse and as people make more choices and as everybody wants more agility, you have to provide, I mean, and so that, that's where that's coming in and I liked the way that Andul I kind of split it into gold silver and bronze. Yeah. And I think that that's where, we're going, right? I mean you should ask your developers right? Are your developers like pining to start up a new instance of Oracle every time you're starting a new project? Probably not reach for their Postgres right? And so, because of that, that's where this is coming from and that's not going to change. And, and yeah, that that ecosystem is going to continue to, to thrive. And there'll be lots of different flavors in the growing open source ecosystem. >> Yeah. I mean, open source absolutely is the underpinning you know, the, the bedrock of innovation, these days. Gentlemen, great power panel. Thanks so much for bringing your perspectives and best of luck in the future. >> Thank you, next time we'll try and match our backgrounds >> Next time. Well, we'll up our game. Okay. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for theCUBE. Stay tuned for more great coverage. Postgres vision, 21. Be right back. (upbeat techno music)

>>It's my pleasure to be one of the hosts of the cube on cloud and the startup showcase brought to you by AWS. This is Dave Vellante and for years, the cube has been following the trail of data. And with the relentless March of data growth, this idea of a single version of the truth has become more and more elusive. Moreover data has become the lifeblood of a digital business. And if there's one thing that we've learned throughout the pandemic, if you're not digital, you're in trouble. So we've seen firsthand the critical importance of reliable and trusted data. And with me to talk about his company and the trends in the market is many sued as the CTO and co-founder of Reltio Maneesh. Welcome to the program. >>Thank you, Dave. It's a pleasure to be here. >>Okay. Let's start with, let's go back to you and your co-founders when you started Reltio it was back in the early days of the big data movement cloud was kind of just starting to take off, but what problems did you see then and what are enterprises struggling with today, especially with, with data as a source of digital innovation. >>They, if you look at the changes that have taken place in the landscape over the course of the last 10 years, when we started Reltio in 2011, there were a few secular trends that were coming to life. One was a cloud compute type of capabilities being provided by vendors like AWS. It was starting to pick up steam where making, uh, compute capabilities available at scale to solve large data problems was becoming real impossible. The second thing that we saw was, uh, this big trend of, uh, you know, you can not have a wall to wall, one single application that solves your entire business problem. Those visions have come and gone. And, uh, we are seeing more of the best of breed application type of a landscape where even if you look within a specific function, let's say sales or marketing, you have more than a dozen applications that any company is using today. >>And that trend was starting to emerge where we knew very well, that the number of systems that we would have to work with would continue to increase. And, uh, that created a problem of where would you get the single source of truth or the single best version of a customer, a supplier, a product that you're trying to sell those types of critical pieces of information that are core to any business that's out there today. And, um, you know, that created the opportunity for us at Reltio to think about the problem at scale for every company out there, every business who needed this kind of a capability and for us to provide this capability in the cloud as a software, as a service, uh, uh, offering. So that's where, uh, you know, the foundation of Reltio started. And the core problem that we wanted to solve was to bridge the gap that was created by all these data silos and create a unified view of the core critical information that these companies run on. >>Yeah. I mean, the cloud is this giant, you know, hyper distributed system data by its very nature is distributed. It's interesting what you were sort of implying about, you know, the days of the monolithic app are gone by my business partner years ago, John furrier and the cube said data is going to become the new development kit. And we've certainly seen that with the, the pandemic, but tell us more about Reltio and how you help customers deal with that notion of data, silo, data silos, data fragmentation, how do you solve that problem? >>So, data fragmentation is what exists today. And, um, you know, with the Reltio, uh, software as a service offering that we provide, we allow customers to stitch together and unify the data coming from these different fragmented, siloed, uh, applications or data sources that they have within their enterprise at the same time. Um, there's a lot of dependence on the third party data. You know, when you think about, uh, different problems that you're trying to solve, you have, uh, for B2B type of information that in Bradstreet type of data providers in life sciences, you have IQ via type of data providers. Um, you know, as you look at other verticals, there is a specialized third-party data provider for any, and every kind of information that most of the enterprise businesses want to combine with their in-house data or first party data to get the best view of who they're dealing with, who are they working with, you know, who are the customers that they're serving and use that information also as a starting point for the digital transformation that they want to get to. >>Um, and that's where Reltio fits in as the only platform that can help stitch together, this kind of, uh, information and create a 360 degree view that spans all the data silos and provides that for real-time use for BI and analytics to benefit from, for data science to benefit from. And then this emerging notion of, uh, data in itself is a, um, you know, key starting point that is used by us, uh, in order to make any decisions, just like, uh, we go, you know, if I, they wanted to look at information about you, I would go to places like LinkedIn, look up the information. And then our, my next set of decisions with that information, if somebody wanted to look up information on Reltio, they would go to, let's say Crunchbase as an example, and look up, uh, who are the investors? How much money have we raised all those details that are available? It's not a CRM system by itself, but it is an information application that can aid and assist in the decision-making process as a starting point. And that user experience on top of the data becomes an important vehicle for us to provide, uh, as a part of the Reltio platform capabilities. >>Awesome. Thank you. And I want to get into the, to the tech, but before we do, maybe we just cut to the chase and maybe you can talk about some of the examples of, of Reltio and action. Some of the customers that you can talk about, maybe the industries that are, that are really adopting this. W what can you tell us there, Maneesh, >>Um, we work across a few different verticals, some of the key verticals that we work in our life sciences, um, and travel and hospitality and financial services, insurance, um, S uh, retail, as an example, those are some of the key verticals for us, but, uh, to give you some examples of, uh, the type of problems that customers are solving with Reltio as the data unification platform, um, let's take CarMax as an example, CarMax is a customer who's in the business of, uh, buying used cars, selling used cars, servicing those used cars. And then, um, you know, you as a customer, don't just transact with them. Once you, you know, you've had a car for three years, you go back and look at what can you trade in that car for, but in order for CarMax to provide a service to you that, uh, goes across all the different touch points, whether you are visiting them at their store location, uh, trying to test drive a car or viewing, uh, information about the various vehicles on their website, or just, uh, you know, punching in the registration number of your car, just to see what is the appraisal from them in terms of how much will they pay for your car? >>This requires a lot of data behind the scenes for them to provide a seamless journey across all touch points and the type of information that they use, uh Reltio for aggregating, unifying, and then making available across all these touch points is all of the information about the customers, all of the information about, uh, the, uh, household, uh, you know, the understanding that they're trying to achieve because, uh, life events can, uh, be buying signals, uh, for, uh, consumers like uni, as well as, uh, who was the, um, associate who helped you either in the selling of a car buying of a car, because business is all about building relationships for the longer term lifetime value that they want to capture. And in that process, um, making sure that they're providing continuity of relationship, they need to keep track of that data. And then the vehicle itself, the vehicle that you buy yourself, uh, there is a lot of information in order to price it, right, that needs to be gathered, uh, from multiple sources. So the continuum of data all the way from consumer to the vehicle is aggregated from multiple sources, unified inside Reltio, and then made available, uh, through API APIs or through other methods, and means to the various applications can be either built on top of that information, or can consume that information in order to better aid and assist the processes, business processes that those applications have to run end to end. Well, it sounds like >>That's come along. Sorry. >>I was just going to say it that's one example and, uh, you know, across other verticals that are other similar examples of how companies are leveraging, Reltio >>Just say, can come a long way from simple linear clickstream analysis of a website. I mean, you're talking about really rich information and, and, you know, happy to dig into some other examples, but, but I wonder how does it work? I mean, what's the magic behind it? What's the, the tech look like, I mean, obviously you leveraging AWS, maybe you could talk about how so, and maybe some of the services there and some of your unique IP. >>Yeah. Um, you know, so the unique opportunity for us when we started in 2011 was really to leverage the power of the cloud. We started building out this capability on top of AWS back in 2011. And, uh, you know, if you think about, uh, the problem itself, uh, the problem has been around as long as you have had more than one system to run your business, but the magnitude of the problem has expanded several fold. Um, you know, for example, I have been in this area was, uh, responsible for creating some of the previous generation capabilities and, uh, most of the friction in those previous generation MDM or master data management type of solutions, um, as the, you know, the technical term that is used to refer to this area, uh, was that those systems could not keep pace with the increasing number of sources or the depth and breadth of the information that, uh, customers want to capture, whether it is, uh, you know, about a patient or a product, or let's say a supplier that you're working well. >>Uh, there is always additional information that you can capture and, uh, you know, use to better inform the decisions for the next engagement and, uh, that kind of model where the number of sources we're always going to increase the depth and breadth of information was always going to increase. The previous generation systems were not geared to handle that. So we decided that not only would we use at scale compute capabilities in the cloud, um, with the products like AWS as the backbone, but also solve some of the core problems around how more sources of information can be unified at scale. And then the last mile, which is the ability to consume such rich information, just locking it in a data warehouse has been sort of the problem in the past. And you talked about the clickstream analysis, uh, analytics has a place, but most of the analytics is a rear view mirror picture of the, uh, you know, work that you have to do, versus everybody that we talked to, uh, as a potential customer, wanted to solve the problem of what can we do at the point of engagement, how can we influence decisions? >>So, you know, I'll give you an example. I think, uh, everybody's familiar with Quicken loans, um, as the mortgage lender and, uh, in the mortgage lending business, uh, Quicken loans is the customer who's using Reltio as the customer data, um, unification platform behind the scenes. But every interaction that takes place, their goal is that they have a very narrow time window, um, you know, anywhere from 10 minutes to about an hour, where if somebody expresses an interest in refinancing or getting a mortgage, they have to close that, uh, business within that, uh, Hart window, the conversion ratios are exponentially better in that hot window versus waiting for 48 hours to come back with the answer of what will you be able to refinance your mortgage, uh, at. And, uh, they've been able to use this notion of real time data, where as soon as you come in through the website, or if you come in through the rocket mortgage app, or you're talking to a broker by calling the one 800 number, they are able to triangulate that it's the same person coming from any of these different channels and respond to that person, whether an offer, uh, ASAP so that, uh, there is no opportunity for the competition to get in and present you with a better offer. >>So those are the types of things where the time to, uh, conversion or the time to action is being looked at. And everybody's trying to shrink that time down, uh, that ability to respond in real time with the capabilities was sort of the last mile missing out of this equation, which didn't exist with previous generation capabilities. And now customers are able to benefit from that. >>That is an awesome example. I know at firsthand, I'm a customer of Quicken and rocket, and when you experience that environment, it's totally different than anything you've ever seen before. So it's helpful to hear you explain, like what's behind that because it's, it's truly disruptive. And I, and I'll tell you, the other thing that, that sort of triggered a thought was that we use the word realtime a lot, and we try to develop years ago. We said, what does real-time really mean? And the, the answer we CA we landed on was before you lose the customer, and that's kind of what you just described. Uh, and that is what gives as an example, a quick and a real advantage again, having experienced it firsthand. It's, it's pretty, pretty tremendous. So that's a nice, that's a, that's a nice reference. Um, so, and the other thing that struck me is that what I wanted to ask you, how it's different from sort of legacy master data management solutions, and you sort of described that they've seized to me, they got to take their, their traditional on-prem stack, rip it out, stick it in the cloud is okay, we got our stack in the cloud. >>Now your technical approach is dramatically different. You had the advantage of having a clean sheet of paper, right? I mean, from a, from an CTO's perspective, what's your, >>Yeah. The clean sheet of paper is the luxury that we have, you know, having seen this movie before having, um, you know, looked at solving this problem with previous generation technologies, it was really the opportunity to start with a clean sheet of paper and define a cloud native architecture for solving the problem at scale. So just to give you an example, um, you know, across all of our customers, we are today managing, um, uh, about 6.5 billion consolidated profiles of people, organizations, product locations, um, you know, assets, uh, those kinds of details. And these are, these are the types of, uh, crown jewels of the business that every business runs on. You know, for example, if you wanted to, um, let's say you're a large company, like, uh, you know, Ford and you wanted to figure out how much business are you doing, where the, uh, you know, another large company, because the other large company could be a global organization, could be spread across multiple geographies, could have multiple subsidiaries associated with it. >>It's been a very difficult answer to understand what is the total book of business that they have with that other, um, big, uh, customer and, uh, you know, being able to have the right, uh, unified, uh, relevant, rich clean as the starting point that gives you visibility to that data, and then allows you to run precise analytics on top of that data, or, uh, you know, drive, uh, any kind of, uh, conclusions out of the data science type of algorithms or MLAI algorithms that you're trying to run. Um, you have to have that foundation of clean data to work with in order to get to those answers. >>Nice. Uh, and then I had questions on just the model is this, it's a SAS model. I presume, how, how is it priced? Do you have a, do you have a freemium? How do I get started? Maybe you could give us some color. >>Yeah, we are a SAS provider. We do everything in the cloud, uh, offer it as a SAS offering, um, for customers to leverage and benefit from our pricing is based on the volume of, uh, uh, consolidated profiles. And the, I use the word profiles because this is not the traditional, uh, data model where you have rows columns, foreign keys. This is a, you know, a profile of a customer, regardless of attribution or any other details that you want to capture. And, um, you know, that just as an example is what we consider as a profile. So number of consolidated profiles under management is the key vector of pricing. Uh, customers can start small and they can grow from there. We have customers who manage anywhere from a few hundred thousand profiles, uh, you know, off these different types of data domains, customer, patient provider, uh, product, uh, asset, those types of details. But, uh, then they grow and some of the customers, uh, HP Inc, as a customer is managing close to 1.5 billion profiles of B2B businesses at a global scale of B2C consumers at global scale. And they continue to expand that footprint as they look at other opportunities to use the single source of truth capabilities provided by Reltio. >>And your relationship with AWS you're, you're obviously building on top of AWS, you're taking advantage of the cloud native capabilities. Are you in the AWS marketplace? Maybe you could talk about AWS relationship a bit. >>Yeah. AWS has been a key partner for us, uh, since the very beginning, uh, we are now on the marketplace. Uh, customers can start with the free version of the product, um, and start to play with the product, understand it better, uh, and then move into the paid tier, um, you know, as they bring in more data, uh, into Reltio. And, uh, you know, we also, uh, have, uh, the partnership with AWS where, uh, you know, customers can benefit from the relationship where they are able to, um, uh, use the, the spend against Reltio to offset the commitment credits that they have for AWS, um, you know, as a cloud provider. So, uh, you know, we are working closely with AWS on key verticals, like life sciences, travel and hospitality as a starting point. >>Nice that love, love, those credits, um, company update, uh, you know, head count funding, revenue trajectory, what kind of metrics are you comfortable sharing? >>So, uh, we are currently, uh, at about, um, you know, slightly North of 300 people, uh, overall at rail queue, we will, uh, grow from 300 to about 400 people this year, uh, itself. Uh, we are, uh, uh, you know, we just put out a press release, uh, where we mentioned some of the subscription ARR we finished last year at about $74 million in ARR. And we are, uh, looking at, uh, crossing the a hundred million dollar ARR, um, uh, threshold, uh, later this year. So we're on a great growth trajectory and, uh, the businesses, uh, performing really well. And we are, uh, looking at working with more customers and helping them solve this, uh, uh, you know, data silo, fragmentation of data problem by having them leverage the Reltio capability at scale across their enterprise. >>That's some impressive growth. Congratulations, w w we're, I'm sure adding a hundred people you're hiring all over the place, but where we get some of your priorities. >>So, um, you know, the, as the business is growing, we are spending equally both on the R and D side of the house, uh, investing more there, but at the same time, also on our go to market, uh, so that we can extend our reach, make sure that, uh, more people know about, uh, Reltio and can start leveraging the benefit of, uh, the technology that we have built on top of, uh, AWS. >>Yeah. I mean, it sounds like you've obviously nailed product market fit, and now you're, you know, scaling and scaling the go to market. You moved from CEO into the CTO role. Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. Why, why, what was prompted that move >>Problems of luxury, uh, you know, as I like to call them, uh, once you know, that you're on a great growth trajectory and, uh, the business is performing well, it's all about, uh, figuring out ways of, uh, you know, making sure that you can drive harder and faster towards that growth, uh, milestones, uh, that you want to achieve. And, uh, you know, for us, uh, the story is no different. Uh, the team has done a wonderful job of, uh, making sure that we can build the right platform, um, you know, work towards this opportunity, that PC, which by the way, um, they just to share with you, uh, MDM or master data management has always been underestimated as a, uh, you know, yes, there is a problem that needs to be solved, but the market sizing was, uh, in a, not as clear, but some of the most recent, uh, estimates from analysts like Gartner, but the, uh, you know, sort of the new incarnation of, uh, data unification and master data management at about a $30 billion, uh, you know, uh, Tam or this market. >>So with that comes the responsibility that we have to really make sure that we are able to bring this capability to a wide array of customers. And with that, uh, I looked at, uh, you know, how could we scale the business faster and have the right team to work, uh, help us maximize the opportunity. And that's why, uh, you know, we decided, uh, that it was the right point in time for me to bring in somebody who's, uh, worked, uh, at, uh, the stretch of, you know, taking a company from just a a hundred million dollars in ARR to, uh, you know, half a billion dollars in ARR and doing it at a global scale. So Chris Highland, uh, you know, has had that experience and having him take on the CEO role, uh, really puts us on a tremendous, uh, our path to tremendous growth and achieving that, uh, with the right team. >>Yeah. And I think I appreciate your comments on the Tam. I love to look at the Tam and to do a lot of Tam analysis. And I think a lot of times when you define the future Tam based on sort of historical categories, you sometimes under count them. I mean, to me, you guys are in the, the, the digital business business. I mean, the data transformation, the company transformation business, I mean, that could be order of magnitude even bigger. So I think the future is bright for your company. Reltio Maneesh. And thank you so much for coming on the program really appreciate. >>Well, thanks for having me, uh, really enjoyed it. Thank you. >>Okay. Thank you for watching. You're watching the cubes startup showcase. We'll be right back.

(upbeat music) >> It's my pleasure, to be one of the hosts of theCUBE on cloud and the startup showcase brought to you by AWS. This is Dave Vellante and for years theCUBE has been following the trail of data. And with the relentless match of data growth this idea of a single version of the truth has become more and more elusive. Moreover, data has become the lifeblood of a digital business. And if there's one thing that we've learned throughout the pandemic, if you're not digital, you're in trouble. So we've seen firsthand, the critical importance of reliable and trusted data. And with me to talk about his company and the trends in the market is Manish Sood the CTO and co-founder of Reltio. Manish, welcome to the program. >> Thank you, Dave. It's a pleasure to be here. >> Okay, let's start with, let's go back to you and your co-founders when you started Reltio it was back in the early days of the big data movement, cloud was kind of just starting to take off, but what problems did you see then and what are enterprises struggling with today, especially with data as a source of digital innovation. >> Dave, if you look at the changes that have taken place in the landscape over the course of the last 10 years, when we started Reltio in 2011 there were a few secular trends that were coming to life. One was a cloud compute type of capabilities being provided by vendors like AWS. It was starting to pick up steam where making compute capabilities available at scale to solve large data problems was becoming real and possible. The second thing that we saw was this big trend of you know, you can not have a wall to wall, one single application that solves your entire business problem. Those visions have come and gone and we are seeing more of the best of breed application type of a landscape where even if you look within a specific function let's say sales or marketing, you have more than a dozen applications that any company is using today. And that trend was starting to emerge where we knew very well that the number of systems that we would have to work with would continue to increase. And that created a problem of where would you get the single source of truth or the single best origin of a customer, a supplier, a product that you're trying to sell, those types of critical pieces of information that are core to any business that's out there today. And, you know, that created the opportunity for us at Reltio to think about the problem at scale for every company out there, every business who needed this kind of capability and for us to provide this capability in the cloud as a software, as a service offering. So that's where, you know, the foundation of Reltio started. And the core problem that we wanted to solve was to bridge the gap that was created by all these data silos, and create a unified view of the core critical information that these companies run on. >> Yeah, the cloud is this giant, you know hyper distributed system, data by its very nature is distributed. It's interesting what you were sort of implying about you know, the days of the monolithic app are gone, but my business partner years ago John Furrier at theCUBE said, data is going to become the new development kit. And we've certainly seen that with the pandemic but tell us more about Reltio and how you help customers deal with that notion of data silos, data fragmentation, how do you solve that problem? >> So data fragmentation is what exists today. And, with the Reltio software as a service offering that we provide, we allow customers to stitch together and unify the data coming from these different fragmented siloed applications or data sources that they have within their enterprise. At the same time, there's a lot of dependence on the third party data. You know, when you think about different problems that you're trying to solve, you have for B2B type of information that in Bradstreet type of data providers, in life sciences you have IQVIA type of data providers. You know, as you look at other verticals that is a specialized third party data provider for any and every kind of information that most of the enterprise businesses want to combine with their in-house data or first party data to get the best view of who they're dealing with, who are they working with, you know who are the customers that they're serving and use that information also as a starting point for the digital transformation that they want to get to. And that's where Reltio fits in as the only platform that can help stitch together this kind of information and create a 360 degree view that spans all the data silos and provides that for real-time use, for BI and analytics to benefit from, for data science to benefit from, and then this emerging notion of data in itself is a, you know, key starting point that is used by us in order to make any decisions. Just like we go, you know, if I they wanted to look at information about you, I would go to places like LinkedIn, look up the information, and then on my next set of decisions with that information. If somebody wanted to look up information on Reltio they would go to, let's say crunchbase as an example and look up, who are the investors? How much money have we raised? All those details that are available. It's not a CRM system by itself but it is an information application that can aid and assist in the decision-making process as a starting point. And that user experience on top of the data becomes an important vehicle for us to provide as a part of the Reltio platform capabilities. >> Awesome, thank you. And I want to get into the tech, but before we do maybe we just cut to the chase and maybe you can talk about some of the examples of Reltio and action, some of the customers that you can talk about, maybe the industries that are really adopting this. What can you tell us there Manish? >> We work across a few different verticals some of the key verticals that we work in are life sciences and travel and hospitality and financial services, insurance retail, as an example. Those are some of the key verticals for us. But to give you some examples of the type of problems that customers are solving with Reltio as the data unification platform, let's take CarMax as an example,. CarMax is a customer who's in the business of buying used cars, selling used cars servicing those used cars. And then, you know, you as a customer don't just transact with them once, you know, you've had a car for three years you go back and look at what can you trade in that car for? But in order for CarMax to provide a service to you that goes across all the different touch points whether you are visiting them at their store location trying to test drive a car or viewing information about the various vehicles on their website, or just you know, punching in the registration number of your car just to see what is the appraisal from them in terms of how much will they pay for your car. This requires a lot of data behind the scenes for them to provide a seamless journey across all touch points. And the type of information that they use relative for aggregating, unifying, and then making available across all these touch points, is all of the information about the customers, all of the information about the household, you know, the understanding that they are trying to achieve because life events can be buying signals for consumers like you and I, as well as who was the associate who helped you either in the selling of a car, buying of a car, because their business is all about building relationships for the longer term, lifetime value that they want to capture. And in that process, making sure that they're providing continuity of relationship, they need to keep track of that data. And then the vehicle itself, the vehicle that you buy yourself, there is a lot of information in order to price it right, that needs to be gathered from multiple sources. So the continuum of data all the way from consumer to the vehicle is aggregated from multiple sources, unified inside Reltio and then made available through APIs or through other methods and means to the various applications, can be either built on top of that information, or can consume that information in order to better aid and assist the processes, business processes that those applications have to run and to end. >> Well, sounds like we come along, (indistinct). >> I was just going to say that's one example and, you know across other verticals, that are other similar examples of how companies are leveraging, Reltio >> Yeah, so as you say, we've come a long way from simple linear clickstream analysis of a website. I mean, you're talking about really rich information and you know happy to dig into some other examples, but I wonder how does it work? I mean, what's the magic behind it? What's the tech look like? I mean, obviously leveraging AWS, maybe you could talk about how, so, and maybe some of the services there and some of your unique IP. >> Yeah, you know, so the unique opportunity for us when we started in 2011 was really to leverage the power of the cloud. We started building out this capability on top of AWS back in 2011. And, you know, if you think about the problem itself, the problem has been around as long as you have had more than one system to run your business, but the magnitude of the problem has expanded several fold. You know, for example, I have been in this area was responsible for creating some of the previous generation capabilities and most of the friction in those previous generation MDM or master data management type of solutions as the you know, the technical term that is used to refer to this area, was that those systems could not keep pace with the increasing number of sources or the depth and breadth of the information that customers want to capture, whether it is, you know, about a patient or a product or let's say a supplier that you're working with, there is always additional information that you can capture and you know use to better inform the decisions for the next engagement. And that kind of model where the number of sources we're always going to increase the depth and breadth of information was always going to increase. The previous generation systems were not geared to handle that. So we decided that not only would we use add scale compute capabilities in the cloud, with the products like AWS as the backbone, but also solve some of the core problems around how more sources of information can be unified at scale. And then the last mile, which is the ability to consume such rich information just locking it in a data warehouse has been sort of the problem in the past, and you talked about the clickstream analysis. Analytics has a place, but most of the analytics is a real view mirror picture of the, you know, work that you have to do versus everybody that we talk to as a potential customer wanted to solve the problem of what can we do at the point of engagement? How can we influence decisions? So, you know, I'll give you an example. I think everybody's familiar with Quicken loans as the mortgage lender, and in the mortgage lending business, Quicken loans is the customer who's using Reltio as the customer data unification platform behind the scenes. But every interaction that takes place, their goal is that they have a very narrow time vendor, you know anywhere from 10 minutes to about an hour where if somebody expresses an interest in refinancing or getting a mortgage they have to close that business within that hot vendor. The conversion ratios are exponentially better in that hot vendor versus waiting for 48 hours to come back with the answer of what will you be able to refinance your mortgage at? And they've been able to use this notion of real time data where as soon as you come in through the website or if you come in through the rocket mortgage app or you're talking to a broker by calling the 1800 number they are able to triangulate that it's the same person coming from any of these different channels and respond to that person with an offer ASAP so that there is no opportunity for the competition to get in and present you with a better offer. So those are the types of things where the time to conversion or the time to action is being looked at, and everybody's trying to shrink that time down. That ability to respond in real time with the capabilities were sort of the last mile missing out of this equation, which didn't exist with previous generation capabilities, and now customers are able to benefit from that. >> That is an awesome example. I know at firsthand, I'm a customer of Quicken and rocket when you experience that environment, it's totally different, than anything you've ever seen before. So it's helpful to hear you explain like what's behind that because, it's truly disruptive and I'll tell you the other thing that sort of triggered a thought was that we use the word realtime a lot and we try to develop years ago. We said, what does real-time really mean? And the answer we landed on was, before you lose the customer, and that's kind of what you just described. And that is what gives as an example a quick and a real advantage again, having experienced it firsthand. It's pretty, pretty tremendous. So that's a nice reference. So, and the other thing that struck me is, I wanted to ask you how it's different from sort of legacy Master Data Management solutions and you sort of described that they've since to me they've got to take their traditional on-prime stack, rip it out, stick it in the iCloud, it's okay we got our stack in the cloud now. Your technical approach is dramatically different. You had the advantage of having a clean sheet of paper, right? I mean, from a CTO's perspective, what's your take? >> Yeah, the clean sheet of paper is the luxury that we have. You know, having seen this movie before having, you know looked at solving this problem with previous generation technologies, it was really the opportunity to start with a clean sheet of paper and define a cloud native architecture for solving the problem at scale. So just to give you an example, you know, across all of our customers, we are today managing about 6.5 billion consolidated profiles of people, organizations, product, locations, you know, assets, those kinds of details. And these are the types of crown jewels of the business that every business runs on. You know, for example, if you wanted to let's say you're a large company, like, you know, Ford and you wanted to figure out how much business are you doing, whether, you know another large company, because the other large company could be a global organization, could be spread across multiple geographies, could have multiple subsidiaries associated with it. It's been a very difficult to answer to understand what is the total book of business that they have with that other big customer. And, you know, being able to have the right, unified, relevant, ready clean information as the starting point that gives you visibility to that data, and then allows you to run precise analytics on top of that data, or, you know drive any kind of conclusions out of the data science type of algorithms or MLAI algorithms that you're trying to run. You have to have that foundation of clean data to work with in order to get to those answers. >> Nice, and then I had questions on just analysis, it's a SAS model I presume, how is it priced? Do you have a freemium? How do I get started? Maybe you could give us some color on that. >> Yeah, we are a SAS provider. We do everything in the cloud, offer it as a SAS offering for customers to leverage and benefit from. Our pricing is based on the volume of consolidated profiles, and I use the word profiles because this is not the traditional data model, where you have rows, columns, foreign keys. This is a profile of a customer, regardless of attribution or any other details that you want to capture. And you know, that just as an example is what we consider as a profile. So number of consolidated profiles under management is the key vector of pricing. Customers can start small and they can grow from there. We have customers who manage anywhere from a few hundred thousand profiles, you know, off these different types of data domains, customer, patient, provider, product, asset, those types of details, but then they grow and some of the customers HPInc, as a customer, is managing close to 1.5 billion profiles of B2B businesses at a global scale of B2C consumers at global scale. And they continue to expand that footprint as they look at other opportunities to use, the single source of truth capabilities provided by Reltio. >> And, and your relationship with AWS, you're obviously building on top of AWS, you're taking advantage of the cloud native capabilities. Are you in the AWS marketplace? Maybe you could talk about AWS relationship a bit. >> Yeah, AWS has been a key partner for us since the very beginning. We are now on the marketplace. Customers can start with the free version of the product and start to play with the product, understand it better and then move into the paid tier, you know as they bring in more data into Reltio and, you know be also have the partnership with AWS where, you know customers can benefit from the relationship where they are able to use the spend against Reltio to offset the commitment credits that they have for AWS, you know, as a cloud provider. So, you know, we are working closely with AWS on key verticals, like life sciences, travel and hospitality as a starting point. >> Nice, love those credits. Company update, you know, head count, funding, revenue trajectory what kind of metrics are you comfortable sharing? >> So we are currently at about, you know, slightly not at 300 people overall at Reltio. We will grow from 300 to about 400 people this year itself we are, you know, we just put out a press release where we mentioned some of the subscription ARR we finished last year at about $74 million in ARR. And we are looking at crossing the hundred million dollar ARR threshold later this year. So we are on a great growth trajectory and the business is performing really well. And we are looking at working with more customers and helping them solve this, you know, data silo, fragmentation of data problem by having them leverage the Reltio capability at scale across their enterprise. >> That's some impressive growth, congratulations. We're, I'm sure adding hundred people you're hiring all over the place, but where we are some of your priorities? >> So, you know, the, as the business is growing we are spending equally, both on the R and D side of the house investing more there, but at the same time also on our go to market so that we can extend our reach, make sure that more people know about Reltio and can start leveraging the benefit of the technology that we have built on top of AWS. >> Yeah, I mean it sounds like you've obviously nailed product market fit and now you're, you know, scaling the grip, go to market. You moved from CEO into the CTO role. Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. Why, what was prompted that move? >> Problems of luxury, you know, as I like to call them once you know that you're in a great growth trajectory, and the business is performing well, it's all about figuring out ways of, you know making sure that you can drive harder and faster towards that growth milestones that you want to achieve. And, you know, for us, the story is no different. The team has done a wonderful job of making sure that we can build the right platform, you know work towards this opportunity that we see, which by the way they've just to share with you, MDM or Master Data Management has always been underestimated as a, you know, yes there is a problem that needs to be solved but the market sizing was in a, not as clear but some of the most recent estimates from analysts like Gartner, but the, you know, sort of the new incarnation of data unification and Master Data Management at about a $30 billion, yeah, TAM for this market. So with that comes the responsibility that we have to really make sure that we are able to bring this capability to a wide array of customers. And with that, I looked at, you know how could we scale the business faster and have the right team to work help us maximize the opportunity. And that's why, you know, we decided that it was the right point in time for me to bring in somebody who's worked at the stretch of, you know taking a company from just a hundred million dollars in ARR to, you know, half a billion dollars in ARR and doing it at a global scale. So Chris Highland, you know, has had that experience and having him take on the CEO role really puts us on a tremendous path or path to tremendous growth and achieving that with the right team. >> Yeah, and I think I appreciate your comments on the TAM. I love to look at the TAM and to do a lot of TAM analysis. And I think a lot of times when you define the the future TAM based on sort of historical categories, you sometimes under count them. I mean, to me you guys are in the digital business. I mean, the data transformation the company transformation business, I mean that could be order of magnitude even bigger. So I think the future is bright for your company Reltio, Manish and thank you so much for coming on the program. Really appreciate it. >> Well, thanks for having me, really enjoyed it. Thank you. >> Okay, thank you for watching. You're watching theCUBEs Startup Showcase. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

(soft music) >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE on Cloud, where we're talking to CEOs, CIOs, Chief Technology Officers, and investors on the future of Cloud, with me is Dave Humphrey. Who's the Managing Director, and co-head of private equity in North America at Bain Capital. Dave, welcome to theCUBE first time, I think. >> First time, yeah, Dave, thanks very much for having me. >> So, let's get right into it, as an investor, how are you thinking about the evolution of cloud, when you look back at the last decade? It's not going to be the same, in this coming decade it's ironic 2020 is thrown us into, the accelerated digital transformation and cloud. How do you look at the evolution of cloud, from an investment perspective? What's your thesis? >> That's a great question, David for us we're focused on investing, in technology and really across the economy. And I'd say ,the cloud is the overarching trend, and dynamic in the technology markets. It really affect two reasons. One is a major shift ,of course that's going on. But the second and frankly even more interesting one, just as all the growth, that the cloud is creating, in the technology marketplace. The shift, think is been well covered, but five years ago in 2015, by our analysis, 2/3 of all computing workloads were done on premises. And only five years later, that's that's split. So, 2/3 of all computing workloads now done in the cloud and of course that shift, there's a lot of ramifications, as an investor. But even more interesting to us, is the growth in technology and the usage of technology, that the cloud is creating. So, over that same period of time, the total number of computing workloads run has increased, by 2.6 times, in just a five-year period of time which is really a dramatic thing and it makes sense when you think about, all the new software applications that could be created, all the data that can be used by new users and new segments, and the real-time insight that can be gleaned from there cause that growth, that really were focused on investing behind, as investors in technology. >> It's interesting you share those numbers, and you hear a lot of numbers. I actually think you're even being conservative. Ginni Rometty, used to talk about 80% of workloads, are still on-prem. Andy Jassy at re:Invent said that, 96% of the spending is still on premises. So, that was kind of an interesting stat. And I guess the other thing that I would note is it's not just a share shift, it is, it's not just, the cloud eating away on-prem. We've clearly seen that. But there's also incremental opportunity as well. If you look at Snowflake, for example adding value across multiple clouds and creating new markets. So there's that one-two punch, of stealing share from on-prem (clears throat). Also incremental growth, which is probably accelerated as a result, of this compressed digital transformation. So when you look at the big three Cloud players. I mean, roughly speaking, there probably account for $80 billion in total revenue. Which I guess, is a small portion of the overall IT market. So, it has a long way to go, but what's the best way to get good returns, from an investment standpoint, without getting clobbered, by their tendency to sometimes co-opt some of the best ideas and put them on their primary services. >> Yeah, absolutely, well, for us, it really comes back to the same fundamental principles, we look for in any investment. Which is finding, a business that solves, a really important problem for its customers, and does so in a way that's really advantage, versus competition and can do something, that other competitors just can't do. Whether those be the hyperscalers that you're describing, or other specialized and focused competitors. And then finding a way ,that we can partner with those companies to help them to accelerate their growth. So, surely the growth of the likes of AWS and Microsoft and Google, as you were describing has been a profound, competitive shift, along with the cloud shift, that we've all talked about. And those companies of course can offer, and do things that you asked, purveyors of computing couldn't. But, fundamentally they're selling an infrastructure layer, and there is room for all sorts of new competitors, and new applications that can do something better than anybody else can. So, any company that we're looking at, we're asking ourselves the question, why are they the best ones, to do what they're doing? How can they solve the most problems, for their customers and do that, in a way that's resilient? And we see lots of those opportunities. >> And I want to pick your brain, about the Nutanix investment, but before we get there. I wonder if you could just talk, about Bain Capital their history of investment in both cloud and infrastructure software and how do those investments, how would they perform and how do they inform your current thesis? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, Bain Capital was started in the mid 80s, 1984. Actually, as a spin out Bain Company Consulting. And the basic premise was that, if we're good at advising and supporting businesses. We should partner with them and invest behind them and if they do well, we'll do well. And as I said, focusing on these businesses but do something really valuable for their customers in a real advantage way with some discontinuous growth opportunity. That's led us to grow a lot. We started out actually in the venture business, and grew into the private equity business, but now we invest across all life stages of company all over the world. So we're $105 billion in assets that we manage, across 10 lines of business and we're truly global. So I think we have about 470 investment professionals and 210 of those, at this point are located outside the US. One of the really interesting things for us in investing in technology broadly and in infrastructure and the Cloud more specifically is that we're able to do that all over the world and we're able to do that across all the different life stages of a company. So we have a thrive in venture capital business, that really we've been in, since the origins of Bain Capital has invested across countless cloud and security and infrastructure businesses, taken successful companies public like SolarWinds sold companies to strategic and grown businesses in really thriving ways. We have a growth mid-market growth technology business, that we launched last year, called our Technology Opportunities Fund. They've made a really interesting, cloud-based investment in a company called the Cloud Gurus, Cloud Guru, excuse me. That trains, the next generation of IT professionals to be successful in the cloud. And then of course in our private equity business where I spend my time. We are highly focused on technologist sector. And the impacts of the cloud in that sector broadly, we have invested in many infrastructure businesses, scale businesses like, BMC Software and Rocket Software, security businesses like, Blue Coat Systems and Symantec. And of course, for those big businesses they've got both on premises solutions. They've got cloud solutions and often we're focused on helping them continue to grow and innovate and take their solutions to the cloud. And then, this taken us to our most recent investment in Nutanix that we're very excited about it. We think it's truly a growth business in a large market that has an opportunity to capitalize, on these trends we're talking about. >> I wonder if you could comment on some of the changes that have occurred, you guys have been in the private equity business, for a long time. And if you look at kind of the early days of private equity, it was all, EBITDA suck as much cash out of the company as possible and whatever's left over we'll figure out what to do with it. And it's, it seems like investors have realized, wow, we can actually, if we put a little investment in and do some engineering, and some go to market we can actually, get better multiples. And so you've got the kind of rule of 30, 35 and 40 where EBITDA plus growth is kind of the metric. How do you think about that and look at that evolution? >> Yeah, it's interesting because in many ways Bain Capital was started as the antithesis to what you're describing. >> Great. >> So we started again as, with a strategic lens and a focus on growth and a focus on, if we got the longterm and the lasting impact of our businesses right, that the returns would follow and you're right that the market has evolved in that way. I mean, I think some of the dynamics that we've seen, has been certainly growth of the private equity business. It's become a much larger piece of the capital markets than it was certainly 10 years ago and 20 years ago. Also with that growth comes the globalization of that business all over the world and the specialization. So you certainly see technology focused firms and technology focused funds in a way that you didn't see 10 years ago or certainly 20 years ago. Actually Bain Capital interestingly enough, we had a technology focused fund in 1989 called Bain Information Partners. So we've been focused on the sector for a very long time. But you certainly see a lot more technology investors, than you did in your 10 to 20 years ago. >> How are you thinking about valuations these days? I mean, it's good to be in tech, it's even better to be in the cloud, software, cloud, if you're looking at, some of the companies, especially the work from home pivot. But a lot of that appears to be, many people believe it's going to be permanent. How are you feeling about the both public market and private market valuations in that dynamic? >> Yeah, well, it's amazing, right? I don't think any of us in March when the COVID crisis was just emerging, would've anticipated that come November, the markets and certainly the technology markets, would be even more robust and stronger than they were say in January, February. But I think it's a testament to the resilience of the technology and just how intricate and intertwined technology has become with our daily lives. And how much companies depend on its use. And frankly, it's been, the COVID environment has been an accelerant, for many of the ways in which we depend on technology. So witness this interview, of course, through the cloud, and you're seeing the way that we operate our business day-to-day, the way companies are accessing their data and information it has only further, accelerated the need for technology, and the importance of that technology to how businesses operate. So I think you're seeing that, you're reflected in the market values out there, but for us we're focused on businesses, that still have that catalytic opportunity ahead that can, do more to compensate for the price of entry. >> Let's talk about ,this massive investment you guys made in Nutanix, $750 million. I guess it's a small piece of your 105 billion, but still massive investment. How did that opportunity come to you? What was your thinking behind that investment and what are you looking for in terms of the go-forward plan and growth plan for 2021 and really important beyond? >> Yeah, absolutely, we're thrilled to be partnered with and invested in Nutanix. We think is a terrific company and our most recent technology investment are private equity business. It really came about through a proactive efforts that we had in the spring. We've got a team focused on the technology sector, focused across infrastructure and applications and internet and digital media businesses and financial technology. And through those efforts, we were looking for businesses, that we felt had faced some dislocation in their market values, associated with the COVID environment that we're facing. But that we thought were really attractive businesses, well positioned have leading solutions, and had substantial and discontinuous growth opportunities. And as we look through that effort, we really felt that Nutanix stood out just as a core leader and in fact, really the innovator and the inventor of the market, in which it competes with a substantial market share and position, solving a really important problem for its customers, with a big growth opportunity ahead. But, the stock price had come down, because the business has been undergoing a transition. And we didn't think that was fully understood, by the market. And so, we saw an opportunity to partner with Nutanix, to invest money into the business, to help to fund its transition and its growth, and to be partners along for all the value of the business we'll continue to create, we think it's a terrific company and we're excited to be invested. >> Well, you and I have talked about this, that transition from a traditional license model, to one that's an annual recurring revenue model which many companies have gone through. Adobe certainly has done it, Tableau successfully did it. Splunk is kind of in the middle of that transition right now, and maybe not well understood. You've got companies like, Datadog and Snowflake again to doing consumption-based pricing. So there's a lot of confusion in the marketplace. And I wonder if you could talk about, that transition and why it was attractive to you, to actually place that bet now. >> Yeah, absolutely and as you say, number of companies at this point have been through, various forms of of this shift from selling their technology upfront to selling it over time. And we find that the model of selling the technology over time, is one that can be powerful. It can be aligning for customers, as well as for the vendor of the software solutions. And in Nutanix in particular, again, we saw all the ingredients that we think, make this an opportunity for the business. Again, market-leading technology that customers love that is solving a really important problem that technology because Nutanix had been grown, and bootstrapped under the leadership Dheeraj when it was built and founded. Had been selling its software together within appliance. Often in a upfront sale. And has been undergoing under their own initiative, transitioned from selling that software with an appliance to a software based model to one that's more rattle over time. And we thought that there was the opportunity to continue that transition and by doing that. To be able to offer more growth, and more innovation that we can bring to our customers to continue to fund their shifts. So, something that frankly was well underway before we invested. As the business makes this transition, from collecting upfront to more evenly over time. We saw a potential use for our capital, to help to fund that growth. And we're just focused on being a good partner, to help the company keep investing and innovating, as it continues to do that. >> As I was talking to somebody other day, Dave and I told him, I was interviewing you. And I was mentioning the Nutanix investment. And I said, I'm definitely going to cover that. As part of this Cube on Cloud program and they said, well, then Nutanix, that's not cloud. I'm like, well, wait a minute, what's cloud? So, we heard Andy Jassy at re:Invent, talking all lot about hybrid. Antonio Neri ,right after HPE, made its earning last earnings announcement. He came on and said that, well we heard the big cloud player talk about hybrid. And so the definition is changing. But so how are you looking at the market? Certainly, there's this hyper converged infrastructure, but there's also this software play, there's this cloud play. Help us squint through, how you see that. >> Absolutely, so, Nutanix as you alluded to pioneer the market for hyper converged infrastructure, for bringing compute and storage and networking together. Often in private Cloud environments, in a way that was really powerful for your customers and they can of course continue to be the leaders in that marketplace. But they've continued to innovate and invest in ways that can, solve problems for customers and related problems across the hybrid cloud. So, combining both the public cloud with that private cloud and across multiple public clouds, with things like clusters and lots of innovation, that the business is doing, in partnership with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft and others. And so we think that Nutanix has a powerful role to play, in that hybrid cloud world, in a multi-cloud world. And we're excited to back them in. >> Well, I think too, what maybe people don't understand, is that not only is Nutanix, compatible with AWS and compatible with Azure and GCP, but it's actually trying, to create an abstraction layer across those, those clouds. Now, there's two sides of that debate. Some will say, well, that has latency issues or yes it reduces complexity, but at the same time it doesn't give you, that fine-grained access that's kind of the AWS narrative customers, want simplicity and we're seeing the uptake across clouds. I have a multi-part question for you, Dave. So, obviously Bain very strong in strategy. I'm curious ,as to how much you get involved, in the operational details. I mean, obviously $750 million you've got a stake there. But what are the two or three major strategic considerations for not just even just Nutanix, but Cloud and software infrastructure companies? And how much focus do you put on the operational and what are the priorities there? >> Absolutely, well, we pride ourselves in being good partners to our businesses and in helping them to grow, not just with our capital, which I think is of course important, but also with our sweat equity and our human capital, and our partnership and we can do that in lots of ways. It's fundamentally about supporting our businesses, however, is needed to help them to grow. We've been investing in the technology sector, as I described over, over 30 years. And so, we've built up a set of capabilities around things like, helping to a partner with the Salesforce of a company is helping them to think about the ways in which they allocate their research and development and their innovation ways in which they, continue to do acquisitions, to further that pipeline. We support our businesses in lots of ways. But we're not engineers, we're not developers. Of course, we're looking for businesses that are fundamentally great. They've got great technology. They solve problems for customers in a way, we could never replicate. That's, what's all amazing about a business like Nutanix and just over a 10 year period of time, it literally has customer satisfaction levels, that we haven't seen from any other infrastructure software company that we've had the pleasure of diligencing over the last several years. So, what we're focused on, is how can we take those great products and offerings that Nutanix has, and continue to support them, through the further growth and expansion of areas like, the further Salesforce investment, to expand into these new areas like clusters, that we were talking about and thinking about, things that they can do, to further expand the strategic hold. And so, we have a large team of Bain Capital as I mentioned, 260 investment professionals, in our private equity business alone. About a third of those are just available to our companies to help support them, with various initiatives and efforts after we invest. And we'll certainly, of course make all of those available to Nutanix as well. >> Somebody was asking me the other day, what's hyper-converged infrastructure? How did that come about? And I was explaining, back in the day you had, you'd buy some servers and some storage, and you'd have a network. And you sort of have different teams. And you'd put applicant, you figure it out all out and put the applications on top, test it and make sure it all works and then the guys at VCE and VMware and Cisco and EMC, they got together and said, okay, we're going to bolt together a bunch of different components and pretest it here you go, here's a, here's a skew. And then, what Nutanix did was actually, really transformational and said, okay. Look, we can do this through software. And now that was what late 2000? Now, we're sort of entering this new era, this next generation of cloud, cross clouds. So, I wonder how you think about, based on what you were just talking about the whole notion of MA versus organic. There's a lot of organic development that needs to be done but perhaps you could buy in or inorganically through MA to actually get there faster. How do you think about that balance? >> Look I think that was an articulate by the way explanation of I think that the origins of a hyperconverged infrastructure, so I enjoyed that very much. But I think that with any of our businesses and with Nutanix we're of course looking at where are we trying to get to in several years and what are the best ways to support the business to get there? Of course, they'll primarily that will be through continuing organic investment in the company and all the innovation in the product, that they've been doing. Will the company contemplate acquisitions, to further achieve the development goals and the objectives for solving paying points for customers, to get to the strategic places they're trying to get to of course, but it all, is a part of the package of what's a good fit for the company and its growth objective. >> I mean, with the size of your portfolio, I mean, you're a full stack investor, I would say. Is there any part of the so-called tech stack that you won't touch that you would actually not walk, but run away from? (laughs) >> Well, I wouldn't say that we're running away from anything, but the questions that we're asking ourselves are, is the technology that we're investing endurable? Is it advantaged and does have a growing role in the world? And if we think that those things are true, we're absolutely, thrilled to invest behind those things. If there are things that we feel like, that's not the case. then we would tend to shy away from those investments. We've certainly found opportunities in businesses that people perceived as one, but we believe to be another. >> Well, so, let me ask you specifically about Nutanix. I mean, clearly they achieved escape velocity. One of the few companies actually, from last decade, it was Nutanix pure, not a whole lot of others that actually were able to maintain independence as a public company. What do you see as their durability? They're, moat if you will. >> Yeah, absolutely, well clearly we think that it's a very durable and very advantaged business. Yeah, thus the investment. Look, we think that Nutanix has been able to offer the best hyperconverged infrastructure product in the market bar none. One that is got the best ease of use is the most nimble and flexible for customers. And you just see that resulting customer feedback. And also that plays across very heterogeneous architectures in a way that it's really powerful. Because of that we think that they're best positioned to be able to leverage that technology as they have been, to continue to play across both public and private hybrid cloud environments. And so we're excited to back them in that journey. It really starts from solving an acute customer paying point, better than anybody else can. And we're looking to back them to continue to expand that vision. >> Yeah, well, I've talked to a lot of Nutanix customers, over the years and that is the fundamental value proposition it's really simple, very high, customer satisfaction. So, that makes a lot of sense. Well, Dave, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and participating in theCUBE on Cloud. Really appreciate your perspectives, wish you best of luck. And hopefully we can do this again in the future. Maybe face to face >> Yeah, face to face maybe someday. Dave, I really appreciate it. It's been a pleasure and good luck with the rest of your interviews. >> All right, thank you. Well keep it right there, everybody for more Cube on Cloud. This is Dave Vellante, we'll be right back. (soft music)

>>from the Cube Studios >>in Palo Alto and >>Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >>Hey, welcome back here. Ready? Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're doing a special presentation today really talking about AI and making ai really with two companies that are right in the heart of the Dell EMC as well as Intel. So we're excited to have a couple Cube alumni back on the program. Haven't seen him in a little while. First off from Intel. Lisa Spelman. She is the corporate VP and GM for the Xeon Group in Jersey on and Memory Group. Great to see you, Lisa. >>Good to see you again, too. >>And we've got Ravi Pinter. Conte. He is the SBP server product management, also from Dell Technologies. Ravi, great to see you as well. >>Good to see you on beast. Of course, >>yes. So let's jump into it. So, yesterday, Robbie, you guys announced a bunch of new kind of ai based solutions where if you can take us through that >>Absolutely so one of the things we did Jeff was we said it's not good enough for us to have a point product. But we talked about hope, the tour of products, more importantly, everything from our workstation side to the server to these storage elements and things that we're doing with VM Ware, for example. Beyond that, we're also obviously pleased with everything we're doing on bringing the right set off validated configurations and reference architectures and ready solutions so that the customer really doesn't have to go ahead and do the due diligence. Are figuring out how the various integration points are coming for us in making a solution possible. Obviously, all this is based on the great partnership we have with Intel on using not just their, you know, super cues, but FPG's as well. >>That's great. So, Lisa, I wonder, you know, I think a lot of people you know, obviously everybody knows Intel for your CPU is, but I don't think they recognize kind of all the other stuff that can wrap around the core CPU to add value around a particular solution. Set or problems. That's what If you could tell us a little bit more about Z on family and what you guys are doing in the data center with this kind of new interesting thing called AI and machine learning. >>Yeah. Um, so thanks, Jeff and Ravi. It's, um, amazing. The way to see that artificial intelligence applications are just growing in their pervasiveness. And you see it taking it out across all sorts of industries. And it's actually being built into just about every application that is coming down the pipe. And so if you think about meeting toe, have your hardware foundation able to support that. That's where we're seeing a lot of the customer interest come in. And not just a first Xeon, but, like Robbie said on the whole portfolio and how the system and solution configuration come together. So we're approaching it from a total view of being able to move all that data, store all of that data and cross us all of that data and providing options along that entire pipeline that move, um, and within that on Z on. Specifically, we've really set that as our cornerstone foundation for AI. If it's the most deployed solution and data center CPU around the world and every single application is going to have artificial intelligence in it, it makes sense that you would have artificial intelligence acceleration built into the actual hardware so that customers get a better experience right out of the box, regardless of which industry they're in or which specialized function they might be focusing on. >>It's really it's really wild, right? Cause in process, right, you always move through your next point of failure. So, you know, having all these kind of accelerants and the ways that you can carve off parts of the workload part of the intelligence that you can optimize betters is so important as you said Lisa and also Rocket and the solution side. Nobody wants General Ai just for ai sake. It's a nice word. Interesting science experiment. But it's really in the applied. A world is. We're starting to see the value in the application of this stuff, and I wonder you have a customer. You want to highlight Absalon, tell us a little bit about their journey and what you guys did with them. >>Great, sure. I mean, if you didn't start looking at Epsilon there in the market in the marketing business, and one of the crucial things for them is to ensure that they're able to provide the right data. Based on that analysis, there run on? What is it that the customer is looking for? And they can't wait for a period of time, but they need to be doing that in the near real time basis, and that's what excellent does. And what really blew my mind was the fact that they actually service are send out close to 100 billion messages. Again, it's 100 billion messages a year. And so you can imagine the amount of data that they're analyzing, which is in petabytes of data, and they need to do real time. And that's all possible because of the kind of analytics we have driven into the power It silver's, you know, using the latest of the Intel Intel Xeon processor couple with some of the technologies from the BGS side, which again I love them to go back in and analyze this data and service to the customers very rapidly. >>You know, it's funny. I think Mark Tech is kind of an under appreciated ah world of ai and, you know, in machine to machine execution, right, That's the amount of transactions go through when you load a webpage on your site that actually ideas who you are you know, puts puts a marketplace together, sells time on that or a spot on that ad and then lets people in is a really sophisticated, as you said in massive amounts of data going through the interesting stuff. If it's done right, it's magic. And if it's done, not right, then people get pissed off. You gotta have. You gotta have use our tools. >>You got it. I mean, this is where I talked about, you know, it can be garbage in garbage out if you don't really act on the right data. Right. So that is where I think it becomes important. But also, if you don't do it in a timely fashion, but you don't service up the right content at the right time. You miss the opportunity to go ahead and grab attention, >>right? Right. Lisa kind of back to you. Um, you know, there's all kinds of open source stuff that's happening also in the in the AI and machine learning world. So we hear things about tense or flow and and all these different libraries. How are you guys, you know, kind of embracing that world as you look at ai and kind of the development. We've been at it for a while. You guys are involved in everything from autonomous vehicles to the Mar Tech. Is we discussed? How are you making sure that these things were using all the available resources to optimize the solutions? >>Yeah, I think you and Robbie we're just hitting on some of those examples of how many ways people have figured out how to apply AI now. So maybe at first it was really driven by just image recognition and image tagging. But now you see so much work being driven in recommendation engines and an object detection for much more industrial use cases, not just consumer enjoyment and also those things you mentioned and hit on where the personalization is a really fine line you walk between. How do you make an experience feel good? Personalized versus creepy personalized is a real challenge and opportunity across so many industries. And so open source like you mentioned, is a great place for that foundation because it gives people the tools to build upon. And I think our strategy is really a stack strategy that starts first with delivering the best hardware for artificial intelligence and again the other is the foundation for that. But we also have, you know, Milat type processing for out of the Edge. And then we have all the way through to very custom specific accelerators into the data center, then on top about the optimized software, which is going into each of those frameworks and doing the work so that the framework recognizes the specific acceleration we built into the CPU. Whether that steel boost or recognizes the capabilities that sit in that accelerator silicon, and then once we've done that software layer and this is where we have the opportunity for a lot of partnership is the ecosystem and the solutions work that Robbie started off by talking about. So Ai isn't, um, it's not easy for everyone. It has a lot of value, but it takes work to extract that value. And so partnerships within the ecosystem to make sure that I see these are taking those optimization is building them in and fundamentally can deliver to customers. Reliable solution is the last leg of that of that strategy, but it really is one of the most important because without it you get a lot of really good benchmark results but not a lot of good, happy customer, >>right? I'm just curious, Lee says, because you kind of sit in the catbird seat. You guys at the core, you know, kind of under all the layers running data centers run these workloads. How >>do you see >>kind of the evolution of machine learning and ai from kind of the early days, where with science projects and and really smart people on mahogany row versus now people are talking about trying to get it to, like a citizen developer, but really a citizen data science and, you know, in exposing in the power of AI to business leaders or business executioners. Analysts, if you will, so they can apply it to their day to day world in their day to day life. How do you see that kind of evolving? Because you not only in it early, but you get to see some of the stuff coming down the road in design, find wins and reference architectures. How should people think about this evolution? >>It really is one of those things where if you step back from the fundamentals of AI, they've actually been around for 50 or more years. It's just that the changes in the amount of computing capability that's available, the network capacity that's available and the fundamental efficiency that I t and infrastructure managers and get out of their cloud architectures as allowed for this pervasiveness to evolve. And I think that's been the big tipping point that pushed people over this fear. Of course, I went through the same thing that cloud did where you had maybe every business leader or CEO saying Hey, get me a cloud and I'll figure out what for later give me some AI will get a week and make it work, But we're through those initial use pieces and starting to see a business value derived from from those deployments. And I think some of the most exciting areas are in the medical services field and just the amount, especially if you think of the environment we're in right now. The amount of efficiency and in some cases, reduction in human contact that you could require for diagnostics and just customer tracking and ability, ability to follow their entire patient History is really powerful and represents the next wave and care and how we scale our limited resource of doctors nurses technician. And the point we're making of what's coming next is where you start to see even more mass personalization and recommendations in that way that feel very not spooky to people but actually comforting. And they take value from them because it allows them to immediately act. Robbie reference to the speed at which you have to utilize the data. When people get immediately act more efficiently. They're generally happier with the service. So we see so much opportunity and we're continuing to address across, you know, again that hardware, software and solution stack so we can stay a step ahead of our customers, >>Right? That's great, Ravi. I want to give you the final word because you guys have to put the solutions together, it actually delivering to the customer. So not only, you know the hardware and the software, but any other kind of ecosystem components that you have to bring together. So I wonder if you can talk about that approach and how you know it's it's really the solution. At the end of the day, not specs, not speeds and feeds. That's not really what people care about. It's really a good solution. >>Yeah, three like Jeff, because end of the day I mean, it's like this. Most of us probably use the A team to retry money, but we really don't know what really sits behind 80 and my point being that you really care at that particular point in time to be able to put a radio do machine and get your dollar bills out, for example. Likewise, when you start looking at what the customer really needs to know, what Lisa hit upon is actually right. I mean what they're looking for. And you said this on the whole solution side house. To our our mantra to this is very simple. We want to make sure that we use the right basic building blocks, ensuring that we bring the right solutions using three things the right products which essentially means that we need to use the right partners to get the right processes in GPU Xen. But then >>we get >>to the next level by ensuring that we can actually do things we can either provide no ready solutions are validated reference architectures being that you have the sausage making process that you now don't need to have the customer go through, right? In a way. We have done the cooking and we provide a recipe book and you just go through the ingredient process of peering does and then off your off right to go get your solution done. And finally, the final stages there might be helped that customers still need in terms of services. That's something else Dell technology provides. And the whole idea is that customers want to go out and have them help deploying the solutions. We can also do that we're services. So that's probably the way we approach our data. The way we approach, you know, providing the building blocks are using the right technologies from our partners, then making sure that we have the right solutions that our customers can look at. And finally, they need deployment. Help weaken due their services. >>Well, Robbie, Lisa, thanks for taking a few minutes. That was a great tee up, Rob, because I think we're gonna go to a customer a couple of customer interviews enjoying that nice meal that you prepared with that combination of hardware, software, services and support. So thank you for your time and a great to catch up. All right, let's go and run the tape. Hi, Jeff. I wanted to talk about two examples of collaboration that we have with the partners that have yielded Ah, really examples of ah put through HPC and AI activities. So the first example that I wanted to cover is within your AHMAD team up in Canada with that team. We collaborated with Intel on a tuning of algorithm and code in order to accelerate the mapping of the human brain. So we have a cluster down here in Texas called Zenith based on Z on and obtain memory on. And we were able to that customer with the three of us are friends and Intel the norm, our team on the Dell HPC on data innovation, injuring team to go and accelerate the mapping of the human brain. So imagine patients playing video games or doing all sorts of activities that help understand how the brain sends the signal in order to trigger a response of the nervous system. And it's not only good, good way to map the human brain, but think about what you can get with that type of information in order to help cure Alzheimer's or dementia down the road. So this is really something I'm passionate about. Is using technology to help all of us on all of those that are suffering from those really tough diseases? Yeah, yeah, way >>boil. I'm a project manager for the project, and the idea is actually to scan six participants really intensively in both the memory scanner and the G scanner and see if we can use human brain data to get closer to something called Generalized Intelligence. What we have in the AI world, the systems that are mathematically computational, built often they do one task really, really well, but they struggle with other tasks. Really good example. This is video games. Artificial neural nets can often outperform humans and video games, but they don't really play in a natural way. Artificial neural net. Playing Mario Brothers The way that it beats the system is by actually kind of gliding its way through as quickly as possible. And it doesn't like collect pennies. For example, if you play Mary Brothers as a child, you know that collecting those coins is part of your game. And so the idea is to get artificial neural nets to behave more like humans. So like we have Transfer of knowledge is just something that humans do really, really well and very naturally. It doesn't take 50,000 examples for a child to know the difference between a dog and a hot dog when you eat when you play with. But an artificial neural net can often take massive computational power and many examples before it understands >>that video games are awesome, because when you do video game, you're doing a vision task instant. You're also doing a >>lot of planning and strategy thinking, but >>you're also taking decisions you several times a second, and we record that we try to see. Can we from brain activity predict >>what people were doing? We can break almost 90% accuracy with this type of architecture. >>Yeah, yeah, >>Use I was the lead posts. Talk on this collaboration with Dell and Intel. She's trying to work on a model called Graph Convolution Neural nets. >>We have being involved like two computing systems to compare it, like how the performance >>was voting for The lab relies on both servers that we have internally here, so I have a GPU server, but what we really rely on is compute Canada and Compute Canada is just not powerful enough to be able to run the models that he was trying to run so it would take her days. Weeks it would crash, would have to wait in line. Dell was visiting, and I was invited into the meeting very kindly, and they >>told us that they started working with a new >>type of hardware to train our neural nets. >>Dell's using traditional CPU use, pairing it with a new >>type off memory developed by Intel. Which thing? They also >>their new CPU architectures and really optimized to do deep learning. So all of that sounds great because we had this problem. We run out of memory, >>the innovation lab having access to experts to help answer questions immediately. That's not something to gate. >>We were able to train the attic snatch within 20 minutes. But before we do the same thing, all the GPU we need to wait almost three hours to each one simple way we >>were able to train the short original neural net. Dell has been really great cause anytime we need more memory, we send an email, Dell says. Yeah, sure, no problem. We'll extended how much memory do you need? It's been really simple from our end, and I think it's really great to be at the edge of science and technology. We're not just doing the same old. We're pushing the boundaries. Like often. We don't know where we're going to be in six months. In the big data world computing power makes a big difference. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The second example I'd like to cover is the one that will call the data accelerator. That's a publisher that we have with the University of Cambridge, England. There we partnered with Intel on Cambridge, and we built up at the time the number one Io 500 storage solution on. And it's pretty amazing because it was built on standard building blocks, power edge servers until Xeon processors some envy me drives from our partners and Intel. And what we did is we. Both of this system with a very, very smart and elaborate suffering code that gives an ultra fast performance for our customers, are looking for a front and fast scratch to their HPC storage solutions. We're also very mindful that this innovation is great for others to leverage, so the suffering Could will soon be available on Get Hub on. And, as I said, this was number one on the Iot 500 was initially released >>within Cambridge with always out of focus on opening up our technologies to UK industry, where we can encourage UK companies to take advantage of advanced research computing technologies way have many customers in the fields of automotive gas life sciences find our systems really help them accelerate their product development process. Manage Poor Khalidiya. I'm the director of research computing at Cambridge University. Yeah, we are a research computing cloud provider, but the emphasis is on the consulting on the processes around how to exploit that technology rather than the better results. Our value is in how we help businesses use advanced computing resources rather than the provision. Those results we see increasingly more and more data being produced across a wide range of verticals, life sciences, astronomy, manufacturing. So the data accelerators that was created as a component within our data center compute environment. Data processing is becoming more and more central element within research computing. We're getting very large data sets, traditional spinning disk file systems can't keep up and we find applications being slowed down due to a lack of data, So the data accelerator was born to take advantage of new solid state storage devices. I tried to work out how we can have a a staging mechanism for keeping your data on spinning disk when it's not required pre staging it on fast envy any stories? Devices so that can feed the applications at the rate quiet for maximum performance. So we have the highest AI capability available anywhere in the UK, where we match II compute performance Very high stories performance Because for AI, high performance storage is a key element to get the performance up. Currently, the data accelerated is the fastest HPC storage system in the world way are able to obtain 500 gigabytes a second read write with AI ops up in the 20 million range. We provide advanced computing technologies allow some of the brightest minds in the world really pushed scientific and medical research. We enable some of the greatest academics in the world to make tomorrow's discoveries. Yeah, yeah, yeah. >>Alright, Welcome back, Jeff Frick here and we're excited for this next segment. We're joined by Jeremy Raider. He is the GM digital transformation and scale solutions for Intel Corporation. Jeremy, great to see you. Hey, thanks for having me. I love I love the flowers in the backyard. I thought maybe you ran over to the Japanese, the Japanese garden or the Rose Garden, Right To very beautiful places to visit in Portland. >>Yeah. You know, you only get him for a couple. Ah, couple weeks here, so we get the timing just right. >>Excellent. All right, so let's jump into it. Really? And in this conversation really is all about making Ai Riel. Um, and you guys are working with Dell and you're working with not only Dell, right? There's the hardware and software, but a lot of these smaller a solution provider. So what is some of the key attributes that that needs to make ai riel for your customers out there? >>Yeah, so, you know, it's a it's a complex space. So when you can bring the best of the intel portfolio, which is which is expanding a lot, you know, it's not just the few anymore you're getting into Memory technologies, network technologies and kind of a little less known as how many resources we have focused on the software side of things optimizing frameworks and optimizing, and in these key ingredients and libraries that you can stitch into that portfolio to really get more performance in value, out of your machine learning and deep learning space. And so you know what we've really done here with Dell? It has started to bring a bunch of that portfolio together with Dell's capabilities, and then bring in that ai's V partner, that software vendor where we can really take and stitch and bring the most value out of that broad portfolio, ultimately using using the complexity of what it takes to deploy an AI capability. So a lot going on. They're bringing kind of the three legged stool of the software vendor hardware vendor dental into the mix, and you get a really strong outcome, >>right? So before we get to the solutions piece, let's stick a little bit into the Intel world. And I don't know if a lot of people are aware that obviously you guys make CPUs and you've been making great CPIs forever. But there's a whole lot more stuff that you've added, you know, kind of around the core CPU. If you will in terms of of actual libraries and ways to really optimize the seond processors to operate in an AI world. I wonder if you can kind of take us a little bit below the surface on how that works. What are some of the examples of things you can do to get more from your Gambira Intel processors for ai specific applications of workloads? >>Yeah, well, you know, there's a ton of software optimization that goes into this. You know that having the great CPU is definitely step one. But ultimately you want to get down into the libraries like tensor flow. We have data analytics, acceleration libraries. You know, that really allows you to get kind of again under the covers a little bit and look at it. How do we have to get the most out of the kinds of capabilities that are ultimately used in machine learning in deep learning capabilities, and then bring that forward and trying and enable that with our software vendors so that they can take advantage of those acceleration components and ultimately, you know, move from, you know, less training time or could be a the cost factor. But those are the kind of capabilities we want to expose to software vendors do these kinds of partnerships. >>Okay. Ah, and that's terrific. And I do think that's a big part of the story that a lot of people are probably not as aware of that. There are a lot of these optimization opportunities that you guys have been leveraging for a while. So shifting gears a little bit, right? AI and machine learning is all about the data. And in doing a little research for this, I found actually you on stage talking about some company that had, like, 350 of road off, 315 petabytes of data, 140,000 sources of those data. And I think probably not great quote of six months access time to get that's right and actually work with it. And the company you're referencing was intel. So you guys know a lot about debt data, managing data, everything from your manufacturing, and obviously supporting a global organization for I t and run and ah, a lot of complexity and secrets and good stuff. So you know what have you guys leveraged as intel in the way you work with data and getting a good data pipeline. That's enabling you to kind of put that into these other solutions that you're providing to the customers, >>right? Well, it is, You know, it's absolutely a journey, and it doesn't happen overnight, and that's what we've you know. We've seen it at Intel on We see it with many of our customers that are on the same journey that we've been on. And so you know, this idea of building that pipeline it really starts with what kind of problems that you're trying to solve. What are the big issues that are holding you back that company where you see that competitive advantage that you're trying to get to? And then ultimately, how do you build the structure to enable the right kind of pipeline of that data? Because that's that's what machine learning and deep learning is that data journey. So really a lot of focus around you know how we can understand those business challenges bring forward those kinds of capabilities along the way through to where we structure our entire company around those assets and then ultimately some of the partnerships that we're gonna be talking about these companies that are out there to help us really squeeze the most out of that data as quickly as possible because otherwise it goes stale real fast, sits on the shelf and you're not getting that value out of right. So, yeah, we've been on the journey. It's Ah, it's a long journey, but ultimately we could take a lot of those those kind of learnings and we can apply them to our silicon technology. The software optimization is that we're doing and ultimately, how we talk to our enterprise customers about how they can solve overcome some of the same challenges that we did. >>Well, let's talk about some of those challenges specifically because, you know, I think part of the the challenge is that kind of knocked big data, if you will in Hadoop, if you will kind of off the rails. Little bit was there's a whole lot that goes into it. Besides just doing the analysis, there's a lot of data practice data collection, data organization, a whole bunch of things that have to happen before. You can actually start to do the sexy stuff of AI. So you know, what are some of those challenges. How are you helping people get over kind of these baby steps before they can really get into the deep end of the pool? >>Yeah, well, you know, one is you have to have the resource is so you know, do you even have the resource is if you can acquire those Resource is can you keep them interested in the kind of work that you're doing? So that's a big challenge on and actually will talk about how that fits into some of the partnerships that we've been establishing in the ecosystem. It's also you get stuck in this poc do loop, right? You finally get those resource is and they start to get access to that data that we talked about. It start to play out some scenarios, a theorize a little bit. Maybe they show you some really interesting value, but it never seems to make its way into a full production mode. And I think that is a challenge that has faced so many enterprises that are stuck in that loop. And so that's where we look at who's out there in the ecosystem that can help more readily move through that whole process of the evaluation that proved the r a y, the POC and ultimately move that thing that capability into production mode as quickly as possible that you know that to me is one of those fundamental aspects of if you're stuck in the POC. Nothing's happening from this. This is not helping your company. We want to move things more quickly, >>right? Right. And let's just talk about some of these companies that you guys are working with that you've got some reference architectures is data robot a Grid dynamics H 20 just down the road in Antigua. So a lot of the companies we've worked with with Cube and I think you know another part that's interesting. It again we can learn from kind of old days of big data is kind of generalized. Ai versus solution specific. Ai and I think you know where there's a real opportunity is not AI for a sake, but really it's got to be applied to a specific solution, a specific problem so that you have, you know, better chatbots, better customer service experience, you know, better something. So when you were working with these folks and trying to design solutions or some of the opportunities that you saw to work with some of these folks to now have an applied a application slash solution versus just kind of AI for ai's sake. >>Yeah. I mean, that could be anything from fraud, detection and financial services, or even taking a step back and looking more horizontally like back to that data challenge. If if you're stuck at the AI built a fantastic Data lake, but I haven't been able to pull anything back out of it, who are some of the companies that are out there that can help overcome some of those big data challenges and ultimately get you to where you know, you don't have a data scientist spending 60% of their time on data acquisition pre processing? That's not where we want them, right? We want them on building out that next theory. We want them on looking at the next business challenge. We want them on selecting the right models, but ultimately they have to do that as quickly as possible so that they can move that that capability forward into the next phase. So, really, it's about that that connection of looking at those those problems or challenges in the whole pipeline. And these companies like data robot in H 20 quasi. Oh, they're all addressing specific challenges in the end to end. That's why they've kind of bubbled up as ones that we want to continue to collaborate with, because it can help enterprises overcome those issues more fast. You know more readily. >>Great. Well, Jeremy, thanks for taking a few minutes and giving us the Intel side of the story. Um, it's a great company has been around forever. I worked there many, many moons ago. That's Ah, that's a story for another time, but really appreciate it and I'll interview you will go there. Alright, so super. Thanks a lot. So he's Jeremy. I'm Jeff Frick. So now it's time to go ahead and jump into the crowd chat. It's crowdchat dot net slash make ai real. Um, we'll see you in the chat. And thanks for watching

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Everybody, welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California in our studios where we have a quarantine crew and we're doing remote interviews with thought leaders in the industry and people who have been around the block, beat it through three industry cycles but also can share their perspectives on the COVID-19 situation that we're in, the challenges and the opportunities. And I have with me, Jeremy Burton, a good friend of theCUBE. Have been a CUBE alumni now for 10 years, now the CEO of Observe, it's a stealth startup. I got a little taste of it, it's a Cloud thing. It's going to be part of this whole new guard. Jeremy, great to see you. You're sheltering in place, we're sheltering in the studio. Thanks for joining me. >> No, thanks for the offer. I mean, it's funny these days I welcome chance to actually speak to somebody and particularly, somebody that's not at Observe. So this is a rare treat in the last three weeks. >> Telling the wife and kids, "Hey, I'm going to go talk to theCUBE guy." So you know, I'm going to have some fun for a while. Look, I want to just have a candid fun conversation 'cause I think one of the things that's interesting to me in one, things that we're spending a lot of time doing media on is getting the word out about some of the things that are going on. People do have anxiety, they're sheltering in place for the folks that've been in the tech industry, working at home and being virtual has been part of the thing. It's not a big thing but from some of the people it's like a first time thing. And also it's also highlighting a disruption that kind of is off the books if you will, the classic continuous operations and disaster recovery was also confined to power outages or hurricanes or all those things that we people are protected against. But this is just a surge of the herd of the people going home. It's causing an at scale problem and showing these challenges, but there's also opportunities. What's your take on this? How do you see this evolving? What's your view of the current situation and some of the comments? >> Yeah, I think for most of us we're in a little bit unchartered territory. I don't really know a whole lot about medicine or the details of the virus or how pandemics happen. But we obviously have to, we deal with the consequences of it. And so I think right now although, I think it's a fairly bad situation for a lot of people, just having been through a couple of recessions where we all went through 9/11. The world does turn around and you come out the other side. And so the key thing is you start like a very much as a cliche, but you've got to live in the moment, "What can I do right now? "What can I affect right now? "How can I make sure that what I'm working on "is a value for when we come out the other side "and when more curveballs come along?" I think you've got a reason about that with the best information you have at the time. So I almost feel like you very much, you've got to just live solid like day to day, week to week, listen to the data and adapt based on that. But it's certainly starting to reinvent how work is done. I think we've all worked from home at some point. We've all worked using our equipment at home. But the prospect of working that way for months on end and it maybe been the new way of working, is a whole new ballgame. So I'm a big believer that this will fundamentally change the way we work. I don't think we're going to go 100% back to the way that we were, and there's going to be quite a lot of readjustments, and I think in that world, there's going to be some new companies come along that are big winners. And by definition, there's going to be some big losers as well. >> Well, people who know theCUBE know that I'm a big fan of you as an executive. I've seen the vision, you have also great technical shops and product shops, but also a good operational view. You've always been a fan of digital. And I think if you look at video conferencing, for instance, WebEx as a Cisco thing, great bulletproof of the enterprise, but Zoom has come across the scene. I've never seen so many Zoom parties. I did one with my family that they actually liked it. They were having fun. We had cocktails raising the wineglasses up. So people are Zooming their CUBE in, we're doing interviews. So video now is not just a corporate thing. You're seeing the engagement of digital taking on a new life and this is a whole new roles and responsibilities that we might reimagine how people do their business because with the events being canceled that are going on, whether they're concerts or just industry or tech events or any event, that physical space is gone, now it's going to digital. So how do you replicate the business value or personal value from physical face to face to digital? It's a whole new venue, there's new roles. It's complicated, it's a complex system. What's your thought on that? >> It is though, but what I have been pleasantly surprised by, I'd love it going in the office. I love the engagement with people and hanging out in the office. And so I was not really a big fan of remote working and virtually working, but I have to say, not only now where we virtually work in and we do the Zoom meetings and that's all well and good. It's a big cultural thing with at Observe to do a game night. And so we thought, "Well, why can't we do a virtual game night "and lending some trade secrets here? "But our favorite game was Secret Hitler." >> Yeah, that's a great game. One of my family's favorite. >> Turns out there's an online Secret Hitler. And you know what? The first time we played it, one of the nice thing is we've got less than 20 people in the company. So you got 12 or 14 people online. It's actually manageable. But I have to say, I'm almost embarrassed to say, it was almost as good sitting there with a drink playing virtual Secret Hitler as it was sitting around the desk. And so now I'm thinking when we go back to work, maybe we don't need to leave our desks and go have a drink together. We can just sit there on Zoom and play the secret Hitler online. Then you start looking around, "Well, what are the games can I play online?" Not like for one or two players or five players and I'm not talking about playing kind of Halo or something like that, but good collaborative games for tens of people to play at once. There's not as many as you think. So I feel like the social aspect of it, I mean, online gaming I think is huge. But even the video conferencing software, you would have thought that we would be done WebEx by now, right? I mean Skype and WebEx, we've had those for years, right? And so how does Zoom, which does guess what, video conferencing come along and start to clear up. And Zoom is not perfect by the way, but this is almost the crisis that they needed to make a fabulous business. I do believe as we start to come out the other side, I think there's going to be much, much investment in the VC world, on improving that remote work experience Because as much as me and you can talk to a video session, we can't collaborate and work together. The tools for doing that, I think still are relatively poor. >> I think you're onto something. Zoom by the way, had 10 million active dailies in December. This month was 200 million rocket ship. They got 90,000 universities. They essentially made some good moves. I think that's going to be good, but you bring up a good point about these new kinds of opportunities that are going to come out the other side, which is, think about Secret Hitler. For the folks who don't know, is a great game that you play with people, in your family or in friend group like Cards Against Me. And if you know that game, it's a similar thing concept, but you have different games. It's really fun, you should get it. Check it out online. But think about that online gaming or just what engagement means socially. I mean the old web days or just like a couple of months ago was individual engagement, "Did you like my tweet? "Did you like my Facebook post?" You're getting at something that's little bit more of a social organizational construct of group engagement, intimacy. >> Right, and the thing is we would do game night once a month and we'd get videos in and get the teamed together. Once a month was good when everybody had their own life to deal with. Now people are craving like, "Hey can we do this like every week?" And I wouldn't be surprised if the frequency increases from that, but I think that just almost speaks to human beings and that we crave social interaction. And even though most of the people at Observe are engineers and by definition should not enjoy as much social interaction, they do. They love it, right? And to me, that gaming and social direction, that's part of work. And so you have to have a virtual environment that can reproduce that. >> I mean, it's very interesting to see some of the entrepreneurial exercises or pitches that come out of this because I think it's going to be a Renaissance, it's not Renaissance 'cause it's going to come back. It's always been there. But the new kind of entrepreneurial products coming out are going to address these things. And the question I want to ask you, 'cause you've been on the big company, you've done extremely well in your career, than you get back down to your roots to doing startup, you're launching, you haven't yet launched. So you got hit right here, you're working at home sheltering in place. I was talking to a couple of VC buddies, venture capitalists, and they're saying, "I'm reading books and I'm doing research "but I really can't meet people." So their work has changed. How do you see the investment community reacting to this? Certainly valuations might come down. Obviously, their limited partners are being hit with the stock market. You're seeing a disruption. What do you see going on in the VC world around this cold hard time? >> I mean certainly all VCs are not created equal. So I think there's going to be different perspectives based on the background of the DNA of the VC involved. I think certainly at Observe, I feel very fortunate that we've got a sort of Hill Ventures. So these guys were the investors behind Snowflake and behind Pure Storage and many other good companies but they're very longterm investors and their advice to me has been, "Well look, "some of the most innovative times if you like, "have been during and after a major crisis. "And so if you make short term decisions "to get you through those crisis, "they're all terrible but they don't last forever "and there will be another side. "And so make good business decisions "and good investment decisions through this "because there will be winners "that emerge on the other side." And that's really what I try and get the team focused on is, "Guys for now, we're sort of hunkered down "and it feels bad, "but we're probably more privileged than most. "And we have an opportunity maybe on the other side, "to take advantage, we don't have a revenue stream, "we don't have existing customers. "We can sort of take this Greenfield business "that we've got and you go on the offensive "when things returned to assemblance of normal." So The Hill had been fantastic. And I would hope that most VCs retain that perspective, which is if it was a good company three weeks ago, it's probably still a good company today. And the best way to create value is to sort of empower I think the CEOs and executive teams to make the right sort of longer term decisions. Try and capitalize when you come out the other side because there will be losers as well. And I think the wrong decisions now can put you on the losing end of that equation in three, four, five months time. >> Yeah, that's a good point. If you are a good company just a few months ago or even weeks ago or a year ago, you're still a good company. That's really going to be a tell sign to what happens in some of these companies. If I got to ask you a more focused question on this whole, which side of the street are you on? Are you riding the wave or are you going to get taken away and washed away with it? Because there are bets and well, I want to get into Observe in a minute, but you mentioned Snowflake there in the Cloud wave. Obviously, that's pretty bullish. We're still bullish on that. Obviously, it's going to be game changer. But is there a tell sign for the kind of bets that those good management teams need to make now? Because I agree with you, when the Dot-com bubble burst in 2000 and really 2004 kicked back up again. 2008, we saw that post and a lot of great companies were created. So what's your advice on which side of history do you need to be on here? I'll say Cloud is one. What is your view on that? >> Yeah, I mean we felt for many years, it's not just since I went to the startup, but I am a huge believer in this transition to digital businesses. Frictionless interactions, automation, yes, obviously people are required to run a business, but if you could run a business remotely, or the businesses automated in a way such that it doesn't require hands-on operation, then that's a beautiful thing. And my belief is that, this terrible situation will force people to really think seriously about what the digital business looks like. If you don't have one, then that you may not be able to be in business in a year, two, three years down the line, right? There'll be some carryover, but I think the smart businesses are going to be able to function in an environment such as this. >> Yeah, I think that's great. >> That's going to be playing on everybody's minds. Now more than ever, I think that the digital business is a necessity. >> Yeah, I was just talking to a colleague and we were just talking about how all of the events got canceled and you've had the history running some of those best events ever in the industry at EMC. And we participated in those and you know your staff when it comes to events, there's economic value in these physical events as a venue, Science Convention Center in Moscone here in San Francisco. I mean there's a lot of things that go on, a lot of decision-making that's been standardized over the years and there's an economic value that comes out of those events. Now that's gone, and then these little digital teams, some companies have like five people, two people, sometimes maybe if you're lucky you have 10 or more or a department. And then you've got demand generation. All these guys are being told now, "You have to make up for the shortfall "in not just leads but value." And this just has been a big burden for some of my friends out there who are like, "Wait a minute, you want to take that and move it over here?" It's been kind of a challenge. What is your view on this? Because a lot of people are trying to figure this particular problem out on how to make digital work today and have some extensibility and get success. What's your take? >> Well, I'm still a huge believer I mean, whereas sort of like we just saw digital marketing content is still very much King, right? If you can produce a compelling piece of content online, TV quality with a depth of knowledge that you're going to attract an audience, now can you then make that experience interactive? Can you engage the audience in a deeper way? Yeah, you're probably not going to have something which lasts for a full day or for three days online, but I think it's really going to force the creativity on the content side to another level, right? It can't just be talking heads and PowerPoint pictures. So that rethinking from first principles, what an online conference or an online experience actually looks like in a way that it engages the people who are watching. To me, those folks are going to go do very, very well. And the economics, I know how much it costs to put on a conference for 10 or 15,000 people. And by the way, I know how much it costs to put on a virtual event for 10 or 15,000 people. And the economics are astounding in that difference. Now if you're physically somewhere, you can feel things that you can't feel online. Come on though, this is a problem that requires some innovation to solve, right? We've talked about virtual reality and augmented reality, but it's still pretty clunky and relegated to sort of niche use cases and bad games. But at some point, that technology has to reach the point where it can be useful and engage in a new. You can approximate to that physical experience. But I think that is going to be critical but many businesses even beyond sort of marketing and virtual events and that kind of thing, many businesses are just going to have to reinvent how they engage and interact with their customers and the automation of their operations and how do you get by when you don't have as many people physically in an office or operating machines? Everybody's going to have to think through that. >> Yeah, I think that's great insight and that's going to be a great clip that I'll share and I think that's going to be inspirational for the folks trying to solve that problem. The things that we're focused in on, as you know, and this is something that we're doing a lot of work on, is the engagement with groups and you mentioned The Secret Hitler as the game, they're going to see some new clever things go on. And I think the group dynamic and having people in whether it's virtual and physical spaces exchanging credible things, ideas or jokes or whatever is going to be a new kind of dynamic. >> Yeah. >> Because that's going to have to fill the void. >> Yeah, I mean I've got a small company so we can play these individual games, but just think about some of these board type games where I want to have three teams and I want to divide the company up into three. The logistics of actually figuring that out is ridiculous and it shouldn't be that way, right? And so these are basics of human social interactions. We want to play a game together, we want to divide up into teams. But that sounds like a relatively trivial thing, but try and find the number of games available that allow you to easily do that and each team interaction independently of the others, it's almost impossible. >> It's going to be fun to watch and I think and I hope we're going to learn. Well, thanks for the device. Let's get back to your startup. Let's get a plug in for that, I want to get the plug in. I've seen you in stealth so you can't really go into great detail, but you have been talking to customers. You are obviously related, that's related to Snowflake, but you were going to do some things with Snowflake. You're in the Cloud. Can you just take a minute to give a plug for what you guys are doing for the people who want to know what you guys are leaning towards in terms of the value proposition? >> Yeah well, when I look back in my career, one of the times I enjoyed the most was the time at Oracle and working with data. And I've been fortunate enough for the last four and a half years or so to be on the board of Snowflake. Couple of ex Oracle guys, Benoit and Thierry founded the company and they've reinvented the database. And I felt like I've sat for 20 years looking for the second coming of the database and we all were sort of had fake thinking it was Hadoop. And turns out it wasn't. But I think Snowflake and the separation of storage and compute that allows them to sort of scale and have a usage-based pricing model, I just think is absolutely revolutionary and I think it's going to be one of the great companies of the new era. And so when I was there when I looked at Observe, really the thesis was that using a platform like Snowflake, you could potentially reason about unstructured log data. It's all like Splunk. You could reason about time series data, a little bit like Datadog or tracing data like AppDynamics or in fact any data, you could reason about it together. And today, if you look at the world, it's like if you want to do something with logs, you go get one product. If you want to do something with relational data, you get another, if you want to do time series data, you get another, you want to do tracing, you get an APM tool. And nobody has the big picture, right? Everybody's got their own little piece of data and their own perspective on where the issue might be in your company. But nobody really knows and it's usually put together in the brain of, of the smartest guy in the room. And so I thought it was quite simple. At Snowflake, you've got this commercial database that can do instruction data and time series data and relational data. And what if we could collect all data within an organization together, structure it, relate it, and then imagine what you could find out about your infrastructure, your applications, your business? >> Sort of unification? Does it have like unification kind of concept for users or IT? >> Yeah, I think the emerging category would be observability but it really is a collapsing of log analytics, metrics monitoring and tracing into this new category of observability. We don't necessarily just view that though as sort of data coming out of Kubernetes clusters or out of AWS or wherever. We actually could ingest security data. We could ingest data from people surfing using your app or surfing your website. We could take logs coming out of machines on a factory floor. So the way we built the product, it can be literally any kind of data. And we try and structure it and relate it and make sense of it and then make it very easy for people to navigate through it and determine issues and problems. So yeah, we're pretty excited about it. And like I said, we could not have built this even a couple of years ago because I don't think Snowflake would have been there. And in fact, that was one of the big risks when we started the company. Can we build it on Snowflake? And so here we are two years later and we think we can. Well, we're sure we can do it. >> Yeah, they've had a good run too. I mean, look at the growth of Snowflake. >> Yeah, it's crazy. I've never seen anything like it and in the last 20 years and B2B, I've never seen anything like it. So just like I felt in the mid 90s when I was at Oracle, people were making decisions to go with Oracle and then saying, "Hey, help me get all of my other data in that, "my mainframe data, my this, my that." I think Snowflake are going to go through the same sort of growth phase and hopefully with Observe, we can be like, "Hey, if you want to put "your unstructured data or time series data, "we can help you do that very easily." >> Well, this is exactly the current wave that you want to be on the right side of because like you said, just a year or so ago or a couple of years ago, it wasn't available. This is kind of the new capabilities. >> Yeah, I feel like there's going to be a lot of businesses, grow ridiculously. You talked about the Zoom numbers. These are ridiculous growth numbers and there are going to be companies come out the other side that take advantage of the new environment. And as they're growing, as they're scaling, as they build these new microservice-based applications, they're going to run into issues and we hope at least that it's products with our kind of architecture, that's going to be able to help these fast-growing businesses. So yeah, as I said, we're somewhat fortunate in that we don't have a product yet, but certainly on the other side of this, we think there's going to be plenty of opportunity to help a few folks. >> We know you got to do a launch and we're looking forward to hearing more and getting the briefing, and looking forward to hearing more about it when you go public. And yeah, thanks for coming on and taking the time today. I know you got your daughter's birthday party there and you're going to have some celebration. Thank you for sharing the insights on your vision of digital. I thought that was very compelling and great to see you and stay safe. >> Great to see you. Yeah, my 18-year-old, it's got a birthday party and she like always would worry, "What if no one shows up?" Well, today she knows no one's going to show up. >> Except for her family, yeah. >> It's going to be down in the family, yeah. So thanks for that and you guys stay safe and been great the last 10 years knowing theCUBE been that long but hopefully, here is the next 10 years after this current situation is over. >> Yeah, looking forward to it, it's going to be a lot of fun rye and get the content out there. And again, thanks for coming on during this important time and sharing your insights and also just making some entertainment here. We're getting some conversations so people can fill the void and play some games and have some fun. Jeremy, thanks. Great to see you. Jeremy Burton, senior executive in the industry. I've known him for years, been a CUBE alumni since theCUBE was formed. Now the CEO of Observe, sharing his insights on the industry but more importantly, how to be successful, how to come out the other side. Don't be too optimistic. Be focused on today and get through it. That's his advice. Of course, we're theCUBE bringing you all the data as we can now with remote interviews during this time. Thanks for watching, I'm John furrier. (soft music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Everybody, welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California in our studios where we have a quarantine crew and we're doing remote interviews with thought leaders in the industry and people who have been around the block, beat it through three industry cycles but also can share their perspectives on the COVID-19 situation that we're in, the challenges and the opportunities. And I have with me, Jeremy Burton, a good friend of theCUBE. Have been a CUBE alumni now for 10 years, now the CEO of Observe, it's a stealth startup. I got a little taste of it, it's a Cloud thing. It's going to be part of this whole new guard. Jeremy, great to see you. You're sheltering in place, we're sheltering in the studio. Thanks for joining me. >> No, thanks for the offer. I mean, it's funny these days I welcome chance to actually speak to somebody and particularly, somebody that's not at Observe. So this is a rare treat in the last three weeks. >> Telling the wife and kids, "Hey, I'm going to go talk to theCUBE guy." So you know, I'm going to have some fun for a while. Look, I want to just have a candid fun conversation 'cause I think one of the things that's interesting to me in one, things that we're spending a lot of time doing media on is getting the word out about some of the things that are going on. People do have anxiety, they're sheltering in place for the folks that've been in the tech industry, working at home and being virtual has been part of the thing. It's not a big thing but from some of the people it's like a first time thing. And also it's also highlighting a disruption that kind of is off the books if you will, the classic continuous operations and disaster recovery was also confined to power outages or hurricanes or all those things that we people are protected against. But this is just a surge of the herd of the people going home. It's causing an at scale problem and showing these challenges, but there's also opportunities. What's your take on this? How do you see this evolving? What's your view of the current situation and some of the comments? >> Yeah, I think for most of us we're in a little bit unchartered territory. I don't really know a whole lot about medicine or the details of the virus or how pandemics happen. But we obviously have to, we deal with the consequences of it. And so I think right now although, I think it's a fairly bad situation for a lot of people, just having been through a couple of recessions where we all went through 9/11. The world does turn around and you come out the other side. And so the key thing is you start like a very much as a cliche, but you've got to live in the moment, "What can I do right now? "What can I affect right now? "How can I make sure that what I'm working on "is a value for when we come out the other side "and when more curveballs come along?" I think you've got a reason about that with the best information you have at the time. So I almost feel like you very much, you've got to just live solid like day to day, week to week, listen to the data and adapt based on that. But it's certainly starting to reinvent how work is done. I think we've all worked from home at some point. We've all worked using our equipment at home. But the prospect of working that way for months on end and it maybe been the new way of working, is a whole new ballgame. So I'm a big believer that this will fundamentally change the way we work. I don't think we're going to go 100% back to the way that we were, and there's going to be quite a lot of readjustments, and I think in that world, there's going to be some new companies come along that are big winners. And by definition, there's going to be some big losers as well. >> Well, people who know theCUBE know that I'm a big fan of you as an executive. I've seen the vision, you have also great technical shops and product shops, but also a good operational view. You've always been a fan of digital. And I think if you look at video conferencing, for instance, WebEx as a Cisco thing, great bulletproof of the enterprise, but Zoom has come across the scene. I've never seen so many Zoom parties. I did one with my family that they actually liked it. They were having fun. We had cocktails raising the wineglasses up. So people are Zooming their CUBE in, we're doing interviews. So video now is not just a corporate thing. You're seeing the engagement of digital taking on a new life and this is a whole new roles and responsibilities that we might reimagine how people do their business because with the events being canceled that are going on, whether they're concerts or just industry or tech events or any event, that physical space is gone, now it's going to digital. So how do you replicate the business value or personal value from physical face to face to digital? It's a whole new venue, there's new roles. It's complicated, it's a complex system. What's your thought on that? >> It is though, but what I have been pleasantly surprised by, I'd love it going in the office. I love the engagement with people and hanging out in the office. And so I was not really a big fan of remote working and virtually working, but I have to say, not only now where we virtually work in and we do the Zoom meetings and that's all well and good. It's a big cultural thing with at Observe to do a game night. And so we thought, "Well, why can't we do a virtual game night "and lending some trade secrets here? "But our favorite game was Secret Hitler." >> Yeah, that's a great game. One of my family's favorite. >> Turns out there's an online Secret Hitler. And you know what? The first time we played it, one of the nice thing is we've got less than 20 people in the company. So you got 12 or 14 people online. It's actually manageable. But I have to say, I'm almost embarrassed to say, it was almost as good sitting there with a drink playing virtual Secret Hitler as it was sitting around the desk. And so now I'm thinking when we go back to work, maybe we don't need to leave our desks and go have a drink together. We can just sit there on Zoom and play the secret Hitler online. Then you start looking around, "Well, what are the games can I play online?" Not like for one or two players or five players and I'm not talking about playing kind of Halo or something like that, but good collaborative games for tens of people to play at once. There's not as many as you think. So I feel like the social aspect of it, I mean, online gaming I think is huge. But even the video conferencing software, you would have thought that we would be done WebEx by now, right? I mean Skype and WebEx, we've had those for years, right? And so how does Zoom, which does guess what, video conferencing come along and start to clear up. And Zoom is not perfect by the way, but this is almost the crisis that they needed to make a fabulous business. I do believe as we start to come out the other side, I think there's going to be much, much investment in the VC world, on improving that remote work experience Because as much as me and you can talk to a video session, we can't collaborate and work together. The tools for doing that, I think still are relatively poor. >> I think you're onto something. Zoom by the way, had 10 million active dailies in December. This month was 200 million rocket ship. They got 90,000 universities. They essentially made some good moves. I think that's going to be good, but you bring up a good point about these new kinds of opportunities that are going to come out the other side, which is, think about Secret Hitler. For the folks who don't know, is a great game that you play with people, in your family or in friend group like Cards Against Me. And if you know that game, it's a similar thing concept, but you have different games. It's really fun, you should get it. Check it out online. But think about that online gaming or just what engagement means socially. I mean the old web days or just like a couple of months ago was individual engagement, "Did you like my tweet? "Did you like my Facebook post?" You're getting at something that's little bit more of a social organizational construct of group engagement, intimacy. >> Right, and the thing is we would do game night once a month and we'd get videos in and get the teamed together. Once a month was good when everybody had their own life to deal with. Now people are craving like, "Hey can we do this like every week?" And I wouldn't be surprised if the frequency increases from that, but I think that just almost speaks to human beings and that we crave social interaction. And even though most of the people at Observe are engineers and by definition should not enjoy as much social interaction, they do. They love it, right? And to me, that gaming and social direction, that's part of work. And so you have to have a virtual environment that can reproduce that. >> I mean, it's very interesting to see some of the entrepreneurial exercises or pitches that come out of this because I think it's going to be a Renaissance, it's not Renaissance 'cause it's going to come back. It's always been there. But the new kind of entrepreneurial products coming out are going to address these things. And the question I want to ask you, 'cause you've been on the big company, you've done extremely well in your career, than you get back down to your roots to doing startup, you're launching, you haven't yet launched. So you got hit right here, you're working at home sheltering in place. I was talking to a couple of VC buddies, venture capitalists, and they're saying, "I'm reading books and I'm doing research "but I really can't meet people." So their work has changed. How do you see the investment community reacting to this? Certainly valuations might come down. Obviously, their limited partners are being hit with the stock market. You're seeing a disruption. What do you see going on in the VC world around this cold hard time? >> I mean certainly all VCs are not created equal. So I think there's going to be different perspectives based on the background of the DNA of the VC involved. I think certainly at Observe, I feel very fortunate that we've got a sort of Hill Ventures. So these guys were the investors behind Snowflake and behind Pure Storage and many other good companies but they're very longterm investors and their advice to me has been, "Well look, "some of the most innovative times if you like, "have been during and after a major crisis. "And so if you make short term decisions "to get you through those crisis, "they're all terrible but they don't last forever "and there will be another side. "And so make good business decisions "and good investment decisions through this "because there will be winners "that emerge on the other side." And that's really what I try and get the team focused on is, "Guys for now, we're sort of hunkered down "and it feels bad, "but we're probably more privileged than most. "And we have an opportunity maybe on the other side, "to take advantage, we don't have a revenue stream, "we don't have existing customers. "We can sort of take this Greenfield business "that we've got and you go on the offensive "when things returned to assemblance of normal." So The Hill had been fantastic. And I would hope that most VCs retain that perspective, which is if it was a good company three weeks ago, it's probably still a good company today. And the best way to create value is to sort of empower I think the CEOs and executive teams to make the right sort of longer term decisions. Try and capitalize when you come out the other side because there will be losers as well. And I think the wrong decisions now can put you on the losing end of that equation in three, four, five months time. >> Yeah, that's a good point. If you are a good company just a few months ago or even weeks ago or a year ago, you're still a good company. That's really going to be a tell sign to what happens in some of these companies. If I got to ask you a more focused question on this whole, which side of the street are you on? Are you riding the wave or are you going to get taken away and washed away with it? Because there are bets and well, I want to get into Observe in a minute, but you mentioned Snowflake there in the Cloud wave. Obviously, that's pretty bullish. We're still bullish on that. Obviously, it's going to be game changer. But is there a tell sign for the kind of bets that those good management teams need to make now? Because I agree with you, when the Dot-com bubble burst in 2000 and really 2004 kicked back up again. 2008, we saw that post and a lot of great companies were created. So what's your advice on which side of history do you need to be on here? I'll say Cloud is one. What is your view on that? >> Yeah, I mean we felt for many years, it's not just since I went to the startup, but I am a huge believer in this transition to digital businesses. Frictionless interactions, automation, yes, obviously people are required to run a business, but if you could run a business remotely, or the businesses automated in a way such that it doesn't require hands-on operation, then that's a beautiful thing. And my belief is that, this terrible situation will force people to really think seriously about what the digital business looks like. If you don't have one, then that you may not be able to be in business in a year, two, three years down the line, right? There'll be some carryover, but I think the smart businesses are going to be able to function in an environment such as this. >> Yeah, I think that's great. >> That's going to be playing on everybody's minds. Now more than ever, I think that the digital business is a necessity. >> Yeah, I was just talking to a colleague and we were just talking about how all of the events got canceled and you've had the history running some of those best events ever in the industry at EMC. And we participated in those and you know your staff when it comes to events, there's economic value in these physical events as a venue, Science Convention Center in Moscone here in San Francisco. I mean there's a lot of things that go on, a lot of decision-making that's been standardized over the years and there's an economic value that comes out of those events. Now that's gone, and then these little digital teams, some companies have like five people, two people, sometimes maybe if you're lucky you have 10 or more or a department. And then you've got demand generation. All these guys are being told now, "You have to make up for the shortfall "in not just leads but value." And this just has been a big burden for some of my friends out there who are like, "Wait a minute, you want to take that and move it over here?" It's been kind of a challenge. What is your view on this? Because a lot of people are trying to figure this particular problem out on how to make digital work today and have some extensibility and get success. What's your take? >> Well, I'm still a huge believer I mean, whereas sort of like we just saw digital marketing content is still very much King, right? If you can produce a compelling piece of content online, TV quality with a depth of knowledge that you're going to attract an audience, now can you then make that experience interactive? Can you engage the audience in a deeper way? Yeah, you're probably not going to have something which lasts for a full day or for three days online, but I think it's really going to force the creativity on the content side to another level, right? It can't just be talking heads and PowerPoint pictures. So that rethinking from first principles, what an online conference or an online experience actually looks like in a way that it engages the people who are watching. To me, those folks are going to go do very, very well. And the economics, I know how much it costs to put on a conference for 10 or 15,000 people. And by the way, I know how much it costs to put on a virtual event for 10 or 15,000 people. And the economics are astounding in that difference. Now if you're physically somewhere, you can feel things that you can't feel online. Come on though, this is a problem that requires some innovation to solve, right? We've talked about virtual reality and augmented reality, but it's still pretty clunky and relegated to sort of niche use cases and bad games. But at some point, that technology has to reach the point where it can be useful and engage in a new. You can approximate to that physical experience. But I think that is going to be critical but many businesses even beyond sort of marketing and virtual events and that kind of thing, many businesses are just going to have to reinvent how they engage and interact with their customers and the automation of their operations and how do you get by when you don't have as many people physically in an office or operating machines? Everybody's going to have to think through that. >> Yeah, I think that's great insight and that's going to be a great clip that I'll share and I think that's going to be inspirational for the folks trying to solve that problem. The things that we're focused in on, as you know, and this is something that we're doing a lot of work on, is the engagement with groups and you mentioned The Secret Hitler as the game, they're going to see some new clever things go on. And I think the group dynamic and having people in whether it's virtual and physical spaces exchanging credible things, ideas or jokes or whatever is going to be a new kind of dynamic. >> Yeah. >> Because that's going to have to fill the void. >> Yeah, I mean I've got a small company so we can play these individual games, but just think about some of these board type games where I want to have three teams and I want to divide the company up into three. The logistics of actually figuring that out is ridiculous and it shouldn't be that way, right? And so these are basics of human social interactions. We want to play a game together, we want to divide up into teams. But that sounds like a relatively trivial thing, but try and find the number of games available that allow you to easily do that and each team interaction independently of the others, it's almost impossible. >> It's going to be fun to watch and I think and I hope we're going to learn. Well, thanks for the device. Let's get back to your startup. Let's get a plug in for that, I want to get the plug in. I've seen you in stealth so you can't really go into great detail, but you have been talking to customers. You are obviously related, that's related to Snowflake, but you were going to do some things with Snowflake. You're in the Cloud. Can you just take a minute to give a plug for what you guys are doing for the people who want to know what you guys are leaning towards in terms of the value proposition? >> Yeah well, when I look back in my career, one of the times I enjoyed the most was the time at Oracle and working with data. And I've been fortunate enough for the last four and a half years or so to be on the board of Snowflake. Couple of ex Oracle guys, Benoit and Thierry founded the company and they've reinvented the database. And I felt like I've sat for 20 years looking for the second coming of the database and we all were sort of had fake thinking it was Hadoop. And turns out it wasn't. But I think Snowflake and the separation of storage and compute that allows them to sort of scale and have a usage-based pricing model, I just think is absolutely revolutionary and I think it's going to be one of the great companies of the new era. And so when I was there when I looked at Observe, really the thesis was that using a platform like Snowflake, you could potentially reason about unstructured log data. It's all like Splunk. You could reason about time series data, a little bit like Datadog or tracing data like AppDynamics or in fact any data, you could reason about it together. And today, if you look at the world, it's like if you want to do something with logs, you go get one product. If you want to do something with relational data, you get another, if you want to do time series data, you get another, you want to do tracing, you get an APM tool. And nobody has the big picture, right? Everybody's got their own little piece of data and their own perspective on where the issue might be in your company. But nobody really knows and it's usually put together in the brain of, of the smartest guy in the room. And so I thought it was quite simple. At Snowflake, you've got this commercial database that can do instruction data and time series data and relational data. And what if we could collect all data within an organization together, structure it, relate it, and then imagine what you could find out about your infrastructure, your applications, your business? >> Sort of unification? Does it have like unification kind of concept for users or IT? >> Yeah, I think the emerging category would be observability but it really is a collapsing of log analytics, metrics monitoring and tracing into this new category of observability. We don't necessarily just view that though as sort of data coming out of Kubernetes clusters or out of AWS or wherever. We actually could ingest security data. We could ingest data from people surfing using your app or surfing your website. We could take logs coming out of machines on a factory floor. So the way we built the product, it can be literally any kind of data. And we try and structure it and relate it and make sense of it and then make it very easy for people to navigate through it and determine issues and problems. So yeah, we're pretty excited about it. And like I said, we could not have built this even a couple of years ago because I don't think Snowflake would have been there. And in fact, that was one of the big risks when we started the company. Can we build it on Snowflake? And so here we are two years later and we think we can. Well, we're sure we can do it. >> Yeah, they've had a good run too. I mean, look at the growth of Snowflake. >> Yeah, it's crazy. I've never seen anything like it and in the last 20 years and B2B, I've never seen anything like it. So just like I felt in the mid 90s when I was at Oracle, people were making decisions to go with Oracle and then saying, "Hey, help me get all of my other data in that, "my mainframe data, my this, my that." I think Snowflake are going to go through the same sort of growth phase and hopefully with Observe, we can be like, "Hey, if you want to put "your unstructured data or time series data, "we can help you do that very easily." >> Well, this is exactly the current wave that you want to be on the right side of because like you said, just a year or so ago or a couple of years ago, it wasn't available. This is kind of the new capabilities. >> Yeah, I feel like there's going to be a lot of businesses, grow ridiculously. You talked about the Zoom numbers. These are ridiculous growth numbers and there are going to be companies come out the other side that take advantage of the new environment. And as they're growing, as they're scaling, as they build these new microservice-based applications, they're going to run into issues and we hope at least that it's products with our kind of architecture, that's going to be able to help these fast-growing businesses. So yeah, as I said, we're somewhat fortunate in that we don't have a product yet, but certainly on the other side of this, we think there's going to be plenty of opportunity to help a few folks. >> We know you got to do a launch and we're looking forward to hearing more and getting the briefing, and looking forward to hearing more about it when you go public. And yeah, thanks for coming on and taking the time today. I know you got your daughter's birthday party there and you're going to have some celebration. Thank you for sharing the insights on your vision of digital. I thought that was very compelling and great to see you and stay safe. >> Great to see you. Yeah, my 18-year-old, it's got a birthday party and she like always would worry, "What if no one shows up?" Well, today she knows no one's going to show up. >> Except for her family, yeah. >> It's going to be down in the family, yeah. So thanks for that and you guys stay safe and been great the last 10 years knowing theCUBE been that long but hopefully, here is the next 10 years after this current situation is over. >> Yeah, looking forward to it, it's going to be a lot of fun rye and get the content out there. And again, thanks for coming on during this important time and sharing your insights and also just making some entertainment here. We're getting some conversations so people can fill the void and play some games and have some fun. Jeremy, thanks. Great to see you. Jeremy Burton, senior executive in the industry. I've known him for years, been a CUBE alumni since theCUBE was formed. Now the CEO of Observe, sharing his insights on the industry but more importantly, how to be successful, how to come out the other side. Don't be too optimistic. Be focused on today and get through it. That's his advice. Of course, we're theCUBE bringing you all the data as we can now with remote interviews during this time. Thanks for watching, I'm John furrier. (soft music)

>> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering Red Hat Summit 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Good to have you back here on theCube we are live in Boston at the Convention Center here. Along with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls and on theCUBE we're continuing our coverage of Red Hat Summit 2019 in Boston, as I said. Joined now by Reza Shafii, who is the VP of Platform Services at Red Hat. Former CoreOS guy >> That's right. >> Stu actually has his CoreOS socks on, >> He told me. >> Today, yeah, so he came dressed for the occasion. >> Shh, can't see those on camera, John. I can't be wearing vendor here. >> Don't show it to the camera. >> Well I just say they're cool! They're cool. Glad to have you with us, Reza. And first off, your impression, you have a big announcement, right, with OpenShift. OpenShift 4 being launched officially on the keynote stage today. That's some big news, right? >> It's a big deal, it's a big deal. The way I think about it is that it's really a culmination of the efforts that we planned out when we sat down between the CoreOS leadership team and the Red Hat leadership team, when the acquisition was closed. And we planned this out, I remember a meeting we had in the white board room. We planned this out. In terms of bringing the best of OpenShift and CoreOS technology together. And it's really great to see it out there on the keynote, and actually all demoed and working. >> And working, right? Key part. >> Reza, dig in for us a little bit here, because it's one thing to say okay, we got a white board and we put things together. You know, when I looked at both companies, at first both, CoreOS before the acquisition and Red Hat, I mean open source, absolutely as its core. I remember talking to the CoreOS team, I'm like, you guys are gonna build a whole bunch of really cool tools, but what's the business there? Do you guys think you're gonna be the next Red Hat? Come on. Well, now you're part of Red Hat. So, give us a little bit of the insight as to what it took to get from there to the announcements, CoreOS infused in many of the pieces that we heard announced this week. >> Yeah, so the way I like to think about it is that Red Hat's OpenShift's roots, it started with making sure that they create a really nice comfortable surface area for the deaf teams. The deaf teams can go in and start pushing the applications and it just ensures that it's running those applications in the right way. The CoreOS roots came from the operations perspective and the system administrator. We always looked at the world from the system administrator. Yes, you're right, CoreOS had a number of technologies they were working on, etcd, Rocket, clair. I used to joke that there's a constellation of open source services that we're working on, but where is the one product? And, towards the end, right before the acquisition, the one product I think was pretty clear is Tectonic, the Kubernetes software. Now, if you look at Tectonic, the key value difference was automated operations. The core tenants of what Alex Polvi and Brandon Philips said into the mindset of the company was we're outnumbered, the number of machines out there is going to be way more than we can handle, therefore we need to automate all operations. They started that on the operating system itself, with CoreOS, the namesake of the company. And then they brought that to Kubernetes. What you see with OpenShift is, OpenShift 4, you see us bringing that to, not only the Kubernetes core, that's the foundation of OpenShift 4, so all capabilities of running Kubernetes are automated with 20 plus operators now. But you see that apply to all the other value capabilities that are on top of OpenShift as well, and we're bringing that to ISV. I was walking around and a number of ISV's have their operators as the number one thing they're advertising. So you're seeing automated operations really take hold and with OpenShift 4 being a foundation for that. >> You talk about operations or operators, you have Operator Hub that was launched earlier this year, what was the driving force behind that? And then ultimately what are you trying to get out of that in terms of advancement and going forward here? >> Right, I think it means it's worked. Going back a little bit of history on this, the operator pattern was coined at CoreOS as a way to do things on a Kubernetes cluster to automate operations. The right way. You have to expose it as a proper API, you have to use a controller, so on and so forth. Then as the team started doing that we realized well there's a lot of demand for this pattern, we started documenting it, describing it better and so on. But then we realized there's a good case for a framework to help people build these automations. Therefore we announced the operator framework at Cubeacon. I think it was a year and a half ago. What happened then was interesting, suddenly we started seeing hundreds plus operators being built on the operator framework. But, it was hard because you could see five Redis operators, 10 MySQL operators. It was hard for our customers to know where can I find the right set of operators that have the right functionality and how do they compare to each other? OperatorHub.IO is a registry that we launched together with AWS, Google and Microsoft to solve for that problem. Now that we have a way to create operators easily and capture that automated operations, we have sort of created a pattern and a framework around it, where do you go to find the right set of operators. >> It's an interesting point because if you look in the container space, especially Kubernetes, it's like, okay well what's standardized, what works across all of these environments? We always worry, I've probably got some pain from previous projects and foundations as to well what's certified and what's not and how do we do that? So, did I see there's a certification now for operators and how do you balance that we need it to work everywhere, we don't wanna have it's Red Hat's building an open ecosystem not something that's limited to only this? >> Yes. So OperatorHub.IO is a community initiative. And, every operator you find on there should work on any Kubernetes. So in fact as part of the vetting process we make sure that that's the case. And then on the certification we launched today, actually, and you can see a number of, we have already 20 plus operators that are certified. This is where we take it a step further and we work with the vendors to make sure that it works on OpenShift. It's following a number of guidelines that we have, in terms of using, for example, Rail as the basis. They work with us to run the updates through security checks and so on. And that's just to give our enterprise customers more levels of guarantees and validation, if they would like to. >> So what are they getting out of that, out of the certification system? What, I guess, stability and certainty and all those kinds of things that I'm looking for, standardization of some kind, is that what's driving that? >> It's simple, at the end of the day they got three things. They get automated updates that are pushed through the OpenShift update mechanism. So if you are using the Redis one, for example, and it's certified, you're gonna be able to update the Redis operator through the same cluster administration mechanism, then you would apply it to the entire cluster itself. You see updates from Redis come in, you can put it through the same approval work so on, so on. The second is they get support. So they get first line of support from Red Hat. They can call Red Hat, our customers and actually we work with them on that. And the third is that they actually get that security vulnerability scans that we put them through to make sure that they pass certain checks. And actually one last one, they also get Rail as the basis of the operator, so, yup. >> Reza, help bring us into the customer point of view. What does all this mean to them, what are the big challenges, how do they modernize their applications and get more applications moving along this path? >> Yeah, in this case the operator customer is mainly the infrastructure administrators. It's important to point that out. The developers will get some benefit on that in that it's self service, so the provision, but there's other ways to do that as well. You can go to a Helm chart, deploy that Helm chart, you get that level of self service automated provisioning. To go ahead and configure for example, a charted MongoDB database on a Kubernetes cluster, you have to create something like 20 different objects. And then to update that to change the charts, you have to go and modify all those 20 different objects. Let's just stay at that level alone. An operator makes that before different parameters on a yaml file that you change. The operator takes that and applies all these configurations for you. So, it's all about simplifying the life of the infrastructure administrators. I truly believe that operators, human operators, infrastructure administrators are one of the least appreciated personas right now that we have out there. They're not the most important ones, but there is a lot of pain points and challenges that they have we're not really thinking about too much. And I think OpenShift goes a long way and operators go a long way to actually start thinking about their pain point as well. >> So what do you think their reaction was this morning when they're looking, first off, the general announcement, right? And then some of the demonstrations and all those things that are occurring? Is there, do you have or are you talking to customers? Are you getting the sense of relief or of anticipation or expectation? I mean, how would you characterize that? >> Think they're falling into a couple of different buckets. There's the customers we've talked to, for awhile now, that know this stuff, so this is not super new to them, but they're very happy to see it. There's one big automaker that's a customer of us and the main human operator was telling me awhile ago that he does not want any service on the cluster unless it has an operator, this is a year and a half ago. And he kept pushing me well I want a Kafka one and I want an Elasticsearch one, and you know. And we, CoreOS, were too small to try to build that ourselves. Obviously that's not, we can't maintain a Kafka operator and a CoreOS one. Now, he's able to go to our operator APP, he's gonna be able to get a Kafka operator that's maintained by Kafka experts. He's gonna be able to get a Redis operator that's maintained by Redis experts. So that bucket of customers are super happy. And then there's another one that's just starting to understand the power of all this. And I think they're just starting to kick the tires and play around with this. Hopefully they will get to the same point as the first bucket of customers, and be asking for everything to be operator based all the time. >> Convert the tire kickers, you're gonna be okay, right? >> That's right. >> Thank you for the time. >> Thank you. >> We appreciate that and continued success at Red Hat, and, once again, good to see you. >> Thank you, always a pleasure. >> You bet. Live, here on theCUBE, you're watching Red Hat Summit 2019. (upbeat music)

>> Live from San Francisco. It's the cube covering IBM thing twenty nineteen brought to you by IBM. >> Okay. Welcome back, everyone. We're live here in San Francisco for the cubes. Exclusive coverage of IBM. Think twenty nineteen for a student in our next two guests are great. Glad Co senior vice president, general manager of the mainframe division Broadcom Only with CIA and acquired Clayton Donley, head of security and immigration. Broadcom, both formerly of CIA. Big acquisition. Big value guys. Welcome to the Cube. Good to see you. >> Thanks a lot for having us. >> So we just talked before we came on camera here, IBM. Think a lot of cars here and software a icloud systems and software working together. Kind of thesis of the Broadcom. See a acquisition that that murder, that move was a big one. A lot of analysts liked it. Your thoughts. Now that's playing out here. Yeah, I think it was >> really interesting. If you look at what Broadcom has gone after in the marketplace, is they're They're not looking for the flash in the pan or trying to chase the next new thing. They're looking for core businesses or components. Software products that they believe are, you know, have real staying power and will be around for a decade or Mohr into the future, and then they want to invest in those and nurture they really want to be. Even if it's in a new space, they want to invest in something where they'll be number one or two in the marketplace. >> It's interesting. You're looking at the mark with cloud, you see scale. You see data, all this stuff we talked about for years and years, but it really comes back down. A systems and software working together clouds one big, complex distributed system. So all from distractions could maybe tract away. Those complexities isn't doing its end of the day. It's software plus large scale systems. This kind of was playing out. This is in the wheelhouse of what you guys do it. Can you guys had some color that trend and what needs to happen to make it more and more viable? Mohr performance easier to use? >> Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, what we see is that customers are having a lot of problems with individual pieces of software. They're having problems when they put all this together. All right, So if you look at even to your question about Brock, come a moment ago. They sort of came in in price software through through the data center because they're providing everything. May I chips, too? Fibre channel networks and other kinds of things that are running peoples, you know, networks of the very largest scale and what their realizes when you get into the enterprise software level customers have such challenges because, you know, they don't get to cherry pick just cool things or the easy things to go integrate. They've got everything from mainframe client server to interior to whatever they picked up over the years. That stuff has to work together seamlessly to get kind of value. That makes sense. And that's why I think when you start looking at, you kind of are focus. It's on helping customers bring that together, get that value. >> It's all about the hybrid environment, because what we're getting at here is I got to make the legacy work with the new. But the beautiful thing about cloud native of some of these new micro services and containers is you don't have to kill the old Bring in the new. There's a great abstraction around software now that's making them work together. But yet the new stuff and work really great. This is the kind of the new architecture. Your thoughts on this? >> Yeah. I mean, obviously you're here a lot about that here it think right there, talking all about hybrid I T or multi cloud. I think there's a stat out there that, you know, seventy five percent of the large enterprises in the world say they'll be have multi cloud or hybrid environments by twenty twenty. I think they all have it today, Right? You think mobile mainframe, right? There's not workloads that work in isolation. You pick up your phone and you go to check your balance. It's gonna kick off a transaction that's going to go toe edge device or an edge server that's going to go through a network and maybe hit another server. And eventually it's going to go back to a mainframe to check the balance or to transfer funds or something like that. So they're having to deal with it already today. And and there's two kind of sides of the coin. You want that interaction for the developers to be common across those platforms, yet you want them to be ableto leverage on the power the strength, the security of the underlying platform without having to know all the gory details, which is, you know why. It makes a lot of sense for us mainframe and distributed. If you look across what is the CIA Technologies portfolio that Broadcom acquired, A lot of the capabilities that we have are the same capabilities that work across those environments so that the enterprise customers can interact with it one way. >> Clayton it. When I hear this environment, there's certain things that I need to worry about everywhere. It's, you know, my data. How do I protect my data? And, of course, security is one of those areas where there are lots of different environments, and unfortunately, there's lots of different considerations. Depending on which clouds I have which environment, you know, mainframe X eighty six power. You all have different considerations. The mantra I've heard that that seems to resonate is security is everyone's responsibility, you know, up and down the stack from the chip level all the way through the application. So explain where you know CIA. Now Broadcom fits in tow this picture and lives in this, you know, even more. Header. Genus world and by the way, totally agree. Multi cloud is what customers have today. Yeah, >> I mean, if you if you look at it, I mean, customers. They're building out, you say new mobile applications and and, you know, building them, his services in the cloud and so forth. But what we're finding is that the transactions and other kinds of things, they're still happening in some of these other environments. Maybe those environments still live in a data center. Maybe they've been moved to a private cloud. Maybe they're in a public cloud. Writing on my ass or some other kind of bank is a service. What we're finding is that each of you that transaction has to be protected. The guy that gives you the ability to call that transaction from a mobile app needs to be protected. All of these things need to be protected. But then you need to be able to orchestrate that. Make sure that you're laying down those based protecting those bits. Same way every time testing them the same way every time. And I think that if you look at what we're looking at and our values really in digital infrastructure management, right, but you're you're bringing all these pieces in cloud, multi cloud mainframe, All of these environments you have, You have a way to operate it, Manage it as well as for security. >> Yeah. So, Greg, you know, when I look back my career, there's something that's been repeating a lot. It's I go back to find it here, go back to the nineties. It was like, Okay, what was some of the reasons why the excess piece failed? It was like, Well, it was networking security, you know, in cloud happened. It was, well, security and management, howto like, you know, figure out some of these management of a hetero genius environment has typically been a downfall in it. It's something that we struggled at as an industry. So why will now be different? How how is the industry helping to solve that issue? And, you know, simple is something that we keep trying to hear. But, you know, actually, achieving it is pretty >> challenge. I think it's fundamentally realizing that the core large enterprises in the world today are using mainframes, right, and some of them have tried to migrate. Something's off, and it's not about complexity of migrating it off. It's about whether or not you can land somewhere that has that same security throughput, resiliency, all that kind of stuff. But if you recognize that you're gonna have these systems interacting and you recognize that we have to make it easier for people whether they're coming out of university or they're coming from a background of distributed or open source, you want to make it easier to interact. It's what's informing everything we do in our strategy and mainframe. So we talk about open, frictionless and optimized. So it's all about the idea of that mainframe system and those processes that were running, whether it's Dev ops, whether it's, you know, databases and tools, whatever we're doing, the security, the analytics that we're doing that has to be open and be able to interact with other people's tools as well as other people's platforms. Frictionless is all about the idea of you got to make it easy to do that interaction somebody that comes at this from a non mainframe context that maybe knows I calm the cartoon characters of open source. You know, get your gold for Jenkins or whatever, right that they can use that to interact with the mainframe and leverage it, and then you want to be optimized. You want to make it for the real deep technical professional to get the most out of it and focus where the expertise is, or for the novice cannot really have to need training wheels, but to be able to ride that bike right away and perform the things. So all these things you can see how their kind of informed and setting that tone of thinking about, ah, hybrid environment and connecting that mainframe in, across, not sitting as an island unto itself, >> I mean, you bring up a good point. A couple points, One is distributed. Computing has been around for a while. Mainframes. I mean, I'm old enough to remember that I was private client server way. We see the point of the main finger. >> You're gonna be >> dead soon. Most of all, kind of went away that, but it never died, right? We all know, but there's a renaissance. Rumors of my death are greatly, exactly. A lot of them didn't go down, but they were, but they were really died. But but here's the thing. There's a renaissance and mainframe because of cloud computing and cloud operations. If everything's cloud operationalized, then essentially you have a big one. Big distribute computer call resource and edges that are subsystem. So the notion of buying a mainframe isn't a platform decision. It's a right tool. The right job kind of decision, so people are not looking at mainframes was a bad decision. If it fits right, that's not like everyone should buy made friends. But if you need it, the horse power, the question is begs. The question is, why is there a renaissance and mainframes? What's the reason why people are buying them? Is it because it fits into a certain position? Is that certain scale? Is it because they could plug right into the cloud and be a big resource? >> I think there's I think there's also, ah, realization, you know, think about if you're the the newer CEO, our CTO, and you start looking at your state and you realize that you know this mainframe thing thatyou're spending twenty percent of your budget on is actually doing seventy percent of your process that you kind of look at it and you go. We'll work really cost effective. So then you start looking at? Well, where is it most cost effective. And does it make sense to use, Use it there. And then when you could tie it into everything else, when you can can get the same types of security tools and lock it down and locked the interaction down you say, Hey, this might, But this might make sense for me to do it. And I think it just ends up being dollars and cents and then the resiliency, right? I mean, when people aren't having that downtime >> plate, you're going to run your business. You want up time. If you're any commerce, you want high stamp your systems. So it really is the right tool for the world, like a thing for the right job. Is this happening? Give us the update on our people, buying more reason because it's just it's better. >> I think part of it also is, you know, why fix what isn't broken, right? The main friends running there, It's up. It's provided transactions. I think he used to have used to have this impediment to getting access, to need to find some old global guy, you need to find all this other stuff because you had your business, >> Cobol programmers. But now it runs analytics. >> It's like a It's like a foreign language to some people, right? You say Kobol was like, after one Chinese. So what? We've done those We've made it. So you don't have to learn. Cobell. You don't have to learn some specialized thing. You can come in with a prize. You come in with the technology, they teach kids and, you know, elementary school t use Java script and other kinds of things to come in access. So same things that are now in the mean >> it's basically a big iron and the old expression, big horsepower, >> horsepower, high throughput, high resiliency. >> Greg, I heard you talk about things like Dev ops that you fit in this environment. Absolutely. We've attracted. I remember, you know, when you nosy lennix on mainframe rolled out fifteen years ago. You want to do the cool new dock? Er, you know things? Absolutely. But if I look at the death ofthe people, people that are going to pay for this a lot of times they say, Well, I'm used to more that cloud model. How do I get? You know, they moved to an off ex model. We're still early in that trend, but, you know, Dizzy Syria's mainframe. Will it fit into the new modern paradigm? From a CFO standpoint, >> I definitely think so. If you if you look at a lot of the stuff that's going on in the marketplace and even concepts that we're testing with clients today around, you know you can refer to it as consumption based pricing or value based pricing, you know, looking at how much you're actually using and then charging for that with a known, you know, Hey, if I grow my capacity this much, how much am I going to pay or if I go down? I'm not going to be able to redeploy those dollars elsewhere. All those constructs are stuff that we're working with customers today on. So it is very much the idea of a cloud like environment that can either be delivered on creme through you buying your own hardware or, you know there's IBM that as easy cloud, there's folks like in so no its center that have clouds that have mainframe up in them today. >> And the developer environment clearly is going towards infrastructures code, which is the abstraction away? Just programmable infrastructure. They don't care where it was fast, right? Doesn't matter. Does it really matter >> how I look? Way contributed, too. Zoe Bright side, right? That was the command line interface, and everybody was like, Oh, my God, You know, they thought maybe we had some executives that were sitting back that had this brilliant idea. We were actually using out agile methodologies in our development, and we gave in each programming increment. We gave the engineers time to do what they wanted to do. You know, one sprint per cycle. And some of our young developers said, You know what I wish I could use, Get Jenkins and gulp and tie them into Endeavor or these other Dev ops tools or it stops tools. They developed it as an internal use tool for a command line, and we've stumbled over on accent. We said, Oh my God, this is thing We think something we think customers would want. And then, as we got talking with Rocket with IBM, Rocket had a Web interface, IBM at the mediation layer and we said, Holy cow, You know, this is something. If we got together, we contributed. We could really start a renaissance around mainframe, and a lot of people are going What? Why you've got proprietary tools and software. Why would you open up? Because the reality is we want our customers to find it easier to work with the mainframe and look out compete on the differentiation of my underlying lying product, whether it be price or function. But I want my customers to be able to tie in my software with IBM with rockets with rooms out whomever and picked because of where the value is, not because they feel locked in >> its You're going about one >> of the gripes about mainframe, right? People thought they were locked in >> lock and proprietary weird interfaces freshen, You take the friction away >> and that's not that's your father's >> mainframe. That's not today's May in front of that was exactly the old. The only kind of perception, right? We bring Lennox and all these tools and infrastructures. Code is just another resource on the network. Guys. Thanks for the insight. Appreciate Left home My mainframe. My God made my day here. So I'm free clad world final. Give a plug quickly for Broadcom. What, you guys working on. What's the big news here for you guys? Give a quick. >> Hey, I'll tell you for me, Broadcom acquiring the mainframe business is all about investment. And, I mean, we're a software business, So more than ninety percent of my expenses people, if I'm not hiring, I'm full of it. I'm not investing. I'm hiring were posted like crazy. We're hiring, We're expanding to the team, and the idea is all about there's customers have used core products for many years, and they want to count on him for many years to come. Were making those investments, and we're going to continue to invest in the new capabilities dealt, make more efficient, effective on the platform. >> Your thoughts, >> you know, I >> mean, I think that you know that, you know, it's interesting. You look a broad, calm, and a lot of people don't know. You know what's the focus right there? They're not traditionally the software space, and so >> on. They are the >> first thing you well, they are now. And one of the things that we're doing this if you look at our investment rate in R and D in general, it's up there. I mean, world class. If you look at the largest your most successful cloud players forget about, you know, your large cap. Take protect companies to sell in terms of percentage of our percentage of revenue. They spend it R and B. We're far above that. We're at a very high level. We're going to continue to invest in a lot of innovation, you know? Aye, aye. Machine Learning Dev. Ops, of course. You know, curious security is >> a cultural shift. We could see vinyl records. We're gonna come back now. You got mainframe back. How much back can I get a mainframe for? If I want to be the new cool kid on the block, you >> got to go to IBM >> for the hardware. But I could talk to you about yourself or to help you with it. You gotta mean faith for the Cube. Just have one in our house. Thanks, guys. I appreciate it. Thanks. Pleasure. You covered your talking mean freeze and IBM Think software. Lynn Nix, The new World Cloud Data. I I'm John's First Amendment back with more coverage after this short break