>>Oh, welcome back to the cubes coverage of coop con cloud native con 2021. I'm John is the Cuba, David Nicholson, our cloud host analyst, and it's exciting to be back in person in event. So we're back. It's been two years with the cube con and Linux foundation. So scrape, it was a hybrid event and we have a great guest here, Cuban London, Nick Dirk, and CT field CTO of harness and harness.io. The URL love the.io. Good to see you. >>Thank you guys for having me on. I genuinely appreciate >>It. Thanks for coming on. You were a part of our AWS startup showcase, which you guys were featured as a fast growing mature company, uh, as cloud scales, you guys have been doing extremely well. So congratulations. But now we're in reality now, right? So, okay. Cloud native has kind of like, okay, we don't have to sell it anymore. People buying into it. Um, and now operationalizing it with cloud operations, which means you're running stuff, applications and infrastructure is code and it costs money. Yeah. Martine Casada at Andreessen Horowitz. Oh, repatriated from the cloud. So there's a lot of, there's some cost conversations starting to happen. This is what you guys are in the middle of. >>Yeah, absolutely. What's interesting is when you think about it today, we want to shift left. When you want to empower all the engineers, we want to empower people. We're not giving them the data they need, right. They get a call from the CFO 30 days later, as opposed to actually being able to look at what change I did and how it actually affected. And this is what we're bringing in. Allowing people to have is now really empowering. So throughout the whole software delivery life cycle from CGI continuous integration, continuous delivery feature flagging, and even bringing cost modeling and in cloud cost management. And even then being able to shut down, shut down the services that you're not using, how much of that is waste. We talk about it. Every single cloud conference it's how much is waste. And so being able to actually turn those on, use those accordingly and then take advantage of even the cheapest instances when you should. That's really what >>It's so funny. People almost trip over dollars to pick up pennies in the cloud business because they're so focused on innovation that they think, okay, we've got to just innovate at all costs, but at some point you can make it productive for the developers in process in the pipeline to actually manage that. >>That's exactly it. I mean, if you think about it to me in order to breach state continuous delivery, we have to automate everything. Right. But that doesn't mean stop at just delivering, you know, to production. That means to customer, which means we've got to make them happy, but then ultimately all of those resources in dev and QA and staging and UAT, we've sticker those as well. And if we're not being mindful of it, the costs are astronomical, right. And we've seen it time and time again with every company you see, you've seen every article about how they've blown through all their budgets. So bring it to the people that can affect change. That's really the difference, making it visible, looking at it. In-depth not just at the cloud level and all the spend there, but also even at the, uh, thinking about it, the Kubernetes level down to the containers, the pods and understanding where are the resources even inside of the clusters and bringing that as an aggregate, not just for visibility and, and giving recommendations, but now more importantly, because part of a pipeline start taking action. That's where it's interesting. It's not just about being able to see it and understand it and hope, right? Hope is not a strategy acting upon it is what makes it valuable. And that's part of the automate everything. >>Yeah. We'll let that at the Dawn of the age of DevOps, uh, there was a huge incentive for a developer just to get their job done, to seize control of infrastructure, the idea of infrastructure as code, you know, and it's, it's, you know, w when it was being born, it's a fantastic, I've always wondered though, you know, be careful what you wish for. Do you really want all of that responsibility? So we've got responsibility from a compliance and security perspective and of course cost. So, so where do we, where do we go from here, I guess is the question. Yeah. So >>When we look at building this all together, I think when we think about software delivery, everybody wants to go fast. We start with velocity, right? Everybody says, that's where I want to go. And to your point with governance compliance, the next roadblock to hit is weight. In order to go fast, I have to do it appropriately. I've got governing bodies that tell me how this has to work. And that becomes a challenge. >>It slows it down too. It doesn't, I mean, basically people are getting pissed off, right? This is, this general sentiment is, is that developers are moving fast with their code. And then they have to stop. Compliance has to give the green light sometimes days, correct? Uh, it used to be weeks now. It's days, it's still unacceptable. So there's like this always been that tension to the security groups or say it, or finance was like slow down and they actually want to go faster. So that has to be policy-based something. Yep. This is the future. What is your take on that? >>Take on, this is pretty simple. When everybody talks about people, process and technology, it's kind of bogus, right? It's all about confidence. If you're confident that your developers can deploy appropriately and they're not going to do something wrong, you'll let them to play all the time. Well, that requires process. But if you have tooling that literally guarantees your governance, make sure that at no point in time, can any of your developers actually do something wrong. Now you have, >>That's the key. That's the key. That's the key because you're giving them a policy-based guardrails to execute in their programs >>And that's it. So now you can free up all those pieces. So all those bottlenecks, all those waiting all those time, and this is how all of our customers, they move from, you know, change advisory boards that approve deployments. >>Can you give us some, give us some, give us some, uh, customer anecdotal examples of this inaction and kind of the love letters you get, or, or the customer you take us through a use case of how it all. >>So this is one of my favorites. So NCR national cash register. If you slide a credit card at like a Chick-fil-A or a Safeway, right? Um, traditional technology. But what was interesting is they went from doing PCI audit, which would take seven days to go to a PCI audit right now with harness, because, >>And by the way, when you and the seventh, six day, the things that you did on day one change. >>Exactly, exactly. And so now, because of using harness and everything's audited, and all the changes are, are controlled to make sure that developers again, can only do what they're allowed. They only get to broadcast two per production. If they've met all their security requirements, all their compliance, permits, all their quality checks. Now, because of that, they literally gave a re read only view of harness to their auditor. And in three hours it was over. And it's because now we're that evidence file from code commit through to production. Yeah. It's there for point of sale compliant. >>So what is the benefits to them? What's the result saves them time, saves the money. What's the good, the free up more times. I'll see the chops it down. That's the key. >>Yeah. It's actually something we didn't build in like our ROI calculators, which was, we talked to their engineers and we gave them their nights and their weekends back, which I thought was amazing. But Thursday night, when we're doing that deploy, they don't have to be up. Harness is actually managing and understanding, using machine learning to understand what normal looks like. So they don't have to, they don't have to sit and look at the knock or sit in the war room and eat the free pizza. Yeah. Right. And then when those things break, same concept rates aren't as good. So >>I got to ask you, I got you here. You know, as the software development delivery lifecycle is radically being overhauled right now, which people generally agree that that's the case, the old models are, are different. How do you see your vision around AI and automation playing into this? Because you could say, okay, we're going to have different kinds of coding styles. This batch has got an AI block here. It's very Lego block. Like yep. Okay. Services and higher level services in the cloud. What's your reaction to how this impacts automation and >>Sure. So throughout our entire platform, we've designed our AI to take care of the worst parts of anyone's job as Guinea dev ops person. If they love babysitting deployments, they don't harness handles that for them, ask your engineers that they love sitting there waiting for their tests to run. Every time they build, they go get coffee, right. Because we're waiting for all of our tests to run. Y yeah. Right. The reality >>Is sometimes they have to wait days and >>That's it. But like, if I change the gas cap on, uh, on your car, would you expect me to check every light switch and every electronic piece? No. Well, why do we do that with code? And so our AI, our ML is designed to remove all the things that people hate. It's not to remove people's jobs. It's actually to make their jobs much better. >>How do you guys feed the data? What's the training algorithm for that? How does that work? Yeah, >>Actually, it's interesting. A lot of people think it's going to take a ton of time to figure this out. The good news is we start seeing this on the second deployment. On the second bill, we have to have a baseline of what good looks like, and that's where it starts. And it goes from there. And by the way, this isn't a lot of people say AI, and this AML, I teach a class on this because ML is not standard deviation. It's not some checks. So we use a massive amount of machine learning, but we have neural networks to think about things like engineers do. Like if we looked at a log and I saw the same log with two different user IDs, you and I would know, well, it's the same thing. It's just different users, but machine learning models. Don't so we've got to build neural networks to actually think like humans. So that, >>So that's the whole expectation maximization kind of concept of people talk about, >>Well, and that's it because at the end of the day, we're like I said, I'm not trying to take people's jobs. I want to meet. >>Yeah. You want to do the crap work out of the way. And I had to do other redundant, heavy lifting that they have to do every single time we use the cloud way. We've >>Built mechanical muscle in, in the early 19 hundreds. Right. And it made everyone's jobs easier, allowed them to do more with their time. That's exactly what we're doing here. >>I mean, we've seen the big old guys in the industry trying to evolve. You got the hot startups coming out. So you got, you know, adapt or die as classic thing. We've been saying for many years, David on the cube, you know that. So it's like, this is a moment of truth. We're going to see who comes out the other side. How do you, Nick, what would you be your, your kind of guess of when that other side is, when are we gonna know the winners and the losers truly in the sense of where we are now? >>So I think what I've found is that in this space specifically, there's a constant shift and this is something with software. And the problem is, is that we see them come in ebbs and flows, right. And very few times are there businesses that actually carry the model? And what you find is that when they focus on one specific problem, it solves it. Now, if I was working on VMs a few years ago, great, but now we're, we're here at coop con, right? And that's because it's eaten, uh, that side of the world. And so I think it's the companies that can actually grow the test of time and continue to expand to where the problems are. Right. And that's one of the things that I traditionally think about harness and we've done it. We cover our customers where they were, I think the old mainframes, if you had to, where they were, where they are at their traditional, their VM. >>I mean, if you think about it, Nick, it's one of those things where it's like, that's such a common sense way to look at it evolves with a problem. So I ride the right with tech ways. But if you think about the high order bit, here is just applications. We ended the day. Companies have applications that they want to write modern. The applications of their business is going to be codified so that you just work backwards from there. Then you say, okay, what is the infrastructure as code working for me? That's an ethos of dev ops. And that's where we're at. So that's why I think that the cloud need is kind of one already, but we still have the edge devices, more complexity. This is a huge next level conversation at one point is that we just put a hard and top on the complexity. When is that coming? Because the developers are clear. They want to go fast. They want to go shift left and have all that data, get the right analytics, the telemetry and the AI. But it's too complicated still. That is a big problem. >>It's too complicated. You ask for a full-stack developer to also know infrastructure, to also know edge computing. Like it's impossible, right? And this is where tooling helps, right? Because if you can actually parameterize that and make it to the engineers and have to care, they can do what they're best at. Hey, I'm great at turning code in artifact, let them do that and have tooling take care of the rest. This is where our goal is. Again, allow people >>We'll do what they love. And this is kind of the new roles that are changing. What SRE has done. Everyone talks about the SRE and some states just as he had dev ops guy, but it's not just that there's also, uh, different roles emerging. It's, it's an architectural game. At this point, we would say, >>I'd say a hundred percent. And this is where the decisions that you make on are architecturally. If you don't know how to then roll them out, this is what we've seen. Time and time again, you go to these large companies, I've got these great architectures on planning four years later, we haven't reached it because to that point process, >>The process killed them four >>Different new tools throughout the process. Well, yeah. >>So when do we hit peak Kubernetes peak >>Kubernetes? I think we have a bit to go in and I'm excited about the networking space and really what we're doing there and, and bringing that holistic portion of the network, like when Istio was originally released, I thought that was one of the most amazing things, uh, to truly come to it. And I think there's a vast space in networking. Um, and, and so I think in the next few years, we're going to see this, you know, turn into that a hundred percent utilized across the board. This will be that where everyone's workloads continue to exist. Um, somewhat like VMs we're in >>And, and, and no, no fear of developers as code in the very near future. You're talking about automating the mundane. Correct. Uh, there have been stories recently about the three-day workweek, you know, as a, as a fan of, um, utopian science fiction, myself, as opposed to dystopian. Absolutely. I think that, you know, technology does have the opportunity to lift all boats and, uh, and it's, it's not nothing to be afraid of. You know, the fact that I put my dishes in the dishwasher and they run by themselves for three hours. It's a good thing. It's a great thing. >>I don't need to deal with that. Yeah, I agree. No, I think that's, and that's what I said in the beginning. Right. That's really where we can start empowering people. So allow them to do what they're good at and do what they're best at. And if you look at why do people quit? We don't have to go so hard to find. Yeah. Why? Because they're secondary to babysit and implement and they're told everywhere they go, they're not going to have to >>That's the line. And that's all right. We got a break, but it's great insight to have you on the Q one final question for you. Um, I got to ask about the whole data as code something that I've been riffing on for a bunch of years now. And as infrastructures could we get that, but data is now the resource everyone needs, and everyone's trying to, okay, I have the control plane for this and that, but ultimately data cannot be siloed. This is a critical architectural element. How does that get resolved in the land of the competitive advantage and lock in and whatnot? What's your take on that? >>So data's an interesting one because it has, it has gravity and this is the problem. And as we move, as I think you guys know, as you move to the edge as remove, move it places there's insights to be taken at the edge there's insights to be taken as it moves through. And I think what you'll see honestly, going forward is you'll see compute done differently to your point. It needs to be aggregated. It needs to be able to be used together, but I think you'll see people computing it on its way through it. So now even in transport, you'll start seeing insights gained in real time before you can have the larger insights. And I see that happening more and more. Um, and I think ultimately we just want to empower that >>Nick, great to have you on CTO of field CTO of harness and harness.io is a URL. Check it out. Thanks for the insight. Thank you so much. Great comments. Appreciate it. Natural cube analysts right here, Nick, of course, we've got our, our analysts right here, David Nicholson. You're good on your own. I'm John for a, you know, we have the host. Thanks for watching. Stay with two more days of coverage. We'll be back after this short break.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Red Hat. Summit 2020 Brought to you by Red Hat. >>Hi. And welcome back to the Cube's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020. I'm stew Minuteman. And while this year's event is being held virtually, which means we're talking to all of the guests where they're coming from, one of the things that we always love about the user conference is talking to the practitioners themselves And Red Hat Summit. Of course, we love talking to customers and really happy to welcome to the program. Uh, Alejandro Lopez Asano, who's the director of e health with the Argentine Ministry of Health, Coming to us from Buenos Iris, Argentina. Alessandro, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. All right, So Ah, you know, look, healthcare obviously is, You know, normally, you know, challenging in the midst of what is happening globally. There are strange and pressures on. What? What is happening? So really appreciate. You think with us? Um, tell us a little bit about you know, the organization, and you know your role in Nike's role in supporting the company's mission. >>I'm part of the minister of girls in Argentina, Argentina Federal country. That's a national military girls, according it's Felker Healthcare System. All around the country with different provinces work, we work with the with the Ministry of Culture, which problems with the governor of problems trying to maintain and coordination the healthcare system. And we create the national policies that tried everybody. Show them to apply on the assistance that we create national incentive. This is much more. It's similar to the US, with the national government. Create incentives the province since the states adopt new new new practices and the best quality >>Excellent. So, yeah, the anytime we talk about healthcare, you know, uh, you know, medical records, of course, critically important. It's usually a key piece of, I d you know, governance, compliance in general. So what are some of the challenges that the ministry basis when it comes to you know, this piece >>of overall health care? My role in the midst of cops is exactly that. Coordinate health information systems around the country and having and access to the single sorts of medical records around the country. It's a great thing that we're trying to achieve We don't want to have a central repository, but they're going to have some kind of have that allows you to access information for all around the country. So the fragmentation of the seat between different provinces and also having public providers and private providers. It's a challenge because the information for one patient is this. Turn a lot of different places. I need to have some kind off have or enterprise services. But you're allows you to gather this information at the point of care and to provide the best quality of care for the patient having the full road regardless of work. It was taking her before. >>Yeah, pretty Universal Challenger talking about their distributed architecture, obviously security of Paramount performance, but still has to have the scale and performance that customers need to bring us in a little bit. This this project, you know, how long has this national health information system? How long has it been to put that together, Bring us through a little bit as to you know, how you choose how to architect these pieces, >>except that we've been working on for the last three years and then be able to create an architecture that was not invasive, that anyone can collaborate and contribute to this information network, but still having the on the rights and other responsibility for Monday in their own data. And we didn't want to have a central that the rates that it's acceptable security issues or privacy issues. We wanted information to remain distributed. But to be able to collect that a 10 point so they're able to create a set off AP Eyes Bay seven Healthcare interoperability standards that allow developers off critical systems all around the country to adopt this new way of changing information to your and privately provided to the practitioners so they can access information. Another side, >>Excellent. And so three years. You know, that's a rather big project. You've got quite a lot of constituents, and obviously, you know, healthcare is, you know, completely essential and critical service. There, underneath the pieces obviously were part of Red Hat Summit covering this so help us understand a little bit, you know, Red Hat and any other partners. You know what technologies they're using to deliver this? >>That's the big challenge was to have this kind of distributed organization with a central how that needs to provide services around the country at any time today. And we really think people need to be confident that they can use this network, that we're treating patients. We don't want them to try to do it and fail from the lost confidence in that you're not going to have the greater adoption from system developers. We need to have a very strong and company in the world, and this can grow really exponentially cause data. I mean, any chess is constructing, like one billion right work on math or something like that. But we know we can grow exponentially, but we need to have some kind of infrastructure that was reliable, but it was easy to deploy the first time. But the house and growth road map that will allow us to incorporate all the extra capacity around Argentina, Mr Safeway Way, need to be confident that we can grow a dog's level. So basically we were working already. We're Kalina and all the basic things. We wanted to go to open shift. It was really important to be able to have the container station system that allows us to found according to the needs and the adoption, right? That was really unpredictable because we need to create incentives for election. But you never know how fast the adoption would be. We need to have some flexibility of attracted by open ship, but also, we need to use a P. I like the scale in order to provide this way to communicate ap eyes to give people secure form to access the FBI's to learn about them and to try. So we're using different parts off the off the stack we have in order to do that. >>Okay, great. Tell us the adoption of this solution. How was the how is the learning curve? But, you know, moving to containerized architectures. You talking about all the AP eyes in there? How much was there a retraining of your group? Were there any new people that came in? You know what was what was Red Hat's role in really the organizational pieces of getting everybody on this on this new skill set? >>Well, the role of record was central because we didn't have the capability to go on research all these open source tools and find the proper combination between the container administrated orchestrator, the continuous integration part it was really difficult for us to start from scratch. I mean, this is something that this violent wanting to have a huge team, a lot of time, special skills and when you, because there are teams were used to work in monolithic applications with a very long development cycles that every time you need to change, we need, like, three months another. See, the change lives in the application for the end user, but we need to make a radical change there. So we saw in Red Hat Opportunity. We have a robot on the container adoption program sandcastle the steps that we need to work true. So what's really good to have our 16 team to retrain and to go through the container adoption program to use the combination of tools that breath already provides, like a stock that's the really compatible with each other. Then you need to know that that is easy to update when there are changes in their security things that they need to take to get the notification. So this and you have the daily support also because we have to create a new brand developers and the Dev Ops team was negative and you have developers and very technical person that didn't know anything about the application. We helped to create the tools that this, these new roles that combined these activities on the day to day work record expert was really key to that because they give us the roadmap. But what we need to do with timeframe with thing, that sort of statement we need to do in order on give us the daily support, the retraining, and they were really excited to work. Yeah, attempting that also was really good news for them because they were using old versions of job on old versions, off deployment systems, that they were everything by heart and the common life. And now, when they learn to do that with sensible and with the continuous integration system, a lot of menial tasks that they were doing everything you know there are automated. But that's a really great impact on the quality of life for them. >>Well, it's interesting that you talk about that, you know. Automation, of course, has been something we've been talking about for decades, but critically important today, you know, 100. I'm curious with kind of the situation happening with the pandemic. You know, people are having to work from home. There needs to be social, distancing the automation. And you know some of this new tooling. You know, what impact has that had on being able to deal with today's work >>environment? That kind of very good impact also, because not only for the automation, because that was that. It's really people have a secure way to work from home to the place ever. You don't need to access directly. Each one of the servers with logging or things like that is much more secure, much safer, much easier to work from home and maintaining the city. But also the dynamic has put a strain on the system because we are maintaining in open shift the whole family objects and violence system for Argentina, and that has much more information going through all the decision making. Politicians are getting information from the violence system and make predictions the style policies and they did. That information is to be available all the time, and previously, when a new strain came like the officially system went down, what was old workings globally So but now, with open shift, we were able to dial up more resources. The system, I maintain the quality, the world, the perimeter Signet work until the decision making person that needs information just in there. >>All right, so So all 100. We've talked about kind of a transformation that you've had. There's the government impact. There's the practice, the other providers of services. If you talk about you know, the ultimate end patient, you know what is the impact on them or you know what? What you have implemented here, >>what they did, that the patients now would be able to move between different parts of this complex system we have before. It was very common that the patient arrived hospital with about full of studies in paper, like somebody from a previous hospital finishes reported lab reports. And they have to bring about Dr and don't have to go to all the way from the foundation or a basic both from a province to the capital to get terrible, especially when they go back. And the Dr in the province don't have any information about what happened on one side that said no. They will care if you but no information. I get it through the patient. But now I think the system will integrate the older caregiver around Argentina in a much more simpler where you will be able to collaborate with doctors, another throwing, sitting, other CPIs on the patient will be able to vote from private to public. We have different kind of procedures, and every information will follow him on. Everyone will be able to take care of him with the best information. >>I'll under that. That's really powerful pieces there. So I guess the last piece is a little bit about kind of where you are with the overall project. What future goals do you have for this initiative? >>You've been really happy with the way we're starting to have adoption. We have more than 37 knows not already working in this network. And so this is really good. We have a good adoption right on. The implementation of open shift is going really well. The developers are really happy. We see the impact. That there are no downtime is really good. We need to continue transforming old legacy applications, monolithic applications to transform that into micro services. This work to do in deconstructing these big applications into more scalable micro services, and we need to take more advantage off. Sorry. Scale, Because really excellent feature for Developer portal. So, like that, everything will be about the adoption of the FBI. That information much simpler when we give all those tools developed. >>That's that. Once again, Andre, thank you so much. This has been, ah, really important work that your team is doing. Congratulations on the progress that you've made and, you know, definitely hope in the future. We will get to see you at one of the Red hat summits in person. So thank you so much for joining us. Thank you very much. All right, Lots more coverage from the cube at Red Hat Summit 2020. I'm stew minimum. And thank you. As always for watching the Cube. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to a CUBE Conversation. We always love talking to founders of companies. We love supporting the Boston-area community, but even more, right now, we're of course talking to leaders in the industry about some of the challenges facing with the global pandemic, so, happy to welcome to the program first-time guest Paulo Rosado, who is the founder and CEO of OutSystems. You are based in Boston, your company is global. Paulo, thanks so much for joining us, and let's start out talking about kind of the age we are in right now and how you are supporting your customers, your employees, and the developer community that you engage with. >> Absolutely, and it's a pleasure to be here, Stu. Actually, since the 23rd of March, that our 1,100 employees are all working remote, so we've had more than 1,000 Zoom calls logged, at least among the people that I know. And we have dogs and kids everywhere, and we have to adjust, 'cause we have a lot of new parents, so the kids are all over them and whatever. But actually, productivity and morale is really at a high rate. The business is going really, really well. However, as in a very OutSystems type of way, actually, because we're so fast building these digital solutions that we've launched a program with our partners. We asked them for ideas, we got more than 200 ideas coming in, and we're sponsoring 20 of those ideas. One of them is with Deloitte, for instance, where we fundamentally, in one week, they've created a full logistics system to manage all the supplies within 16 municipalities, including ventilators, masks, PPEs and the like. >> Well, that's great to hear, right. So if people want to find out more on the OutSystems website, it's the COVID-19 Community Response Program, and love to see, Paulo, we're going to talk a bit about OutSystems and what you're doing for customers. Of course, the speed of development of new applications is what your company's been doing for a long time, and it kind of becomes a little bit bromide that we talk about, "Oh, well, software's eating the world." Well, in challenging times, how is software hoping to meet the challenges that communities, municipalities, employees, companies need to survive in these challenging situations? So anything else you want to talk about, kind of the community program? >> Yeah, well, so what we did is we opened up the community, worldwide community, actually, because today we serve about 60 countries, and so we wanted to have projects that really add impact. We had a couple from Germany, and some from Asia, and it's amazing. Today, we have sponsored 14, so we have 14 scalable installations already running. Some of these projects have gone live, some are still in development. But what's interesting is that the 200,000-plus communities, that they're getting together. We have all these virtual teams, subject matter experts, relationships with house officers and house offices, and developers, and we're just churning away. And the innovation of the people when they have, actually, something that they can build real solutions fast, they can iterate on top, it's absolutely amazing. And it's our contribution, also, to the world here, really. >> Yeah, very important, Paulo, thank you for doing that. Boy, I think, Paulo, you started the company back in 2001. The discussion around software and developers was rather nascent back in those days. So bring us a little bit through the journey of the company, if you would, and some of the major things that are different now in, really, you're entering the third decade of the company, so bring us back to some of the early days, as well as, what is significantly different today? >> Actually, the idea that we had initially was very much the one that has become truth. We were just about 14 years ahead of the market. So the company's called OutSystems because at the time, we believed that a large percent of systems would migrate out of the data center. That is what today is called the cloud. We believed, at the time, based on all the evidence, that a lot of software that companies were going to be building needed to be done in a very agile way, which is, you need to build fast, but not only build fast, but change very, very fast. And it took us a while until we reached about three to four years ago, when suddenly, everything became agile. Suddenly, everything that you build, all the software that you build, you no longer had one year or 18 months to build this project. Now, you had weeks, and those times have been compressing. And so, what's happening now is we encounter ourselves in a world where companies increasingly want to build more software because they want to be differentiated, they want to compete, but the talent available and the speed they have to build these pieces of software are becoming more and more challenging, and we help a lot in doing that. We are the most mature, the most advanced no-code/low-code platform in the market. And so, it's a great time for us now. >> Yeah, Paulo, I'd like to help understand software development, application modernization are very important topics for a number of years now. I think back to last year, Satya Nadella on stage at Microsoft Ignite, and he was talking about just the massive amounts of new applications that would be built over the next few years. And it's interesting, a company like Microsoft that, you go back 10 years ago, it'd be like, "Well, you'll be using all of our software, "not thinking about building your own software." So you've got partnerships with the public cloud providers, there's all sorts of new partners as well as competitors entering the space. So help us understand kind of where OutSystems fits in this ecosystem and differentiates itself from some of the other noise that's out there. >> No, absolutely. Well, we've woken up a lot of giants, definitely, with this approach. One of the differentiators is that these platforms are actually pretty hard to build, and so, if you look into what Satya said in that particular conference, he was mentioning the fact that fundamentally, every company needs to become a cloud software company. But in order for you to become a cloud software company, you need a very large number of talent skills. You need good web developers, front-end developers, back-end developers. You need to have people who understand DevOps, you need to understand scalability, security, all of these things. You can do that with the tens and even hundreds of tools that are in the market, but what the platform like OutSystems stands up by doing is ends up abstracting a lot of debt and just gives you a very fast capacity for you to build your mobile applications, your pricing engines, your workflows, your portals, in a very fast way. So leveraging the people that you have, leveraging the unique knowledge of the business that you have, and letting you catch up to disruptors that really have all those technical skill sets that today are so rare. >> Yeah, and I'd love to hear, tell us a little bit about your customer base. So you've been around for many years, so I'm sure it is quite diverse, but how many customers does OutSystems have? If you've got a key use case or two that might help us understand where this low-code/no-code solution is helping them through their journey. >> Oh, absolutely, we have companies like Safeway, Chevron, T-Mobile. All of them have somehow different use cases, because we are in the business of innovation, and so, whatever you want to innovate with, you innovate typically with OutSystems. We have a particular company which is the largest oil and gas terminal management company in the world. They have 73 terminals. And one of the things they built was a full ERP, a full platform, digital platform, to manage all logistics of the tankers that come into the ports, deploy the oil in the reservoirs, and then having trucks that come and take the oil away. It's a very complex business, and they were looking at, fundamentally, a four- to six-year project to build this, and they did it in seven months. And so, these type of compressions of time for these very large systems is a huge, huge differentiator. Then we have, on the other hand, companies that have built their front ends, typically mobile applications integrated with web applications, and those applications change, fundamentally, almost every day or every week. We have a bank, for instance, that's releasing a version per day in their applications. That speed of development gives them a huge competitive advantage but puts a lot of pressure on the stack and all the IT that's needed, and we help there because of the platform. >> Yeah, Paulo, we've been talking for years about some of the transformations that companies are going through, and that application transformation really is one of the bigger challenges that they face along those lines. In some of the events I go to, the communities I look at, there's a lot of talk about how containerization in Kubernetes is helping to move the infrastructure team to get ready for this. Of course, we've talked a bit already about how public cloud's changing things. Serverless is a different paradigm for how application developers should think about the platforms they're living on. How does OutSystems kind of plug in to these trends which have come along in the time since you've been out there? >> Oh, very well. The way these platforms work, at least, the way the OutSystems platform works, is that we have an automation layer who's responsible, fundamentally, for compressing time and making things increasingly easier. Basically, just give an IT department or company the capacity to build things 100 times faster. But underneath, we actually use the newest architectures that give us high scalability, also scaling resilience, 99.999% of uptime. And in those cases, for instance, for that, we use containers, Linux, Docker, all of those type of technologies. We run standard on AWS, we also run on Azure. And so, we can provide automation, but underneath, we're fundamentally using the same tools that all enterprise-grade architects are using. >> Okay, great, Paulo. Last question I have for you, give us a little bit your outlook on the future of software development, what we should be looking at when it comes to OutSystems and your community. >> Well, actually, it's not only about OutSystems, it's all about development of the software. We believe, and we see evidence of it, that while software development used to be done by some elites about 10, 15 years ago, today, every company needs to build their own software. And more than 65% of new software that's going to be built in the next three to five years is going to be done with a no-code or low-code platform. That's just too much, you just need that speed, you don't have enough talent. And actually, what we see, and we're doing a lot of research there, is that complementing the developers, we're seeing more and more AI bots that actually assist development in a lot of the boring tasks that are part of the development and deployment cycle, like validation of code, automatic testing, creating the right patterns of architecture for high scalability and maintainability. We're introducing a lot of those things in the platform. So in the next years, we believe we'll see more and more developers being helped by artificial intelligence bots, therefore progressing in that 100X to 1,000X automation productivity enhancement. >> Well, I tell you, you're hitting on one of our favorite topics to talk about. (Paulo chuckles) We did an event years ago with Andy McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson from MIT, talking about how it really is about racing with the machines. So I've seen things that said, "Oh, computer programmers, you're the next things "that are going to be replaced by robots." And what I'm hearing from you is, of course, what we know is that really it is the combination of people plus this software that are really going to supercharge things going forward. And you're nodding, so you would agree. >> That's exactly it. And we already have evidence of that because we have a lot of our AI is already deployed inside the platform, and so we're measuring, we're learning with it. And we can see tremendous, almost exponential improvements. It's almost as if a developer, as they're creating these functional requirements, gets augmented with an extra brain. So it really works, and it's time now, it's reaching time for AI to be used to help the software development cycle. >> Right, well, Paulo, thank you so much for the conversation. Absolutely we hope that these kind of technologies are the ones that are going to help the global economy as we hopefully move forward from the results of the current global situation here. So thank you so much for joining us, and definitely look forward to keeping track of the company in the future. All right-- >> Thank you, Stu, it was a pleasure. Thank you very much. >> Thanks, I'm Stu Miniman, and as always, check out theCUBE.net for all of the digital events, as well as the archives of interviews that we've done, reach out to us if you have any questions, and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are here in our Palo Alto studios today. We got through March, this is some really crazy time. So we're taking advantage of the opportunity to reach out to some of the community leaders that we have in our community to get some good tips and tricks as to know how to kind of deal with this current situation. All the working from home, school from home. And we're really excited to have one of the experts. One of my favorite CUBE guests. We haven't had her around since October 2017, which I find crazy. And we'd love to welcome into theCUBE via the remote dial-in, Rachel Tobac. She is the CEO of SocialProof Security. Rachel, great to see you and I cannot believe that we have not sat down since 2017. >> I know, I can't believe it, it's been so much time. Thanks for having me back. >> Absolutely, but we are good Twitter friends. >> Oh yeah >> Exchanging stuff all the time. So, first of, great to see you. Just a kind of of introduction, tell us a little bit about SocialProof Security and your very unique specialty. >> Yes. SocialProof Security is all about social engineering and protecting you from the those types of attackers. So, basically we help you understand how folks manipulate you and try and gain access to your information. I am an attacker myself so I basically go out, try it, learn what we can learn about how we do our attacks and then go on and train you to protect your organization. So, training and testing. >> Alright. Well, I am going to toot your horn a little bit louder than that because I think it's amazing. I think that you are basically 100% undefeated in hacking people during contests at conventions, live. And it's fascinating to me and why I think it's so important it's not a technical hack at all. It's a human hack, and your success is amazing. And I've seen you do it. There's tons of videos out there with you doing it. So, what are kind of just the quick and dirty takeaways that people need to think about knowing that there are social hackers, not necessarily machine hackers out there, trying to take advantage of them. What are some of these inherit weaknesses that we just have built into the system? >> Yeah, thanks for your kind words too, I appreciate that. The challenge with social engineering is that it leverages your principles of persuasion. The parts of you that you cannot switch off. And so, I might pretend to be similar to you so that I can build rapport with you. And it's really hard for you to switch that off because you want to be a kind person, you want to be nice and trusting. But it's hard, it's a tough world out there and unfortunately criminals will leverage elements of your personality and your preferences against you. So, for instance if I know you have a dog, then I might play a YouTube video of a dog barking and try and gain access to information about your systems and your data, while pretending to be IT support, for example. And that's really tough because, you know three minutes into the conversation we are already talking about our dog breeds and now you want to trust me more. But unfortunately just because we have something in common, it doesn't mean that I am who I say I am. And so, I always recommend people are politely paranoid. It just basically means that you use two methods of communication to confirm that people are who they say they are. And if they are trying to get you to divulge sensitive information or go through with a wire transfer, for instance, you want to make sure that you check that first. We just saw an example of this with Barbara Corcoran. Famously on Shark Tank. Where she has many investments in real estate. And unfortunately a cyber criminal was able to take advantage and get almost $400,000 wired over to them and they did lose that money because they were able to take advantage of the bookkeeper, the accountant and the assistant and folks just were not checking back and forth that people are who they say they were with multiple methods of communication. >> It's crazy. A friend of mine actually is in the real estate business. And we were talking earlier this year and he got a note from his banker. Looked like his banker's email. It was the guy's name that he works with all the time. Was talking about a transfer. It didn't have a bunch of weird misspelling and bad grammar. And all kind of the old school things that kind of would expose it as a hack. And he picked up the phone and called the guy, and said "we don't have a transaction happening right now. "Why did you send this to me?" So it gets really really really good. But lets dive into just a little vocabulary 101. When people talk about "fishing" and "spearphishing" what does that exactly mean for people that aren't really familiar with those terms? >> Sure. Most likely you are going to see it happen over email. In fact, with COVID-19 right now we've seen through Google's Transparency Report on fishing that there's been a 350% increase in fishing attacks. And I believe Brisk had this huge research that said that there were 300,000 plus suspicious COVID 19 fishing websites that were just spun up in the past couple of weeks. It's pretty scary but basically what they are trying to do is get you to input your credentials. They are trying to get access to your machine or your credentials so that they can use them on other high value sites, gain access to your information, your data, points, your sensitive data basically. And use that against you. It's really tough. Unfortunately, criminals don't take a break even in crisis. >> Yeah they are not self-isolating unfortunately, I guess they are sitting there with their computers. So that's interesting. So, I was going to ask you, kind of what is the change in the landscape now. So you answered a little bit there but then the other huge thing that's happening now is everybody is working from home. They are all on Zoom, they are all on Skype, WebEx. And you've actually had some really timely post just recently about little things that people should think about in terms on just settings on Zoom to avoid some of the really unfortunate things that are popping in kind of randomly on Zoom meetings. So, I wonder if you could share some of those tips and tricks with the audience. >> Yeah, absolutely. Some of the big issues that we are seeing recently is what people have coined as Zoombombing. It's all over the news. So you've probably heard about it before but in case you are wondering exactly what that is. It's whenever an attacker either guesses your Zoom ID code and you don't have a password on your Zoom call that you are in the middle of. Or they might gain access to your Zoom ID code because maybe your took a screenshot of your Zoom and posted that to social media. And now if you don't have password protection or your waiting room is on they can just join your call and sometimes you might not notice that they are on the call, which could lead to privacy issues, data breach for instance or just a sensitive data leak. If they join via the phone you might not even notice that they are on the call. And so it's really important to make sure that you have password protection on for your Zoom and you have waiting rooms enabled. And you don't want to take pictures of your workstation. I know that's really tough for folks. because they want to showcase how connected they are during these difficult times I do understand that. But realize that when you take those screenshots of your workstation, this is something that we just saw in the news with Boris Johnson just a few days ago. He posted an image of his zoom call and it included some of the software they used. And so, you just mentioned spearphishing, right? I can look at some of that software get an idea for maybe the version of his operating system the version of some of the software he may be using on his machine and craft a very specific spearfish just for him that I know will likely work on his machine, with his software installed because I understand the version and the known vulnerabilities in that software. So, there's a lot of problems with posting those types of pictures. As a blanket rule you are not going to want to take pictures of your workstation. Especially not now. >> Okay, so, I remember that lesson that you taught me when we're in Houston at Grace Hopper. Do not take selfies in front of your pics, in front of your work laptop. 'Cause as you said, you can identify all types of OS information. Information that gives you incredible advantage when you are trying to hack into my machine. >> Yeah, that's true. And I think a lot of people don't realize they are like, "everybody uses the browser, everybody uses Power Point", for example. But sometimes, the icons and logos that you have on your machine, really give me good information about the exact version and potentially the versions that might be out of data in your machine. When I can look up those non-vulnerabilities pretty easily that's a pretty big risk. The other things that we see is people take screenshots and I can see their desktop and when I can see your desktop, I might know the naming convention that you use for your files which I can name drop with you or talk about on the phone or over email to convince you that I really do have access to your machine like I am IT support or something. >> Yeah, it's great stuff. So for people who want more of this great stuff go to Rachel's Twitter handle. I'm sure we have it here on the lower third. You've got the great piece with. Last week with John Oliver hacking the voting machines like a week before the elections last year which was phenomenal. Now I just saw your in this new HBO piece where you actually just sit down at the desk with the guy running the show and hacker disciplines systems. Really good stuff. Really simple stuff. Let's shift gears one more time, really in terms of what you are doing now. You said you are doing some help in the community to directly help those in need as we go through this crisis. People are trying to find a way to help. Tell us a little bit more about what you are doing. >> Yeah, as soon as I started noticing how intense COVID-19 was wreaking havoc on the hospital and healthcare systems in the world I decided to just make my services available for free. And so I put out a call on my social medias and let folks know "Hey if you need training ,if you need support if you just want to walk through some of your protocols and how I might gain access to your systems or your sensitive data through those protocols, let me know and I'll chat with you" And, I've had an amazing response. Being able to work with hospitals all over the world for free to make sure that they have the support that they need during COVID-19 it really does mean a lot to me because it's tough I feel kind of powerless in this situation there's not a lot that I can personally do there are many brave folks who are out there risking it all every single day to be able to do the work to keep folks safe. So, just trying to do something to help support the healthcare industry as they save lives. >> Well, that's great. I mean, it is great 'cause if you are helping the people that are helping ,you know, you are helping maybe not directly with patients but that's really important work and there's a lot of stuff now that's coming out in terms of, kind of of this tunnel vision on COVID-19 and letting everything else kind of fall by the wayside including other medical procedures and there is going to be a lot of collateral damage that we don't necessarily see because the COVID situation has kind of displaced everything out and kind of blown it out. Anything that you can do to help people get more out of the resources, protect their vulnerability is nothing but goodness. So, thank you for doing that. So, I will give you a last word. What's your favorite, kind of closing line when you are at Black Hat or RSA to these people to give them the last little bit "Come on, don't do stupid things. There is some simple steps you can take to be a little bit less vulnerable" >> Yeah, I think something that we hear a lot is that people kind of give a blanket piece of advice. Like, don't click links. And, that's not really actionable advice. Because a lot of times you are required to click links or download that PDF attachment from HR. And, many times it is legitimate for work. And so, that type of advice isn't really the type of advice I like to give. Instead, I like to say just be politely paranoid and use two methods of communication to confirm if it is legitimate before you go ahead and do that. And, it will take a little bit of time I'm not going to lie it'll take you an extra 30 seconds to 60 seconds to just chat somebody and say "Hey quick question about that thing you sent over" But it can start to change the security consciousness of your culture. And maybe they'll put out a chat while they send out an email from HR to let you know that it is legitimate and then you are kind of starting this cycle at the beginning. Not every single person has to ask individually you can start getting that security consciousness going where people are politely paranoid and they know that you are going to be too so they are going to preempt it and make sure that you understand something is legitimate with a second form of communication. >> Great tip, I am a little taken aback, everybody now wants to get their score so high their customer satisfaction score so after like every transaction you get this silly surveys "How was your time at SafeWay? "Or Bank of America?" All these things Survey Monkey. I don't really know how those businesses stay in anymore. I am not clicking on any Bank of America customer satisfaction or Safeway customer satisfaction link. But I will be politely paranoid and look for the right ones to click on. (giggle) >> That's good and use two methods of communication to confirm they are real. >> That's right,two-factor authentication. Alright,well Rachel, thank you for taking a few minutes of your time. Thank you for your good work with hospitals in the community and really enjoyed catching up. As always, love your work and I'm sure we'll be talking you more on Twitter. >> Thanks for having me on again and I'll see you on the Internet. >> All right, be safe. >> Rachel: Thank you >> All right, that was Rachel. I am Jeff. You are watching theCUBE. We are coming to you from our Palo Alto Studios. Thanks for watching. Stay safe and we'll see you next time. (instrumental music)

>> Hello everyone. Welcome to this Cube conversation here in Palo Alto. On John Furrier, co host of the Cube. I'm here. Aaron Kalb is the co founder and VP of design and Alation. Great to see them on some fresh funding news. Aaron, Thanks for coming. And spend the time. Good to see you again. >> Good to see you, John. Thanks for having me >> So big news. You guys got a very big round of financing because you go to the next level. A startup. Certainly coming out that start up phase and growth phase super exciting news. You guys doing some very innovative things around, date around community around people and really kind of cracking the code on this humanization democratization of data, but actually helping businesses. I want to talk about it with you. First. Give us the update on the financing, the amount what it means to the company. A lot of cash. >> Yeah. So we're very excited to have raised a fifty million dollar round. Sapphire led the round, and we also had, you know, re ups from all of our existing investors. And, you know, as as a co founder, he always had big dreams for growth. And it's just validating tohave. Ah, a community of investors who can see the future, too, as well as our great community of over one hundred customers now who want to build this data democratized future with us. >> We've been following you guys since the founding obviously watching you guys great use of capital. Fifty million's a lot of capital, so obviously validation check. Good, good job. But now you go to a whole other level growth. What's the capital gonna be deployed for? What's going on with company where you guys I and in terms of innovation, what's the key focus? >> It's a great question. So you know, obviously we have revenue from our customers. But getting this extra infusion from VC lets us just supercharge our development. It's growth. It's going to more customers, both domestically and abroad, goingto a broader user base. And we're Enterprise-wide Adoption within those customers, as well as innovation in the core product, new technology, great design and futures. that are really going to change the organization's access and use data to make better decisions? >> What was the key Learnings As you guys went into this round of funding outside the validation to get through due diligence, all that good stuff. But you guys have made some successful milestones. What was the key? Notable accomplishments that Alation hit to kind of hit this trigger point here for the fifty million? >> Yeah, I'm glad you asked about that. I think that the key thing that's changed it's enabled this. This next phase is that the data catalog market has really come into its own right. In the beginning, in the early days, we were knocking on doors, trying to say, You know, we don't even know it was going to be called data catalog in our first few months. And even though we had the technology, we said, Hey, we got this thing and we know it's useful. Please buy it. Please want it. And the question was, you know, what's the data catalog by what I ever even look at that? And it's just turned a corner. Now, you know, Thanks. In part of things like Gartner telling companies you know, in the next year by twenty twenty, if you have a data catalog, you're goingto see twice the ROI from your existing data investments than if you don't your stories like that are making companies say? Of course, you want to data catalog. It just turned out a dime. Now they're asking, Which data catalog should we get? Why is yours the best in this change of the market maturing? I think it's the biggest change we've seen >> with one thing that we've observed. I want to get your reaction to This is that I'll stay with cloud computing economics, a phenomenally C scale data data science working the cloud. We see great success there. Now there's multiple clouds, multi clouds, a big trend, but also the validation that it's not just all cloud anymore. The on premises activity steel is relevant, although it might have a cloud. Operations really kind of changes the role of data. You mentioned the data catalogue kind of being kind of having a common mainstream visibility from the analysts like Gardner and others on Wiki Bond as well. It makes data the center of the innovation. Now you have data challenges around. Okay, where's the data deployed? Where my using the data? Because data scientists want ease of data, they want quality data. They want to make sure their their algorithm, whether it's machine learning component or software actually running a good data. So data effectiveness is now part of the operations of most businesses. What's your reaction to that? Which your thoughts. Is that how you see it? Is there something different there? What's going on with the whole date at the center? >> Absolutely hit on two key themes for us. One of that idea of the center and the other is your point about data quality and data trust. So, so centrality, we think, is really essential. You know, we're seeing cataloging technology crop up more and more. A lot of people were coming out with catalogs or catalog kind of add ons to their products. But what our customers really tell us is they want the data catalog to be the hub, that one stop shop where they go to to access any data, wherever it lives, whether it's in the cloud or on Prem, whether it's in a relational database or a file system, so is one of Alations key. Differentiators early on was being that central index, much like Google is out of the front page to the Internet, even though it's linking to ad pages all over the place. And the other thing in terms of that data quality and data trustworthiness has been a differentiator, and this was something that was part of our technology when we launched that we didn't put the label out till later. Is this idea of Behavior IO, that's kind of looking at previous human behavior to influence future human behavior to be better. And there's another place we really took some inspiration from Google and Terry Winograd at Stanford before that, you know, he observed. You know, if you remember back before Google search sucked, frankly, right, the results on top are not the most development were not the most trustworthy. And the reason was those algorithms were based on saying, how often does your key word appear in that website? Built, in other words, and so you'd get results on top. That might just not be very good. Or even that were created by spammers who put in a lot of words to get SEO and and, you know, that isn't the best result for you on what Google did was turned that around with page rank and say, Let's use the signals that other people are getting behind about the pages they find valuable to get the best result on top. And Alation is the exact same thing our patented proprietary behavior technology lets us say Who's using this data? How were they using it? Is it reputable? And that enables us to get the right data and transfer the data in front of decision makers. >> And you call that Behavioral IO >> Behavior IO, that's right. >> I mean, certainly remember Google algorithmic search was pooh poohed. It first had to be a portal. Everyone kind of my age. You can't remember those those days and the results were key word stuff by spammer's. But algorithmic search accelerated the quality. So I got to ask you the behavioral Io to kind of impact a little bit. Go a little deeper. What does that mean for customers? Because now I'll see as people start thinking, OK, I need to catalogue my data because now I need to have replication, all kinds of least technical things that are going on around integrity of the data. But why Behavioral Aya? What's the angle on that? What's the impact of the customer? Why is this important? Absolutely so. >> Might have to work through an example, you know we joke about. You might be looking around in your SharePoint drive and find an Excel file called Q three Numbers final. Underscore final. Okay, that seems that'S inject the final numbers, and then you see next to it when it says underscore final underscore, final underscore finalist. Okay, well, is that one final? And it turns out what Data says about itself is less reliable than what other people say about the data. Same thing with Google that if everyone's linking with Wikipedia Page, that's a more reliable page than one that just has, you know, paid for a higher placement, Right? So what a means an organization is with Alation will tell you. You know, this is the data table that was refreshed yesterday and that the CFO and everybody in this department is using every day. That's a really strong signal. That's trustworthy data, as opposed to something that was only used once a year ago. >> So relevance is key there. >> Absolutely. It's relevant. And trustworthiness. We find both all right, indicated more strongly by who's using it and how than by the data itself. >> Are you seeing adoption with data scientist and people who were wrangling date or data analysts that if the date is not high quality, they abandoned. The usage is they're getting kind of stats around that are because that we're hearing a lot of Hey, you know, that I'm not going to really work on the data. But I'm not going to do all the heavy lifting on the front end the data qualities, not there. >> Absolutely. We see a really cool upward spiral. So in Alation, we have a mix of manual, human curated metadata, you know, data stewards and that a curator saying, this is endorsed data. It's a certified data. This is applicable for this context. But we also do this automatic behavior. Io. We parse the query logs. These logs were, you know, put there for audit on debugging purposes. But we were mining that for behavioral insight, and we'll show them side by side on what we see is overtime on day one. There's no manual curation. But as that curation gets added in, we see a strong correlation between the best highest quality data and the most used data. And we also see an upward spiral where, if on day one. People are using data that isn't trustworthy that stale or miscalculated as soon as Ah, an Alation steward slaps a deprecation or a warning on the data asset because of technology like trust check talking about last time I was here, that technology, that's the O part of behavior IO We then stop the future behavior from being on bad data, and we see an upward spiral where suddenly the bad sata is no longer being used and everyone's guided put the pound. >> One thing I'm really impressed with you guys on is you have a great management team and overall team with mixed disciplines. Okay, I think last night about your role, Stanford and the human side of the world. But you have to search analogy, which is interesting because you have search folks. You got hardcore data data geeks all working together. And if you think about Discovery and navigation, which is the Google parent, I need to find a Web page and go, Go, go to it. You guys were in that same business of helping people discover data and act on it or take action. Same kind of paradigm, so explain some customer impact anecdotes. People who bought Alation, what your service and offering and what happened after and what was it like before? We talk about some of that? And because I think you're onto something pretty big here with this discovery. Actionable data perspective. >> Yeah, well, one of our values, it Alation, is that we measure our success through customer impact, you know, not do financing or other other milestones that we are excited about them. So I I would love to talk about our customers. One example of a business impact is an example that our champion at Safeway Albertsons describes where, after safe, it was acquired by Albertson's. They've been sort of pioneers of sort of digital, ah, loyalty and engagement. And there was a move to kind of stop that in its tracks and switch should just mailing people big books of coupons that of customizing, you know, deals for you based on your buying behavior. And they talked about getting a thirty x  ROI on the dollars they've spent on Alation by basically proving the value of their program and kind of maximizing their relationship with their customers. But the stories they're even more exciting to me, then just business impacts in dollars and cents when we can leave a positive impact on people's lives with data. There's a few examples of that Munich reinsurance, the biggest being sure and also a primary ensure in Europe, had some coverage and Forbes about the way that they use Alation, other data tools to be able to help people get back on their feet more quickly after, ah, earthquakes and other natural disasters. And similarly, there's a piece in The Wall Street Journal about how Pfizer is able to create diagnostics and treatments for rare diseases where it wouldn't have been a good ROI even invest in those if they didn't get that increased efficient CNN analytics from Alation on the other data. >> So it's not just one little vertical. It's kind of mean data is horizontally. Scaleable is not like one. Industry is going to leverage Alation, >> Absolutely so you know, I mentioned just now. Insurance and health care and retail were also in tech were in basically every vertical you can imagine and even multiple sectors. You know, I've been focusing on industry, but there's another case that you can read about at the city of San Diego were there. They're doing an open data initiative, enabling people to figure out everything from where parking is easiest, the hardest to anything else. >> The behavioral Io. And it's all about context and behavior, role of data and all this. It's kind of fundamental to businesses. >> That's right. It's all about taking everything about how people using data today and driving people to be even more data driven, more accurate, better able to satisfy their curiosity and be more rational in >> the future. So if I'm a from a potential customer and I heard a rAlation, get the buzz out there, why would I need you? What air? Some signals that would indicate that I should call Alation. What's some of that Corvette? What's the pitch? >> Yeah, it's a great question. No, I sometimes joke with the team that you know every five minutes another enterprise reaches that point where they can't do it the old way anymore. And the needle ations. And the reason for that is that data is growing exponentially and people can only grow at most, you know, linearly. So I compare it a bit again to the days of of Yahoo When the Internet was small, you make a table of contents for it. But as there came to be trillions of red pages, you needed an automatic index with pay drink to make sense of it. So I would say, once you find that your analytics team has spread out and they're spending, you know eighty percent of their time calling up other people to find where development data is, you're asked to Your point is this data high quality show even spend my time on it? You know that's probably not money is well spent with these highly paid people spending other times scrounging If you switch from scrounging to finding understanding and trusting their data for quick and accurate analysis, give us >> a call. So basically the pitches, if you want to be like Yahoo, do it the old way. We know what happened. Yeah, you want to be like Google, two algorithmic and have data >> God rAlation, and you'll be around for a while very well. After that, maybe the one see that that's my words. >> And and that's part of turning that corner. I think in the beginning we were trying to tell people this could be a nice toe have. And now customers are coming to us realizing it's a must have to stay a relevant, you know, And if you've made all these investments in data infrastructure and data people, but you can't connect the dots is you said, between the human side and the tech side that money's all wasted and you're going to not be able to compete against your competitors and impact of customers what you want. >> Well, Eric, congratulations. Certainly is the co founder. It's great success. And how hard is that you start ups? You guys worked hard and again. Why following you guys? Been interesting to see that growth and this innovation involved in creative, A lot of energy. You guys do a good job. So final question, talk about the secret sauce of Alation. What's the key innovation formula? And now that you got the funding where you're going to double down on, where's the innovation going to come next? So the innovation formula and where the innovation, the future, >> absolutely innovation has been critical for us to get here on our customers didn't just buy the exciting features with behavioral and trust. Check that we had but also are buying into the idea that we're going to continue to be the leaders and to innovate. Andi, we're going to do that. So I think the secret sauce which we've had in the past, we're going to continue to innovate in this vein, is to be really conscious of water computers great at and what humans uniquely good at what you humans like doing and trying to have the human and computers work together to really help the human achieve their goals. Right? So, Doctor, the Google example. You know, there's a bunch of systems for collaboratively ranking things, but it takes work to, you know, write a review on the upper Amazon. Google had the insight that we could leverage people are already doing and make it about it. Out of that, we're going to continue to do that. >> The other kind of innovation you'll see is bringing Alation to a wider and wider audience, with less and less technical skill needed. So I came from Syria Apple, and the idea is you have to learn a programming language to Queria database. You could just speak in English. That helps you ask answer questions like What's the weather today? Imagine taking that same kind of experience of seamless integration to the more important questions enterprises are asking. >> We'll have to tap your expertise is we want to have an app called the Cube Syria, which is a cube. What's the innovation in Silicon Valley and have it just spit out a video on the kidding? Final question just to double down on that piece, because I think the human interactions a big part of what you're saying I've always loved that about with your vision is. But this points to a major problems. Seeing whether it's, you know, media, the news cycle These days, people are challenging the efficacy of finding the research and the real deep research on the media. So I was seeing scale on data scale is a huge challenge. You mentioned the growth of data. Computers can scale things, but the knowledge and the curation kind of dynamic of packaging it, finding it, acting on it. It's kind of where you guys are hitting. Talk about that tie name, my getting that right and set is that important? Because, you know, certainly scale is table stakes these days. >> That is super insightful John, because I think human cognition and human thought excuse me, is the bottleneck four being data driven right we have on the Internet trillions of Web pages, you know, more than the Library of Alexandria a hundred times over, and we have in databases millions of columns and trillions of rose. But for that to actually impact the business and impact the world in a positive way, it's got to go through a person who could understand it. And so, in the same way that Google became the mechanism by which the Internet becomes accessible, we think that Alation for organizations is becoming the way that data can become actionable. And the other thing I would say is, you know, in this age of alternative facts and mistrust of data, you know, we've sort of realizing the just having more information out there doesn't actually make people wiser and better able to reason. It can actually be a lot of noise that muddies the signal and confuses people. So we think Alation by also using human computer interaction to help separate the signal from the noise and the quality from the garbage can help stop the garbage in garbage out and make people more rational and more curious and have more trust than what there. Hearing understanding >> build that Paige rang kind of metaphor is interesting because the human gestures, whether it's work or engaging on the data, is a signal tube, not just algorithmic meta data extraction. >> Absolutely anything you do with data and any tool, even outside of Alation. Alation will capture that and use it to guide future behavior for you and your appears to be better and smarter. >> Fifty million dollars. Where's this all going to lead to wins the next innovation. What do you guys see? The future for rAlation? >> Well, you know, I, uh I was just thinking before the show I used to be an apple kind of in the golden Age when Apple was really innovative. And there was the joke where they released something new and say, Redman, start your photocopier. So in this interview, I'm going to be a little close to the chest about the specifics, but we're releasing. But I will tell you we have a room that we're really excited about to go to a broader and broader audience that impactor customers more fully >> well you feel free to say one more thing? >> Yeah. I think the secret to the future is Aaron. Thanks for coming on. >> Really preachy. Congratulations on the funding. He has got a very innovative formula. Good luck. And we'll be following you guys. Thanks, but come on, keep commerce. Thanks so much. Eric Kalb, co founder and VP of designing Alation. Interesting formula. Great. Successful. Former great innovation. Alation. Check him out. I'm Jennifer here in Palo Alto for cube conversation. Thanks for watching.

(electric upbeat music) >> Live from Washington D.C. It's theCUBE. Covering Inforum DC 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Well welcome back here on theCUBE along with Dave Vallante I'm John Walls as we wrap up our coverage here at Inforum 18, Washington D.C. Nations capital. Again just saying which we are between Capital Hill and the White House here. And just on top of the show floor Dave had a chance to check out the goings on down. So good feeling here. Good vibe on the floor. Good feeling on the Keynote stage. I know tomorrow, good lineup as well but just your thoughts as we wind up here on day one. Well I think Charles Phillips is an awesome host. I mean first of all he looks great up there. He's tall. He's thin. He's got has this awesome suit on. I mean the guy is just dressed impeccably. Add to that his mind. I mean he's a very clear thinker, a clear strategist. He's able to articulate the value, the strategy that Infor has and has had for quite some time and the value that it brings to customers. So I really like listening to him. He's not a hype machine. Unlike, you know, so many in this industry who are incredibly successful, Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff you know others you know love to hype what they do. Charles throws a little, few little jokes in there but very low key as we heard this morning. And it seems to be working. I mean as a private company they can write their own narrative. Alright if this were a public company people would be hammering them on the debt. They'd be knocking them on the top-line growth. Cause the Income Statement, you know, from a growth stand point is not exploding but the SAS pieces of the business are. So but you know Wall street, they would be picking at this scabs. So as a private company, they're not subject to the 90-day shot clock. And so as a result they can write their own narrative which I think is incredibly important for this company right now because they have a large installed base of customers that they're trying to move to their new platform. Move, migrate you know, those are scary words for customers. And so the competition, this is why. Why is Oracle coming at Infor so much? Two reasons there may be others. But number one. Infor is hurting Oracle. They're taking share away and Oracle you know, think that they should have 100% market share. Same with SAP. The second is that it sees an opportunity to fight back you know the best, the best defense is a good offense. And so they're trying to go after those customers that Infor's trying to woe to their new platform. And any time you moving it's an opportunity. You know we saw this with big acquisitions like Dell and EMC. You know EMC took their eye off the ball, others came in allowed a company like NetApp to come back. So you see that certainly HP, when it was splitting up, got distracted so you see that and so now what's key about sessions like this, events like this, is it allows Infor to stay relevant. To put a relevance story in front of its customers. So what is that story? It's got a platform. It's got a full stack. It's investing in R and D. It's innovating with technologies like AI. It's building organic innovation. And it's bringing in inorganic through acquisition. Things like Birst for modern BI and injecting that throughout its application portfolio. It's got a full-suite. It was interesting somebody said we had to make a bet, do we go full-suite >> Or best-of-breed. >> Or do we go best-of-breed. >> Right. >> I would argue by going micro-vertical they can claim both. It's very hard to be both best-of-breed and both full-suite. I mean I would agree if you just want to do one thing, you're probably going to do that one thing better than anybody else. And so I'll grant you that. But I think that the balancing act is how do you stay like best-of-breed or near best-of-breed with that full-suite? And I think Infor's found the answer with micro-verticals. And bringing in technologies like AI. Was very impressed with all the robotic process automation talk this morning. That's going to be a huge business it's already. I mean it's growing like crazy. So if I'm an Infor customer and I'm an old Legacy customer I'm thinking: "Wow these guys are really making "some interesting investments." "Yeah I got to spend, "and I got to maybe migrate "but if I don't I'm going to get digitally transformed "by somebody else." And they didn't actually put a lot of scare tactics in there but maybe that's something they should, might want to add in, is some examples of customers that are, that have been left behind. But maybe that's bromide in the industry today. But I think that, that relevance message came through load and strong and I think it's critical for this company. >> I think interesting just to start with the Keynotes, and then we heard it throughout the various guest that we had here on the program today was that it's a compony that really knows who it is. At least that's the feeling I get. Knows where it's going. So it inspires a lot of confidence, right. He does, Charles does. The company does. And they're just kind, they're just real comfortable in their own skin for one. And two, they're committed to other principles outside of business. I'm talking about the diversity and inclusion. That's just not flab, that's really who they are. That's their DNA. I think there's an appealing aspect there too. >> Yeah and so. And then we heard a lot, you know, the Coke industries investment, two and a half billion. I said two billion earlier it's two and a half billion. That money didn't show up in the Balance Sheet, okay. So again. You get to write your own narrative as a private company. So there's still three hundred and thirty-eight million on the Balance Sheet you know, still quite a bit of debts. So again, Wall Street would be picking at that but doesn't even come up, at this event. Customers aren't really asking those questions. They want to see a company that's viable. This company is clearly viable. They have thrown off a lot of cash that's why private equity and organizations like Coke Industries are interested in them. Because it's cashflow positive, they see a lot of, you know, financial upside for this company. So that's kind if cool. They other things is Hook & Loop the Design firm that Infor bought you know, several years ago we heard how that's evolving and becoming a fundamental part of, not just design but product development. I think that's pretty impressive. Many companies are doing that now. These guys got in first and so they're a little bit ahead of the game. I think they're, they're innovating in a way that I think has ripple effects for customers. I mean the customer experience. You hear a lot about diversity at this company, I mean this is not to me lip service. >> Right. >> You know Charles is really serious about this stuff. And he's got the platform to do it and he's investing in it. And so, you know, you see a lot of substantive examples. And I think that will pay off. It will pay dividends. The Four Horsemen now have been sort of evolving. There's a succession planning with the Four Horsemen, right. Because Stephan and Duncan have, have moved on. You know they've left the company or at least they're not front and center anymore. They're LinkedIn still says they're working with Infor so they're somehow affiliated. But they don't have operating roles. It's clear. But Charles and Pam still do. And so you're seeing an evolution there. We're going to ask the head of HR tomorrow about that. We heard from, you know Martine, back to the diversity. Corey Tollefson talking retail. You know again, Micro industry. You know, we know, he didn't mention it, but you know guys like Macy's, Safeway, these are decent sized customers of Infor. We're seeing the partner ecosystem grow. We had Capgemini on today. Grant Thornton is out there. You know Deloitte and others that. >> Accenture is out here I think. >> Accenture's out here, yeah. So that's, that's important. Again I think, I think Coke Industries helped nudge some people in there. "Like Hey, we just made a big investment." "We're a big client of yours." >> Didn't hurt. >> "You're going to pay attention." (laughing) >> "And find some opportunities." Probably said: "Look it's got to be subsidize, "It's got to be a win-win but we want you to look in earnest." And I think others have. I've heard that there's been multi-million dollar deals that these guys have have catalyzed. Kevin Curry from Public Sector, a critical space for Infor, he has almost a thousand customers here and Amazon has a huge presence in Public Sector and they're drafting off of that. And then of course we ended with Raul from AWS which was fun interview. AWS is obviously winning in so many different fronts. Big partnerships with guys like VMware. Obviously number one in Cloud, others I guess if you add up all the revenue are number one. But really Amazon's number one in cloud. >> That's right. >> We know they're tops. Because they're in a. For their serve market, which is infrastructure as a service, they're by far the leader and they started the whole thing. Tomorrow we got Charles Phillips coming on. We got Pam Murphy the two, what I consider founders of Infor. They weren't right, but they were the founders of, the new co-founders of the new Infor if you will. And some customers coming on. So really excited to be here. >> Big day, look forward to it. >> Yeah. >> And we, unfortunately I can't share this with you at home but Venus Williams on the Keynote stage tomorrow. Looking forward to that. Talking about the human potential. Shackles going to be here. Had a last minute cancellation so they've Venus Williams in and talk about really thematically, very consistent to her life story with what Infor is talking about here this week. And we're glad to have the opportunity to be here with you throughout the week, and the show. So that's it for day one here at Inforum 18. From Dave Vallante, I'm John Walls, thanks for joining us here on theCUBE and we'll see you back here tomorrow from Washington D.C. (electric upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from midtown Manhattan, it's the Cube. Covering Big Data New York City 2017. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem sponsors. >> Welcome back everyone, we are here live in New York City, in Manhattan for BigData NYC, our event we've been doing for five years in conjunction with Strata Data which is formerly Strata Hadoop, which was formerly Strata Conference, formerly Hadoop World. We've been covering the big data space going on ten years now. This is the Cube. I'm here with Aaron Kalb, whose Head of Product and co-founder at Alation. Welcome to the cube. >> Aaron Kalb: Thank you so much for having me. >> Great to have you on, so co-founder head of product, love these conversations because you're also co-founder, so it's your company, you got a lot of equity interest in that, but also head of product you get to have the 20 mile stare, on what the future looks, while inventing it today, bringing it to market. So you guys have an interesting take on the collaboration of data. Talk about what the means, what's the motivation behind that positioning, what's the core thesis around Alation? >> Totally so the thing we've observed is a lot of people working in the data space, are concerned about the data itself. How can we make it cheaper to store, faster to process. And we're really concerned with the human side of it. Data's only valuable if it's used by people, how do we help people find the data, understand the data, trust in the data, and that involves a mix of algorithmic approaches and also human collaboration, both human to human and human to computer to get that all organized. >> John Furrier: It's interesting you have a symbolics background from Stanford, worked at Apple, involved in Siri, all this kind of futuristic stuff. You can't go a day without hearing about Alexia is going to have voice-activated, you've got Siri. AI is taking a really big part of this. Obviously all of the hype right now, but what it means is the software is going to play a key role as an interface. And this symbolic systems almost brings on this neural network kind of vibe, where objects, data, plays a critical role. >> Oh, absolutely, yeah, and in the early days when we were co-founding the company, we talked about what is Siri for the enterprise? Right, I was you know very excited to work on Siri, and it's really a kind of fun gimmick, and it's really useful when you're in the car, your hands are covered in cookie dough, but if you could answer questions like what was revenue last quarter in the UK and get the right answer fast, and have that dialogue, oh do you mean fiscal quarter or calendar quarter. Do you mean UK including Ireland, or whatever it is. That would really enable better decisions and a better outcome. >> I was worried that Siri might do something here. Hey Siri, oh there it is, okay be careful, I don't want it to answer and take over my job. >> (laughs) >> Automation will take away the job, maybe Siri will be doing interviews. Okay let's take a step back. You guys are doing well as a start up, you've got some great funding, great investors. How are you guys doing on the product? Give us a quick highlight on where you guys are, obviously this is BigData NYC a lot going on, it's Manhattan, you've got financial services, big industry here. You've got the Strata Data event which is the classic Hadoop industry that's morphed into data. Which really is overlapping with cloud, IoTs application developments all kind of coming together. How do you guys fit into that world? >> Yeah, absolutely, so the idea of the data lake is kind of interesting. Psychologically it's sort of a hoarder mentality, oh everything I've ever had I want to keep in the attic, because I might need it one day. Great opportunity to evolve these new streams of data, with IoT and what not, but just cause you can get to it physically doesn't mean it's easy to find the thing you want, the needle in all that big haystack and to distinguish from among all the different assets that are available, which is the one that is actually trustworthy for your need. So we find that all these trends make the need for a catalog to kind of organize that information and get what you want all the more valuable. >> This has come up a lot, I want to get into the integration piece and how you're dealing with your partnerships, but the data lake integration has been huge, and having the catalog has come up with, has been the buzz. Foundationally if you will saying catalog is important. Why is it important to do the catalog work up front, with a lot of the data strategies? >> It's a great question, so, we see data cataloging as step zero. Before you can prep the data in a tool like Trifacta, PACSAT, or Kylo. Before you can visualize it in a tool like Tableau, or MicroStrategy. Before you can do some sort of cool prediction of what's going to happen in the future, with a data science engine, before any of that. These are all garbage in garbage out processes. The step zero is find the relevant data. Understand it so you can get it in the right format. Trust that it's good and then you can do whatever comes next >> And governance has become a key thing here, we've heard of the regulations, GDPR outside of the United States, but also that's going to have an arms length reach over into the United States impact. So these little decisions, and there's going to be an Equifax someday out there. Another one's probably going to come around the corner. How does the policy injection change the catalog equation? A lot of people are building machine learning algorithms on top of catalogs, and they're worried they might have to rewrite everything. How do you balance the trade off between good catalog design and flexibility on the algorithm side? >> Totally yes it's a complicated thing with governance and consumption right. There's people who are concerned with keeping the data safe, and there are people concerned with turning that data into real value, and these can seem to be at odds. What we find is actually a catalog as a foundation for both, and they are not as opposed as they seem. What Alation fundamentally does is we make a map of where the data is, who's using what data, when, how. And that can actually be helpful if your goal is to say let's follow in the footsteps of the best analyst and make more insights generated or if you want to say, hey this data is being used a lot, let's make sure it's being used correctly. >> And by the right people. >> And by the right people exactly >> Equifax they were fishing that pond dry months, months before it actually happened. With good tools like this they might have seen this right? Am I getting it right? >> That's exactly right, how can you observe what's going on to make sure it's compliant and that the answers are correct and that it's happening quickly and driving results. >> So in a way you're taking the collective intelligence of the user behavior and using that into understanding what to do with the data modeling? >> That's exactly right. We want to make each person in your organization as knowledgeable as all of their peers combined. >> So the benefit then for the customer would be if you see something that's developing you can double down on it. And if the users are using a lot of data, then you can provision more technology, more software. >> Absolutely, absolutely. It's sort of like when I was going to Stanford, there was a place where the grass was all dead, because people were riding their bikes diagonally across it. And then somebody smart was like, we're going to put a real gravel path there. So the infrastructure should follow the usage, instead of being something you try to enforce on people. >> It's a classic design meme that goes around. Good design is here, the more effective design is the path. >> Exactly. >> So let's get into the integration. So one of the hot topics here this year obviously besides cloud and AI, with cloud really being more the driver, the tailwind for the growth, AI being more the futuristic head room, is integration. You guys have some partnerships that you announced with integration, what are some of the key ones, and why are they important? >> Absolutely, so, there have been attempts in the past to centralize all the data in one place have one warehouse or one lake have one BI tool. And those generally fail, for different reasons, different teams pick different stacks that work for them. What we think is important is the single source of reference One hub with spokes out to all those different points. If you think about it it's like Google, it's one index of the whole web even though the web is distributed all over the place. To make that happen it's very important that we have partnerships to get data in from various sources. So we have partnerships with database vendors, with Cloudera and Hortonworks, with different BI tools. What's new are a few things. One is with Cloudera Navigator, they have great technical metadata around security and lineage over HGFS, and that's a way to bolster our catalog to go even deeper into what's happening in the files before things get surfaced and higher for places where we have a deeper offering today. >> So it's almost a connector to them in a way, you kind of share data. >> That's exactly right, we've a lot of different connectors, this is one new one that we have. Another, go ahead. >> I was going to go ahead continue. >> I was just going to say another place that is exciting is data prep tools, so Trifacta and Paxata are both places where you can find and understand an alation and then begin to manipulate in those tools. We announced with Paxata yesterday, the ability to click to profile, so if you want to actually see what's in some raw compressed avro file, you can see that in one click. >> It's interesting, Paxata has really been almost lapping, Trifacta because they were the leader in my mind, but now you've got like a Nascar race going on between the two firms, because data wrangling is a huge issue. Data prep is where everyone is stuck right now, they just want to do the data science, it's interesting. >> They are both amazing companies and I'm happy to partner with both. And actually Trifacta and Alation have a lot of joint customers we're psyched to work with as well. I think what's interesting is that data prep, and this is beginning to happen with analyst definitions of that field. It isn't just preparing the data to be used, getting it cleaned and shaped, it's also preparing the humans to use the data giving them the confidence, the tools, the knowledge to know how to manipulate it. >> And it's great progress. So the question I wanted to ask is now the other big trend here is, I mean it's kind of a subtext in this show, it's not really front and center but we've been seeing it kind of emerge as a concept, we see in the cloud world, on premise vs cloud. On premise a lot of people bring in the dev ops model in, and saying I may move to the cloud for bursting and some native applications, but at the end of the day there is a lot of work going on on premise. A lot of companies are kind of cleaning house, retooling, replatforming, whatever you want to do resetting. They are kind of getting their house in order to do on prem cloud ops, meaning a business model of cloud operations on site. A lot of people doing that, that will impact the story, it's going to impact some of the server modeling, that's a hot trend. How do you guys deal with the on premise cloud dynamic? >> Totally, so we just want to do what's right for the customer, so we deploy both on prem and in the cloud and then from wherever the Alation server is it will point to usually a mix of sources, some that are in the cloud like vetshifter S3 often with Amazon today, and also sources that are on prem. I do think I'm seeing a trend more and more toward the cloud and we have people that are migrating from HGFS to S3 is one thing we hear a lot about it. Strata with sort of dupe interest. But I think what's happening is people are realizing as each Equifax in turn happens, that this old wild west model of oh you surround your bank with people on horseback and it's physically in one place. With data it isn't like that, most people are saying I'd rather have the A+ teams at Salesforce or Amazon or Google be responsible for my security, then the people I can get over in the midwest. >> And the Paxata guys have loved the term Data Democracy, because that is really democratization, making the data free but also having the governance thing. So tell me about the Data Lake governance, because I've never loved the term Data Lake, I think it's more of a data ocean, but now you see data lake, data lake, data lake. Are they just silos of data lakes happening now? Are people trying to connect them? That's key, so that's been a key trend here. How do you handle the governance across multiple data lakes? >> That's right so the key is to have that single source of reference, so that regardless of which lake or warehouse, or little siloed Sequel server somewhere, that you can search in a single portal and find that thing no matter where it is. >> John: Can you guys do that? >> We can do that, yeah, I think the metaphor for people who haven't seen it really is Google, if you think about it, you don't even know what physical server a webpage is hosted from. >> Data lakes should just be invisible >> Exactly. >> So your interfacing with multiple data lakes, that's a value proposition for you. >> That's right so it could be on prem or in the cloud, multi-cloud. >> Can you share an example of a customer that uses that and kind of how it's laid out? >> Absolutely, so one great example of an interesting data environment is eBay. They have the biggest teradata warehouse in the world. They also have I believe two huge data lakes, they have hive on top of that, and Presto is used to sort of virtualize it across a mixture of teradata, and hive and then direct Presto query It gets very complicated, and they have, they are a very data driven organization, so they have people who are product owners who are in jobs where data isn't in their job title and they know how to look at excel and look at numbers and make choices, but they aren't real data people. Alation provides that accessibility so that they can understand it. >> We used to call the Hadoop world the car show for the data world, where for a long time it was about the engine what was doing what, and then it became, what's the car, and now how's it drive. Seeing that same evolution now where all that stuff has to get done under the hood. >> Aaron: Exactly. >> But there are still people who care about that, right. They are the mechanics, they are the plumbers, whatever you want to call them, but then the data science are the guys really driving things and now end users potentially, and even applications bots or what nots. It seems to evolve, that's where we're kind of seeing the show change a little bit, and that's kind of where you see some of the AI things. I want to get your thoughts on how you or your guys are using AI, how you see AI, if it's AI at all if it's just machine learning as a baby step into AI, we all know what AI could be, but it's really just machine learning now. How do you guys use quote AI and how has it evolved? >> It's a really insightful question and a great metaphor that I love. If you think about it, it used to be how do you build the car, and now I can drive the car even though I couldn't build it or even fix it, and soon I don't even have to drive the car, the car will just drive me, all I have to know is where I want to go. That's sortof the progression that we see as well. There's a lot of talk about deep learning, all these different approaches, and it's super interesting and exciting. But I think even more interesting than the algorithms are the applications. And so for us it's like today how do we get that turn by turn directions where we say turn left at the light if you want to get there And eventually you know maybe the computer can do it for you The thing that is also interesting is to make these algorithms work no matter how good your algorithm is it's all based on the quality of your training data. >> John: Which is a historical data. Historical data in essence the more historical data you have you need that to train the data. >> Exactly right, and we call this behavior IO how do we look at all the prior human behavior to drive better behavior in the future. And I think the key for us is we don't want to have a bunch of unpaid >> John: You can actually get that URL behavioral IO. >> We should do it before it's too late (Both laugh) >> We're live right now, go register that Patrick. >> Yeah so the goal is we don't want to have a bunch of unpaid interns trying to manually attack things, that's error prone and that's slow. I look at things like Luis von Ahn over at CMU, he does a thing where as you're writing in a CAPTCHA to get an email account you're also helping Google recognize a hard to read address or a piece of text from books. >> John: If you shoot the arrow forward, you just take this kind of forward, you almost think augmented reality is a pretext to what we might see for what you're talking about and ultimately VR are you seeing some of the use cases for virtual reality be very enterprise oriented or even end consumer. I mean Tom Brady the best quarterback of all time, he uses virtual reality to play the offense virtually before every game, he's a power user, in pharma you see them using virtual reality to do data mining without being in the lab, so lab tests. So you're seeing augmentation coming in to this turn by turn direction analogy. >> It's exactly, I think it's the other half of it. So we use AI, we use techniques to get great data from people and then we do extra work watching their behavior to learn what's right. And to figure out if there are recommendations, but then you serve those recommendations, either it's Google glasses it appears right there in your field of view. We just have to figure out how do we make sure, that in a moment of you're making a dashboard, or you're making a choice that you have that information right on hand. >> So since you're a technical geek, and a lot of folks would love to talk about this, so I'll ask you a tough question cause this is something everyone is trying to chase for the holy grail. How do you get the right piece of data at the right place at the right time, given that you have all these legacy silos, latencies and network issues as well, so you've got a data warehouse, you've got stuff in cold storage, and I've got an app and I'm doing something, there could be any points of data in the world that could be in milliseconds potentially on my phone or in my device my internet of thing wearable. How do you make that happen? Because that's the struggle, at the same time keep all the compliance and all the overhead involved, is it more compute, is it an architectural challenge how do you view that because this is the big challenge of our time. >> Yeah again I actually think it's the human challenge more than the technology challenge. It is true that there is data all over the place kind of gathering dust, but again if you think about Google, billions of web pages, I only care about the one I'm about to use. So for us it's really about being in that moment of writing a query, building a chart, how do we say in that moment, hey you're using an out of date definition of profit. Or hey the database you chose to use, the one thing you chose out of the millions that is actually is broken and stale. And we have interventions to do that with our partners and through our own first party apps that actually change how decisions get made at companies. >> So to make that happen, if I imagine it, you'd have to need access to the data, and then write software that is contextually aware to then run, compute, in context to the user interaction. >> It's exactly right, back to the turn by turn directions concept you have to know both where you're trying to go and where you are. And so for us that can be the from where I'm writing a Sequel statement after join we can suggest the table most commonly joined with that, but also overlay onto that the fact that the most commonly joined table was deprecated by a data steward data curator. So that's the moment that we can change the behavior from bad to good. >> So a chief data officer out there, we've got to wrap up, but I wanted to ask one final question, There's a chief data officer out there they might be empowered or they might be just a CFO assistant that's managing compliance, either way, someone's going to be empowered in an organization to drive data science and data value forward because there is so much proof that data science works. From military to play you're seeing examples where being data driven actually has benefits. So everyone is trying to get there. How do you explain the vision of Alation to that prospect? Because they have so much to select from, there's so much noise, there's like, we call it the tool shed out there, there's like a zillion tools out there there's like a zillion platforms, some tools are trying to turn into something else, a hammer is trying to be a lawnmower. So they've got to be careful on who the select, so what's the vision of Alation to that chief data officer, or that person in charge of analytics to scale operational analytics. >> Absolutely so we say to the CDO we have a shared vision for this place where your company is making decisions based on data, instead of based on gut, or expensive consultants months too late. And the way we get there, the reason Alation adds value is, we're sort of the last tool you have to buy, because with this lake mentality, you've got your tool shed with all the tools, you've got your library with all the books, but they're just in a pile on the floor, if you had a tool that had everything organized, so you just said hey robot, I need an hammer and this size nail and this text book on this set of information and it could just come to you, and it would be correct and it would be quick, then you could actually get value out of all the expense you've already put in this infrastructure, that's especially true on the lake. >> And also tools describe the way the works done so in that model tools can be in the tool shed no one needs to know it's in there. >> Aaron: Exactly. >> You guys can help scale that. Well congratulations and just how far along are you guys in terms of number of employees, how many customers do you have? If you can share that, I don't know if that's confidential or what not >> Absolutely, so we're small but growing very fast planning to double in the next year, and in terms of customers, we've got 85 customers including some really big names. I mentioned eBay, Pfizer, Safeway Albertsons, Tesco, Meijer. >> And what are they saying to you guys, why are they buying, why are they happy? >> They share that same vision of a more data driven enterprise, where humans are empowered to find out, understand, and trust data to make more informed choices for the business, and that's why they come and come back. >> And that's the product roadmap, ethos, for you guys that's the guiding principle? >> Yeah the ultimate goal is to empower humans with information. >> Alright Aaron thanks for coming on the Cube. Aaron Kalb, co-founder head of product for Alation here in New York City for BigData NYC and also Strata Data I'm John Furrier thanks for watching. We'll be right back with more after this short break.

(fun, relaxing music) >> Announcer: Live from the Javits Center, in New York City, it's The Cube. Covering Inforum 2017. Brought to you by Infor. >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Inforum 2017, I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We're joined by Stephan Scholl, he is the president of Infor. Thanks so much for joining us. >> My pleasure. >> For returning to The Cube My pleasure, yeah, three years in a row, I think, or four now, yeah. >> Indeed. >> Well, we skipped a year in-between. >> That's right! Three years. Anyway, it's good to be here. >> This has been a hugely successful conference. We're hearing so much about the growth and momentum of Infor. Can you unpack this a little bit for our viewers? >> Yeah, I mean... People always forget, we only started this aggressive Cloud journey literally three years ago. When we announced at Inforum in New Orleans that we were pivoting the company to Infor industry-based CloudSuites, everybody looked at us and said, "Well, that's an interesting pivot." "Why are you doing that?" Well, as I said yesterday, we really saw a market dynamic that you see retail just getting crushed by what Amazon was doing, and it was obvious, today, but then it wasn't so obvious, but that was going to happen everywhere, and so we really got aggressive on believing we could put together a very different approach to tackling enterprise software. Everybody is so fatigued from buying from our competitors traditional, perpetual software, and then you end up modifying the hell out of it, and then you end up spending a gazillion dollars, and it takes forever, and then if it does work, you're stuck on old technology already, and you never get to the next round of evolution. So we said why don't we build CloudSuites, take the last model industry functionality that we have, put it in a Cloud, make it easy for our customers to implement it, and then we'll run it for them. And then, by the way, when the newest innovation comes up, we'll upgrade them automatically. That's what Cloud's about. So, that's where we saw that transformation happening. So in three years, we went from two percent, as I said, to 55 plus percent of our revenue. And, by the way, we're not a small company. Nobody at our size and scale has ever done that in enterprise software. So what an accomplishment. >> So a lot of large companies, some that you used to work for, are really slow. And, you know what, lot of times that's okay, 'cause IT tends to be really slow, as you move to the Cloud, and move to the situation where, "Okay, guys, new release coming!" What are your customers saying about that, how are you managing that sort of pace of change, that flywheel of Amazon, and you're now innovating on and pushing to your climate? >> Well, they're excited. And, I'll tell you, I remember standing up in Frankfurt, Germany, 18 months ago for a keynote, and said the Cloud is coming, I almost got kicked out of Germany. (laughing) They said it's not going to happen in Germany, "No, we're an engineering pedigree," "We're going to be on premise." >> "You don't understand the German market!" >> "You don't understand our marketplace!" And, we're really close friends with Andy Jassy at AWS, the CEO. The AWS guys are unbelievable, and innovative, and we said, "You know, you guys got to build" "your next data center in Frankfurt." So they put hundreds of millions of dollars investment in, built a data center. What's the fastest growing data center in Europe, right now, for them? Frankfurt! The German market, for us, our pipeline is tenfold increase from what it was a year ago. So, it's working in Germany, and it's happening on a global basis, we have, I think yesterday 75 customers from Saudi, from Dubai, from all the Middle East. Cloud is a great equalizer. And don't underestimate... I'll take luck to our advantage anytime. The luck part is, there's fatigue out there, they're exhausted, they've spent so much money over the last 20, 30 years, and never reached the promise of what they were sold then, and so now, with all the digital disruption, I think of the business competitive challenges that they have to deal with. I mean, I don't care, you could be in Wichita, Kansas building up an e-commerce website, and compete with a company in Saudi tomorrow. The barest entry in manufacturing, retail, look at government agencies, we're doing nine-figure transformations in the Cloud with public sector agencies. Again, two years ago, they would've said never going to happen. >> Rebecca: Yet the government does spend that kind of... >> Mike Rogers, the CIO, was saying to us, "Look at all the technical debt" "that we've accumulated over the years," "and it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse." "If we don't bite the bullet and move now," "it's just going to take that much longer." >> That's right. And they're leap-frogging. I mean, I'm so excited, government agencies! I mean, there's even some edicts in some places where Cloud-only. I mean, this whole Gold Coast opportunity, 40 plus different applications in Australia, all going into the Cloud to handle all the complexities they have around the commonwealth games that they're trying to deal with. I mean, just huge transformations on a global basis. >> At this conference, we're hearing about so many different companies, and, as you said, government agencies, municipalalities, transforming their business models, transforming their approaches. What are some of your favorite transformation stories? >> My favorite one that we're doing is Travis Perkins. John Carter, I think you guys maybe even interviewed him last year when he was here. CEO. Old, staid distribution business, and taking a whole new fresh approach. Undoing 40 to 50 different applications, taking his entire business, putting it online. He deals with contracts... So, they're the Home Depot of the UK market, and right now, if you drive up into that car port and you want to order something, it's manual! Sticky notes, phones, dumb terminals, I need five windows, I need five roofs, I need five pieces of wood. Everything is just a scurry. He wants to put it on, when you drive up next year, you're on an iPad, what would you like? Oh, by the way, you want to make a custom order on that window frame? You want to make green, yellow, red, you want to order different tiles of roof styling? Custom orders is the future! You, as a contractor, walking into that organization, want to make a custom order. That, today, is very complicated for a company like that to handle. So, the future is about undoing all that, embracing the custom order process, giving you a really unique, touchless buying process, where it's all on an iPad, it's all automated. You know what? Telling you here's your five new windows, here's a new frame want on it, and, by the way, you're going to get it in five days, and three hours, and 21 minutes. Deliver it to your door. And, by the way, these guys are huge. They're one of the biggest distribution companies in all of the United Kingdom, and so that's one of my favorite stories. >> Can we go over some of the metrics that you've been sharing. I know it's somewhat repetitive, but I'd like to get it on-record. There's 55%, 84, 88, over 1100, 3x, 60%, maybe start with the 60%. I think it's bookings grown, right? >> That's right, yeah. License sales growth last year alone. And, you know what, I looked at... You know, I see it, Paul always keeps me honest, but I think I can say it anyways, which is, I looked at everybody else. You look at the... I don't want you to mention any competitors' names, but you look at the top five competitors that we have, we grew faster than they did last year on sales of CloudSuite. >> Dave: Okay, so that's 60% bookings growth on Cloud. >> Correct. That's right. Yeah, I mean, when you think of our competitors, I saw 40s, I saw some 30s, I saw maybe 52 at the next one down. So, people don't think of us that way, so we were, at the enterprise scale, the fastest-growing Cloud company in the world. >> Okay, and then, 3x, that's 3x the number of customers who bought multiple products, is that correct? >> Correct. That's exactly right. So think about that transformation. They used to buy from us one product, feature-function rich, great, but now they're buying five products, eight products from us. So 3x increase, year over year, already happening. >> Okay, and then there was 1100 plus, is Go-Lives. >> People always ask us, "You're selling stuff." "Are they using it, is it working?" So you got to follow up with delivery, so we're spending a ton of money on certification, training, and ablement, look at the SI community, look at the... Deloitte, Accenture, Capgemini, and Grand Thornton. Four of the major SIs in the world, that weren't here last year, are all here this year. Platinum sponsors. So, delivery on Go Lives, the SI community is embracing us, helping us, I mean, I can't do hundred million dollar transformations on my own with these customers. I need Accenture, I need Deloitte. Look at Koch! Koch's going to be a massive transformation for financials, human-capital management, and so I've got Accenture and Deloitte helping us, taking a hundred plus billion dollar company on those two systems. >> And then 84, 88, is number of... >> Live customers, I'm sorry, total customers that we have in the Cloud. >> Cloud customers, okay, not total customers. >> No, no, we have 90 thousand plus customers, and then 84, 85 hundred of them are Cloud-based customers. >> You got a ways to go, then, to convert some of those customers. >> Well, that's our opportunity, that's exactly right. >> And then 55% of revenue came from the Cloud, obviously driven by the Cloud bookings growth. >> That's right. Exactly. So, I mean, just the acceleration, I mean, as I said, when we started this thing in New Orleans, two or three percent. Now, tipping point, revenue, I mean, it's one thing to sell software, but to actually turn it into revenue? Nobody at an enterprise scale has done 2% to 55% at our size. Lots of companies in the hundred million dollar range, small companies, you know, if we were a stand-alone Cloud company, we'd be one of the largest Cloud companies in the world. >> So the narrative from Oracle, I wonder if you can comment on this, is that the core of enterprise apps has not moved to the Cloud, and we, Oracle, are the guys to move it there, 'cause we are the only ones with that end-to-end Cloud on prem to Cloud strategy. And most companies can't put core apps, enterprise apps in the Cloud, especially on Amazon. So, what do you say to that? >> Well, it's 'cause they don't have the applications to do that. Oracle doesn't have the application horsepower. They don't have industry-based application suites. If you think of what fusion is, it's a mishmash of all the applications that they bought. There's no industry capability. >> Dave: It's horizontal, is what you're saying. >> It's horizontal. Oracle is fighting a battle against Amazon, they declared war against AWS. I'm glad they're doing that, go ahead! I mean, I don't know how you're going to do that, but they want to fight the infrastructure game. For us, infrastructure is commoditized. We're fighting the business applications layer game, and so, when you look at SAP or Oracle or anybody else, they have never done what we've done in our heritage, which is take key critical mission functionality for aerospace and defense, or automotive, we have the last mile functionality. I mean, I have companies like Ferrari, on of the most complicated companies, we've talked about those guys for years, no modifications! BAE, over in the UK, building the F-35 fighter jets and the Typhoon war planes. It doesn't get any more complicated than building an F-35 fighter jet. No modifications in their software, that they have with us. You can only build Cloud-based solutions if you don't modify the software. Oracle doesn't have that. Never had it. They're not a manufacturing pedigreed organization. SAP's probably more analogous to that, but even for SAP, they only have one complete big product sect covering retail, distribution, finance, it's the same piece of software they send to a bank, that they send to a retailer, that they send to a manufacturer. We don't do that. That's been our core forever. >> So your dogma is no custom mods, because you're basically saying you can't succeed in the Cloud with custom mods. >> Yeah. I mean, we have an extensive ability platform to do some neat things if you need to do that, but generally speaking, otherwise it's just lipstick on the pig if you're running modified applications. That's called hosting, and that's what these guys are largely doing. >> You know, a lot of people count hosting as Cloud. >> That's the game they're playing, right? >> They throw everything in the Cloud kitchen sink. >> That's right. >> Okay. >> And as we've talked with you before, we've spent billions... We all are R&D's at the application layer. We do some work in the integration layer, and so on, but most of our money is spent in the last mile, which, Oracle and SAP, they're all focused on HANA and infrastructure, and system speed, and performance, and all the stuff that we view as absolutely being commoditized. >> But that's really attractive to the SIs, the fact that they don't go that last mile, so why is it that the SIs are suddenly sort of coming to Infor? >> Well, you know what, because they finally see there is a lot of revenue still on the line in terms of change management, business-process re-engineering. You take a company like Travis Perkins, change their entire model of doing business. There isn't just modification revenue, or integration revenue, there is huge dollars to be had on change management, taking the company to CEO John Carter by the hand, and saying, "Here's how you're going to transform" "your entire business process." That more than makes up in many cases high-value dollars than focused on changing a widget from green to yellow. >> And it's right in the wheelhouse of these big consultancies. >> And they're making good money on digital transformation, so what are the digital use cases? Look at Accenture, they're did a great job. I think 20 plus percent of their business now is all coming from digital. That didn't exist three, four years ago. >> Well, you have a lot of historical experience from your Oracle days of working with those large SIs, they were critical, but they were doing different type of work then, and is it your premise that a lot of that's going away and that's shifting toward. >> The voice of the customer is everything, and it may take time, you can snow a customer once, which we've already done in this industry of software. We told them buy generic-based software, Oracle or SAP, modify it with an SI, take five years, implement it for a hundred million dollars, get stuck on this platform, and if you're lucky, maybe upgrade in ten years. Whoever does that today, as a playbook, as a customer, and if an SI can sell that, I'm not buying that. You think any customers I know today are buying that vision? I don't think so. >> Dave: Right there with the outsourcing business. >> Another thing that's come out of this conference is attention to the Brooklyn Nets deal. Can you talk a little big about it, it's very cool. >> I love those guys. >> Dave: We're from Boston, we love the Brooklyn Nets, too. >> Rebecca: They can play us anytime. Every day. >> Dave: For those draft picks. >> Bread on those guys. You know what it is. And Shaun, the GM, the energy... I use that a lot with my own guys. Brooklyn grit. And they're willing to look and upturn every aspect of the game to be more competitive. And so, we're in there with our technology, looking at every facet, what are they eating? What's the EQ stuff? Emotional occlusion. How's that team collaboration coming together? And then mapping it to... They have the best 3-D cameras on the court, so put positioning, and how are they aligning to each other? Who's doing the front guard in terms of holding the next person back so they can have enough room to do a three-point shot. Where should the three-point shot come from? So, taking all the EQ stuff, the IQ stuff, the performance, the teamwork, putting it all into a recipe for success. These guys are, I'm going to predict it here, these guys are going to rock it next couple years as a team. >> But it's not just what goes on in the court, too, it's also about fan engagement, too. >> All that. Well, fair enough, I get all excited about just making them a much better team, but the whole fan experience, walking into a place knowing that if I get up now, the washroom line isn't 15 miles long, and at the cash line for a beer isn't going to take me 20 minutes, that I'm on my app, you actually have all the information and sensors in place to know that, hey, right now's a great time, aisle number four, queue number three, is a one-minute wait for a beer, go. Or have runners, everything's on your phone, they don't do enough service. So there's a huge revenue opportunity along with it, from a business point of view, but I would also say is a customer service element. How many times have we sat in a game and go, "I'm not getting up there." (laughing) Unless you're sitting in the VIP area, well, there's revenue to be had all over the place. >> Yeah, they're missing out on our beer money, yeah. >> It's ways for a stadium services, which are essentially a liquor distribution system. >> Exactly right. But to do that, you got to connect point of sales systems, you got to connect a lot of components, centers in the bathroom, I mean you got to do a lot of work, so we're going to create the fan experience of the future with them. And preferences, the fact that they that when you walk in past the door with your app and if you have Brooklyn Nets app, that we know who your favorite player is, and you get a little text that says, Hey, you know what, 10% discount on the next shirt from your favorite player. Things like that. Making a personal connection with you about what you like is going to change the game. And that's happening everywhere. In retail... Everybody wants to have a one-to-one relationship. You want to order your Nike shoes online with a green lace and a red lace on the right, Nike allows you to do that. You want to order a shirt that they'll make for you with the different emblems on it and different technology to it, those are things they're doing, too. So, a very one-to-one relationship. >> Well, it's data, it's more than data, it's insights, and you guys are, everybody's a data company, but you're really becoming a data and insight-oriented company. Did you kind of stumble into that, or is this part of the grand plan six years ago, or, how'd you get here? >> Listen, this whole... I mean, to do Cloud-based solutions by industry is not just to solve for applications going from infrastructure on-premise to off-premise. What does it allow you to do? Well, if you're in AWS, I can run ten thousand core products... I can run a report in ten minutes with AWS that would take you a week, around sales information, customer information. Look at all the Netflix content. You log in on Netflix, "Suggestions for You". It's actually pretty accurate, isn't it? >> Scarily accurate, sometimes, yes. >> It's pretty smart what goes into the algorithm that looks at your past. Unfortunately, I log into my kid's section, and it has my name on it and I get all these wonderful recommendations for kids. But that's the kind of stuff that we're talking about. Customers need that. It's about real-time, it's not looking backwards anymore, it's about real-time decisioning, and analytics, and artificial intelligence, AI is the future, for sure. >> So more, more on the future, this is really fun, listening to you talk, because you are the president, and you have a great view of what's going on. What will we be talking about next year, at this time. Well, it won't be quite this time, it will be September, but what do you think? >> I think what you're going to see is massive global organizations up on stage, like the ones I mentioned, Travis Perkins, a Safeway, a Gold Coast, a Hertz. Hertz is under attack as a company. The entry point into the rental car business was very very hard. Who's going to go buy 800 thousand cars and get in the rental business, open ten thousand centers? You don't need to do that anymore today! >> Dave: Software! >> It's called software, the application business, so their business model is under attack. We're feverishly working with their CEO and their executive team and their board on redefining the future of Hertz. So, you're going to see here, next year, the conversation with a company like Hertz rebounding and growing and being successful, and... The best defense is a good offense, so they're on the offensive! They're going to use their size, their scale. You look at the retailers, I mean, I love the TAL story, and they may make one out of every six shirts. Amazon puts the same shirt online that they sell for $39.99, TAL's trying to sell for $89.99. They're saying enough of that. They built these beautiful analyzers, sensors, where you walk into this little room, and they do a sensor of a hundred different parts of your body, So they're going to get the perfect shirt for you. So, it's an experience center. So you walk into this little center, name's escaping me now, but they're going to take all the measurements, like a professional Italian tailor would do, you walk in, it's all automatic, you come out of there, they know all the components of your body, which is a good thing and a bad thing, sometimes, right, (laughing) they'll know it all, and then you go to this beautiful rack and you're going to pick what color do you want. Do you want a different color? So everything is moving to custom, and you'll pay more for that. Wouldn't you pay for a customized shirt that fits your body perfectly, rather than an off-the-rack kind of shirt at $89.99? That's how you compete with the generic-based e-commerce plays that are out there. That use case of TAL is going to happen in every facet. DSW, the DSW ones, these experience centers, the shoeless aisles, that whole experience. You walking in as... The most loyal women shoppers are DSW with their applications, right. >> Rebecca: (laughs) Yes, yes. >> And how many times have you tried a shoe on that doesn't fit properly, or it's not the one you want, or they don't have your size, or you want to make some configurations to it. You got one, too! >> Ashley came by and gave me this, 'cause I love DSW. >> I mean, they're what, one of the biggest shoe companies in the world not standing still, and Ashley is transforming, they went live on financials in like 90 days in the Cloud? Which for them, that kind of innovation happening that fast is unbelievable. So next year, the whole customer experience side is going to be revolutionary for these kinds of exciting organizations. So, rather than cowering from this digital transformation, they're embracing it. We're going to be the engine of digital transformation for them. I get so excited to have major corporations completely disrupting themselves to change their market for themselves moving forward. >> What is the Koch investment meant to you guys, can you talk about that a little bit? I mean, obviously, we hear two billion dollars, and blah, blah, blah, but can you go a little deeper for us? >> I mean, forget all the money stuff, for a minute, just the fact that we're part of a company that is, went from 40 million when Charles Koch started, taking over from his family, and went to 100 plus billion. Think about that innovation. Think about the horsepower, the culture, the aggressiveness, the tenacity, the will to win. We already had that. To combine that with their sheer size and scale is something that is exciting for me, one. Two is they view technology as the next big chapter for them. I mean, again, not resting on your laurels, I'm already 100 billion, they want to grow to 150, 200 billion, and they see technology as the root to getting there. Automating their plants, connecting all their components of their employees, gain the right employees to the right place, so workforce management, all the HR stuff that we're doing on transformation, the financials, getting a global consolidated view across 100 billion dollar business on our systems. That's transformation! That's big, big business for us, and what a great reference to have! A guy like Steve Fellmeier up yesterday, he'll be up here next year talking about how he's using us to transform their business. There's not many 100 billion dollar companies around, right, so what a great reference point for us to have them as a customer, and as a proved point of success. >> Well, we'll look forward to that in September, and seeing you back here next year, too. >> Look forward to it. >> Stephan, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks, appreciate it, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante, that is it for us and The Cube at Inforum 2017. See you next time.

(The Cube Theme) >> Voiceover: Live from Silicon Valley, it's the Cube, covering Google Cloud Next '17. >> Hey, welcome back here, and we're here live in Palo Alto for a special two days of coverage of Google Next 2017. I've John Furrier here in The Cube. We have reporters and analysts on the ground who are calling in, getting reaction on all the great news, and of course, Google's march to the enterprise cloud really is the big story, of course, they have their cloud they've been powering with their infrastructure and it had great presence, powering their own stuff, just like Amazon.com had Amazon webservices, Google Cloud now powering Google and others. Diane Green, new CEO, taking the reins, making things happen, we covered that news, and for an entrepreneurial perspective we have Tarun Thakur who is a co-founder and CEO Datos.io, former entrepreneur at Data Domain, been in the business, newly funded, Series A entrepreneur funded with True Ventures and Lightspeed. >> That is correct, John, thank you. >> Thanks for coming on. Tell us what you guys do first. Explain what you guys as a company are doing. >> Absolutely. I'd love to first thank you for the opportunity. It's a pleasure to be here. About Datos, I'll sort of zoom out a little bit and if you really see what's really happening out in the industry, our founding premise, me and my co-founder, Prasenjit, our founding principle is very simple. There are some transformative changes happening in the application era. I was just listening to Akash talk rom SAP, and enterprise workloads are moving to the cloud. That was our founding premise, that not only do you not have those IOT workloads, these SAS workloads, the real time analytics workloads, being born in the cloud, but you have all these traditional workloads that are moving as fast as they can to the cloud. So if you really look at that transformative change, we have a very simple founding premise: applications define the choice of the IT stack underneath it. What do we mean by that? The choice of the database, the choice of the storage, the choice of all the data management tooling around it, starting with protection, starting with governance, compliance, and so on and so forth, right? So if the application workloads are under disruption, and they're moving to the cloud, the impact it has on the IT stack underneath is phenomenal. >> So Tarun, you guys had a great write-up in the Register, Chris Miller, who is well known in the story, 'cause we all follow him, he's a great guy, and very fair, but he can be critical, too, he's very snarky. We like his columns. He called you guys the Tesla of the backup world. What does he mean by that? Does he mean it like you have all the bells and whistles of a modern thing, or is there a specific nuance to why he's calling you the Tesla of the backup world? >> No, this is excellent, John. You know, we are fortunate and we're honored. >> Electric backup? I mean, what's happening here? (laughing) I mean, what does he mean by that? What's the meaning? >> Couldn't have given us a better privilege than what he gave. Had a chance to host him in the office, small office, much smaller than what you have here, in December, and a 45 minute session became a two hour session and really he dug into why the Tesla, and essentially it goes back to, John, you had the traditional workloads running on your traditional databases, classical scale-operational databases like Oracle and SQL. Now, you're dealing with these next generation, hyperscale distributed applications. IOT real time analytic is building on that team, those are being deployed fundamentally on distributed architectures. Your Apache Cassandra, your Amazon Dynamo DB, your Google Spanner, now that we're talking in the context of Google Cloud Next, right? When you look at those distributed architectures, there's so much fundamental shift. You don't run them on shared storage, you don't have media servers anymore in the cloud- >> You have the edge. You have the edge out there. >> You have the edge computing. Given all those changes, you have to fundamentally rethink of backup, and that's essentially what we did. Just going back to Tesla, Tesla was started with a fundamentally seminal architecture. >> So you thought this from the ground up. That's essentially one point, and the other one is that it's modern in the sense of it's really taken advantage of the new architecture. >> That's absolutely right, you know, when we started, again, back in June of 2014, we really started with the end in mind, ten years, the next ten years ahead of us, and the end in mind was, "Look, it's going to be distributed architectures, "it's going to be your hyperscale applications, the webscale applications, and you need to be able to understand data and protect it and recover it and manage your data at that scale. >> Okay, so you guys are also Google partners, so you have an interesting perspective. You're on the front lines, Series A entrepreneur, you haven't cleared the runway yet. You still have to prove yourself. The game is just starting; you don't end it with the financing. That's just validation for the vision and the mission, and you've had some good press so far from Chris, now as you execute, you have a partner in Google. What's your analysis of Google, and as someone who's close to them, certainly as an entrepreneur, you're nimble, you're fast, you understand the tech, you mentioned Spanner, great horizontal scale of opportunity, but some of the enterprises might be a little slower, and they have different orientation, so help us understand what's Google doing? What's their main focus? >> I'll give you an answer in three part series. Number one, we are, again, a start-up, seriously, as you said, we have a lot ahead of us, even though we've been out here for three years, it feels like yesterday. (laughing) >> John: It's a grind. >> It is a grind, but to partner Google Cloud, one of our key marquee customers, a Fortune 100 home improvement retailer, under NDA, cannot take their name out of respect. >> John: Well the register says Home Depot. (laughing) >> Okay. >> Okay, so- >> I'll let Chris do the honor, but it's a Fortune 100 home improvement retailer, John, and their line of business, their entire e-commerce platform, the CIO down has moved their entire platform, migrated from DB2 to Google Cloud. It's not running on DB2 on Google Cloud platform, it's running all on a distributed massive scale- >> So did they sunset DB2 or did they completely- >> Tarun: Completely migrated away from DB2. >> Okay. >> It's part of the digital transformation journey Home Depot is at. They are three years in, they have two more years to go, and as part of the digital transformation journey they're on, they are now running their e-commerce website, which, think of you and I going to Thanksgiving and buying your home tools, and that application runs on a highly scalable Apache Cassandra database on Google Cloud. Now, second part, going back to large-scale enterprises, Home Depot, being how progressive they are, they understood cloud does not mean recoverability. Cloud gives me the scale, cloud gives me the economics, cloud gives me the availability, but it doesn't give me the point in time, and I need myself to be covered against that "what if" moment. We have hold-the-delta moments, we have hold-the-gitlack moments, SalesForce.com down with that human error, right? You don't want to be in that position as a Home Depot. >> You mean Amazon went down? >> Tarun: And Amazon. >> Yeah, Amazon went down. >> And if you read the analysis, the analysis was, "We're sorry guys, there was a human error. "Somebody was meant to change this directory; "he changed that directory." >> So this is a whole new game. One of the fears that the enterprises have is that in a new architecture, besides security, which is a huge issue, we'll have another segment on that shortly, but is that I want to leverage the capabilities of the partner in the cloud, because manageability, certain things, I don't want to build on my own, and so I can see you guys being a new modern piece because the data piece is so important because I'm storing at the edge, I'm not moving data around, so there's no data in motion as much as it is on premise. Is that a big part of this? >> It is, from a, I'll zoom out again, from a CIO perspective, we pitched this to about 100+ CIOs so far. From there it is truly, and I hate to use this word, but it's truly a multi-cloud world, John. They have invested in private clouds and an on-prem infrastructure that ain't going anywhere anytime soon. They are moving some of their SAP instances to a CenturyLink, MSPs, the managed service providers, but they know, as a CIO, I have my application developers and I have my lines of businesses- >> John: And they have their operations guys, too. >> Who want to go as fast as they can. I'll come back to the operations in a second because you'll be very surprised to hear this, but again from a CIO down, he wants to make his application developers to go as fast as they can, and he wants the lines of business just to go open up the next applications- >> John: Because that's top-line revenue right there. >> That's top-line revenue right there. So they want scale, they want agility, but they don't want to sacrifice that insurance piece. Going back to the IT ops and the dev-ops and the classical ops, you'll be surprised, we've been working with this team, our lead-in to the Fortune 100 home improvement retailer was a line of business, but right now it's all about their core IT team. Their IT ops team, the database admins, the database ops people, they are the ones who are really running this product day-to-day, day in and day out, and scaling it, and using it at the pace they need to. >> What's the big misconception, if you could point to, about Google, because one of the things we're trying to surface is that Amazon and Google, it's not apples to apples comparison, they're different clouds, and it is multi-cloud, I want to get you to that question today, but we can get to that in a second, what your definition of that means, but for now, what is the big misconception in your mind, people might misconstrue with Google? >> That's a great question, John, and I was hearing your previous interview with Akash, and again, I'll give you our partner-centric view; a young start-up built something disruptive for that platform. We got Amazon as the first platform. We have a good set of customers running on Amazon, and of course, this home improvement retailer took us to Google Cloud, "Hey guys, if you want to work with us, "you have to support Google Cloud." We went to Google Cloud, and the amount of pull that we got from Google Cloud folks to make it happen in less than three months was phenomenal. They didn't stop at that. They brought their solution architect team, Google Cloud, wrote a paper about Datos, their team, and posted it on their website. "How to use Datos on Google Cloud." Fascinating. Amazon has never done that. It, again, speaks to if you see all the announcements that came out yesterday, Google Cloud has been a significant- >> Well Google's partnering, Google's partnering, one of the things that came out of today's news that has been teased out is Diane Green said in the keynote, "I like partnering." She used the word, "I like partnering," meaning Google, and she has that DNA. She's from VM, where she knows the valley game, she understands ecosystems. She also likes to work on some cool stuff, which could be a double-edged sword. She's always been innovating. But Google has the tech, and she knows enterprise, so they're marching down that road. What areas would you say Google needs to sharpen up a little bit to kind of move faster on? I mean, obviously there's no critique on them; they're pedaling as fast as they can, but in the areas you think they should work on, is it security, is it the data side, what are the things that you think they've got to pedal a little faster on. >> I would definitely start with enterprising touch. I think they need to really amp up the game around enterprise. >> John: You mean the people, the process? >> The people, the processes, the onboarding, the deployment, giving them the blue templates, giving them reference architectures, giving them, hand ruling them a little bit, and I think that'll go a long ways- >> John: The basic enterprise motions. >> Yes, you need that. You're a cloud; that doesn't mean my database guy is not going to need the help of a Google Cloud admin to help me onboard. They need that wrap-up. From their point on they build phenomenal scalable services. Snap invested two billion dollars in Google Cloud. They understand- >> And Amazon got the other half, but- >> The underlying infrastructure is there. >> Yeah but this is the thing. The problem that, the problem is that there's two perspectives of what we see. One is people want to run like Google in the sense of how they're scaling, but not everyone has Google-like infrastructure, so I think Google has to kind of, they want the developers, in my mind, they get a A+ there, with open source, what they do with Kubernetes and whatnot, the operational orientation is something they've got to work on, SLAs are more important than price. >> Managing the orchestration piece, giving them the visibility, letting them come on and come off, and going back to multi-cloud, I'll tell you again, the same customer took us to a use case, which is so fascinating, John. They want on-prem backup and recovery. Remember, protection is the Trojan horse. Protection, it all starts with protection. >> It's always one of those things that's always been front and center. You saw that. It used to be kind of a throw-away thing. "Oh, what about backup? "Oh, we didn't factor in." Now it's front and center, certainly cloud is going to be impacted because data's everywhere. Data's going to be highly frictionless. Okay, question, and final question on this piece, where we talk about what you guys are doing, what does multi-cloud mean, or two questions: what is the definition of multi-cloud, and what does cloud-native mean to you? Define those terms. >> Absolutely. Those two terms are very, very close to us. So multi-cloud, I'll begin with that. I'll give you a customer use case that will hopefully ground the conversation. A multi-cloud essentially means from a customer perspective, I'm going to run on-prem infrastructure, I want to be able to recover or manage that data in the cloud, I don't want to make multiple copies, I don't want to duplicate data, I want to recover a version of that data in the cloud, why? Because I have my application developers who want to test staff. I want my DR to be in a different cloud. I do not want to put all my eggs in one basket. So again, it is truly- >> John: It's a diversity issue. >> It is, and they want multiple-use cases to be spread across clouds. Some clouds have strength in DR, some clouds, like Amazon, have strength in orchestration, and onboarding, and some cloud platforms like Google Cloud have strengths in, hey, you can bring your application developers and you don't have to worry about retail. Some of the retailers, like Gap, like Safeway, like eBay, those guys will hesitate to go to Amazon because they know Amazon, at the heart, is a retail business. >> So conflict there. Now, cloud-native. Define cloud-native. >> Cloud-native, to us, is you have Oracle running that database natively within the services of the cloud. For example, take Amazon Dynamo DB. It's a beautiful example of a cloud-native service. You don't run Dynamo DB on-prem. It was built ultimately for the cloud. Cloud Spanner, another example of cloud-native. It is built for that infrastructure, floor ground up, and has been nurtured for the last ten years for the elastic infrastructure. >> Alright, Tarun, great to have you on. Quick plug for what you guys are doing. What's next? You got the Series A, you're getting customers, you got a big customer you can't talk about, but it's in the Register article, Home Depot. What other things are you working on? What's the key priorities? Hiring? You've got some new announcements coming up I hear. Rumor mill, I won't say who they are, but you're partnering. What's the key focus? What's your key objectives? >> No, we only stay focused on building, and as you early on said, it's still early for us. We want to stay focused on getting customer acquisition, customer momentum, deploying those customers, making them happy customers, having them become referenceable customers for us, and of course, the next big focus for me personally is going to be bringing some of the people in the team, some of the people who can help me scale the company- >> John: Engineering- >> Engineering, marketing, business development, sales, go to market, so that's going to be second we're to focus, and third, and again, you'll hear the announcement coming very quickly, we're going to be partnering with some of the leading enterprise infrastructure companies, both on their enterprise traditional storage companies, and some of the leading, I'm just going to leave it at that. >> And True Ventures is the seed investor and Lightspeed on the Series A, the True company on the Series A with them. 'Cause they tend to follow, they don't leave you hanging. >> Yeah, Puneet is excellent. I love him. >> Yeah, John Callahan's company's got great stuff. And they had some great eggs, they had FitBit and they've got a lot of great stuff going on. >> Well they're excellent, excellent pro-entrepreneur people. Great to work with as well. >> High integrity, great people. Tarun, thanks for coming on and sharing the entrepreneurial perspective, the innovation perspective, certainly as a Google partner, good to have your reaction and analysis. >> Thank you, John. >> It's The Cube, bringing you all the action from Google Next here in our studio. More Google Next coverage after this short break. (The Cube Theme)

>> Narrator: Live from San Jose, California. In the heart of Silicon Valley. It's theCUBE. Covering QuickBooks Connect 2016. Now here're your hosts. Jeff Frick and John Walls. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back here in San Jose, we're live at the Convention Center for the second day of QuickBooks Connect 2016. A thriving community, 5000 plus attendees here enjoying where there have been some fascinating keynotes and breakout sessions. And it's our pleasure to bring you some of the brightest and best minds in the QuickBooks community. And we have that with us today in the form of Jim McGinnis, who's the Vice President of Product Management at ProConnect. Jim, thanks for being with us. >> Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. >> I got to tell you, I wasn't aware of your stature until Jeff informed me of last year when the two of you met. He said, "I could barley have a conversation with him because the man's a rock star". People kept coming up, they wanted to take selfies with him and it was nonstop. So apparently, your cache goes well beyond theCUBE. >> It's very kind, but the truth is, the rock stars are our 150,000 plus pro-advisors from around the world. These guys are making a huge difference in the small businesses' lives. They come here, they connect with small businesses, with each other, et cetera. Sometimes it feels a little silly, but I'm just honored to get to spend time with them. >> But they wanted the selfie so good for you. They're not asking for Jeff and John. They're asking for Jim. >> In the near future I'm sure. >> Give me an idea, first off, your feelings about the vibe. You heard us talking about, a little bit ago but your thoughts about what you're seeing here and the growth of this show over the last three years. >> I was having a conversation, you know this started on the back of a notebook three years ago where we said, "We're getting big enough that we believe we need to have a show to bring folks together". But we want to be different. We want to be about making connections. So the name QB Connect was born. We wanted to be the place where developers, small businesses, and accountants come together and meet. The vibe is phenomenal. The vibe it starts early Monday morning when we do the accountant kickoff. They go into training. A lot of them get certified in QuickBooks online and advance certifications as well. It continues the next day, yesterday, with these fabulous keynote speakers. Last night with a great band, Third Eye Blind. Sometimes these bands say, "Am I seriously playing for a bunch of accountants"? But they always come away and say, "That is one of the best "shows we've ever done because the enthusiasm, the excitement". Everybody loves to be here. And then today continued. We had fabulous speakers on the stage again. People like Tony Hawk and Simone Biles. >> Yeah, so what do you want when people leave here, and we're going to get into accounting and what's going on certainly in your world. But I'm just curious. The takeaway that you want people to have as they go back to all corners of the globe, frankly. What do you want them to do, and how do you want them to feel about QuickBooks when they go back and do their 12-hour day jobs? >> Absolutely. You know, I want them to feel empowered to really make a difference in their clients' lives, which is super fun. There was a quote yesterday from America who said, "You are modeling possibilities for someone else and you may not even realize it". And boy, our pro-advisors from around the world really model possibilities. They save small businesses all the time. In fact, 89% of small businesses say they're more successful because they work with and accountant. How do I want them to feel about QuickBooks and Intuit? I really want them to feel like we're their partners. Scott Cook founded this company believing that we're here to make a difference. To change our customer's financial lives so profoundly they can't imagine going back. When I talked to accountants last night, today, that's what they tell me. They want to change their small businesses' financial lives so profoundly, they can't imagine not working with an accountant. We're perfect partners. That's what I'd like them to take back. >> It's so funny right? The dirty little secret everyone thinks an accounting show. It's not an accounting show. >> No. >> It's a small business show. It's really a building businesses and partnerships, and really creating that foundation for other people to build from to be more successful in really pursuing their passions. I think that's why the energy is so strong. >> You said it well. It's all about possibilities and it's all about connections. >> Excellent. So lets talk about some big global trends that are not only impacting QuickBooks and Intuit, and your customers, and the accountants but everyone all over the place. The two big ones that have recently just overtaken everything, mobile and cloud. Huge impact on what you can build, how you can deliver it, how people consume it. How have those really changed what you guys have built and delivered at QuickBooks? >> That's great. I'll start with the cloud side because I think that's where it all starts. All those desktops, they're coffins. The data is buried underneath your desk and it's unusable in so many ways. When the data moves up into the cloud, now you can make connections between industries. You can do industry benchmarking. Now the data can just flow seamlessly from one application, like QuickBooks online, through trial balance to another application, like our ProConnect Tax online. We're able to connect up all these fabulous developers who are building solutions that we would never be able to build the creativity that we see and all plug in this online ecosystem. It changes everything. On the mobile side, boy isn't it fun to see all the tweets going by? Our reputations are being built for us. The best we can do is curate them at this stage. The other is it's anytime, anywhere isn't it? This idea that you can make an appointment with your accountant and he or you would drive across town to get some bit of information. It's just too slow in today's world. Mobile enables us to collaborate constantly with our accounting professionals and the accounting professionals to collaborate with their clients. >> And really in a different kind of form and function because mobile is quick. I got two minutes standing in line at the grocery store at Safeway. I got a couple of minutes while I'm filling up my car full of gas. I'm waiting for the kids to come out of the coach's meeting after the soccer games. So it's a lot more frequent little bits of connecting in the way that we use mobile apps to interact with our world. >> Absolutely. Think about all the productivity that's unlocked with mobile. Usually it's a simple question. I need something now. Make an appointment, drive across town, it's miserable. Instead you can ask a question and all that's successful because the data's in the cloud. >> Jeff: Right. >> So what do you do then in terms of, at least with a client base that has a reputation for being a bit slow to move. And there's not an enormous number of early adopters, it's almost like show me. But yet when you have these new possibilities like moving to the cloud, migration there, people are going to get left behind if they don't. How do you convey that sense of urgency and get them to convert and get them to adopt and take advantage of these great products and services that you're developing for people? >> I'm going to answer that by saying I say it ain't so. I think accountants and accounting professionals are some of the most forward people that I've known. Now, they have to be responsible. They have to look out for their clients. And they're under a lot time pressure. I think that if there's been some slowness in moving it's because we haven't gone fast enough to create applications that really save them the time. Software's a tough business, folks. Because before in my previous life I was in Proctor & Gamble. You knew the benefit up front. Software comes with immediate pain and uncertainty about whether it's really going to deliver the promise, the benefit that's there. What we have to do is we have to help show accountants that the possibilities are there and give them immediate satisfaction that the time savings that they seek is there. When we do that, we've already seen it. They move quickly. >> So you're kind of talking about, in a way I think, this firm of the future concept, right? That as far as where we're going in this 21st century. So talk a little more about that and what it means, brass tax terms. When the rubber hits the road here, in terms of the products that you're providing people and the changes you think the customer's going to have to make in order to really fulfill this vision of the firm of the future. >> That's exactly right. Sometimes our accounting professionals or pro-advisors come to us and say, "Can't you make it simpler? "Can't you break it down into a few steps "so I can follow a roadmap step-by-step "and get there?" And we've done that a little bit with our concept of firm of the future. The first step is the importance of getting online. That first client, that's a little scary. Put your next client online, see what its like, enjoy the benefits, learn the new operating systems, learn the new workflows. And then the benefits start to unlock. You can manage them all in QuickBooks online account. You can start tying in the different applications. You can see all of your clients there. And as you get your second and your third, you start to enjoy that. The second part of our pilar I would say, the firm of the future, is we do believe that the billable hour it's not scalable. Of all of the time savings that's coming by moving to an online platform, gosh, you'd have to have a lot more clients in order to make as much money as you're making today. We believe accounting professionals deserve to get paid for the value they create. And that means moving to fixed fee pricing, it means offering a range of services, that means going beyond just typing in data and compliance to actually creating more value through advisory services. And then that's the third pilar right there. Once you're online, and you're making money by creating value through advisory services, you need to get your name out there. Become a specialist in a certain vertical. Help people around the country, even around the globe, know the value that you can create. And they'll flock to you. We've seen little companies start up with two people, this one in Canada, has gone up to I think more than 500 clients in less than three years because they followed the firm of the future approach. >> That's really interesting. It was apart of the keynote too where a lot of the entrepreneurs said they started with their family accountant or family friend who didn't really have a specialization in the industries that they decided to build. Then at some point they had to flip because the value of accounting is not data entry. And it's kind of old school that automation should help you get rid of the redundant low value activity to free you up on the higher value activity which is asset planning, and tax planning, and future planning, and inventory planning, and the things where the accountant can bring much more value to the relationship that aren't tied to how many hours did it take to prepare your return. >> That's absolutely right. We say that the most important feature we can add into QuickBooks is an accountant. Sometimes there's some fear of technology, I have to share what I read recently in the Wall Street Journal which is, machines have been able to beat humans at chess. But there's a concept called centaur chess, which is half machine half human. When a chess expert is combined with a computer can beat any computer. And that's where we are in the accounting profession too. All this technology is fabulous, but where it really starts to sing is when it's combined with an accounting professional who understands it and leverages to give advice only a human being can give. >> Alright so a couple more trends now that are coming, get your reaction. Machine learning, big one, big data obviously it's been around awhile but the machine learning and the augmented intelligence, AI. Some people say artificial intelligence other people say there's nothing artificial about it. >> That's right. >> It should be augmented intelligence. The impacts of those on your software and your customers? >> Great question. Let's be specific. Things like chart of accounts. We can do a pretty good job of estimating what a chart of accounts should be for a given vertical. But they always get modified by the accountants because they know better than we do. When a few of them start to modify it and few more, pretty soon we can leverage the wisdom of the accounting profession crowd to get the very best chart of accounts for any given vertical. What a great opportunity. And then you think about benchmarks. I was talking to somebody before about when all of the plumbing industry is on QBO. And accountants can go in and say this is what accounts receivable should look like for plumbing, for a plumber. Think of the power of that. But one thing we know is every small business says the same thing, but I'm different. No problem, tell me how you're different? And in fact, we'll find 10,000 others who're different, just like you. >> Just like you, right. (all laughing) So, just going forward, you've go tax pros on one side, you've got accountants on the other, never the twain shall meet. Now you're bringing them together. And the importance of that, the value of that in terms of making sure there's an integration, there's a collaboration for small firms? >> In my new role as product manager for the ProConnect group, that's the part I'm really really excited about. Last year we launched QuickBooks online trial balance so that the data flows into the trial balance and from the trial balance mappings can be done and it flows directly into the tax software with a little modification, a click of the button, you can file right from the tax software. But our accountants told us, I don't understand. I don't want to run two different client lists when somethings going on in the tax side of it. I want to know about it where I do my work, in QuickBooks online accountants. So this year we've integrated the tax software right into QuickBooks online accountant. And now we're dreaming a little bit. Where as we talk about moving to advisory services, when it's a separate business impacts in my books, impacts in the decisions I make here, then get handed over the tax side of the shop. Now when it's all one application, those insights come back from tax and say, I wouldn't do it that way. I'd lease that. I wouldn't buy it because you're going to be in a much better position from a tax standpoint. And gosh, your business has really taken off. You need to think differently about your quarterly estimates. Because otherwise you're going to find yourself in a cash flow situation come October. >> So you're getting ahead. You're not looking after the fact and reacting. >> It's advisory service. It moves tax from being a once a year event to being an ongoing relationship. That's exciting. >> Well Jim, it's that kind of vision that I think, makes you a rock star. And if you got time for a quick selfie. (all laughing) If we all just kind of, you know... >> I'm all in. >> Jim McGinnis, Glad you could join us here. I look forward to seeing you down the road too. >> Thank you very much. >> Jeff: Best of luck to you. >> Jim: I've certainly enjoyed it. >> It's a little blurry, we'll have to do another one here. Back with more here from San Jose right after this. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)