(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston connecting with all leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Lisa Martin here with theCUBE conversation. One of our alumni is joining me Satyen Sangani the CEO and Co-Founder of Alation is back. Satyen, it's great to see you this morning. >> I know it's so great to see you especially so soon after we last talked. >> Yeah, we only spoke a couple of months ago when you guys launched the Alation Cloud Service and now big news raising 110 million in Series D led by Riverwood Capital from participation with some new investors, including Snowflake Ventures. Talk to us about this new funding raise. >> Yeah, it's so funny. I mean, we've seen market demand pick up ever since the sort of tail end of last year. And it's just been incredible. And quarter after quarter we keep on hitting and exceeding our numbers and we keep on hiring faster and faster and faster and it just doesn't seem like it's ever been fast enough. And so we've been aggressive since the beginning of the year. And even actually before that in spending and, taking the company from roughly 275 people at the end of the year to now, by the end of this year, 525 people. So with that kind of growth we definitely wanted to have the capital to, carry us to this year and then certainly beyond. And, so we went out and raised around and, obviously we're able to do that on great terms and to find a phenomenal partner in Riverwood. And so super excited about the outcome. >> Exactly saw a lot of demand as you and I talked about just a couple of months ago the acceleration of the business during the pandemic. Talk to me about, as you mentioned the demand has never been higher. Let's talk about the demand for the data intelligence platform how the funding is going to help. What are some of the things that you're specifically going to do? >> Yeah, so there's you know we're going to grow the business in a pretty balanced way. And so from our perspective, that means a couple of things right? So starting with sales and marketing, we've got just a need for more feet on the street. Everybody understands generally that they've got problems in data governance, data management, data search and discovery, enablement to people around data. These are things that people are now starting to understand but they don't always necessarily know how to solve the problem in the most efficient and best way. And many of the traditional approaches that sort of command and control top down, you know, let's go hire an army of consultants to figure this stuff out, tends to be the first thing that comes to mind. And so we're building our sales organization is one thing that we're going to do. The second thing that we're going to do is invest in our customer success and customer journey because everybody's looking for best practice and last but not least workforce investing in product and R&D. And so we're going to be growing the R&D organization by almost a factor of two, and that's going to be globally. And, just being the best in the market means you've got to still solve all these unsolved problems. And we're going to do that. >> Sounds like a tremendous amount of momentum kind of igniting this next era for Alation. When we talk about customers, I love that you're doubling down on the customer success. That's absolutely critical. That's why you're in business. But one of the things that we talk about with customers in every industry is being data-driven. And as we see data intelligence emerging as a very, very critical technology investment to enable an enterprise to become more data-driven or actually data-driven, what are some of the things that you're seeing that those customers are saying Alation help us with XYZ? >> Yeah, so I think everybody feels like they need to be on this. So let's first of all, talk about data intelligence. Like, what is this category? So historically there has been these sort of data management categories where the general approach has been let's curate or manage or clean the data in this manual way in order to be able to get good data in front of people so they can start to use it, right. And that data cleaning, that data work that data stewardship has lived often in IT sometimes with very technical people in the business. And it just doesn't scale. There's just too much data out there and there's too much demand for data. So the demand for data is increasing, the supply for data is increasing. So now there's this category of data intelligence. And basically what it's doing it's saying, look all these things that we're talking about machine learning, AI, all of that can be applied to actually the management of data. People can be way more intelligent about how they do this work. They can be more intelligent how they search. They can be more intelligent about how they curate the data. And so what we're seeing is that people are saying, look, I've got so much data. My entire business relies upon data, and now I need you Alation or somebody to help me do this better to do this faster, to do this more efficiently. And all of these really traditional approaches where you use, you know, predominantly workflows and all this stuff it's just not working. And so that's why people are coming after us. >> Well, that need for data in real time is something that we saw during the pandemic. It's for many industries and many different types of situations. It's no longer a nice to have. It's really going to be the defining element between those businesses that succeed in really kind of leveraged COVID as an accelerant versus those that don't succeed. But I'm curious where your conversations are going within the customer base. As we see the need for data across an organization, but the need to access data that they can trust quickly, data that tells the truth, data that can be shared. Are you seeing this elevate up to C-suite in terms of your customer conversations? >> Yeah, and it is and it is because of one really critical reason because a lot of these data projects both fail and under exceed expectations and they do it for reasons that the C-suite doesn't understand. And so now the C-suite is getting forced to say, well, why is this happening? Why are these not going like, wow, you know the boardroom is saying like, well, we need to do more AI. Well, why aren't we doing more AI? Well, it's 'cause your data isn't really clean 'cause you don't actually have the data that you think you have. Because people don't share your data because people are, you know, your data is locked in some on-premise instance in, some access database that nobody's ever heard of. And so all of these reasons are things that now because they're impeding the business or getting to more senior levels in the organization >> That's kind of what I was thinking. I want to talk now about the investment this particular Series D that we talked about. So you've got investment, as I mentioned from a couple of new partners, but talk to me about the Snowflake and the Salesforce Ventures and how that is helping to catalyze what Alation is doing. >> Yeah, so we've, you know had a long time relationship with Salesforce but we found in the last year in particular that our relationship with Snowflake has just taken off in a way that I have seen few partnerships taking off in in certainly in my career. And, you know, it started really with just scores of customers. I mean, literally scores of customers that are all global to 1000s and fortune 500s where we would often just say, hey, what's your data source. And, you know, let's start with Alation and they'd be like, yeah we are either about to invest in Snowflake or we're invested in Snowflake or, something like that. So we'd often see customers on the journey with Snowflake and Alation at the exact same time. And then the next order conversation became well, you know if we're expanding and rolling out with Snowflake, which customers, you know, everybody looks at Snowflakes 168 net percent net expansion rate where every customer is spending a dollar 68 more than they were last year on average. And, you know, says, wow, if I'm going to scale that much we need to govern all of that data. And so Snowflake customers came to Snowflake and to Alation at the same time, and we've been the natural solution of choice. And so that kind of marriage has been quite symbiotic and we're super excited to partner with them. You know, they think exclusively about data consumption. We think about, you know, finding, discovering understanding data. So it's a really natural marriage. And so we're really excited to partner with them and you're going to see a lot from the two companies moving forward. >> So it sounds like that really was driven from joint customers in terms of facilitating maybe an expansion of the partnership that Alation and Snowflake have. Talk to me a little bit more about what some of the things are that we can expect in the next year. >> Yeah, so I won't take away from the stories that we're about to release, but you are going to see really exciting innovations and product between Snowflake and Alation over the course of the next couple of months. And in particular, you're going to see, you know some fun announcements at the snowflake summit coming up next week. So stay tuned for that. Not surprisingly data governance is going to be a big topic for us. Data search and discovery is going to be a big topic for us. Data privacy and security is going to be a big topic us. And so those are all areas where you're going to see lots of fun products innovation. And then on the other side, you're going to see a lot of go to market innovation. So customers are moving data to the cloud, obviously and that's going to be a big place of discussion just enabling all of the field sales forces getting the stories and the customer stories to market. You're going to see a lot of that from us. >> In the last year, I'm curious if you saw any verticals in particular that really have pivoted with fuel from Alation. I think healthcare, life sciences, manufacturing anything that you, that really stood out to you in the last year >> You know, it's, I mean I think there's been the pandemic certainly hurt certain industries more than others transportation, travel and hospitality. And so we definitely saw a trend where there were dips in some of those industries but those were really temporary. And what we're finding is in a lot of those industries are now coming back bigger than ever. And the other industries in manufacturing and pharma in financial services, you know those are just as strong as they've ever been. And interestingly through the pandemic, what we found is that our user account within the company doubled. So even though the customer base itself didn't double the number of users on the platform across all of our customers, literally doubled on an active basis. And so, it's just been, interestingly enough it's just that across the board the growth has been consistent. And I think, really speaks to the fact that everybody's working from home and needs more data to do their job. >> Well, hopefully that's something that's going to be temporary. This, I was telling you, this is my first day back in the studio and not sitting in the home office. So in terms of the demand we talked about the demand we're customers, you're more than 250 customers now, big names, including one of the I think last year's most used terms household terms of Pfizer. Talk to me about the customer perspective on the funding and in terms of the things that you're going to be able to do to go to market. What are you hearing from your customer? >> Yeah I mean, literally the first thing I hear from 80 to 90% of my customers is go faster. You know, like there's this fun story, right? Where there's two people, they meet in the forest, they start walking together and then all of a sudden they both see a big bear. And the bear is, right about to come right after them. One person sits down and like puts on their running shoes. And they're like, well, you know, the other guy says, oh, there's no way you're going out run the bear. And they're like, well, I (indistinct)the bear. I've got to out run you. Right, and our customers are basically saying to us, look the bear of the data problem is gigantic. And yeah, you might be better than everything else out there, but I still have to as a customer contend with this massive data problem. And you know, if I have to do that, I need you to go faster because data's coming after me faster than ever. And I've got to contend with all of that work. And so they just want us to go faster and they want us to go faster in product. And they want us to go faster in developing the customer journey. And they want us to go faster in developing the ecosystem because many of our customers are you leveraging us as a platform. They want to see data on top of Alation. They want to see data privacy on top of Alation. They want to see data migration on top of Alation. So building out all these capabilities with our partners in our ecosystem and with partners like Snowflake and Salesforce, I mean, they just want us to move faster >> Moving faster, I think we all want that in certain senses but in any industry, consumers, users are getting more and more demanding as you're helping customers achieve their desire of going faster. How do you do that and help them foster a data culture that's, that supports that speed. >> Yeah, it's so interesting because cultural transformation, as you all know, like as we all know, that's like that's certainly slow work, right? Like you're not going to show up at an enterprise and say, hey, I installed Alation. You know what? You're going to have a totally different area culture. Everybody's going to start asking questions with data and the world's going to change, right. And so that, that, you know I'd love for that to be the eventual vision that we achieve. But it's certainly not where we are at today. I think, one of the things that I believe is that you can't go fast and big things you've got to break up big problems and turn them into small problems. And so one of the habits that we've seen within the organization, and one of the things that I talked to our team about every single day is look, you know make small promises and deliver on them. If you got to connect to data source, do that faster. If you're going to train a set of employees do that more quickly because customers have intent with data, but if they don't get the data in front of themselves quickly then they're just going to go to their gut decision. And so capturing that moment of intent and building a sort of velocity is where we see our best customer engagements go. And so that sort of incremental success approach, as opposed to the boil the ocean three month engagement, you know never see the finish line approach is really what I think makes us special and different. >> Tell me a little bit about speaking of culture, about Alations culture. What are some of the things that have changed in the last year? And it sounds like with the Series D round that you've just raised a lot of growth opportunities you mentioned that. Talk to me about the culture, how it's transformed in the last year and what you are excited for going forward. >> Yeah, it's so funny 'cause I always think about culture. You know, people think about culture and they say, companies (indistinct) culture and they think of that culture as being a fixed thing. And it's totally true that, yeah, there's got to be some shared vision, shared values shared ideals within a company in order for it to grow at the pace that we're growing, right. Adding 250 people in a 12 month period is not easy. But it's also the case that, you know, what we found is that there's a lot more specialization within the company. And so people now really, you know where you found the company on generalist you scale a company on specialists. And so getting those specialists inside of the company and respecting them and letting them do their jobs and really kind of building that expertise in the company is something that's been really fabulous and just wonderful to see the team work that way. I think the other thing that's been really interesting obviously is just the remote first work. I mean, we've seen zero loss in productivity and I've talked to CEOs who were like, yeah we need to get people back in the office. I don't really care where my team works. They're getting the job done and they're doing it fabulously for customers. And so if customers want them in front of them, totally great. Obviously love to see the team all the time but it is so wonderful to see how productive people can be when they don't have to spend two hours in a car every day. And so those have been two small things. I mean, at the core, there are other aspects of our culture that have been more permanent, but those two have been slightly different. >> That's great to hear that about the productivity. I was actually very excited to commute this morning for the first time. Although there was no traffic to navigate. As we look at the current market valuation, 1.2 billion the growth rate, the demand for the technologies. What are some, you mentioned some of the events that you're going to be at you mentioned Snowflakes event. Where can folks go to hear more information about this? >> Yeah, absolutely. You can come to our website, of course, at alation.com. There's a ton of information there. Anybody who's watching this interview obviously is a experienced and thoughtful enterprise IT buyers. So certainly, you know, this is a fairly expert audience but we do have tons of field resources that are available. The Alation Cloud instance allows you to get up and running super quickly. And you're going to see that speed increase further over the coming 12 months, but, you know start with alation.com and go from there. And then there's a whole bunch of people who are sitting behind that front door waiting to help you. >> Excellent, alation.com. Well, Satyen congratulations on the funding announcement. Thank you for joining me today helping us unpack what at means the impact, the demand from the customers and how we're going see Alation go even faster. I'm excited to see what happens next in the next couple of months. I'm sure I'll see you again. >> I know. Me too. Thank you Lisa, it's always great to talk. >> Likewise, for Satyen Sangani, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this CUBE conversation. (upbeat music)