(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCube. We're at San Francisco International Gate 54B, at the Alaska Elevated Experience Event. It's pretty exciting, they're really used the opportunity on the Virgin integration, to kind of rebrand everything. Redo the planes, add a lot of new technology, and we're really happy to have our next guest , she's Annabel Chang, she's the vice president of the Bay area for Alaska. Annabelle great seeing you. >> Thank you for having me. >> So congratulations on the event,-- >> Yes. >> I'm sure there's a lot of work that went into this thing. >> Just to say the least, yes. >> So in your remarks during the pressor you spent a lot of time talking about the community involvement >> Yes >> I think you said that you guys invested over a million dollars in kind of local community >> Yes >> Types of activity. So highlight a couple of those organizations and why is it important for Alaska to play in the community that has nothing to do with me getting on an airplane and flying to Seatag. >> Ah, well it actually has everything to do with that. For example, last year we partnered up with the San Jose Mayor's office and the San Jose Public Library Foundation to offer the first ever free coding camp for girls. It was a week long coding camp. Parents didn't have to worry about providing breakfast or lunch. We had it all taken care of. Why does it matter to Alaska Airlines? We also need engineers to help create the apps, to help run the planes and it is super important that we have a diverse workforce that represents our community. Whether we fly and all of the focus that are onboard, as well. >> Right, so that's pretty interesting. Cause I don't think most people would think of you doing that, right? That's a little bit outside the seat mile, kind of calculation and really investing in the community. >> Yes >> A lot of conversation too about the investment in this terminal. You guys are at all 3 Bay Area airports thank you very much. I like to be able to hop on a plane if I'm delayed. >> Yeah >> But you guys are making a big investment here at SFO. >> Yes, so actually I will add a couple of things. We actually are at 6 Northern California airports. So in addition to our big Bay Area airports, we have flights out of Santa Rosa, right into wine country, Monterey and Sacramento. >> Flights out of Santa Rosa? >> Yes. You can bring that wine right onboard. Not, not a problem. Which is really exciting. But last week we just announced that we are going to be opening up a San Francisco lounge. 8500 sq ft. in 2020 on the third floor. You'll have stunning views of the runway. It'll be like nothing else. It'll be the highest domestic lounge at SFO. >> Right. I was wondering if you could just talk about, a little bit about, thinking about the entire customer experience. I had really interesting interview at GE Aviation. >> Yes >> Years ago, where even GE was thinking about kind from the time you leave your door at your house to the arrive at your destination, and all kind of that whole experience between. When you guys talk about lounges, and terminals, and gates, you really are trying to take a much more wholistic view then simply the travel of actual miles in the air. >> 100 percent. It is all about the guest experience. We are trying to be your favorite airline. And we have to earn that loyalty. So from the moment that you are thinking about booking the flight, we already want that to be as easy of a process as possible. From the moment that you deplane and get your bags. And hopefully, we are always looking for ways to be innovative. So, you know many years ago, Alaska Airlines was the first ever to have the kiosks and mobile check-in. And we continue to look for ways to be top in the field. And actually in flight, I'm proud to share that we have the most free movies in the sky, of any airlines. All I tend to watch a few of the same movies over and over again But literally you could scroll, scroll, scroll. It goes from A to Z. Most people kind of get stuck in like the Gs. >> They don't make it past the Gs. >> Yeah, but I promise there's some goodies in the back of the alphabet. >> Right, to just kind of close. You know you talk about WiFi, and you talked about movies, about kind of the role of technology and how Alaska continues to be innovative, leveraging technology with that, with the lounge, with the new C configurations. >> Yeah >> How important to you guys to be able to execute your vision. >> So we want to be your top west coast airline. And the west coast is obviously the tech hub of the entire world. So we know that our travelers care very much about technology. So we're looking ways creative, to make sure that everyone has power. As I always say ABC, always be charging. >> Right, right. >> So we want to make sure your tablets, your phone, your laptop is always available to charge. And we are looking for ways to be creative. So, for example, we know that everyone has personal mobile phones or laptops now. And we're looking for ways to make sure we can take advantage of that technology and offer it to you. >> Right. >> I know, number 1, fast WiFi is going to be key to our success. >> Well Annabel, thanks for taking a few minutes. We look forward to getting on the plane here >> Yeah. >> In a few minutes and >> We're going to have some ice cream aren't we. >> Oh we're going to have ice cream? Yes >> Salt and straw, you don't have to wait in line hopefully. >> Yeah, thank you. >> She's Annabel, I'm Jeff >> Thank you. >> You're watching theCube, we're here at SFO, Gate 54B. Soon we'll be at 35,000 feet. Thanks for watching. >> Awesome >> Catch you next time >> (upbeat music)

>> Live from San Jose, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering DataWorks Summit 2018. Brought to you by Hortonworks. >> Welcome back everyone, you are watching day two of theCUBE's live coverage of DataWorks here in San Jose, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. I'm coming at you with my cohost Jame Kobielus. We're joined by Partha Seetala, he is the Chief Technology Officer at Robin Systems, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Pleasure to be here. >> You're a first timer, so we promise we don't bite. >> Actually I'm not, I was on theCUBE- >> Oh! >> At DockerCon in 2016. >> Oh well excellent, okay, so now you're a veteran, right. >> Yes, ma'am. >> So Robin Systems, as before the cameras were rolling, we were talking about it, it's about four years old, based here in San Jose, venture backed company. Tell us a little bit more about the company and what you do. >> Absolutely. First of all, thanks for hosting me here. Like you said, Robin is a Silicon Valley based company. Our focus is in allowing applications, such as big data, databases, no sequel and AI ML, to run within the Kubernetes platform. What we have built is a product that converges storage, complex storage, networking, application workflow management, along with Kubernetes to create a one click experience where users can get managed services kind of feel when they're deploying these applications. They can also do one click life cycle management on these apps. Our thesis has initially been to, instead of looking at this problem from an infrastructure up into application, to actually look at it from the applications down and then say, "Let the applications drive the underlying infrastructure to meet the user's requirements." >> Is that your differentiating factor, would you say? >> Yeah, I think it is because most of the folks out there today are looking at is as if it's a competent based play, it's like they want to bring storage to Kubernetes or networking to Kubernetes but the challenges are not really around storage and networking. If you talk to the operations folk they say that, "You know what? Those are underlying problems but my challenge is more along the lines of, okay, my CIO says the initiative is to make my applications mobile. They want go across to different Clouds. That's my challenge." The line of business user says, "I want to get a managed source experience." Yes, storage is the thing that you want to manage underneath, but I want to go and click and create my, let's say, an Oracle database or distributions log. >> In terms of the developer experience here, from the application down, give us a sense for how Robin Systems tooling your product enables that degree of specification of the application logic that will then get containerized within? >> Absolutely, like I said, we want applications to drive the infrastructure. What it means is that we, Robin is a software platform. We later ourselves on top of the machines that we sit on whether it is bare metal machines on premises, our VMs, or even an Azure, Google Cloud as well as AWs. Then we make the underlying compute, storage, network resources almost invisible. We treat it as a pool of resources. Now once you have this pool of resources, they can be attached to the applications that are being deployed as can inside containers. I mean, it's a software place, install on machines. Once it's installed, the experience now moves away from infrastructure into applications. You log in, you can see a portal, you have a lot of applications in that portal. We ship support for about 25 applications of some such. >> So these are templates? >> Yes. >> That the developer can then customize to their specific requirements? Or no? >> Absolutely, we ship reference templates for pretty much a wide variety of the most popular big data, no sequel, database, AI ML applications today. But again, as I said, it's a reference implementation. Typically customers take the reference recommendation and they enhance it or they use that to onboard their custom apps, for example, or the apps that we don't ship out of the box. So it's a very open, extensible platform but the goal being that whatever the application might be, in fact we keep saying that, if it runs somewhere else, it's runs on Robin, right? So the idea here is that you can bring anything, and we just, the flip of switch, you can make it a one click deploy, one click manage, one click mobile across Clouds. >> You keep mentioning this one click and this idea of it being so easy, so convenient, so seamless, is that what you say is the biggest concern of your customers? Is this ease and speed? Or what are some other things that are on their minds that you want to deliver? >> Right, so one click of course is a user experience part but what is the real challenge? The real challenges, there are a wide variety of tools being used by enterprises today. Even the data analytic pipeline, there's a lot across the data store, processor pipeline. Users don't want to deal with setting it up and keeping it up and running. They don't want that, they want to get the job done, right? Now when you only get the job done, you really want to hide the underlying details of those platforms and the best way to convey that, the best way to give that experience is to make it a single click experience from the UI. So I keep calling it all one click because that is the experience that you get to hide the underlying complexity for these apps. >> Does your environment actually compile executable code based on that one click experience? Or where does the compilation and containerization actually happen in your distributed architecture? >> Alright, so, I think the simplest- >> You're a prem based offering, right? You're not in the Cloud yourself? >> No, we are. We work on all the three big public clouds. >> Oh, okay. >> Whether it is Azure, AWS or Google. >> So your entire application is containerized itself for deployment into these Clouds? >> Yes, it is. >> Okay. >> So the idea here is let's simplify it significantly, right? You have Kubernetes today, it can run anywhere, on premises, in the public Cloud and so on. Kubernetes is a great platform for orchestrating containers but it is largely inaccessible to a certain class of data centric applications. >> Yeah. >> We make that possible. But our take is, just onboarding those applications on Kubernetes does not solve your CXO or you line of business user's problems. You ought to make the management, from an application point of view, not from a container management point of view, from an application point of view, a lot easier and that is where we kind of create this experience that I'm talking about, one click experience. >> Give us a sense for how, we're here at DataWorks and it's the Hortonworks show. Discuss with us your partnership with Hortonworks and you know, we've heard the announcement of HDP 3.0 and containerization support, just give us a rough sense for how you align or partner with Hortonworks in this area. >> Absolutely. It's kind of interesting because Hortonworks is a data management platform, if you think about it from that point of view and when we engaged with them first- So some of our customers have been using the product, Hortonworks, on top of Robin, so orchestrating Hortonworks, making it a lot easier to use. >> Right. >> One of the requirements was, "Are you certified with Hortonworks?" And the challenge that Hortonworks also had is they had never certified a container based deployment of Hortonworks before. They actually were very skeptical, you know, "You guys are saying all these things. Can you actually containerize and run Hortonworks?" So we worked with Hortonworks and we are, I mean if you go to the Hortonworks website, you'll see that we are the first in the entire industry who have been certified as a container based play that can actually deploy and manage Hortonworks. They have certified us by running a wide variety of tests, which they call the Q80 Test Suite, and when we got certified the only other players in the market that got that stamp of approval was Microsoft in Azure and EMC with Isilon. >> So you're in good company? >> I think we are in great company. >> You're certified to work with HTP 3.0 or the prior version or both? >> When we got certified we were still in the 2.X version of Hortonworks, HTP 3.0 is a more relatively newer version. But our plan is that we want to continue working with Hortonworks to get certified as they release the program and also help them because HTP 3.0 also has some container based orchestration and deployment so you want to help them provide the underlying infrastructure so that it becomes easier for beyond to spin up more containers. >> The higher level security and governance and all these things you're describing, they have to be over the Kubernetes layer. Hortonworks supports it in their data plane services portfolio. Does Robin Systems solutions portfolio tap in to any of that, or do you provide your own layer of sort of security and metadata management so forth? >> Yeah, so we don't want- >> In context of what you offer? >> Right, so we don't want to take away the security model that the application itself provides because might have step it up so that they are doing governance, it's not just logging in and auto control and things like this. Some governance is built into. We don't want to change that. We want to keep the same experience and the same workflow hat customers have so we just integrate with whatever security that the application has. We, of course, provide security in terms of isolating these different apps that are running on the Robin platform where the security or the access into the application itself is left to the apps themselves. When I say apps, I'm talking about Hortonworks. >> Yeah, sure. >> Or any other databases. >> Moving forward, as you think about ways you're going to augment and enhance and alter the Robin platform, what are some of the biggest trends that are driving your decision making around that in the sense of, as we know that companies are living with this deluge of data, how are you helping them manage it better? >> Sure. I think there are a few trends that we are closely watching. One is around Cloud mobility. CIOs want their applications along with their data to be available where their end users are. It's almost like follow the sun model, where you might have generated the data in one Cloud and at a different time, different time zone, you'll basically want to keep the app as well as data, moving. So we are following that very closely. How we can enable the mobility of data and apps a lot easier in that world. The other one is around the general AI ML workflow. One of the challenges there, of course, you have great apps like TensorFlow or Theano or Caffe, these are very good AI ML toolkits but one of the challenges that people face, is they are buying this very expensive, let's say NVIDIA DGX Box, this box costs about $150,000 each, how do you keep these boxes busy so that you're getting a good return on investment? It will require you to better manage the resources offered with these boxes. We are also monitoring that space and we're seeing that how can we take the Robin platform and how do you enable the better utilization of GPUs or the sharing of GPUs for running your AI ML kind of workload. >> Great. >> Those are, I think, two key trends that we are closely watching. >> We'll be discussing those at the next DataWorks Summit, I'm sure, at some other time in the future. >> Absolutely. >> Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, Partha. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, my pleasure. Thanks. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for James Kobielus, We will have more from DataWorks coming up in just a little bit. (techno beat music)