>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Organizations have considerable room to improve their performance without making expensive changes to their talent, their structure, or their fundamental business model. You don't need a slew of consultants to tell you what to do. You already know. What you need is to immediately ratchet up expectations, energy, urgency, and intensity. You have to fight mediocrity every step of the way. Amp it up and the results will follow. This is the fundamental premise of a hard-hitting new book written by Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake, and published earlier this year. It's called "Amp It Up, Leading for Hypergrowth "by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, "and Elevating Intensity." Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. At Snowflake Summit last month, I was asked to interview Frank on stage about his new book. I've read it several times. And if you haven't read it, you should. Even if you have read it, in this Breaking Analysis, we'll dig deeper into the book and share some clarifying insights and nuances directly from Slootman himself from my one-on-one conversation with him. My first question to Slootman was why do you write this book? Okay, it's kind of a common throwaway question. And how the heck did you find time to do it? It's fairly well-known that a few years ago, Slootman put up a post on LinkedIn with the title Amp It Up. It generated so much buzz and so many requests for Frank's time that he decided that the best way to efficiently scale and share his thoughts on how to create high-performing companies and organizations was to publish a book. Now, he wrote the book during the pandemic. And I joked that they must not have Netflix in Montana where he resides. In a pretty funny moment, he said that writing the book was easier than promoting it. Take a listen. >> Denise, our CMO, you know, she just made sure that this process wasn't going to. It was more work for me to promote this book with all these damn podcasts and other crap, than actually writing the book, you know. And after a while, I was like I'm not doing another podcast. >> Now, the book gives a lot of interesting background information on Slootman's career and what he learned at various companies that he led and participated in. Now, I'm not going to go into most of that today, which is why you should read the book yourself. But Slootman, he's become somewhat of a business hero to many people, myself included. Leaders like Frank, Scott McNealy, Jayshree Ullal, and my old boss, Pat McGovern at IDG, have inspired me over the years. And each has applied his or her own approach to building cultures and companies. Now, when Slootman first took over the reins at Snowflake, I published a Breaking Analysis talking about Snowflake and what we could expect from the company now that Slootman and CFO Mike Scarpelli were back together. In that post, buried toward the end, I referenced the playbook that Frank used at Data Domain and ServiceNow, two companies that I followed quite closely as an analyst, and how it would be applied at Snowflake, that playbook if you will. Frank reached out to me afterwards and said something to the effect of, "I don't use playbooks. "I am a situational leader. "Playbooks, you know, they work in football games. "But in the military, they teach you "situational leadership." Pretty interesting learning moment for me. So I asked Frank on the stage about this. Here's what he said. >> The older you get, the more experience that you have, the more you become a prisoner of your own background because you sort of think in terms of what you know as opposed to, you know, getting outside of what you know and trying to sort of look at things like a five-year-old that has never seen this before. And then how would you, you know, deal with it? And I really try to force myself into I've never seen this before and how do I think about it? Because at least they're very different, you know, interpretations. And be open-minded, just really avoid that rinse and repeat mentality. And you know, I've brought people in from who have worked with me before. Some of them come with me from company to company. And they were falling prey to, you know, rinse and repeat. I would just literally go like that's not what we want. >> So think about that for a moment. I mean, imagine coming in to lead a new company and forcing yourself and your people to forget what they know that works and has worked in the past, put that aside and assess the current situation with an open mind, essentially start over. Now, that doesn't mean you don't apply what has worked in the past. Slootman talked to me about bringing back Scarpelli and the synergistic relationship that they have and how they build cultures and the no BS and hard truth mentality they bring to companies. But he bristles when people ask him, "What type of CEO are you?" He says, "Do we have to put a label on it? "It really depends on the situation." Now, one of the other really hard-hitting parts of the book was the way Frank deals with who to keep and who to let go. He uses the Volkswagen tagline of drivers wanted. He says in his book, in companies there are passengers and there are drivers, and we want drivers. He said, "You have to figure out really quickly "who the drivers are and basically throw the wrong people "off the bus, keep the right people, bring in new people "that fit the culture and put them "in the right seats on the bus." Now, these are not easy decisions to make. But as it pertains to getting rid of people, I'm reminded of the movie "Moneyball." Art Howe, the manager of the Oakland As, he refused to play Scott Hatteberg at first base. So the GM, Billy Bean played by Brad Pitt says to Peter Brand who was played by Jonah Hill, "You have to fire Carlos Pena." Don't learn how to fire people. Billy Bean says, "Just keep it quick. "Tell him he's been traded and that's it." So I asked Frank, "Okay, I get it. "Like the movie, when you have the wrong person "on the bus, you just have to make the decision, "be straightforward, and do it." But I asked him, "What if you're on the fence? "What if you're not completely sure if this person "is a driver or a passenger, if he or she "should be on the bus or not on the bus? "How do you handle that?" Listen to what he said. >> I have a very simple way to break ties. And when there's doubt, there's no doubt, okay? >> When there's doubt, there's no doubt. Slootman's philosophy is you have to be emphatic and have high conviction. You know, back to the baseball analogy, if you're thinking about taking the pitcher out of the game, take 'em out. Confrontation is the single hardest thing in business according to Slootman but you have to be intellectually honest and do what's best for the organization, period. Okay, so wow, that may sound harsh but that's how Slootman approaches it, very Belichickian if you will. But how can you amp it up on a daily basis? What's the approach that Slootman takes? We got into this conversation with a discussion about MBOs, management by objective. Slootman in his book says he's killed MBOs at every company he's led. And I asked him to explain why. His rationale was that individual MBOs invariably end up in a discussion about relief of the MBO if the person is not hitting his or her targets. And that detracts from the organizational alignment. He said at Snowflake everyone gets paid the same way, from the execs on down. It's a key way he creates focus and energy in an organization, by creating alignment, urgency, and putting more resources into the most important things. This is especially hard, Slootman says, as the organization gets bigger. But if you do approach it this way, everything gets easier. The cadence changes, the tempo accelerates, and it works. Now, and to emphasize that point, he said the following. Play the clip. >> Every meeting that you have, every email, every encounter in the hallway, whatever it is, is an opportunity to amp things up. That's why I use that title. But do you take that opportunity? >> And according to Slootman, if you don't take that opportunity, if you're not in the moment, amping it up, then you're thinking about your golf game or the tennis match that's going on this weekend or being out on your boat. And to the point, this approach is not for everyone. You're either built for it or you're not. But if you can bring people into the organization that can handle this type of dynamic, it creates energy. It becomes fun. Everything moves faster. The conversations are exciting. They're inspiring. And it becomes addictive. Now let's talk about priorities. I said to Frank that for me anyway, his book was an uncomfortable read. And he was somewhat surprised by that. "Really," he said. I said, "Yeah. "I mean, it was an easy read but uncomfortable "because over my career, I've managed thousands of people, "not tens of thousands but thousands, "enough to have to take this stuff very seriously." And I found myself throughout the book, oh, you know, on the one hand saying to myself, "Oh, I got that right, good job, Dave." And then other times, I was thinking to myself, "Oh wow, I probably need to rethink that. "I need to amp it up on that front." And the point is to Frank's leadership philosophy, there's no one correct way to approach all situations. You have to figure it out for yourself. But the one thing in the book that I found the hardest was Slootman challenged the reader. If you had to drop everything and focus on one thing, just one thing, for the rest of the year, what would that one thing be? Think about that for a moment. Were you able to come up with that one thing? What would happen to all the other things on your priority list? Are they all necessary? If so, how would you delegate those? Do you have someone in your organization who can take those off your plate? What would happen if you only focused on that one thing? These are hard questions. But Slootman really forces you to think about them and do that mental exercise. Look at Frank's body language in this screenshot. Imagine going into a management meeting with Frank and being prepared to share all the things you're working on that you're so proud of and all the priorities you have for the coming year. Listen to Frank in this clip and tell me it doesn't really make you think. >> I've been in, you know, on other boards and stuff. And I got a PowerPoint back from the CEO and there's like 15 things. They're our priorities for the year. I'm like you got 15, you got none, right? It's like you just can't decide, you know, what's important. So I'll tell you everything because I just can't figure out. And the thing is it's very hard to just say one thing. But it's really the mental exercise that matters. >> Going through that mental exercise is really important according to Slootman. Let's have a conversation about what really matters at this point in time. Why does it need to happen? And does it take priority over other things? Slootman says you have to pull apart the hairball and drive extraordinary clarity. You could be wrong, he says. And he admits he's been wrong on many things before. He, like everyone, is fearful of being wrong. But if you don't have the conversation according to Slootman, you're already defeated. And one of the most important things Slootman emphasizes in the book is execution. He said that's one of the reasons he wrote "Amp It Up." In our discussion, he referenced Pat Gelsinger, his former boss, who bought Data Domain when he was working for Joe Tucci at EMC. Listen to Frank describe the interaction with Gelsinger. >> Well, one of my prior bosses, you know, Pat Gelsinger, when they acquired Data Domain through EMC, Pat was CEO of Intel. And he quoted Andy Grove as saying, 'cause he was Intel for a long time when he was younger man. And he said no strategy is better than its execution, which if I find one of the most brilliant things. >> Now, before you go changing your strategy, says Slootman, you have to eliminate execution as a potential point of failure. All too often, he says, Silicon Valley wants to change strategy without really understanding whether the execution is right. All too often companies don't consider that maybe the product isn't that great. They will frequently, for example, make a change to sales leadership without questioning whether or not there's a product fit. According to Slootman, you have to drive hardcore intellectual honesty. And as uncomfortable as that may be, it's incredibly important and powerful. Okay, one of the other contrarian points in the book was whether or not to have a customer success department. Slootman says this became really fashionable in Silicon Valley with the SaaS craze. Everyone was following and pattern matching the lead of salesforce.com. He says he's eliminated the customer service department at every company he's led which had a customer success department. Listen to Frank Slootman in his own words talk about the customer success department. >> I view the whole company as a customer success function. Okay, I'm customer success, you know. I said it in my presentation yesterday. We're a customer-first organization. I don't need a department. >> Now, he went on to say that sales owns the commercial relationship with the customer. Engineering owns the technical relationship. And oh, by the way, he always puts support inside of the engineering department because engineering has to back up support. And rather than having a separate department for customer success, he focuses on making sure that the existing departments are functioning properly. Slootman also has always been big on net promoter score, NPS. And Snowflake's is very high at 72. And according to Slootman, it's not just the product. It's the people that drive that type of loyalty. Now, Slootman stresses amping up the big things and even the little things too. He told a story about someone who came into his office to ask his opinion about a tee shirt. And he turned it around on her and said, "Well, what do you think?" And she said, "Well, it's okay." So Frank made the point by flipping the situation. Why are you coming to me with something that's just okay? If we're going to do something, let's do it. Let's do it all out. Let's do it right and get excited about it, not just check the box and get something off your desk. Amp it up, all aspects of our business. Listen to Slootman talk about Steve Jobs and the relevance of demanding excellence and shunning mediocrity. >> He was incredibly intolerant of anything that he didn't think of as great. You know, he was immediately done with it and with the person. You know, I'm not that aggressive, you know, in that way. I'm a little bit nicer, you know, about it. But I still, you know, I don't want to give into expediency and mediocrity. I just don't, I'm just going to fight it, you know, every step of the way. >> Now, that story was about a little thing like some swag. But Slootman talked about some big things too. And one of the major ways Snowflake was making big, sweeping changes to amp up its business was reorganizing its go-to-market around industries like financial services, media, and healthcare. Here's some ETR data that shows Snowflake's net score or spending momentum for key industry segments over time. The red dotted line at 40% is an indicator of highly elevated spending momentum. And you can see for the key areas shown, Snowflake is well above that level. And we cut this data where responses were greater, the response numbers were greater than 15. So not huge ends but large enough to have meaning. Most were in the 20s. Now, it's relatively uncommon to see a company that's having the success of Snowflake make this kind of non-trivial change in the middle of steep S-curve growth. Why did they make this move? Well, I think it's because Snowflake realizes that its data cloud is going to increasingly have industry diversity and unique value by industry, that ecosystems and data marketplaces are forming around industries. So the more industry affinity Snowflake can create, the stronger its moat will be. It also aligns with how the largest and most prominent global system integrators, global SIs, go to market. This is important because as companies are transforming, they are radically changing their data architecture, how they think about data, how they approach data as a competitive advantage, and they're looking at data as specifically a monetization opportunity. So having industry expertise and knowledge and aligning with those customer objectives is going to serve Snowflake and its ecosystems well in my view. Slootman even said he joined the board of Instacart not because he needed another board seat but because he wanted to get out of his comfort zone and expose himself to other industries as a way to learn. So look, we're just barely scratching the surface of Slootman's book and I've pulled some highlights from our conversation. There's so much more that I can share just even from our conversation. And I will as the opportunity arises. But for now, I'll just give you the kind of bumper sticker of "Amp It Up." Raise your standards by taking every opportunity, every interaction, to increase your intensity. Get your people aligned and moving in the same direction. If it's the wrong direction, figure it out and course correct quickly. Prioritize and sharpen your focus on things that will really make a difference. If you do these things and increase the urgency in your organization, you'll naturally pick up the pace and accelerate your company. Do these things and you'll be able to transform, better identify adjacent opportunities and go attack them, and create a lasting and meaningful experience for your employees, customers, and partners. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks for watching. And thank you to Alex Myerson who's on production and he manages the podcast for Breaking Analysis. Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social and in our newsletters. And Rob Hove is our EIC over at Silicon Angle who does some wonderful and tremendous editing. Thank you all. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts. Wherever you listen, just search Breaking Analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. And you can email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @dvellante or comment on my LinkedIn posts. And please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in enterprise tech. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. Be well. And we'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis. (upbeat music)

>>Hi, everybody. Welcome back to Caesars in Las Vegas. My name is Dave ante. We're here with the chairman and CEO of snowflake, Frank Luman. Good to see you again, Frank. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, >>You, you as well, Dave. Good to be with you. >>No, it's, it's awesome to be, obviously everybody's excited to be back. You mentioned that in your, in your keynote, the most amazing thing to me is the progression of what we're seeing here in the ecosystem and of your data cloud. Um, you wrote a book, the rise of the data cloud, and it was very cogent. You talked about network effects, but now you've executed on that. I call it the super cloud. You have AWS, you know, I use that term, AWS. You're building on top of that. And now you have customers building on top of your cloud. So there's these layers of value that's unique in the industry. Was this by design >>Or, well, you know, when you, uh, are a data clouding, you have data, people wanna do things, you know, with that data, they don't want to just, you know, run data operations, populate dashboards, you know, run reports pretty soon. They want to build applications and after they build applications, they wanna build businesses on it. So it goes on and on and on. So it, it drives your development to enable more and more functionality on that data cloud. Didn't start out that way. You know, we were very, very much focused on data operations, then it becomes application development and then it becomes, Hey, we're developing whole businesses on this platform. So similar to what happened to Facebook in many, in many ways, you know, >>There was some confusion I think, and there still is in the community of, particularly on wall street, about your quarter, your con the consumption model I loved on the earnings call. One of the analysts asked Mike, you know, do you ever consider going to a subscription model? And Mike got cut him off, then let finish. No, that would really defeat the purpose. Um, and so there's also a narrative around, well, maybe snowflake, consumption's easier to dial down. Maybe it's more discretionary, but I, I, I would say this, that if you're building apps on top of snowflake and you're actually monetizing, which is a big theme here, now, your revenue is aligned, you know, with those cloud costs. And so unless you're selling it for more, you know, than it costs more than, than you're selling it for, you're gonna dial that up. And that is the future of, I see this ecosystem in your company. Is that, is that fair? You buy that. >>Yeah, it, it is fair. Obviously the public cloud runs on a consumption model. So, you know, you start looking all the layers of the stack, um, you know, snowflake, you know, we have to be a consumption model because we run on top of other people's, uh, consumption models. Otherwise you don't have alignment. I mean, we have conversations, uh, with people that build on snowflake, um, you know, they have trouble, you know, with their financial model because they're not running a consumption model. So it's like square pack around hole. So we all have to align ourselves. So that's when they pay a dollar, you know, a portion goes to, let's say, AWS portion goes to the snowflake of that dollar. And the portion goes to whatever the uplift is, application value, data value, whatever it is to that goes on top of that. So the whole dollar, you know, gets allocated depending on whose value at it. Um, we're talking about. >>Yeah, but you sell value. Um, so you're not a SaaS company. Uh, at least I don't look at you that that way I I've always felt like the SAS pricing model is flawed because it's not aligned with customers. Right. If you, if you get stuck with orphaned licenses too bad, you know, pay us. >>Yeah. We're, we're, we're obviously a SaaS model in the sense that it is software as a service, but it's not a SaaS model in the sense that we don't sell use rights. Right. And that's the big difference. I mean, when you buy, you know, so many users from, you know, Salesforce and ServiceNow or whoever you have just purchased the right, you know, for so many users to use that software for this period of time, and the revenue gets recognized, you know, radically, you know, one month at a time, the same amount. Now we're not that different because we still do a contract the exact same way as SA vendor does it, but we don't recognize the revenue radically. We recognize the revenue based on the consumption, but over the term of the contract, we recognize the entire amount. It just is not neatly organized in these monthly buckets. >>You know? So what happens if they underspend one quarter, they have to catch up by the end of the, the term, is that how it works or is that a negotiation or it's >>The, the, the spending is a totally, totally separate from the consumption itself, you know, because you know how they pay for the contract. Let's say they do a three year contract. Um, you know, they, they will probably pay for that, you know, on an annual basis, you know, that three year contract. Um, but it's how they recognize their expenses for snowflake and how we recognize the revenue is based on what they actually consume. But it's not like you're on demand where you can just decide to not use it. And then I don't have any cost, but over the three year period, you know, all of that, you know, uh, needs to get consumed or they expire. And that's the same way with Amazon. If I don't consume what I buy from Amazon, I still gotta pay for it. You know, so, >>Well, you're right. Well, I guess you could buy by the drink, but it's way, way more expensive and nobody really correct. Does that, so, yep. Okay. Phase one, better simpler, you know, cloud enterprise data warehouse, phase two, you introduced the, the data cloud and, and now we're seeing the rise of the data cloud. What, what does phase three look like >>Now? Phase, phase three is all about applications. Um, and we've just learned, uh, you know, from the beginning that people were trying to do this, but we weren't instrumental at all to do it. So people would ODBC, you know, JDBC drivers just uses as database, right? So the entire application would happen outside, you know, snowflake, we're just a database. You connect to the database, you know, you read or right data, you know, you do data, data manipulations. And then the application, uh, processing all happens outside of snowflake. Now there's issues with that because we start to exfil trade data, meaning that we started to take data out of snowflake and, and put it, uh, in other places. Now there's risk for that. There's operational risk, there's governance, exposure, security issues, you know, all this kind of stuff. And the other problem is, you know, data gets Reed. >>It proliferates. And then, you know, data science tests are like, well, I, I need that data to stay in one place. That's the whole idea behind the data cloud. You know, we have very big infrastructure clouds. We have very big application clouds and then data, you know, sort of became the victim there and became more proliferated and more segment. And it's ever been. So all we do is just send data to the work all day. And we said, no, we're gonna enable the work to get to the data. And the data that stays in more in place, we don't have latency issue. We don't have data quality issues. We don't have lineage issues. So, you know, people have responded very, very well to the data cloud idea, like, yeah, you know, as an enterprise or an institution, you know, I'm the epicenter of my own data cloud because it's not just my own data. >>It's also my ecosystem. It's the people that I have data networking relationships with, you know, for example, you know, take, you know, uh, an investment bank, you know, in, in, in, in New York city, they send data to fidelity. They send data to BlackRock. They send data to, you know, bank of New York, all the regulatory clearing houses, all on and on and on, you know, every night they're running thousands, tens of thousands, you know, of jobs pushing that data, you know, out there. It just, and they they're all on snowflake already. So it doesn't have to be this way. Right. So, >>Yes. So I, I asked the guys before, you know, last week, Hey, what, what would you ask Frank? Now? You might remember you came on, uh, our program during COVID and I was asking you how you're dealing with it, turn off the news. And it was, that was cool. And I asked you at the time, you know, were you ever, you go on Preem and you said, look, I'll never say never, but it defeats the purpose. And you said, we're not gonna do a halfway house. Actually, you were more declarative. We're not doing a halfway house, one foot in one foot out. And then the guy said, well, what about that Dell deal? And that pure deal that you just did. And I, I think I know the answer, but I want to hear from you did a customer come to you and say, get you in the headlock and say, you gotta do this. >>Or it did happen that way. Uh, it, uh, it started with a conversation, um, you know, via with, uh, with Michael Dell. Um, it was supposed to be just a friendly chat, you know, Hey, how's it going? And I mean, obviously Dell is the owner of data, the main, or our first company, you know? Um, but it's, it, wasn't easy for, for Dell and snowflake to have a conversation because they're the epitome of the on-premise company and we're the epitome of a cloud company. And it's like, how, what do we have in common here? Right. What can we talk about? But, you know, Michael's a very smart, uh, engaging guy, you know, always looking for, for opportunity. And of course they decided we're gonna hook up our CTOs, our product teams and, you know, explore, you know, somebody's, uh, ideas and, you know, yeah. We had some, you know, starts and restarts and all of that because it's just naturally, you know, uh, not an easy thing to conceive of, but, you know, in the end it was like, you know what? >>It makes a lot of sense. You know, we can virtualize, you know, Dell object storage, you know, as if it's, you know, an S three storage, you know, from Amazon and then, you know, snowflake in its analytical processing. We'll just reference that data because to us, it just looks like a file that's sitting on, on S3. And we have, we have such a thing it's called an external table, right. That's, that's how we basically, it projects, you know, a snowflake, uh, semantic and structural model, you know, on an external object. And we process against it exactly the same way as if it was an internal, uh, table. So we just extended that, um, you know, with, um, with our storage partners, like Dell and pure storage, um, for it to happen, you know, across a network to an on-prem place. So it's very elegant and it, it, um, it becomes an, an enterprise architecture rather than just a cloud architecture. And I'm, I just don't know what will come of it. And, but I've already talked to customers who have to have data on premises just can't go anywhere because they process against it, you know, where it originates, but there are analytical processes that wanna reference attributes of that data. Well, this is what we'll do that. >>Yeah. I'm, it is interesting. I'm gonna ask Dell if I were them, I'd be talking to you about, Hey, I'm gonna try to separate compute from storage on prem and maybe do some of the, the work there. I don't even know if it's technically feasible. It's, I'll ask OI. But, um, but, but, but to me, that's an example of your extending your ecosystem. Um, so you're talking now about applications and that's an example of increasing your Tam. I don't know if you ever get to the edge, you know, we'll see, we're not quite quite there yet, but, um, but as you've said before, there's no lack of market for you. >>Yeah. I mean, obviously snowflake it it's, it's Genesis was reinventing database management in, in a cloud computing environment, which is so different from a, a machine environment or a cluster environment. So that's why, you know, we're, we're, we're not a, a fit for a machine centric, uh, environment sort of defeats the purpose of, you know, how we were built. We, we are truly a native solution. Most products, uh, in the clouds are actually not cloud native. You know, they, they originated the machine environments and you still see that, you know, almost everything you see in the cloud by the way is not cloud native, our generation of applications. They only run the cloud. They can only run the cloud. They are cloud native. They don't know anything else, >>You know? Yeah, you're right. A lot of companies would just wrap something in wrap their stack in Kubernetes and throw it into the cloud and say, we're in the cloud too. And you basically get, you just shifted. It >>Didn't make sense. Oh. They throw it in the container and run it. Right. Yeah. >>So, okay. That's cool. But what does that get you that doesn't change your operational model? Um, so coming back to software development and what you're doing in, in that regard, it seems one of the things we said about Supercloud is in order to have a Supercloud, you gotta have an ecosystem, you gotta have optionality. Hence you're doing things like Apache iceberg, you know, you said today, well, we're not sure where it's gonna go, but we offering options. Uh, but, but my, my question is, um, as it pertains to software developments specifically, how do you, so one of the things we said, sorry, I've lost my train there. One of the things we said is you have to have a super PAs in order to have a super cloud ecosystem, PAs layer. That's essentially what you've introduced here. Is it not a platform for our application development? >>Yeah. I mean, what happens today? I mean, how do you enable a developer, you know, on snowflake, without the developer, you know, reading the, the files out of snowflake, you know, processing, you know, against that data, wherever they are, and then putting the results set, God knows where, right. And that's what happens today. It's the wild west it's completely UN uncovered, right? And that's the reason why lots of enterprises will not allow Python anything anywhere near, you know, their enterprise data. We just know that, uh, we also know it from streamlet, um, or the acquisition, um, large acquisition that we made this year because they said, look, you know, we're, we have a lot of demand, you know, uh, in the Python community, but that's the wild west. That's not the enterprise grade high trust, uh, you know, corporate environment. They are strictly segregated, uh, today. >>Now do some, do these, do these things sometimes dribble up in the enterprise? Yes, they do. And it's actually intolerable the risk that enterprises, you know, take, you know, with things being UN uncovered. I mean the whole snowflake strategy and promises that you're in snowflake, it is a, an absolute enterprise grade environment experience. And it's really hard to do. It takes enormous investment. Uh, but that is what you buy from us. Just having Python is not particularly hard. You know, we can do that in a week. This has taken us years to get it to this level, you know, of, of, you know, governance, security and, and, you know, having all the risks around exfiltration and so on, really understood and dealt with. That's also why these things run in private previews and public previews for so long because we have to squeeze out, you know, everything that may not have been, you know, understood or foreseen, you know, >>So there are trade offs of, of going into this snowflake cloud, you get all this great functionality. Some people might think it's a walled garden. How, how would you respond to that? >>Yeah. And it's true when you have a, you know, a snowflake object, like a snowflake, uh, table only snowflake, you know, runs that table. And, um, you know, that, that is, you know, it's very high function. It's very sort of analogous to what apple did, you know, they have very high functioning, but you do have to accept the fact that it's, that it's not, uh, you know, other, other things in apple cannot, you know, get that these objects. So this is the reason why we introduce an open file format, you know, like, like iceberg, uh, because what iceberg effectively does is it allows any tool, uh, you know, to access that particular object. We do it in such a way that a lot of the functionality of snowflake, you know, will address the iceberg format, which is great because it's, you're gonna get much more function out of our, you know, iceberg implementation than you would get from iceberg on its own. So we do it in a very high value addeds, uh, you know, manner, but other tools can still access the same object in a read to write, uh, manner. So it, it really sort of delivers the original, uh, promise of the data lake, which is just like, Hey, I have all these objects tools come and go. I can use what I want. Um, so you get, you get the best of both worlds for the most part. >>Have you reminds me a little bit of VMware? I mean, VMware's a software mainframe, it's just better than >>Doing >>It on your own. Yep. Um, one of the other hallmarks of a cloud company, and you guys clearly are a cloud company is startups and innovation. Um, now of course you see that in, in the, in the ecosystem, uh, and maybe that's the answer to my question, but you guys are kind of whale hunters, <laugh> your customers are, tend to be bigger. Uh, is the, is the innovation now the extension of that, the ecosystem is that by design. >>Oh, um, you know, we have a enormous, uh, ISV following and, um, we're gonna have a whole separate conference like this, by the way, just for, yeah. >>For developers. I hope you guys will up there too. Yeah. Um, you know, the, the reason that, that the ISV strategy is very important for, you know, for, for, for, for many reasons, but, you know, ISVs are the people that are really going to unlock a lot of the value and a lot of the promise of data, right? Because you, you can never do that on your own. And the problem has been that for ISVs, it is so expensive and so difficult to build a product that can be used because the entire enterprise platform infrastructure needs to be built by somebody, you know, I mean, are you really gonna run infrastructure, database, operations, security, compliance, scalability, economics. How do you do that as a software company where really you only have your, your domain expertise that you want to deliver on a platform. You don't wanna do all these things. >>First of all, you don't know how to do it, how to do it well. Um, so it is much easier, much faster when there is already platform to actually build done in the world of clout that just doesn't, you know, exist. And then beyond that, you know, okay, fine building. It is sort of step one. Now I gotta sell it. I gotta market it. So how do I do that? Well, in the snowflake community, you have already market <laugh>, there's thousands and thousands of customers that are also on self lake. Okay. So their, their ability to consume that service that you just built, you know, they can search it, they can try it, they can test it and decide whether they want to consume it. And then, you know, we can monetize it. So all they have to do is cash the check. So the net effecti of it is we drastically lowered the barriers to entry into the world, you know, of software, you know, two men or two women in a dog, and a handful of files can build something that then can be sold, sort of to, for software developers. >>I wrote a piece 2012 after the first reinvent. And I, you know, and I, and I put a big gorilla on the front page and I said, how do you compete with Amazon gorilla? And then one of my answers was you build data ecosystems and you verticalize, and that's, that's what you're doing >>Here. Yeah. There certain verticals that are farther along than others, uh, obviously, but for example, in financial, uh, which is our largest vertical, I mean, the, the data ecosystem is really developing hardcore now. And that's, that's because they so rely on those relationships between all the big financial institutions and entities, regulatory, you know, clearing houses, investment bankers, uh, retail banks, all this kind of stuff. Um, so they're like, it becomes a no brainer. The network affects kick in so strongly because they're like, well, this is really the only way to do it. I mean, if you and I work in different companies and we do, and we want to create a secure, compliant data network and connection between us, I mean, it would take forever to get our lawyers to agree that yeah, it's okay. <laugh> right now, it's like a matter of minutes to set it up. If we're both on snowflake, >>It's like procurement, do they, do you have an MSA yeah. Check? And it just sail right through versus back and forth and endless negotiations >>Today. Data networking is becoming core ecosystem in the world of computing. You know, >>I mean, you talked about the network effects in rise of the data cloud and correct. Again, you know, you, weren't the first to come up with that notion, but you are applying it here. Um, I wanna switch topics a little bit. I, when I read your press releases, I laugh every time. Cause this says no HQ, Bozeman. And so where, where do you, I think I know where you land on, on hybrid work and remote work, but what are your thoughts on that? You, you see Elon the other day said you can't work for us unless you come to the office. Where, where do you stand? >>Yeah. Well, the, well, the, the first aspect is, uh, we really wanted to, uh, separate from the idea of a headquarters location, because I feel it's very antiquated. You know, we have many different hubs. There's not one place in the world where all the important people are and where we make all the important positions, that whole way of thinking, uh, you know, it is obsolete. I mean, I am where I need to be. And it it's many different places. It's not like I, I sit in this incredible place, you know, and that's, you know, that's where I sit and everybody comes to me. No, we are constantly moving around and we have engineering hubs. You know, we have your regional, uh, you know, headquarters for, for sales. Obviously we have in Malaysia, we have in Europe, you know? And, um, so I wanted to get rid of this headquarters designation. >>And, you know, the, the, the other issue obviously is that, you know, we were obviously in California, but you know, California is, is no longer, uh, the dominant place of where we are resident. I mean, 40% of our engineering people are now in be Washington. You know, we have hundreds of people in Poland where people, you know, we are gonna have very stressed location in Toronto. Um, yeah. Obviously our customers are, are everywhere, right? So this idea that, you know, everything is happening in, in one state is just, um, you know, not, not correct. So we wanted to go to no headquarters. Of course the SCC doesn't let you do that. Um, because they want, they want you to have a street address where the government can send you a mail and then it becomes, the question is, well, what's an acceptable location. Well, it has to be a place where the CEO and the CFO have residency by hooker, by crook. >>That happened to be in Bozeman Montana because Mike and I are both, it was not by design. We just did that because we were, uh, required to, you know, you know, comply with government, uh, requirements, which of course we do, but that's why it, it says what it says now on, on the topic of, you know, where did we work? Um, we are super situational about it. It's not like, Hey, um, you know, everybody in the office or, or everybody is remote, we're not categorical about it. Depends on the function, depends on the location. Um, but everybody is tethered to an office. Okay. In words, everybody has a relationship with an office. There's, there's almost nobody, there are a few exceptions of people that are completely remote. Uh, but you know, if you get hired on with snowflake, you will always have an office affiliation and you can be called into the office by your manager. But for purpose, you know, a meeting, a training, an event, you don't get called in just to hang out. And like, the office is no longer your home away from home. Right. And we're now into hotel, right? So you don't have a fixed place, you know? So >>You talked in your keynote a lot about last question. I let you go customer alignment, obviously a big deal. I have been watching, you know, we go to a lot of events, you'll see a technology company tell a story, you know, about their widget or whatever it was their box. And then you'll see an outcome and you look at it and you shake your head and say, well, that the difference between this and that is the square root of zero, right. When you talk about customer alignment today, we're talking about monetizing data. Um, so that's a whole different conversation. Um, and I, I wonder if you could sort of close on how that's different. Um, I mean, at ServiceNow, you transformed it. You know, I get that, you know, data, the domain was okay, tape, blow it out, but this is a, feels like a whole new vector or wave of growth. >>Yeah. You know, monetizing, uh, data becomes sort of a, you know, a byproduct of having a data cloud you all of a sudden, you know, become aware of the fact that, Hey, Hey, I have data and be that data might actually be quite valuable to parties. And then C you know, it's really easy to then, you know, uh, sell that and, and monetize that. Cause if it was hard, forget it, you know, I don't have time for it. Right. But if it's relatively, if it's compliant, it's relatively effortless, it's pure profit. Um, I just want to reference one attribute, two attributes of what you have, by the way, you know, uh, hedge funds have been into this sort of thing, you know, for a long time, because they procure data from hundreds and hundreds of sources, right. Because they're, they are the original data scientists. >>Um, but the, the bigger thing with data is that a lot of, you know, digital transformation is, is, is finally becoming real. You know, for years it was arm waving and conceptual and abstract, but it's becoming real. I mean, how do we, how do we run a supply chain? You know, how do we run, you know, healthcare, um, all these things are become are, and how do we run cyber security? They're being redefined as data problems and data challenges. And they have data solutions. So that's right. Data strategies are insanely important because, you know, if, if the solution is through data, then you need to have, you know, a data strategy, you know, and in our world, that means you have a data cloud and you have all the enablement that allows you to do that. But, you know, hospitals, you know, are, are saying, you know, data science is gonna have a bigger impact on healthcare than life science, you know, in the coming, whatever, you know, 10, 20 years, how do you enable that? >>Right. I, I have conversations with, with, with hospital executives are like, I got generations of data, you know, clinical diagnostic, demographic, genomic. And then I, I am envisioning these predictive outcomes over here. I wanna be able to predict, you know, once somebody's gonna get what disease and you know, what I have to do about it, um, how do I do that? <laugh> right. The day you go from, uh, you know, I have a lot of data too. I have these outcomes and then do me a miracle in the middle, in the middle of somewhere. Well, that's where we come in. We're gonna organize ourselves and then unpack thats, you know, and then we, we work, we through training models, you know, we can start delivering some of these insights, but the, the promise is extraordinary. We can change whole industries like pharma and, and, and healthcare. Um, you know, 30 effects of data, the economics will change. And you know, the societal outcomes, you know, um, quality of life disease, longevity of life is quite extraordinary. Supply chain management. That's all around us right >>Now. Well, there's a lot of, you know, high growth companies that were kind of COVID companies, valuations shot up. And now they're trying to figure out what to do. You've been pretty clear because of what you just talked about, the opportunities enormous. You're not slowing down, you're amping it up, you know, pun intended. So Frank Luman, thanks so much for coming on the cube. Really appreciate your time. >>My pleasure. >>All right. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there for more coverage from the snowflake summit, 2022, you're watching the cube.

>> Hello everybody. And welcome back to, theCUBE coverage of the Snowflake Data Cloud Summit 2020. We're tracking the rise of the Data Cloud, and fresh off the keynotes here, Frank Slootman, the Chairman and CEO of Snowflake and Anita Lynch, the Vice President of data governance at Disney streaming services. Folks Welcome. >> Thank you >> Thanks for having us Dave. >> Anita Disney plus awesome. You know, we signed up early, watched all the Marvel movies, Hamilton, the new Pixar movie soul. I haven't gotten it to the Mandalorian yet, your favorite. But really appreciate you guys coming on. Let me start with Frank. I'm glad you're putting forth this vision around the Data Cloud, because I never liked the term enterprise data warehouse. What you're doing is so different from the sort of that legacy world that I've known all these years. But start with why the Data Cloud? What problems are you trying to solve? And maybe some of the harder challenges you're seeing. >> Yeah, you know, we have a, we've come a long way in terms of workload execution. Right? In terms of scale and performance, and concurrent execution. We've really taken the lid off, sort of the physical constraints that have existed on these type of operations. But there's one problem that we're not yet solving, and that is the siloing and bunkering of data. And essentially, data is locked in applications, it's locked in data centers, it's locked in cloud, cloud regions. Incredibly hard for data science teams to really unlock the true value of data, when you can't address patterns that exist across data sets. So where we perpetuate a status we've had for forever since the beginning of computing. If we don't start to crack that problem now we have that opportunity. But the notion of a Data Cloud is like basically saying, "Look folks, we have to start on siloing and unlocking the data, and bring it into a place, where we can access it across all these perimeters, and boundaries that have historically existed. It's very much a step level function. Like the customers have always looked at things, one workload at a time, that mentality really has to go. You really have to have a Data Cloud mentality, as well as a workload orientation towards managing data. >> Anita, it was great hearing your role at Disney and in your keynote, and the work you're doing, the governance work. and you're serving a great number of stakeholders, enabling things like data sharing. You got really laser focused on trust, compliance, privacy. This idea of a data clean room is really interesting. Maybe you can expand on some of these initiatives here, and share what you're seeing as some of the biggest challenges to success, and of course, the opportunities that you're unlocking. >> Sure. In my role leading data governance, it's really critical to make sure that all of our stakeholders not only know what data is available and accessible to them. They can also understand really easily and quickly, whether or not the data that they're using is for the appropriate use case. And so that's a big part of how we scale data governance, and a lot of the work that we would normally have to do manually is actually done for us through the data clean rooms. >> Thank you for that. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the role of data and how your data strategy has evolved and maybe discuss some of the things that Frank mentioned about data silos. And I mean, obviously you can relate to that having been in the data business for a while, but I wonder if you can elucidate on that. >> Sure. I mean, data complexities are going to evolve over time in any traditional data architecture simply because you often have different teams at different periods and time trying to analyze and gather data across a whole lot of different sources. And the complexity that just arises out of that is due to the different needs of specific stakeholders. There are time constraints and quite often, it's not always clear how much value they're going to be able to extract from the data at the outset. So what we've tried to do to help break down those silos is allow individuals to see upfront how much value they're going to get from the data by knowing that it's trustworthy right away. By knowing that it's something that they can use in their specific use case right away. And by ensuring that essentially as they're continuing to kind of scale the use cases that they're focused on, they're no longer required to make multiple copies of the data, do multiple steps to reprocess the data. And that makes all the difference in the world. >> Yeah, for sure. I'm a copy Creek because it'd be the silent killer. Frank I followed you for a number of years, you're a big thinker, you and I have had a lot of conversations about the near-term, mid-term and long-term, I wonder if you could talk about, in your keynote you're talking about eliminating silos and connecting across data sources. Which is really powerful concept but really only if people are willing and able to connect and collaborate. Where do you see that happening? Maybe what are some of the blockers there? >> Well, there's certainly a natural friction there. I still remember when we first started to talk to, Salesforce, you know, they had discovered that we were a top three destination of Salesforce data and they were wondering why that was, and the reason is of course, that people take Salesforce data push it to snowflake because they want to overlay it with what data outside of Salesforce. Whether it's Adobe or any other marketing dataset. And then they want to run very highly scaled processes on it. But the reflexes in the world of SaaS is always like no, we're an Island, we're a planet down to ourselves. Everybody needs to come with us, as opposed to we go to a different platform to run these types of processes. It's no different for the public cloud vendor. They didn't only, they have massive moats around their storage to really prevent data from leaving their orbit. So there is natural friction in terms for this to happen. But on the other hand there is an enormous need. We can't deliver on the power and potential of data unless we allow it to come together. Snowflake is the platform that allows that to happen. We were pleased with our relationship with Salesforce because they did appreciate why this was important and why this was necessary. And we think, other parts of the industry will gradually come around to it as well. So the idea of a Data Cloud has really come, right. When people are recognizing why this matters now. It's not going to happen overnight. It is a step while will function a very big change in mentality and orientation. >> Yeah. It's almost as though the the SaaS suffocation of our industry sort of repeated some of the application silos and you build a hardened top around it, all the processes are hardened around it and okay, here we go. And you're really trying to break that, aren't you? >> Yep, exactly. >> Anita, again, I want to come back to this notion of governance. It's so it's so important. It's the first role in your title and it really underscores the importance of this. You know, Frank was just talking about some of the hurdles and this is a big one. I mean, we saw this in the early days of big data where governance was just afterthought. It was like bolted on the kind of wild wild West. I'm interested in your governance journey. And maybe you can share a little bit about what role snowflake has played there in terms of supporting that agenda and kind of what's next on that journey. >> Sure. Well, I've led data teams in numerous ways over my career. This is the first time that I've actually had the opportunity to focus on governance and what it's done is allowed for my organization to scale much more rapidly. And that's so critically important for our overall strategy as a company. >> Well, I mean, a big part of what you were talking about at least my inference in your talk was really that the business folks didn't have to care about, you know, wonder about they cared about it, but they don't have to wonder about, and about the privacy concerns, et cetera. You've taken care of all that it's sort of transparent to them. Is that right?| >> Yea That's right absolutely. So we focus on ensuring compliance across all of the different regions where we operate. We also partner very heavily with our legal and information security teams. They're critical to ensuring that we're able to do this. we don't do it alone. But governance includes not just the compliance and the privacy, it's also about data access, and it's also about ensuring data quality. And so all of that comes together under the governance umbrella. I also lead teams that focus on things like instrumentation, which is how we collect data. We focus on the infrastructure and making sure that we've architected for scale and all of these are really important components of our strategy. >> I got a...So I have a question maybe each of you can answer. I sort of see this, our industry moving from products, to then, to platforms and platforms even evolving into ecosystems. And then there's this ecosystem of data. You guys both talked a lot about data sharing but maybe Frank, you can start, Anita you can add on to Frank's answer. You're obviously both passionate about the use of data and trying to do so in a responsible way. That's critical but it's also going to have business impact. Frank, where's this passion come from on your side. And how are you putting into action in your own organization? >> Well, you know I'm really going to date myself here, but many, many years ago, I saw the first glimpse of multidimensional databases that were used for reporting really on IBM mainframes. And it was extraordinarily difficult. We didn't even have the words back then in terms of data warehouses and business. All these terms didn't exist. People just knew that they wanted to have a more flexible in way of reporting and being able to pivot data dimensionally and all these kinds of things. And I just bought whatever this predates windows 3.1, which really, set off the whole sort of graphical, way of dealing with systems which there's now a whole generations of people that don't know any different right? So I've lived the pain of this problem and sort of had a front row seat to watching this transpire over a very long period of time. And that's one of the reasons, why I'm here, because I finally seen, a glimpse of, I also, as an industry fully, fully just unleashing and unlocking to potential. We're now in a place where the technology is ahead of people's ability to harness it. Which we've never been there before. It was always like, we wanted to do things that technology wouldn't let us. It's different now. I mean, people are just, their heads are spinning with what's now possible, which is why you see markets evolve, very rapidly right now we were talking earlier about how you can't take past definitions and concepts and apply them to what's going on in the world. because the world's changing right in front of your eyes right now. >> So Anita maybe you could add on to what Frank just said and share some of the business impacts and outcomes that are notable since you've really applied your your love of data and maybe, maybe touch on, on culture. Data culture, any words of wisdom for folks in the audience who might be thinking about embarking on a Data Cloud journey, similar to what you've been on. >> Yeah sure. I think for me, I fell in love with technology first and then I fell in love with data. And I fell in love with data because of the impact that data can have on both the business and the technology strategy. And so it's sort of that nexus, between all three. And in terms of my career journey and some of the impacts that I've seen. I mean, I think with the advent of the cloud, before, well, how do I say that. Before the cloud actually became so prevalent and such a common part of the strategy that's required it was so difficult, you know, so painful. It took so many hours to actually be able to calculate the volumes of data that we had. Now we have that accessibility, and then on top of it, with the snowflake Data Cloud it's much more performance oriented from a cost perspective because you don't have multiple copies of the data, or at least you don't have to have multiple copies of the data. And I think moving beyond some of the traditional mechanisms for for measuring business impact, has only been possible with the volumes of data that we have available to us today. And it's just, it's phenomenal to see the speed at which we can operate. And really, truly understand our customer's interests and their preferences and then tailor the experiences that they really want and deserve for them. It's, been a great feeling to get to this point in time. >> That's fantastic. So, Frank, I got to ask you this. So in your spare time you decided to write a book, I'm loving it. I don't have a signed copy so I'm going to have to send it back and have you sign it. But, and you're, I love the inside baseball. It's just awesome. So really appreciate that. So, but why did you decide to write a book? >> Well, there were a couple of reasons, obviously we thought of as an interesting tale to tell for anybody, who is interested in what's going on, how did this come about? Who are the characters behind the scenes and all this stuff. But from a business standpoint because this is such a step function it's so non incremental, we felt like, we really needed quite a bit of real estate to really lay out what the full narrative and context is. And, we thought, the books titled the "Rise of the Data Cloud." That's exactly what it is. And we're trying to make the case for that mindset, that mentality, that strategy because all of us, I think as an industry, were at risk of, persisting, perpetuating where we've been since the beginning of computing. So we're really trying to make a pretty forceful case for a look. There's an enormous opportunity out there but there's some choices you have to make along the way. >> Guys, we got to leave it there. Frank, I know you and I are going to talk again Anita, I hope we have a chance to meet face to face and talk in theCUBE live someday. You're phenomenal guests and what a great story. Thank you both for coming on. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there. You're watching the, Snowflake Data Cloud Summit, on theCUBE.

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around >>the world. This is a cute conversation high, but this is Day Volonte. And as you know, we've been tracking the next generation of clouds. Sometimes we call it Cloud to two point. Frank's Lukman is here to really unpack this with me. Frank. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Yeah, you as well. They could see it >>s o obviously hot off your AIPO A lot of buzz around that. Uh, that's fine. We could we could talk about that, but I really want to talk about the future. What? Before we get off the I p o. That was something you told me when you're CEO service. Now you said, hey, we're priced to perfection, so it looks like snowflakes gonna be priced to perfection. It's a marathon, though. You You made that clear. I presume it's not any different here for you. Yeah, >>well, I think you know the service now. Journey was different in the sense that we were kind of under the underdogs, and people sort of discovered over the years the full potential of the company and I think there's stuff like they pretty much discovered a day. One. It's a little bit more, More sometimes it's nice to be an underdog. Were a bit of an over dog in this, uh, this particular scenario, but, you know, it is what it is, Andre. You know, it's all about execution delivering the results, delivering on our vision, Uh, you know, being great with our customers. And, uh, hopefully the chips will fall where they where they may. At that point, >>yeah, you're you're You're a poorly kept secret at this point, Frank. After a while, I wanted, you know, I've got some excerpts of your book that that I've been reading. And, of course, I've been following your career since the two thousands. You're off sailing. You mentioned in your book that you were kind of retired. You were done, and then you get sucked back in now. Why? I mean, are you in this for the sport? What's the story here? >>Uh, actually, that that's not a bad way of characterizing it. I think I am in that, uh, you know, for the sport, uh, you know the only way to become the best version of yourself is to be to be under the gun and, uh, you know, every single day. And that's that's certainly what we are. It sort of has its own rewards building great products, building great companies, regardless off you know what the spoils. Maybe it has its own rewards. And I It's hard for people like us to get off the field and, you know, hang it up. So here we are. >>You know, you're putting forth this vision now the data cloud, which obviously it's good marketing, but I'm really happy because I don't like the term Enterprise Data Warehouse. I don't think it reflects what you're trying to accomplish. E D. W. It's slow on Lee. A few people really know how to use it. The time value of data is gone by the time you know, your business is moving faster than the data in the D. W. And it really became a savior because of Sarbanes Oxley. That's really what it came a reporting mechanism. So I've never seen What you guys are doing is is e d w. So I want you to talk about the data cloud. I want to get into the to the vision a little bit and maybe challenge you on a couple things so our audience can better understand it. Yes. So >>the notion of a data cloud is is actually, uh, you know, type of cloud that we haven't had. I mean, data has been been fragmented and locked up in a million different places in different clouds. Different cloud regions, obviously on premise, um, And for data science teams, you know, they're trying thio drive analysis across datasets, which is incredibly hard, Which is why you know, a lot of this resorts to, you know, programming on bond things of that sort of. ITT's hardly scalable because the data is not optimized. The economics are not optimized. There's no governance model and so on. But a data cloud is actually the ability thio loosely couple and lightly Federated uh, data, regardless of where it is. So it doesn't have scale limitations or performance limitations. Uh, the way traditional data warehouses have had it. So we really have a fighting chance off really killing the silos and unlocking the bunkers and allowing the full promise of data sciences and ml On day I thio really happen. I mean, a lot of lot of the analysis that happens on data is on the single data set because it's just too damn hard, you know, to drive analysis across multiple data sets. And, you know, when we talk to our customers, they have very precise designs on what they're trying to do. They say, Look, we are trying to discover, you know, through through through deep learning You know what the patterns are that lead to transactions. You know, whether it's if you're streaming company. Maybe it's that you're signing up for a channel or you're buying a movie or whatever it is. What is the pattern you know, of data points that leads us to that desired outcome. Once you have a very accurate description of the data relationships, you know that results in that outcome, you can then search for it and scale it, you know, tens of million times over. That's what digital enterprises do, right? So in order to discover these patterns enriched the data to the point where the patterns become incredibly predictive. Uh, that's that's what snowflake is formed, right? But it requires a completely Federated Data mo because you're not gonna find a data pattern in the in the single data set per se right? So that's that's what it's all about. I mean, the outcomes of a data cloud are very, very closely related to the business outcomes that the user is seeking, right? It's not some infrastructure process. It has a very remote relationship with business outcome. This is very, very closely related. >>So it doesn't take a brain surgeon to look at the Trillion Years Club. And so I could see that I could see the big you know, trillion dollars apple $2 trillion market cap companies. They got data at the core, whereas most companies most incumbents. Yeah, it might be a bottling plant that the core, some manufacturing or some other processes they put, they put data around it in these silos. It seems like you're trying toe really? Bring that innovation and put data at the core. And you've got an architecture to do that. You talk about your multi cluster shared storage architecture. You mentioned you mentioned data sharing it. Will this, in your opinion, enable, for instance, incumbents to do what a lot of the startups were able to do with the cloud days? I mean they got access to data centers, which they they couldn't have before the cloud you're trying to do with something similar with data. >>Yeah, so So, you know, obviously there's no doubt that the cloud is a critical enabler. This wouldn't be happening. Uh, you know what? I was at the same time, the trails that have been blessed by the likes of Facebook and Google. Uh, e the reason those enterprises are so extraordinary valuable is is because of what they know. Uh, you know, through data and how they can monetize what they know through data. But that is now because that power is now becoming available, you know, to every single enterprise out there. Right, Because the data platform, the underlying cloud capabilities, we are now delivering that to anybody who wants it. Now, you still need to have strong date engineering data science capabilities. It's not like falling off a log, but fundamentally, those capabilities are now, you know, broadly accessible in the marketplace. >>So we're talking upfront about some of the differences between what you've done earlier in your career. Like I said, you're the worst kept secret, you know, Data domain. I would say it was sort of somewhat of a niche market. You you blew it up until it was very disruptive, but it was somewhat limited in what could be done. Uh, and and maybe some of that limitation, you know, wouldn't have occurred if you stay the price, uh, independent company service. Now you mop the table up because you really had no competition there, Not the case here. You you've got some of the biggest competitors in the world, so talk about that. And what gives you confidence that you can continue to dominate, >>But, you know, it's actually interesting that you bring up these companies. I mean, data. The man was a scenario where we were constrained on market and literally we were a data backup company. As you recall, we needed to move into backup software. Need to move the primary storage. While we knew it, we couldn't execute on it because it took tremendous resource is which, back in the day, it was much harder than one of this right now. So we ended up selling the company to E M. C and and now part of Dell. But way short, uh, we're left with some trauma from that experience, Uh, that, you know, why couldn't we, you know, execute on that transformation? So coming to service now, we were extremely. I'm certainly need personally, extremely attuned to the challenges that we have endured in our prior company. One of the reasons why you saw service now break out at scale at tremendous growth rights is because of what we have learned from the prior journey. We're not gonna ever get caught again in a situation where we could not sustain our markets and sustain our growth. So if service I was very much the execution model was very much a reaction to what we had encountered in the prior company. Now coming into snowflake totally different deal. Because not only is there's a large market, this is a developing market. I think you've pointed out in some of your broadcasting that this market is very much in flux on the reason is that you know, technology is now capable of doing things for for people and enterprises that they could never do before. So people are spending way mawr resource is than they ever thought possible on these new capability. So you can't think in terms of static markets and static data definitions, it means nothing. Okay, These things are so in transition right now, it's very difficult for people you know to to scope that the scale of this opportunity. >>Yeah. I wanna understand you're thinking around and, you know, I've written about the TAM, and can Snowflake grow into its valuation and the way I drew it, I said, Okay, you got data Lakes and you got Enterprise Data Warehouse. That's pretty well understood. But I called it data as a service to cover the closest analogy to your data cloud. And then even beyond that, when you start bringing in the edge and real time data, uh, talk about how you're thinking about that, Tam. And what what you have to do to participate. You have toe, you know, bring adjacent capabilities, ISAT this read data sharing that will get you there. In other words, you're not like a transaction system. You hear people talking about converge databases, you hear? Talk about real time inference at the edge that today anyway, isn't what snowflake is about. Does that vision of data sharing and the data cloud does that allow you to participate in that massive, multi $100 billion tam that that I laid out and probably others as well. >>Yeah, well, it is always difficult. Thio defined markets based on historical concept that probably not gonna apply whole lot for much longer. I mean, the way we think of it is that data is the beating heart of the digital enterprise on, uh, you know, digital enterprises today. What do you look at? People against the car door dash or so on. Um, they were built from the ground up to be digital on the prices and data Is the beating heart off their operation Data operations is their manufacturing, if you will, um, every other enterprise out there is is working very hard to become digital or part digital and is going to learn to develop data platforms like what we're talking about here to data Cloud Azaz. Well, as the expertise in terms of data engineering and data scientist to really fully become a digital enterprise, right. So, you know, we view data as driving operations off the digital enterprise. That's really what it iss right data, and it's completely data driven. And there's no people involved. People are developing and supporting the process. But in the execution, it is end to end. Data driven. Being that data is the is the signal that initiates the process is technol assess. Their there being a detective, and then they fully execute the entire machinery probe Problematic machinery, if you will, um, you know, of the processes that have been designed, for example, you know, I may fit a certain pattern. You know, that that leads to some transactional context. But I've not fully completed that pattern until I click on some Lincoln. And all of a sudden proof I have become, you know, a prime prospect system, the text that in the real time and then unleashes Oh, it's outreach and capabilities to get me to transact me. You and I are experiencing this every day. You know, when we're when we're online, you just may not fully re election. That's what's happening behind the scenes. That's really what this is all about. So and so to me, this is sort of the new online transaction processing is enter and, uh, you know, data digital. Uh, no process that is continually acquiring, analyzing and acting on data. >>Well, you've talked about the time time value of of data. It loses value over time. And to the extent that you can actually affect decisions, maybe before you lose the customer before you lose the patient even even more importantly or before you lose the battle. Uh, there's all kinds of, you know, mental models that you can apply this. So automation is a key part of that. And then again, I think a lot of people like you said, if you just try to look at historical markets, you can't really squint through those and apply them. You really have toe open up your mind and think about the new possibilities. And so I could see your your component of automation. I I see what's happening in the r P. A space and and I could see See these this massive opportunities Thio really change society, change business, your last thoughts. >>There's just there's just no scenario that I can envision where data is not completely core in central to a digital enterprise, period. >>Yeah, I think I really do think, Frank, your your your Your vision is misunderstood somewhat. I think people say Okay. Hey, we'll bet on salute men Scarpelli the team. That's great to do that. But I think this is gonna unfold in a way that people may be having predicted that maybe you guys, yourselves and your founders, you know, haven't have aren't able to predict as well. But you've got that good, strong architectural philosophy that you're pursuing and it just kind of feels right, doesn't it? >>You know, I mean, one of the 100 conversations and, uh, you know, things is the one of the reasons why we also wrote our book. You know, the rights of the data cloud is to convey to the marketplace that this is not an incremental evolution, that this is not sort of building on the past. There is a real step function here on the way to think about it is that typically enterprises and institutions will look at a platform like snowflakes from a workload context. In other words, I have this business. I have this workload. This is very much historically defined, by the way. And then they benchmark us, you know, against what they're what they're already doing on some legacy platform. And they decided, like, Yeah, this is a good fit. We're gonna put Snowflake here. Maybe there, but it's still very workload centric, which means that we are essentially perpetuating the mentality off the past. Right? We were doing it. Wanna work, load of the time We're creating the new silos and the new bunkers of data in the process. And we're really not approaching this with level of vision that the data science is really required to drive maximum benefit from data. So our arguments and this is this is not an easy arguments is to say, toc IOS on any other sea level person that wants to listen to that look, you know, just thinking about, you know, operational context and operational. Excellent. It's like we have toe have a platform that allows us unfettered access to the data that, you know, we may need to, you know, bring the analytical power to right. If you have to bring in political power to a diversity of data sets, how are we going to do that right? The data lives in, like, 500 different places. It's just not possible, right, other than with insane amounts of programming and complexity, and then we don't have the performance, and we don't have to economics, and we don't have the governance and so on. So you really want to set yourself up with a data cloud so that you can unleash your data science, uh, capabilities, your machine learning your deep learning capabilities, aan den, you really get the full throttle advantage. You know of what the technology can do if you're going to perpetuate the silo and bunkering of data by doing it won't work. Load of the time. You know, 5, 10 years from now, we're having the same conversation we've been having over the last 40 years, you know? >>Yeah. Operationalize ing your data is gonna require busting down those those silos, and it's gonna require something like the data cloud to really power that to the next decade and beyond. Frank's movement Thanks so much for coming in. The Cuban helping us do a preview here of what's to come. >>You bet, Dave. Thanks. >>All right. Thank you for watching. Everybody says Dave Volonte for the Cube will see you next time

>>Hello, buddy. And welcome back to the cubes. Coverage of Snowflake Data Cloud Summer 2020. We're tracking the rise of the data cloud and fresh off the keynotes. Hear Frank's Luqman, the chairman and CEO of Snowflake, and Anita Lynch, the vice president of data governance at Disney Streaming Services. Folks. Welcome E Need a Disney plus. Awesome. You know, we signed up early. Watched all the Marvel movies. Hamilton, the new Pixar movie Soul. I haven't gotten to the man DeLorean yet. Your favorite, but I really appreciate you guys coming on. Let me start with Frank. I'm glad you're putting forth this vision around the data cloud because I never liked the term Enterprise Data Warehouse. What you're doing is is so different from the sort of that legacy world that I've known all these years. But start with why the data cloud? What problems are you trying to solve? And maybe some of the harder challenges you're seeing? >>Yeah. You know, we have We've come a long way in terms of workload, execution, right? In terms of scale and performance and concurrent execution. We really taking the lid off. Sort of the physical constraints that that have existed on these types of operations. But there's one problem, uh, that were not yet, uh solving. And that is the silo ing and bunkering of data essentially in the data is locked in applications. It's locked in data centers. It's locked in cloud cloud regions incredibly hard for for data science teams to really unlock the true value of data when you when you can address patterns that that exists across data set. So we're perpetuate, uh, status we've had for for ever since the beginning off computing. If we don't start Thio, crack that problem now we have that opportunity. But the notion of a data cloud is like basically saying, Look, folks, you know, we we have to start inside, lowing and unlocking the data on bring it into a place where we can access it. Uh, you know, across all these parameters and boundaries that have historically existed, it's very much a step level function. Customers have always looked at things won't workload at that time. That mentality really has to go. You really have to have a data club mentality as well as a workload orientation towards towards managing data. >>Anita is great here in your role at Disney and you're in your keynote and the work you're doing the governance work and you're you're serving a great number of stakeholders, enabling things like data sharing. You got really laser focused on trust, compliance, privacy. This idea of a data clean room is really interesting. You know, maybe you can expand on some of these initiatives here and share what you're seeing as some of the biggest challenges to success. And, of course, the opportunities that you're unlocking. >>Sure, I mean, in my role leading data to governance, it's really critical to make sure that all of our stakeholders not only know what data is available and accessible to them, they can also understand really easily and quickly whether or not the data that they're using is for the appropriate use case. And so that's a big part of how we scale data governance. And a lot of the work that we would normally have to do manually is actually done for us through the data Clean rooms. >>Thank you for that. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the role of data and how your data strategy has evolved and maybe discuss some of the things that Frank mentioned about data silos. And I mean, obviously you can relate to that having been in the data business for a while, but I wonder if you could elucidate on that. >>Sure, I mean data complexities air going to evolve over time in any traditional data architecture. Er, simply because you often have different teams at different periods in time trying thio, analyze and gather data across Ah, whole lot of different sources. And the complexity that just arises out of that is due to the different needs of specific stakeholders, their time constraints. And quite often, um, it's not always clear how much value they're gonna be able to extract from the data at the outset. So what we've tried to do to help break down the silos is allow individuals to see up front how much value they're going to get from the data by knowing that it's trustworthy right away. By knowing that it's something that they can use in their specific use case right away, and by ensuring that essentially, as they're continuing to kind of scale, the use cases that they're focused on their no longer required Thio make multiple copies of the data, do multiple steps to reprocess the data. And that makes all the difference in the world, >>for sure. I mean, copy creep, because it be the silent killer. Frank, I've followed you for a number of years. Your big thinker. You and I have had a lot of conversations about the near term midterm and long term. I wonder if you could talk about you know, when you're Kino. You talk about eliminating silos and connecting across data sources, which really powerful concept. But really only if people are willing and able to connect and collaborate. Where do you see that happening? Maybe What are some of the blockers there? >>Well, there's there's certainly, ah, natural friction there. I still remember when we first started to talk to to Salesforce, you know, they had discovered that we were top three destination off sales first data, and they were wondering why that was. And the reason is, of course, that people take salesforce data, push it to snowflake because they wanna overlay it with what data? Outside of Salesforce, you know, whether it's adobe or any other marketing data set and then they want to run very highly skilled processes, you know, on it. But the reflexes in the world of SAS is always like, No, we're an island were planning down to ourselves. Everybody needs to come with us as opposed to we We go, you know, to a different platform to run these type of processes. It's no different for the for the public club. Better day didn't mean they have, you know, massive moats around there. Uh, you know, their stories to, you know, really prevent data from from leaving their their orbit. Eso there is natural friction in, uh, in terms off for this to happen. But on the other hand, you know, there is an enormous need, you know, we can't deliver on on the power and potential of data unless we allow it to come together. Uh, snowflake is the platform that allows that to happen. Uh, you know, we were pleased with our relationship with Salesforce because they did appreciate you know why this was important and why this was necessary. And we think you know, other parts of the industry will gradually come around to it as well. So the the idea of a data cloud has really come, right? Uh, people are recognizing, you know, why does this matter now? It's not gonna happen overnight. There's a step global function of very big change in mentality and orientation. >>Yeah. It's almost as though the SAS ification of our industry sort of repeated some of the application silos and you build a hardened top around it. All the processes are hard around. OK, here we go. And you're really trying to break that, aren't you? Yeah, Exactly. Anita. Again, I wanna come back to this notion of governance. It's so it's so important. It's the first role in your title, and it really underscores the importance of this. Um, you know, Frank was just talking about some of the hurdles, and this is this is a big one. I mean, we saw this in the early days of big data. Where governance was this after thought it was like, bolted on kind of wild, Wild West. I'm interested in your governance journey. And maybe you could share a little bit about what role snowflake has played there in terms of supporting that agenda. Bond. Kind of What's next on that journey? >>Sure. Well, you know, I've I've led data teams in a numerous, uh, in numerous ways over my career. This is the first time that I've actually had the opportunity to focus on governance. And what it's done is allowed for my organization to scale much more rapidly. And that's so critically important for our overall strategy as a company. >>Well, I mean a big part of what you were talking about. At least my inference in your talk was really that the business folks didn't have to care about, you know, wonder about they cared about it. But they're not the wonder about and and about the privacy, the concerns, etcetera. You've taken care of all that. It's sort of transparent to them. Is that >>yeah, right. That's right. Absolutely So we focus on ensuring compliance across all of the different regions where we operate. We also partner very heavily with our legal and information security teams. They're critical to ensuring, you know, that were ableto do this. We don't we don't do it alone. But governance includes not just, you know, the compliance and the privacy. It's also about data access, and it's also about ensuring data quality. And so all of that comes together under the governance umbrella. I also lead teams that focus on things like instrumentation, which is how we collect data. We focus on the infrastructure and making sure that we've architected for scale and all of these air really important components of our strategy. >>I got. So I have a question. Maybe each of you can answer. I I sort of see this our industry moving from, you know, products toe, then two platforms and platforms, even involving into ecosystems. And then there's this ecosystem of data. You guys both talked a lot about data sharing, But maybe Frank, you could start in Anita. You can add on to Frank's answer. You're obviously both both passionate about the use of data and trying to do so in a responsible way. That's critical, but it's also gonna have business impact. Frank, where's this passion come from? On your side. And how are you putting in tow action in your own organization? >>Well, you know, I'm really gonna date myself here, but, you know, uh, many, many years ago, uh, I saw the first glimpse off, uh, multidimensional databases that were used for reporting really on IBM mainframes on git was extraordinarily difficult. We didn't even have the words back then in terms of data, warehouses and all these terms didn't exist. People just knew that they wanted to have, um, or flexible way of reporting and being able Thio pivot data dimensionally and all these kinds of things. And I just whatever this predates, you know, Windows 3.1, which really set off the whole sort of graphical in a way of dealing with systems which there's not a whole generations of people that don't know any different, Right? So I I've lived the pain off. This problem on sort of had a front row seat to watching this this transpire over a very long period of time. And that's that's one of the reasons you know why I'm here. Because I finally seen a glimpse off. You know, I also as an industry fully fully just unleashing and unlocking the potential were not in a place where the technology is ahead of people's ability to harness it right, which we've never been there before, right? It was always like we wanted to do things that technology wouldn't let us. It's different now. I mean, people are just heads are spinning with what's now possible, which is why you see markets evolved very rapidly right now. We were talking earlier about how you can't take, you know, past definitions and concepts and apply them to what's going on the world. The world's changing right in front of your eyes right now. >>Sonita. Maybe you could add on to what Frank just said and share some of the business impacts and and outcomes that are notable since you're really applied your your love of data and maybe maybe touch on culture, data, culture, any words of wisdom for folks in the audience who might be thinking about embarking on a data cloud journey similar to what you've been on? >>Yeah, sure, I think for me. I fell in love with technology first, and then I fell in love with data, and I fell in love with data because of the impact the data can have on both the business and the technology strategy. And so it's sort of that nexus, you know, between all three and in terms of my career journey and some of the impacts that I've seen. I mean, I think with the advent of the cloud you know before. Well, how do I say that before the cloud actually became, you know, so prevalent and such a common part of the strategy that's required It was so difficult, you know, so painful. It took so many hours to actually be able to calculate, you know, the volumes of data that we had. Now we have that accessibility, and then on top of it with the snowflake data cloud, it's much more performance oriented from a cost perspective because you don't have multiple copies of the data, or at least you don't have toe have multiple copies of the data. And I think moving beyond some of the traditional mechanisms for for measuring business impact has has only been possible with the volumes of data that we have available to us today. And it's just it's phenomenal to see the speed at which we can operate and really, truly understand our customers, interests and their preferences, and then tailor the experiences that they really want and deserve for them. Um, it's it's been a great feeling. Thio, get to this point in time. >>That's fantastic. So, Frank, I gotta ask you if you're still in your spare time. You decided to write a book? I'm loving it. Um, I don't have a signed copy, so I'm gonna have to send it back and have you sign it. But your love, the inside baseball, it's just awesome. Eso really appreciate that. So but why did you decide to write a book? >>Well, there were a couple of reasons. Obviously, uh, we thought it was an interesting tale to tell for anybody who's interested in, you know what's going on. How did this come about, You know, where the characters behind the scenes and all this kind of stuff. But, you know, from a business standpoint, because this is such a step function, it's so non incremental. We felt like, you know, we really needed quite a bit of real estate to really lay out what the full narrative in context is on. Do you know, we thought books titled The Rise of the Data Cloud. That's exactly what it iss. And we're trying to make the case for that mindset, that mentality, that strategy. Uh, because all of us, you know, I think it's an industry were risk off, you know, persisting, perpetuating. Uh, you know, where we've been since the beginning off computing. So we're really trying to make a pretty forceful case for Look, there's an enormous opportunity out there. The different choices you have to make along the way. >>Guys, we got to leave it there. Frank. I know you and I are gonna talk again. Anita. I hope we have a chance to meet face to face and and talking the Cube live someday. You're phenomenal guests. And what a great story. Thank you both for coming on. Thank you. All right, you're welcome. And keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back for the next guest right after this short break and we're clear. All right. Not bad.

>> Hello everybody and welcome back to the cubes coverage of the Snowflake Data Cloud Summit 2020. We're tracking the rise of the Data Cloud, and fresh off the keynotes here, Frank Slootman, the chairman and CEO of Snowflake and Anita Lynch, the vice president of Data Governance at Disney Streaming Services. Folks, welcome. >> Thank you Thanks for having us, Dave, >> I need a Disney plus awesome. You know, we signed up early, watched all the Marvel movies, Hamilton, the new Pixar Movie saw, I haven't gotten into the Mandalorian yet, your favorite, but, (woman laughing) really appreciate you guys coming on. Let me start with Frank. I'm glad you're putting forth this vision around the data cloud, because I never liked the term Enterprise Data Warehouse, what you're doing is so different from the sort of that legacy world that I've known all these years, but start with why the Data Cloud, what problems are you trying to solve? And maybe some of the harder challenges you're seeing. >> Yeah I know, you know we've come a long way in terms of workload execution, right? In terms of scale and performance, you know, concurrent execution, we really taken the lid off sort of the physical constraints that have existed on these types of operations. But there's one problem, that we're not yet solving. And that is the siloing and bunkering of data. And especially in a data is locked in application it is locked data centers, is locked in cloud regions, incredibly hard for data science teams to really, you know, unlock the true value of data. When you can address patterns that exist across a data set. So we're perpetuate, a status we've had forever since the beginning of computing. If we don't start to crack that problem now we have that opportunity. But the notion of a Data Cloud is like basically saying, look folks, you know, we have to start unsiloing and unlocking the data, and bring it into a place, you know, where we can access it, you know, across all these parameters and boundaries that have historically existed. It's very much a step level function. Now the customers have always looked at things one workload at a time, that mentality really has to go. You really have to have a Data Cloud mentality, as well as a workload orientation towards managing data. >> Anita was great hearing your role at Disney, and your keynote, and the work you're doing, the governance work, and you're serving a great number of stakeholders, enabling things like data sharing, you got really laser focused on trust, compliance, privacy. Is this idea of a data clean room is really interesting. You maybe you can expand on some of these initiatives here and share what you're seeing as some of the biggest challenges to success. And of course, the opportunities that you're unlocking. >> Sure. I mean, in my role, leading Data Governance, it's really critical to make sure that all of our stakeholders, not only know what data is available and accessible to them, they can also understand really easily and quickly, whether or not the data that they're using is for the appropriate use case. And so, that's a big part of how we scale data governance, and a lot of the work that we would normally have to do manually, is actually done for us through the data clean rooms. >> Thank you for that. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the role of data and how your data strategy has evolved and maybe discuss some of the things that Frank mentioned about data silos, and obviously you can relate to that, having been in the data business for awhile, but wonder if you can elucidate on that. >> Sure. I mean, data complexities are going to evolve over time in any traditional data architecture, simply because you often have different teams at different periods in time, trying to analyze and gather data across a whole lot of different sources. And the complexity that just arises out of that, is, due to the different needs of specific stakeholders. There are time constraints, and quite often it's not always clear, how much value they're going to be able to extract from the data at the outset. So what we've tried to do to help break down those silos, is, allow individuals to see upfront how much value they're going to get from the data, by knowing that it's trustworthy right away . By knowing that it's something that they can use in their specific use case right away. And by ensuring that essentially, as they're continuing to kind of scale the use cases that they're focused on, they're no longer required to make multiple copies of the data, do multiple steps to reprocess the data. And that makes all the difference in the world. >> Yeah, for sure. I mean copy creek, cause it'd be the silent killer. Frank I followed you for a number of years. You're a big thinker. You and I have had a lot of conversations about the near term, mid term and long term. I wonder if you could talk about, you know, when your keynote, you talked about eliminating silos, and connecting across data sources, which really powerful concept, but it really only, if people are willing and able to connect and collaborate, where do you see that happening? Maybe what are some of the blockers there? >> Well, there's certainly a natural friction there. I still remember when we first started to talk to Salesforce, you know, they had, discovered that we were a top three destination of Salesforce data and they were wondering, you know, why that was? And the reason is of course that people take Salesforce data, push it to Snowflake, because they want to overlay it with data outside of Salesforce. You know what it is Adobe or any 6other marketing dataset. And then they want to run very highly skilled processes, you know, on it. But the reflexes in the world of SAS, is always like, no, we're an Island, we're a planet onto ourselves. Everybody needs to come with us as opposed to, we go to a different platform to run these types of processes. It's no different for thee public cloud vendor. They did only, they have, you know, massive moats around, you know, their storage to, you know, to really prevent data from leaving their orbit. So there is natural friction in terms of for this to happen. But on the other hand, you know, there is an enormous need, you know, we can't deliver on the power and potential of data, unless we allow it to come together. Snowflake is the platform that allows that to happen. You know, we were pleased with our relationship with Salesforce because they did appreciate, you know, why this was important and why this was necessary. And we think, you know, other parts of the industry will gradually come around to it as well. So the idea of a Data Cloud has really come. Right, people are recognizing, you know, why does this matters now. It's not going to happen overnight. It is a step what will function a very big change in mentality and orientation. You know? >> Yeah. It's almost as though the sussification of our industry sort of repeated some of the application silos, and build a heart on to and all the processes of(mummers) Okay, here we go. And you're really trying to break that aren't you? >> Yep, exactly. >> Anita, again, I want to come back to this notion of governance. It's so important. It's the first rule in your title, and it really underscores the importance of this. You know, Frank was just talking about some of the hurdles and this is a big one. I mean we saw this in the early days of big data where governance was this afterthought. It was like bolted on kind of wild west. I'm interested in your governance journey. And maybe you can share a little bit about what role Snowflake has played there in terms of supporting that agenda, and kind of what's next on that journey. >> Sure. Well, you know, I've led data teams, in numerous ways over my career, this is the first time, that I've actually had the opportunity to focus on governance. And what it's done, is allowed for my organization to scale much more rapidly. And that's so critically important for our overall strategy as a company. >> Well, I mean, a big part of what you were talking about, at least my inference in your talk, was really that the business folks didn't have to care about, your wonder about they cared about it, but they don't have to wonder about, and about the privacy concerns, et cetera, you've taken care of all that. It's sort of transparent to them. >> Yeah, that's right. Absolutely. So we focus on ensuring compliance across all of the different regions where we operate. We also partner very heavily with our legal and information security teams. They're critical, to ensuring you know, that we're able to do this. We don't do it alone. But governance includes not just, you know, the compliance and the privacy. It's also about data access. And it's also about ensuring data quality. And so all of that comes together under the governance umbrella. I also lead teams that focus on things like instrumentation, which is how we collect data, we focus on the infrastructure, and making sure that we've architected for scale , and all of these are really important components of our strategy. >> So I have a question maybe each of you can answer it. I sort of see this, our industry moving from products to then, to the platforms and platforms even evolving into ecosystems. And then there's this ecosystem of data. You guys both talked a lot about data sharing, but, but maybe Frank, you can start and Anita you can add onto Frank's answer. You obviously both passionate about the use of data and trying to do so in a responsible way, that's critical, but it's also going to have business impact. Frank, where's this passion come from on your side? And how are you putting into action in your own organization? >> Well, you know, I'm really going to date myself here, but you know many years ago, you know, I saw the first glimpse of multidimensional databases that were used for reporting really on IBM mainframes. And it was extraordinarily difficult. We didn't even have the words back then in terms of data, warehouses and business, all these terms didn't exist. People just knew that they want to have a more flexible way of reporting and being able to pivot data, dimensionally, all these kinds of things. And I just by whatever this predates, you know, windows 3.1, which really, you know, set off the whole sort of graphical, you know, way of dealing with systems, which there's not whole generations of people that don't know any different. Right? So I've lived the pain of this problem, and sort of had a front row seat, to watching this transpire over a very long period of time. And that's one of the reasons, you know, why I'm here because I finally seen, you know, a glimpse of, you know, I also, as an industry fully, just unleashing and unlocking the potential. We're not at a place where the technology is ahead of people's ability to harness it. Right. Which we'd never been there before. Right. It was always like we wanted to do things and technology wouldn't let us, it's different now. I mean, people are just, heads are spinning with what's now possible, which is why you see Marcus evolve, you know, very rapidly right now, we were talking earlier about how you can't take, you know, past definitions and concepts and apply them to what's going on in the world. The world's changing right in front of your eyes right now, >> So Anita maybe you could add on to what Frank just said and share some of the business impacts, and outcomes that are notable since you've really applied your love of data and maybe touch culture, data culture. Any words of wisdom for folks in the audience who might be thinking about embarking on a Data Cloud journey, similar to what you've been on. >> Yeah Sure. I think for me, I fell in love with technology first, and then I fell in love with data and I fell in love with data because of the impact that data can have, on both the business, and the technology strategy. And so it's sort of that nexus between all three. And in terms of my career journey and some of the impacts that I've seen. I think with the advent of the Cloud, you know, before, well, how do I say this? Before the cloud actually became so prevalent and such a common part of the strategy that's required, it was so difficult, you know, so painful. It took so many hours to actually, be able to calculate, you know, the volumes of data that we had. Now we have that accessibility. And then on top of it, with the Snowflake Data Cloud, it's much more performance oriented from a cost perspective because you don't have multiple copies of the data, or at least you don't have to have multiple copies of the data. And I think, moving beyond some of the traditional mechanisms for measuring business impact, has only been possible with the volumes of data that we have available to us today. And it's just, it's phenomenal to see the speed at which we can operate and really, truly understand our customer's interests and their preferences, and then tailor the experiences that they really want and deserve for them. It's been a great feeling to get to this point in time. >> That's fantastic. So, Frank, I got to ask you to do so in your spare time you decided to write a book am loving it. I have a signed copy, so I'm going to have to send it back and have you sign it. But, and I love the inside baseball. It's just awesome. So really appreciate that. So, but why did you decide to write a book? >> Well, there were a couple of reasons. Obviously we thought it was an interesting tale to tell for anybody, you know, who is interested in, you know, what's going on? How did this come about? You know, or the characters behind the scenes and all this kind of stuff. But, you know, from a business standpoint, you know, because this is such a step function, it's so non incremental, we felt like we really needed quite a bit of real estate to really lay out, what the full narrative and context is. And, you know, we thought, you know, books titled the rise of the Data Cloud. That's exactly what it is. And we're trying to make the case for that mindset, that mentality, that strategy, because all of us, you know, I think as an industry we're at risk of, you know, persisting, perpetuating, you know, where we've been since the beginning of computing. So we're really trying to make a pretty forceful case for look, you know, there's an enormous opportunity out there, but there's some choices you have to make along the way. >> Guys, we got to leave it there. Frank. I know you and I are going to talk again, Anita, I hope we have a chance to meet face to face and in the cube live someday, your phenomenal guest and what a great story. Thank you both for coming on. Thanks Dave, >> Thank you >> You're welcome to keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with the next guest right after this short break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Coversation. >> All right everybody, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this special CUBE Conversation. I first met Frank Slootman in 2007 when he was the CEO of Data Domain. Back then he was the CEO of a disruptive company and still is. Data Domain, believe or not back then, was actually replacing tape drives as the primary mechanism for backup. Yes, believe it or not, it used to be tape. Fast forward several years later, I met Frank again at VMworld when he had become the CEO of ServiceNow. At the time ServiceNow was a small company, about 100 plus million dollars. Frank and his team took that company to 1.2 billion. And Gartner, at the time of IPO said "you know, this doesn't make sense. "It's a small market, it's a very narrow help desk market, "it's maybe a couple billion dollars." The vision of Slootman and his team was to really expand the total available market and execute like a laser. Which they did and today, ServiceNow a very, very successful company. Snowflake first came into my line of sight in 2015 when SiliconANGLE wrote an article, "Why Snowflake is Better "Than Amazon Redshift, Re-imagining Data". Well last year Frank Slootman joined Snowflake, another disruptive company. And he's here today to talk about how Snowflake is really participating in this COVID-19 crisis. And I really want to share some of Frank's insights and leadership principles, Frank great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having us Dave. >> So when I first reported earlier this year on Snowflake and shared some data with the community, you reached back out to me and said "Dave, I want to just share with you. "I am not a playbook CEO, I am a situational CEO. "This is what I learned in the military." So Frank, this COVID-19 situation was thrown at you, it's a black swan, what was your first move as a leader? >> Well, my first move is let's not overreact. Take a deep breath. Let's really examine what we know. Let's not jump to conclusions, let's not try to project things that we're not capable of projecting. That's hard because we tend to have sort of levels of certainty about what's going to happen in the week, in the next month and so on and all of a sudden that's out of the window. It creates enormous anxiety with people. So in other words you got to sort of reset to okay, what do we know, what can we do, what do we control? And not let our minds sort of go out of control. So I talk to our people all the time about maintain a sense of normalcy, focus on the work, stay in the moment and by the way, turn the newsfeed off, right, because the hysteria you get fed through the media is really not helpful, right? So just cool down and focus on what we still can do. And then I think then everybody takes a deep breath and we just go back to work. I mean, we're in this mode now for three weeks and I can tell you, I'm on teleconferencing calls, whatever, eight, nine hours a day. Prospects, customers, all over the world. Pretty much what I was doing before except I'm not traveling right now. So it's not, >> Yeah, so it sounds clear-- >> Not that different than what it was before. (laughs) >> It sounds very Bill Belichickian, you know? >> Yeah. >> Focus on those things of which you can control. When you were running ServiceNow I really learned it from you and of course Mike Scarpelli, your then and current CFO about the importance of transparency. And I'm interested in how you're communicating, it sounds like you're doing some very similar things but have you changed the way in which you've communicated to your team, your internal employees at all? >> We're communicating much more. Because we can no longer rely on sort of running into people here, there and everywhere. So we have to be much more purposeful about communications. For example, I mean I send an email out to the entire company on Monday morning. And it's kind of a bunch of anecdotes. Just to bring the connection back, the normalcy. It just helps people get connected back to the mothership and like well, things are still going on. We're still talking in the way we always used to be. And that really helps and I also, I check in with people a lot more, I ask all of our leadership to constantly check in with people because you can't assume that everybody is okay, you can't be out of sight, out of mind. So we need to be more purposeful in reaching out and communicating with people than we were previously. >> And a lot of people obviously concerned about their jobs. Have you sort of communicated, what have you communicated to employees about layoffs? I mean, you guys just did a large raise just before all this, your timing was kind of impeccable. But what have you communicated in that regard? >> I've said, there's no layoffs on our radar, number one. Number two, we are hiring. And number three is we have a higher level of scrutiny on the hires that we're making. And I am very transparent. In other words I tell people look, I prioritize the roles that are closest to the direct train of the business. Right, it's kind of common sense. But I wanted to make sure that this is how we're thinking about it. There are some roles that are more postponable than others. I'm hiring in engineering without any reservation because that is the long term strategic interest of the company. One the sales side, I want to know that sales leaders know how to convert to yields, that we're not just sort of bringing capacity online. And the leadership is not convinced or confident that they can convert to yield. So there's a little bit finer level of scrutiny on the hiring. But by and large, it's not that different. There's this saying out there that we should suspend all non-essential spending and hiring, I'm like you should always do that. Right? I mean what's different today? (both laugh) If it's non-essential, why do it, right? So all of this comes back to this is probably how we should operate anyways, yep. >> I want to talk a little bit about the tech behind Snowflake. I'm very sensitive when CEOs come on my program to make sure that we're not, I'm not trying to bait CEOs into ambulance chasing, that's not what it's about. But I do want to share with our community kind of what's new, what's changed and how companies like Snowflake are participating in this crisis. And in particular, we've been reporting for awhile, if you guys bring up that first slide. That the innovation in the industry is really no longer about Moore's Law. It's really shifted. There's a new, what we call an innovation cocktail in the business and we've collected all this data over the last 10 years. With Hadoop and other distributed data and now we have Edge Data, et cetera, there's this huge trove of data. And now AI is becoming real, it's becoming much more economical. So applying machine intelligence to this data and then the Cloud allows us to do this at scale. It allows us to bring in more data sources. It brings an agility in. So I wonder if you could talk about sort of this premise and how you guys fit. >> Yeah, I would start off by reordering the sequence and saying Cloud's number one. That is foundational. That helps us bring scale to data that we never had to number two, it helps us bring computational power to data at levels we've never had before. And that just means that queries and workloads can complete orders of magnitude faster than they ever could before. And that introduces concepts like the time value of data, right? The faster you get it, the more impactful and powerful it is. I do agree, I view AI as sort of the next generation of analytics. Instead of using data to inform people, we're using data to drive processes and businesses directly, right? So I'm agreeing obviously with these strengths because we're the principal beneficiaries and drivers of these platforms. >> Well when we talked about earlier this year about Snowflake, we really brought up the notion that you guys were one of the first if not the first. And guys, bring back Frank, I got to see him. (Frank chuckles) One of the first to really sort of separate the notion of being able to scale, compute independent of storage. And that brought not only economics but it brought flexibility. So you've got this Cloud-native database. Again, what caught my attention in that Redshift article we wrote is essentially for our audience, Redshift was based on ParAccel. Amazon did a great job of really sort of making that a Cloud database but it really wasn't born in the Cloud and that's sort of the advantage of Snowflake. So that architectural approach is starting to really take hold. So I want to give an example. Guys if you bring up the next chart. This is an example of a system that I've been using since early January when I saw this COVID come out. Somebody texted me this. And it's the Johns Hopkins dataset, it's awesome. It shows you, go around the map, you can follow it, it's pretty close to real time. And it's quite good. But the problem is, all right thank you guys. The problem is that when I started to look at, I wanted to get into sort of a more granular view of the counties. And I couldn't do that. So guys bring up the next slide if you would. So what I did was I searched around and I found a New York Times GitHub data instance. And you can see it in the top left here. And basically it was a CSV. And notice what it says, it says we can't make this file beautiful and searchable because it's essentially too big. And then I ran into what you guys are doing with Star Schema, Star Schema's a data company. And essentially you guys made the notion that look, the Johns Hopkins dataset as great as it is it's not sort of ready for analytics, it's got to be cleaned, et cetera. And so I want you to talk about that a little bit. Guys, if you could bring Frank back. And share with us what you guys have done with Star Schema and how that's helping understand COVID-19 and its progression. >> Yeah, one of the really cool concepts I've felt about Snowflake is what we call the data sharing architecture. And what that really means is that if you and I both have Snowflake accounts, even though we work for different institutions, we can share data optics, tables, schema, whatever they are with each other. And you can process against that in place if they are residing in a local, to your own platform. We have taken that concept from private also to public. So that data providers like Star Schema can list their datasets, because they're a data company, so obviously it's in their business interest to allow this data to be profiled and to be accessible by the Snowflake community. And this data is what we call analytics ready. It is instantly accessible. It is also continually updated, you have to do nothing. It's augmented with incremental data and then our Snowflake users can just combine this data with supply chain, with economic data, with internal operating data and so on. And we got a very strong reaction from our customer base because they're like "man, you're saving us weeks "if not months just getting prepared to start to do an al, let alone doing them." Right? Because the data is analytics ready and they have to do literally nothing. I mean in other words if they ask us for it in the morning, in the afternoon they'll be running workloads again. Right, and then combining it with their own data. >> Yeah, so I should point out that that New York Times GitHub dataset that I showed you, it's a couple of days behind. We're talking here about near realtime, or as close as realtime as you can get, is that right? >> Yep. Yeah, every day it gets updated. >> So the other thing, one of the things we've been reporting, and Frank I wondered if you could comment on this, is this new emerging workloads in the Cloud. We've been reporting on this for a couple of years. The first generation of Cloud was IS, was really about compute, storage, some database infrastructure. But really now what we're seeing is these analytic data stores where the valuable data is sitting and much of it is in the Cloud and bringing machine intelligence and data science capabilities to that, to allow for this realtime or near realtime analysis. And that is a new, emerging workload that is really gaining a lot of steam as these companies try to go to this so-called digital transformation. Your comments on that. >> Yeah, we refer to that as the emergence or the rise of the data Cloud. If you look at the Cloud landscape, we're all very familiar with the infrastructure clouds. AWS and Azure and GCP and so on, it's just massive storage and servers. And obviously there's data locked in to those infrastructure clouds as well. We've been familiar for it for 10, 20 years now with application clouds, notably Salesforce but obviously Workday, ServiceNow, SAP and so on, they also have data in them, right? But now you're seeing that people are unsiloing the data. This is super important. Because as long as the data is locked in these infrastructure clouds, in these application clouds, we can't do the things that we need to do with it, right? We have to unsilo it to allow the scale of querying and execution against that data. And you don't see that any more clear that you do right now during this meltdown that we're experiencing. >> Okay so I learned long ago Frank not to argue with you but I want to push you on something. (Frank laughs) So I'm not trying to be argumentative. But one of those silos is on-prem. I've heard you talk about "look, we're a Cloud company. "We're Cloud first, we're Cloud only. "We're not going to do an on-prem version." But some of that data lives on-prem. There are companies out there that are saying "hey, we separate compute and storage too, "we run in the Cloud. "But we also run on-prem, that's our big differentiator." Your thoughts on that. >> Yeah, we burnt the ship behind us. Okay, we're not doing this endless hedging that people have done for 20 years, sort of keeping a leg in both worlds. Forget it, this will only work in the public Cloud. Because this is how the utility model works, right? I think everybody is coming to this realization, right? I mean excuses are running out at this point. We think that it'll, people will come to the public Cloud a lot sooner than we will ever come to the private Cloud. It's not that we can't run on a private cloud, it just diminishes the potential and the value that we bring. >> So as sort of mentioned in my intro, you have always been at the forefront of disruption. And you think about digital transformation. You know Frank we go to all of these events, it used to be physical and now we're doing theCUBE digital. And so everybody talks about digital transformation. CEOs get up, they talk about how they're helping their customers move to digital. But the reality is is when you actually talk to businesses, there was a lot of complacency. "Hey, this isn't really going to happen in my lifetime" or "we're doing pretty well." Or maybe the CEO might be committed but it doesn't necessarily trickle down to the P&L managers who have an update. One of the things that we've been talking about is COVID-19 is going to accelerate that digital transformation and make it a mandate. You're seeing it obviously in retail play out and a number of other industries, supply chains are, this has wreaked havoc on supply chains. And so there's going to be a rethinking. What are your thoughts on the acceleration of digital transformation? >> Well obviously the crisis that we're experiencing is obviously an enormous catalyst for digital transformation and everything that that entails. And what that means and I think as a industry we're just victims of inertia. Right, I mean haven't understood for 20 years why education, both K through 12 but also higher ed, why they're so brick and mortar bound and the way they're doing things, right? And we could massively scale and drop the cost of education by going digital. Now we're forced into it and everybody's like "wow, "this is not bad." You're right, it isn't, right but we haven't so the economics, the economic imperative hasn't really set in but it is now. So these are all great things. Having said that, there are also limits to digital transformation. And I'm sort of experiencing that right now, being on video calls all day. And oftentimes people I've never met before, right? There's still a barrier there, right? It's not like digital can replace absolutely everything. And that is just not true, right? I mean there's some level of filter that just doesn't happen when you're digital. So there's still a need for people to be in the same place. I don't want to sort of over rotate on this concept, that like okay, from here on out we're all going to be on the wires, that's not the way it will be. >> Yeah, be balanced. So earlier you made a comment, that "we should never "be spending on non-essential items". And so you've seen (Frank laughs) back in 2008 you saw the Rest in Peace good times, you've seen the black swan memos that go out. I assume that, I mean you're a very successful investor as well, you've done a couple of stints in the VC community. What are you seeing in the Valley in regard to investments, will investments continue, will we continue to feed innovation, what's your sense of that? Well this is another wake up call. Because in Silicon Valley there's way too much money. There's certainly a lot of ideas but there's not a lot of people that can execute on it. So what happens is a lot of things get funded and the execution is either no good or it's just not a valid opportunity. And when you go through a downturn like this you're finding out that those businesses are not going to make it. I mean when the tide is running out, only the strongest players are going to survive that. It's almost a natural selection process that happens from time to time. It's not necessarily a bad thing because people get reallocated. I mean Silicon Valley is basically one giant beehive, right? I mean we're constantly repurposing money and people and talent and so on. And that's actually good because if an idea is not worth in investing in, let's not do it. Let's repurpose those resources in places where it has merit, where it has viability. >> Well Frank, I want to thank you for coming on. Look, I mean you don't have to do this. You could've retired long, long ago but having leaders like you in place in these times of crisis, but even when in good times to lead companies, inspire people. And we really appreciate what you do for companies, for your employees, for your customers and certainly for our community, so thanks again, I really appreciate it. >> Happy to do it, thanks Dave. >> All right and thank you for watching everybody, Dave Vellante for theCUBE, we will see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the cute covering knowledge sixteen Brought to you by service. Now here your host, Dave Alon and Jeffrey >> College sixteen everybody hashtag no. Sixteen. Check out crowd chat dot net slash No. Sixteen. Gonna crowd check going on. Frank's Luminous here is the president and CEO and not so invisible Hand of service now at the helm. Frank, it's great to see you again. Always looked so nice. Job on the keynote this morning. Eleven thousand plus right, actually closer to twelve thousand. About twenty registrations tweeted out again today. M c world was ten thousand this year. So you're bigger than the M C world, at least in attendance. Imagine what it's going to be when you're a twenty four billion dollars company with. But anyway, congratulations. Thank you. Great to see you again. So yeah. So you must feel good about where you were at the financial analyst meeting yesterday. You laid out the vision you guys were on track for sixteen. Still focused on four billion dollars by twenty twenty. We know a lot can happen between now and twenty twenty, but you gotta be feeling pretty good about the tam expansion the product portfolio. The customer acceptance. Give us the update. >> Yeah, way to feel good. I laid out yesterday for the capital markets. Folk folks are framework. Phase one was R R R zero to one hundred. Uh, that was really when we were startup, Fred Laddie was CEO of the company. It was reaching escape velocity. The night came in in two thousand eleven that was faced to, and we're really focused on scale on discipline and really delivering on the promise that have been created. And the company went from one hundred million two billion dollars last year. But now you know, we're we've entered phase three and face tree is a billion to four billion and we're changing. We're changing from a single product single mark, a single channel company to one that's multi products, multi channel and multi market. And it's a transition. We're not assuming that lather rinse repeat is going to take care of it. So we're raising ourselves to another level. We're questioning what we're doing just to keep things, keep everybody on their tell us >> and your keynote this morning to talk about the states. The first greatest yaar pcrm oracle ASAP. and the second greatest state popularized the course by by sales force. Others before salesforce boost sales force Really one and you guys are laying out a vision for a service management across the enterprise, and you touch deeply into those other estates described that strategy and how it's going to affect customers going forward. >> Yeah, our deep belief is that the way we made its work is going to change under the influence ofthe technology. And what's possible? Has it been that long that we sort of got wire to our in boxes and email became our reactive reflects of way off doing things right? There was a time before e mail. Well, there will be a time after e mail as well. A lot of work is going to be defined into work flows. And then the reason is we don't need to reinvent the wheel over and over and over again. Every single time we do something you know when we define work flows, we had the opportunity Teo plant for work. We have the opportunity to motto Orc, we can analyze work. We can figure out what it cost. We can figure out how well we're doing These are This is where efficiency comes from. Essentially, companies will become clouds. They will all becomes, offer companies right, and they all are going to start to manage themselves like that. So the future of rolls and enterprises and institution and jobs, it's less about being into processes that will be in terms of defining and building the process and then managed in the process. These are these are profound fundamental transformations how we >> work. And you spoke on the Kino to about kind of the different point of view within engagement model when you come from and some type of background versus some of the other interaction. Specifically contrast ing serum, Um, in the way that engagement method works. Versace somewhere. Yeah. You solved the problem. Help a person get up off the floor. I love your I followed that. I can't get up example, but then really get to the root cause. And now you know the good position you're in. As that methodology moves beyond just the chorus people, two people doing it functions in all different roles. >> This this this, this our heritage. We've always taking the service management model. It's basically an engagement model an engineering model because we need to do recalls analysis. Why are we talking in the first place and then to fix and change model? It's a holistic process if you just haven't engaged a model that's not that satisfying because we're just trying to relieve the pain of the moment. But we're not prosecuting general line cost. And even if we knew the underlying cause, we're doing nothing about it. And people keep coming back with the same problem over and over again. So it's not so much about just managing the quality, the service. It's about managing the underlying quality off the core product that we're providing, whether that probably product for that product is in service. >> So a few years ago, I said, I thought you were on a collision course with sales force, and you kind of bristled at that and say, I know we're just doing our thing, but you're Tam is now so large. I mean, you're good, becoming a very large software company. You're in rarified air, so essentially everybody's, you know, I'm gonna have you in their line of sites. That's good. In the other hand, you know, it's an interesting position to be in. So what? Your thoughts on that from >> industry landscape. It's a huge market. You know, we're not super fixated on a confrontation with this player, that player. But we have philosophical conviction that doing customer service, you know our way is the right way to do that. And with things moving to Coyote Internet Oh, thanks, it's becoming way more important. It's not enough to say, Hey, my device is not working, you know? Can I reset the device? Can I see what's going on by straight? People have to become way smarter a za function off the software technology that we have just saying Well, you know, take you call and try to figure out what's going on right? And these days, you're already when you have a conductivity problem with tea for your WiFi service and so on, they can already already tell you, you know, what the hell thiss off your device and what what the problem domain really is. We're going to go way further in that direction. I mean, somebody shows of the refrigerators busted somebody shows up at your door. That person knows nothing, right until they literally open the door and they start looking around right. That's going to change because they will already know. And they'LL have to write parts with them, right if parts are actually involved or they can fix it remotely. So that's desk for service models are moving >> well, your tent, You're celebrating your tent in tenth year anniversary now, and the interesting thing about service now is used. You started in it. You call them your peeps. Your fundamental assumption is that it is touching everything in making that bet That has been a tailwind fear. It's quite a bit different than some of the other software companies that you see going >> down. So he's not just touching everything. It is everything that >> sass cos a cloud of Takeda mean more sass Company's coming out of general business. Then there is the technology business. Do you see that trend? >> I think, by the way, salesforce. I commend them for this vision. They've always said every company becomes this offer company that is absolutely and profoundly true. We're all becoming clouds, Um, and we're literally, you know, running as hard as we can, uh, to catch that ball downfield. You know what? This is about >> you guys have built an incredibly viable business now with riel mo mentum. So as you look forward to next ten years, talk about sort of that vision that you see of service management going beyond I t into other functions of the company as well as growing the ecosystem. >> Yeah, so no, our vision and our approach is about looking at work, right? We're not managing records. Whether it's HR or financial records. It's not about the record. It's about the work. If you take a company like sales first, they're focused on the customer. We're focused on the service. The service is the unit of work. So we have a unique focus on zooming in on that unit of work and structuring, defining and managing that. So to us, everything looks like a service at every application, every task, every request. Everything we do has a beginning and an end. And as an opportunity for structuring, automating, analyzing, monitoring all those candle thanks. So our future world, you know, we'll still have email, but so much of what we do in the day to day basis will be structured in systems and by the way, our life is consumers were already living that way. He just don't notice it because that's natural. I mean, uber is a structure of workflow. Even Facebook, in many ways, is that way. Making a reservation is the structural work flow. Ordering something at Amazon structure workflow and it's lights out lightspeed sort of world is trying to go. >> And if you think about growing this company to the to the next phase lots going on, you making acquisitions, you're bringing in a new town. The ecosystem is really an interesting item here because we saw Accenture Pickup Cloud Sherpas this year. We saw fruition and CSC And so you're seeing the big guys now take notice. That's gotta make you feel great. Talk about the ecosystem a little bit, >> Yeah, it's definitely in on inflection in our world when people are not just saying put me in coach, you know I can do this, but they're starting to, you know, put out real capital on buying companies. Now. There's numbers behind service now, and we're not just on an opportunistic thing in their business, but we're an ongoing business on dare doubling down. They're not. There will be many acquisitions off a lot of our service partners and also our technology partner. So we have a hundred seventy partners here. This is really good because we don't want our customers to sort of feel like I'm dependent on service now for everything. We want them to have many choices, not just in deployment partners, but also technology integrations. No value at its offer products. They shouldn't be depending on you for everything on us. >> In terms of emanate, it's been selective. I mean, you know, you know, we see these larger legacy cos they live off of ebony because they can't innovate you guys doing a lot of innovation internally. But But take a minute to talk about Emma and the particular we're interested in how you integrate cos you don't bolt on to the platform, you essentially re platform. You rewrite talk about that a little bit? >> Yes. Are our eminent strategy has been focused on talent and technology. Tellem builds the technology. Technology without the talent is not very useful. You know, in the short time you'LL run out of gas on that so it's always the combination of the people and what they have built that you correct We don't integrate technology that we acquire, we take it apart and we re implement it on our platform. That is a core core commitment that we make to our customer base, that we are not going to saddle you with the problems you've had for the last thirty years, where you are constantly testing and retesting integrations between this assets versus that assets and have whole steps dedicated to sort of keep the patchwork operable. We take that on right. You don't have to worry about it. You turn on the service, it will work with everything else on. Our customers early on, recognized that we were different in that regard. It's very expensive. It's very time consuming. But when we go to buy an asset and a talent pool, we first look at Cannes, where you re platform it's and secondly, does the technical team that comes with it. I want to do that because if somehow there they're not bought in on that strategy, we don't want to go there >> right. I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about your customers. You guys have a very special relationship with your customers and David on the Q. We go to a lot of shows, and there are few people at that elicit the excitement within the room like Fred does when he comes on stage, you know, and we talk a lot about when the founder's still involved in the company. It's really important that I still remember the first time I saw the cakes and twenty thirteen like, What does it do with the cakes and still Crispo post on lengthen five cakes a day? I think he just doesn't follow him. You'LL see cakes from all OVER the WORLD What do you are hearing from your customers? As you guys go to this next phase because you've had a really special relationship, we've gone beyond just when when Fred was running it, you've taken it to a billion. Now you're going to four. What kind of feedback and engagement we haven't out in the field. Don't talk to customers all, >> you know. Yeah, I do a lot. We're very intensely customer phasing company, just just culturally, but we're incredibly dedicated to their success, the way we believe that the value of our company is sort of summed up in the aggregate in terms of how strongly a customers feel about us. Forget all the financial metro. It's how strongly customers feel about you is the ultimate value off your your franchise. The cakes. It's a celebration. One service now goals life. It is. People feel like we let him out of jail. I mean, they have. Pignon goes with the name of the product that they're replacing. Haven't >> seen the >> way, So it's it's what they go from one generation or two generations ago into, Ah, very modern, transformational, empowering, platform. Empowering thing is really important because they are now in charge, right? They're able to make changes on a daily basis. Before they could do nothing. They were dependent on bunch of people that they could never get access to, to make changes for them. It all goes away right, that that's the essence off. But what service now provides >> thiss concept of love, this customer discussion? Because I love initiatives that born in the customer, I think Siam was one of those. I think it came out of Europe. I'm not exactly sure talk about Siam what it is and how it relates to your business. >> Siam feels to us a little bit like the next installment on my tail, sort of the evolution ofthe vital because it's not just service management. It's service, integration and management. But they had a very, very precise definition and framework around what we did. What I till. It's also what we're doing. The Siam were really expanding the scope and sort of adapting it to a much broader context because we think Siam you take its narrow definition very useful, very productive. And we have lots of customers that are pursuing a Siam strategy. But we're saying what semen says, which is now we're going to reorganize our entire enterprise in terms ofthe our service assets, anything that produces the service. But it's an organization or a system or a group of people, whatever it is, as well as everybody that has toe have access to the service. And those were not just people. They're also systems. So they re conceptualize one of this to be an enterprise, very visionary and very, very transformational. You won't recognize enterprise is an institution in the future. There'll be so different that people won't no longer be on in the inside of the process. They will be on the outside of the process, right? Jobs are changing. It's gonna have profound. If one says there will be lots of jobs, well, there will be new jobs and a lot of the old jobs. You know, they're going to go by the wayside >> and, you know, you're obviously in Silicon Valley, and I know there's a lot of work being done about. This is probably not the way we're going to communicate in the future. You guys, this theme of a new way to work today in your keynote, you talked about I ot You threw that buzz word out there and you said, I know before you start rolling your eyes and you guys have a play actually, in I o t again As Jeff said, we go to a lot of these conferences. You hear the similar thing? Digital transformation. I ot your play on aisle is around wearables and really driving some platform innovation to your wrist you have the watch on is that I had guys announced a wearable today, I said, I think I just I tweeted. I think that service now just announced Well, I watch aware a bone some things that we did. And so what's that all about? >> Well, we we've been able Teo, deliver services on watch ever since. Yeah, watch came out because we're a platform. We've been able to do this literally from day one. We're just tryingto inspire our customers to figure out How do you really use a watch? Right? Warm of the struggles that Apple has where the watch is, What's the killer app? It's not replacing Fitbit. You know that that z not enough, right? What's the most killer app for a wearable? And we think you're really time and predictive business metrics. You know, at a glance, because that's where this gramophone you really have to, you know, work to device. This is at a glance, right? And we are really tryingto get to this real time predictive mode off doing things because it's just so much more productive. But as I said in the rap over the keynote right, there's a lot of sizzle people lost watches and *** bang stuff. What enables toe watch. And that's really what we think Apple needs. You know, Forest tries used what enables that watch to become a productive business device, and it's the underlying repository of data that's continually being updated. That's what makes the watch powerful. >> So how did this come about you guys? You obviously like you said you had apse for the watch Your you enable that. But it wasn't good enough for you just didn't fit the use case well enough. But he said, Hey, let's go build it. >> Yeah, there is. There is a design aspect to it. And, you know, it is you heard during the keynote whether people do typically, you know, we're just shrink down to you. I from the bigger form factor to watch. And that's always the first generation >> and my phone on a watch. And >> everybody goes like, Well, that's not it. So and then we go back to the drawing board and we really, really think through the usability off that form factor, which is so tiny >> one of things about knowledge is the content from the customers. So I want to ask you how you spend your time here. Yesterday was a financial analyst meeting. Today you're in the general session and the keynotes. You got a CEO event going on. You had a partner event going on. How do you know. Is there there three francs? >> No, it's, uh it's it's no I I couldn't be more thrilled. We have so much going on at this conference in in years to come. You know that we'LL be vertical Industry conference is going on because we see that as the next evolution next phase of our evolution is that vertical ization is happening already because we have someone e big customers and single verticals. Whether it's financials and pharma retail, those folks can get so much benefit from associating with their counterparts in the same line of business, especially when the value of moves from it to broader enterprise that becomes very pertinent. So we're worked over in the middle of figuring out how to sort of enable ourselves We've enabled ourselves as a multi product organization. That was the whole face three transition. But the vertical ization is something that sort of next in our revolution. >> I mentioned my last question for eventual Silicon Valley. Obviously you're part of of of really set of rising stars and your butchery. You know, Scott decent and saw him the other day seen Cem Riel innovations coming at the same time, hearing a lot of these Caesar. Real nervous. You don't sound nervous. You sound really hopeful. What's your What's your outlook for? >> You know, your situation. We had our financial analyst yesterday, and you know that the capital markets crowd is very nervous. All of us are trying to decide on my in or out, and some things they do both before noon. Uh, I can't run a company that way. Most of the decisions that we make on a daily basis are not with a quarterly oriented. They go on for years and years, so I can't get that excited. You know, about the second floor of the business on a very short term basis, we know were lashed to the mast. We're going to go down with the ship. Were committed, were not interrupt. We're in. We're completely in. So our mindset is that we're just We're fine to be on the ship in running us, right? In January, the capital market sold is off. And in April that came back in were the same company, right? There was no reason to be that excited either to the downside or the upside. Right? This this a marathon companies get billed over long periods of time. >> Yeah, you don't seem like you're on that ninety days shot. Claws clock. Of course, it helps when you have a great customer base together. You got a great team. Frank's Lumen. Thanks so much for first of all, for having us at knowledge, we love this event. It's one of our favorites. And thanks for coming. It's >> great beer. Thank you. >> Alright, keep right, everybody. We'Ll be back with our next guest right after this is the cue. We're alive. Service now. Knowledge. Sixteen. Right back. It's always fun to come back to the cube because

David it's just gonna call in like basically live feel more nos Vegas Nevada execute again it's the 10 covering knowledge 15 brought to you by service now hello everyone welcome to the cube this is our flagship program we go out to the events in the correct the city okla noise I'm John furry the founder silicon they enjoy my coach Dave vellante co-founder Wikibon org and networks I to be in Las Vegas live for three days of wall-to-wall coverage of service now's no 15 knowledge 15 hashtag no 15 go to the crowd chat / no 15 join the conversation our first guest is Frank's lubin president/ceo source now great to see you again thanks for having us thanks much absolutely the keynote was great i mean in the world's changing IT cloud vmware's had an announcement about native apps on the cloud customers are changing business models are changing talk about what you get to do house that you had a big stock drop in the past week and value is that a sentiment of the of the of the Wall Street dynamic products what is it about the business right now with clouds specifically the business model for your customers it's flywheel the SAS models what's what's going on what's your take on all that flying cloud companies and obviously well I ought to got a lot of the high we're one of them you know we're priced to perfection right and that's that's not an easy place to be for for for anybody and you know we're not really focused on that it's this is a marathon every quarter is one mile marker he can't get too excited about you know one versus the other we're really pacing ourselves your building you know an enterprise that's going to be here for for a long time and our focus is not just on modernizing what what people are doing it's focusing on transforming what people are doing and the emphasis that we place on everything as a service structure workflow approaches getting away from message oriented ways of doing things like email is enormous sea change right there is there's over 100 million PDFs out their forms that people have to download and fill out what somebody else then has to scan and reenter right the world is ripe for this type of innovation the technology is here all we need to do is apply it the start okay so I said when I talked yesterday and I said any successful 12 billion dollar valuation company's going to have a day like friday but I've noticed post the financial analyst discussion yesterday things have calmed down a little bit so who knows maybe it's a buying opportunity I wanted to tie it into the TAM expansion that we've seen when you first took this company public everybody looked at it as a very small niche and it took you and Mike scarpelli and others a while to sort of educate Wall Street on the size of the potential and we're now starting to see that come to fruition you guys talk about expanding into the business side and now you're doing it you talk about going into mobile you talk about you know new innovations at the SMB why is it that you're so successful at executing at what you're doing is that the platform is that the people is that the customers I wonder if you could describe that a little bit what's the magic formula are fundamentally a platform company we that was not always well understood even before I joined the company and I talked to Fred Lunney the founder we were very well aware of the opportunity to expand just dramatically beyond the boundaries of the initial application set which was the IGM set of applications it's just how to do that right when you peel away the veneer the rhetoric the nomenclature you know what you see is a workflow an orchestration platform this is so broadly applicable right what these knowledge conferences are all about is to show people what is possible on this platform and you know all we have to do is take the horse to water soda drink and then you know they go on their own right this is a place where people come to get inspired platform and if you seen from some of the examples that we had on stage this morning and people are not tackling crm applications what service now you know why there's really nothing there's really no boundaries in terms of service management for us to tackle workflows and orchestrations like that right so the world is your oyster II and there's really no place that we we can go with this platform all we got to do is empower and energize the audience that you have here and the fact that they show up in such huge numbers as evidence that were we're succeeding at that right good all the events it's the same kind of theme Internet of Things Big Data have paced are changing clouds and innovator what is it about the cloud and your platform and your customers in terms of the business models what is it about the innovation that's going on right without business must change what specifically can you highlight and get some example because you have a lot of customers we were just talking that the cubbies are sending dozens of people here this event it's not just a boondoggle there's some real work getting done so there's a huge transformation see what is it about the business model now that's changing what are you guys doing turn on your platform this conference is called knowledge for a reason people come here to get knowledge right that's right the labs and training and all this kind of stuff but the most important thing to understand about service now what we did with the individuals really lowered the skills profile and the skill demands to be able to access this level of functional and we really did that by an order of magnitude this wasn't just a platform for programmers people that really have procedural programming skills we really took that out of the equation and people have Excel style skills people will understand the rows and columns and data types that's enough to know to be able to go up okay now what happens in that process we empower very large groups of people in our case IT people to basically take control back over this platform you know in Prior generations of this class of software they were always dependent very small we were people that weren't very accessible and very expensive to do thanks for them how they're doing that is what has unleashed explosion creativity let's talk a little bit about your keynote everything as a service was your big theme EAS sort of acronym what is everything is the service number one second question is is there an analogue to vm sprawl is there a potential for server sprawl what do you what are you telling customers about that are they asking you questions but start with what does everything is a service what does that mean everything is what service means taking work work in the sense the repeatable activities things we do over and over again digging it out of the realm of messaging email text phone and putting it into structure workflow we essentially invent that dress as once without best practices really tune and optimize that process and every single time we do that activity we do it exactly the same way and we enforce the business rules the logic upfront stupid enough to thinking like I always is the silly example an organization I lose my security badge or I mangled in the door I need a new on what do I do well you know I Massey Hill I just asked my admin you figure it out okay but everybody else starts roaming the halls like where do i go to go to the front desk maybe you know that thing employees have to have a place to go for their service needs whatever it is HR related facilities related maybe have a parking issue and you should be able to search navigate themselves to a place where they can make a request and then that request is no different than sending a package through fedex or ordering something on amazon information it's now following you you don't have to go and chase it anymore right oh there's a big inversion of how we work i mean we often target service now but we're changing how we work because we're going we're getting away from the structure messaging woman be structure workflow that's what everything is a service is about regard to aquino but so second part of I want to talk about that is my question is there a dark side to that is there a risk of just too many services service sprawl or do you have service for that is there an app for that yeah talk about that logo the obviously during our keynote we actually spoke explicitly to that point because you're concerning your race is legitimate people are saying hey you know DevOps is great you know empowering all these groups to publish their own services that's great but now I'm going to lose control I'm going to lose visibility and we'll lose accountability i'm going to have compliance security problems and so on what we do is you know we actually maintain the transparency the visibility and the control while people are doing things so it doesn't become the Wild West that we've had in Prior generations of software >> Frank talk about what you're seeing in big data honestly you know we didn't cover that space this doesn't seem to be its own little market but certainly medupe to some stuff going on but companies are looking at Big Data certainly in data as it advantaged in some of the things whether it's IT and or an apple agents what's your vision and what is what our customers doing with the day how's the NIT date is great and everyone's the service date is enabler you look at that and how do you find your customs look at it are very transactionally intense but so our systems they're not data rich in the sense that we deal with enormous volumes of data so it's a little bit of a different model and during the keynote what I talked about it's not like they what's hiding your data we can't figure out what's going on the data by structuring the data right what big data tries to do they're trying to figure out what's going on in unstructured data really really hard to do we structure the data so hence it's very very easy for us to analyze the dashboard exactly what's going on but our focus is not so much on big data it's on real time data the real time dimension is something that is going to become huge because people are demanding real-time information is just not interesting to look at data it's 12 24 hours old and because we are sitting on life data the ability to represent it so you can see your business in action right that is insanely exciting for for executives and managers network magic was hot in the old days with the network little but now the way date is got that same kind of paradigm where you have active data passive data and by melding together they can create values that mean we the CIO that we talked to they what you mean by real time today yeah I said look where I want to get you there's one my office just wall-to-wall LED panels and I want to see every every pocket of activity I want to see it executing in real time whether it's good better and different setting threshold seeing exceptions and says I want to be it's like watching the stock market I want to watch my my business that way and that is what we're going to focus on very different from data oceans and data legs and all this kind of stuff we've already structured the data we're not going to have the problem of big data the three of us started our careers without email and it was amazing productivity bump into our lives when we got email but now email is this productivity killer you talked about it in your keynote you guys did a survey is that basically forty percent of a time is spent on admin tasks and employees time I know judge doesn't manage I'll give your calculation i saw was manager with just even you know higher salaries but so how much of that can you actually reduce and what a customer is actually doing around that well it can be reduced by orders of magnitude you can't make it go away I mean people have needs but being able to make those needs fully automated very intuitive very productive it's absolutely possible right I mean 42 days a week almost half time on tasks that have nothing to do or your job is absurd I think this is almost a dirty little secret of business death we have invested in everything except our own internal workplace productivity right we're stuck in the 1980s if not the 1970s and who's going to put on that mantle write it and we're always trying to drive IT to take on that mantle because who else CEOs typically are focused about revenue right image presentation right coo CFO's those are the people that should be driving the internal productivity challenge sorry just that we just haven't made any progress there in decades and the acceleration now is a significant I start guy an email Facebook say I just finally gave my blackberry you mentioned iPhone and your kita he's still using the blackberry I was like that's actually a great scandalous blog post opportunity but are you mentioned iphone in your keynote moment of this is changing the world certainly edge of the network smartphones and we also hear from customers want to be more Apple night so what's your what were you hearing from customers and they say I don't want to be like the 80s and 90s I want to be more like Apple meaning kind of like the iPhone and the innovation that they bring what they brought to that or you guys been using uber as an example or open table as an example that's that modern vibe for the customer what are they trying to get to in an environment what's their outcome what are you hearing customers the first aspect is the series experience itself in other words what does would like to do what you want to get done essentially we're transactional platform we're not a hanging around platform like a social system we twitter has no no point no purpose it's just nice to shoot things out into the ether and help somebody sees it our systems are not like that it's about performing a unit of work something very specific about the beginning it doesn't end and there's things that happen in between the result it's very different that way uber is also a transactional app I want to hail a cab I need a ride opentable is transactional act I want a reservation there's a very specific end point to that unit of work and this is where technology can be incredibly helpful to get you there faster i use the Gulf example you know fewer strokes is better right and as people want they want have grubert a lot and I find that user experience my blowing compared to trying to call or or hail account it's cheaper and it scales incredibly well right but if wherever you are or whenever you are it seems to be there's cars around this quite impressive App Store like model the enterprise has been kicked around for a while is that service cataloging uber shows the real-time aspect of services needs you know demand in real time but in the back-end service catalog that more apples to the apple store at the back end its lights out light speed right in other words it's just like Amazon right everything is the speed of light until I got to pick something off the shelf the real world kicks in and i have to ship something the same thing same thing with fedex I mean the information processing aspect of FedEx is what makes fedex special in fact that they have planes and trucks you know it is not what your user experience focuses on yeah you got minimal exposure to that you are you're on your way to a billion dollars here shortly you've laid out a plan for four billion by the league 2020 correct with the the financial analyst a lot of people say well one of these guys going to make money you have indicated before you you're right now after scale after growth and what if you could address that um we actually were profitable are you sure I mean we were you could make a lot more money if you want to do but you're going for growth I should have clarified that question better you guys can be wildly profitable if you skip down and just reach over office we've always said and by the way you know one of the things that that our business model really focuses on is making sure that the cash equation really work so on a cash flow basis we're doing extraordinarily well because it's a subscription model you know the profitability equation is a little squishy it's more accounting them than economic which is why the focus on cash our investors focus on growth in the next thing to focus is on this cash right and after they get generally accounting representation of our at some point the law of large numbers kicks in and that's really maybe out in the business out a target model yesterday I was we put updated for the financial analyst shows you exactly where the leverage is coming from transparent supplies for peace I want to let's do a great job of that very drill into on the he said amazon amazon does a great job executing and near a great executors and certainly proven that we do successful with the company but they're constantly innovating the new product announcements debía new announcements is that the new competitive advantage scale and stickiness through rapidly iteration of new features is that this is just a one-off outlier with amazon you see no price it be more like that's one of them  you see that with Tesla they've changed the car industry there's constant updates to the cars right a changes of driving experience and that that model of rapid iteration is really the new normal you know back to the real time thing it gets really boring when you get an update every 18 months you think we don't tolerate those kind of time friends anymore and lag is not a good ending our but I you know software gotta ask you a final question I know you getting we're getting a puppy you get very busy schedule thanks to spend the time with us as well I'll see you had a your competitive sailor and following your career right outside sirs now you got a boat for the nuchal hand you mentioned data ocean data legs big big fan of data ocean I want you to share perspective from what you've learned sailing and being successful winning and sailing with how to navigate an idea this as a c-level executive or a CEO CIO or some of the trenches what lessons can sail in your experience is sailing and running service now what would you share with the folks out there as they try to look at their transitional transformation I teach transformation the others there's a lot of analogs if you will between sailing and business because it's this multi-dimensional game that we play you know in sailing it's about technology it's about how great your crew is it's I'll get your boat is it's the weather is what the competition is doing all those things you have in business so people always want to write it yourselves he's like another you know another another brutal contest township and that's that's all true it's very multi-dimensional and finding your high leverage entry point because you know it's very easy to do super business super busy and business and really not move the dial right so understanding where leverage exists what opportunities are that's really the art form I Frank great to have I know you're busy to getting them getting of the big nokia pricing the president/ceo of service now here live in Las Vegas is to Cuba railroad next guest live in three days wall-to-wall coverage here at no.15 join the conversation crowd chef net / no 15 right now

but cube at servicenow knowledge 14 is sponsored by service now here are your hosts Dave vellante and Jeff trick here we go hi buddy we're back this is Dave vellante with Jeff freak this is the cube we go out to the events we extract the signal from the noise we have a crowd chatting on its crowd chat / no 14 so check that out put your tweets in crouch at awesome engagement app Frank's Lupin is here president CEO of service now Frank it's it's a pleasure to have you back on the cube great to see again great to be here thanks things how you feeling I'm feeling great no I got that keynote got the keynote out this morning you had the financial analyst in yesterday had the industry analyst and they're working you hard absolutely it's a circus yeah so your keynote this morning was great I was right up front they have a nice spot for the industry analyst so appreciate that take good notes but one of the themes that you struck was really hit home to me because you talked about transforming IT from essentially a cost center into a value producer and how service now is at the heart of that and and how the role of the CIO is changing so one of you could sort of summarize and talk a little bit about how you see the role of IT and generally in the CIO specifically changing and what role service now plays in that transformation yeah just just to give a little bit on macro context right that's sort of the worst of all scenarios that we see out there where I t is essentially viewed as as a commodity as a utility and as a result you know people don't see much impact I just want to get a cheaper cheaper cheaper and they want to cut more costs out of the infrastructure and staffing levels and so on and actually is just an organization that we're tolerating because I guess we have to have email and Internet access and all that sort of thing now you go looking into broader world around what technology has done to change business right what amazon has done based on their technology platform what we've seen an online banking you know what we're seeing an online education there's just just incredible examples of innovation using technologies now aighty hasn't done that for their own enterprises they happen in some instances are some some really great examples out there where I t did impacted business but by and large IT is not viewed as to go to people that know how to bring technology into business you know in a way that that really turns the tables on the competition do some mind-blowing things i always ask CIOs when i when i meet him and says what have you done in the last 12 months that really blew people's minds or in terms of applying technology to business problems right and they start sort of thinking like i'll actually it is surely nothing i can think of well that's probably you know a question you should be asking yourself all the time right if it's not when lightning in a bottle when it's not the sort of thing that sort of lights up the whole enterprise like we won't do it is we have to do this that excitement then you're shooting too low and you know in general I find the the cost obsession and IT is an indication that we're not looking for the opportunity and I think that's that that's it that's a damn shame or we're here to change that well you talked about panning for gold was that proposed here in California and it's also a propellant you your company is smoking hot and you know your your commonly associated with the likes of workday and Salesforce and sponsor must be very very proud of that but also there's gold and then RIT shops right there's goal than those organizations that's not being being mined and and you know I think you talk about your penetration is what twenty percent of your your target your global 2000 where we have footprint in about eighteen percent of the enterprises that we think are relevant and appropriate to us but within those eighteen percent you know we were probably a third saturated so so very early innings for service now even though we've achieved considerable scale and very high growth at that scale so when you go into one of your accounts can you discern actual that actual value production vision that you set forth can you see it can you touch it can you you know to this to a skeptic a prospectus yeah Frank that sounds good but can you actually sort of provide proof points yeah managing surface is just essential in terms of economizing and saving money and here's why no I'll give you some some very pedestrian examples that we've seen in real life and the human resources department and probably get the example because I t everybody sort understands how to how the game works right HR organizations historically have not had service models they have that email and phones and so on the problem just called somebody as a result that was a huge amount of work that preoccupied the HR organization that nobody knew what people were working on and the staffing grew and grew and grew to deal with the growing volume of ink wires and problems and changes and so on until they have systems service models and they have reporting and analytics that showed them what was consuming their time once you know that you can put initiatives in place to start dealing with the underlying causes that are driving that work I have seen HR organizations dwindle their staffing by 50% just by understanding what of this day we're working on right that's what service management is all about instead of just delivering service you're managing and once that quarter drops by the way IT organizations they get this in space right because you know large enterprises they got fifty hundred thousand one hundred fifty thousand instance flowing to their organization a month it's a huge consumer of resource right if you go to these other service domains and you see very similar things this layer of software really optimizes that resource well the way they attack it oftentimes is human resource doesn't that scare a lot of prospects away when they hear oh wow near cup service now and they're going to replace all these these people it's a it's a good question actually wrote a blog post about it recently as well there is no doubt that in the economy at large we're going to see massive substitution from people to systems why because the technology is here and the economic imperative is here it's very much a societal and social question but you know here's the thing see alternative you know are we going to try and stop it and not do it it's going to happen the markets are going to run their course what needs to happen is that we adjust you know for example you know in education we have a lot of teachers right what's going to happen to teachers when education is delivered through online streaming well teachers gobble you want to become crooklyn developers in other words evolve and change in their roles because education is going online slowly but let's go into why because the format the service experience is that much better it scales that much better in step much more economical than what we currently have well you said today in your key note that the system is broken you know I'm having to put four kids through school I appreciate a nudge there to the educational system why did it take so long I mean these are the IT guys ease of the technology guys in the organization they're there to deliver value why did it take so long for this kind of transformational yeah wave Steve Jobs has been the late Steve Jobs been quoted many times people don't know what they want until I show it to him and that's sort of what we're doing we're showing it to him that's what we did this morning we're showing people what they can aspire to that's what we're here for we're trying to stimulate inspire motivate give people a sense of mission right as opposed to keeping the lights on managing crises running around with your hair on fire that's not a very attractive you know a view to half of your organization and what you do all day right yeah so I have it struck again by your keynote the Affordable Care Act affectionately known as Obamacare they not the government not a customer of yours or what's the scoop oh no they could you have helped with had problem we could have for sure but then again many people cook that for the foot of people then software and technology they look at something like that yeah last night I set a dinner with Adam infrastructure for Kaiser Permanente and they had a certainly know the problems of open enrollment that a massive scale and certainly we didn't want to trivialize the problem it is really really hard to need to operate the service like that at the scale that that they need to but there is no doubt that you know we don't need any new core technology to build systems like that I mean the technology exists the skills exists sure that I want to walk better than so let's talk about your business a little bit this year third year now right since you've joined service now exactly three years this week yeah so let's sort of break that down but when you when you join service now that the discussion was around and you talked about this yesterday the the whole team and everybody was looking at help desk saying wow how can these these these values be justified and of course you blew that away and now people are beginning to understand that it's interesting to note that data domain you sold the company i think for what 2.5 billion the entire market is is now greater than the market that it replaced interesting that's right the market was three billion it's now I according obviously bigger than three billion and growing yeah you know so that's kind of interesting now that's a much more confined market you know you talked about the tons of the team they're being finite you always knew it was finite here it's different you guys have started to sort of fine tune your tam analysis and communicate that it's still hard because you just don't know the how people are going to use your software they're finding new ways but the team and I took a stab and I came up with 30 billion but it was a top-down it wasn't a bottom up and it was I had to get the blog post out so it's kind of a back of the napkin but still it's very very large clearly a multiple of the IT service management market so I wonder if you could talk about sort of the the evolution of your thinking in terms of the market opportunity with service now were you always sort of where we are today or that have to evolve over time now it has evolved I'd say dramatically obviously the expansion from what used to be called help desk management to IT service management basically you know exploded the market at least 5-fold and they were licensing five to ten times as many people on our system now for itsm purposes then we used to and in the mid 90s during to help desk area because back then all we did was licensed people ever physically on the help desk right people that would take phone calls and emails and so on now really everybody in the IT organization is an actor and a participant in the workflow of service management you may be a DBA maybe a network engineer you're going to get when an incident comes in or a problem is defined you're going to be part of that workflow right so that Dad expansion was not understood early on but beyond that services is everything is everywhere and services everything and every physical and even non physical assets have service models around them so once you start looking forward you see it absolutely everywhere you know I don't know what's a few billion among friends you know I know all that the numbers are but this is heavily transformational I think one of the things that people struggle with they're looking for a line of sight right in our company like workday is viewed very possibly why because they're seeing them take dollar for dollar market evaluation away from companies that they can identify recipe in Oracle and so on feels very credible to gamma that's 250 billion dollars or mark oh I can see those guys from work the Oracle Sapa okay take a chunk out of their eyes I know you go look at service now you need to have more imagination there's this great court from Arthur Schopenhauer that I showed you yesterday which said you know you know takedowns to hit a target that nobody else can hit but it takes genius to hit a target on nobody else can see right it's transformational right what worked it does is modern with what service now does this transformation is fundamentally different so when you came on to service now I presume your focus was putting in the infrastructure and the process is to make sure that you could scale just having watched you in your career you're you're big on growth and yeah you're pretty aggressive so so take us through sort of you know where you sort of started and what the emphasis was and and where it is now be clearly you're investing in sales and marketing you're investing in AP I didn't know this the substantial number of global 2000 companies in asia-pacific so that's another so how is that I mean break that down into maybe one or two or three sort of segments of your attention and effort there there's sort of you can sort of split up in two major stages or phases the first phase you know when when I took over the helm of the company was very much focused on operationalizing stabilizing scale being able to deliver what we're already doing in a consistent and predictable manner and that was not a minor task because because the company had grown so fast but hadn't been able to basically catch itself in terms of bill into business building the organization underneath its business so that preoccupied us tremendously the whole thing about cloud is is not like there's a lot of people you know running around out there to actually no clout that understand clot that can build clouds and how many people do you know that I've actually done this because there's you know three years ago I mean they were far and few we actually recruited people that have built the original cloud of ebay because those guys were pioneers they have solved a lot of the problems associated with cloud early on we saw a lot of people that understood data centers the cloud this is almost in verse two data centers the mentality that you need to to run them davos phase one before us and we sort of got through that you know about you know a year and a half ago for sure about a year ago and we started to shift gears you know really from the operational infrastructure concentration that we've had to really trying to drive strategically the business towards enterprise service management they're really expanding the addressable market way beyond where we had been before we were going to market until i see i l-look itsm replacement you have to do it you're sitting on 10 15 20 year old software it's crappy it's got to go fine we're going to do that right but we want to give you this much bigger perspective managing service in the enterprise and you know make that a mission that you can own as a CEO and drive throughout your organization over a period of years and a lot of our customers have road maps that are 24 36 months and it shows you all the things they're going to knock off over that period of time and all the different you know parksley enterprises to sell is its engineering its market yourself so on yes okay so Tam expansion and now obviously accessing that to him we hire in a lot of sales people and go to market I was struck walking around the exhibit hall last night because you just announced app creator I think last year yep knowledge I was struck by you know that the booth down there with the number of apps I mean it's just astounding where that's going wouldn't have predicted you know some of them that I that I saw so that's obviously part of the the tam expansion as well I wonder if we could talk about the importance of a single system of record in order to achieve that vision because it's not always easy right politically people want to keep data in their own little silos so how does that work you can't force it in because it sort of just happen organically how critical is that to your success I mean when you have applications or services that relate to each other like for example you know this morning we showed in a demo I think we're sure like seven or eight different applications in the course of one demonstration the reason that is a single system of record matters so much when you do that is all these apps need to be aware of each other right when your when your staff in the projects you need to look at the resource management well that resource management relates to the skill requirements as well the skills that are available right what you don't want is these apps living in their own universes with their own data moss your own database because now you have to start the hack integrations between them to make any sense out of that and that's the world we lived and that's been the bane of software existence for for so long the ServiceNow said I'm not going to do that okay every application that relates to any other application they're going to be operating on exactly the same data model and by the way you see that throughout our platform right when you bring up an asset in the CMDB like a server or a rather or Santa whatever it is you'll be able to see all the other data artifacts throughout the platform like instantly problem of changes in projects and tasks that relate to that particular asset there's nobody else that can do that right and we provide the 360-degree visibility that makes application development so compelling because you know all the users are already defined the system you don't even have to get started with that you only define users once right you reuse all that and all the other artifacts already exists so you get this data gravitas that the more data that is there to richer the application with almond environment becomes yeah we talked about this too at the analyst meeting about the relationship to your M&A strategy you've got to be selective it's got to fit in to that single system of record does that however limit your choices in rule absolute limit our choices but you know this is the commitment from an architectural standpoint that we make us that we're not going to repeat what legacy vendors have done is I mean you know 50 apps whole stand along to hack integrations between them as I said that's the world our customers want to leave behind because it was just horrible former from an efficiency standpoint after a while all you people do is managing the operability of the patchwork plethora of assets that they have they're not doing anything productive and in our world they don't they do none of that right they're not upgrading software because it's the clouds you know we do that and they're not hacking integrations between apps because there is no constant of integration on service not with all the apps are aware through a shared data model so is there still plenty of M&A opportunity for you out there though I mean your stocks up I know it's off a little bit lately which I think it's really healthy I'm happy about that nice little breather but still you know you've made great progress adding value you can obviously use your stock as acquisition card co there's still plenty of opportunities for you notice there's absolutely tons of opportunities again in a day you know software infrastructure is it's very similar and very common between application itself for us to bring an application into our user interface framework I mean they have to have a user interface framework of some sort right so whether we replace what they have with ours with a replace the data structure we replace the underlying cloud we can do all those things right the question is is there going to be hard is it going to be expensive is it going to be time-consuming or maybe not as much and that will influence how attractive we are to the asset all right Frank we're way over on time but I could go forever i mean really appreciate you coming on CX for having us here it's really fantastic event all right keep it right to everybody we're back with our next guest this is the cube we're live from moscone right back

this one minute I'm here with my co-host Jeff Frick who we just fresh off of the AWS summit the Amazon event Jeff and I covered that and we're here at knowledge 13 now this conference is all about the notion of going from IT as a service organization changing high teas mantra from no to now that really is the theme of this conference and we're here with Frank's luton who's the president and CEO of service now Frank welcome back to the cube thanks good to be here that's good to see you again we had you on that vm world is great story when we first introduced service now to our community you just fresh off the keynote fantastic keynote by the way thank you you had strong themes i mentioned the from no to now you talked about itu gave a little little tongue-in-cheek joke about the line outside the the rmv the Registry of Motor Vehicles and that's sort of the the idea is you guys are transforming IT from an organization that is trying to manage demand push off demand saying no we'll get it in six months it'll cost you five million dollars to one that really is redesigning IT processes around the globe so first of all welcome back congratulations how do you feel after that keynote I have to work a lot of energy in that room and it was electrifying it was awesome well one of the one of the guys in the panel stopped when you had asking the question I think was the guy from NY yes he said even stop you looked at the audience said i love this crowd that was a great crowd we gave a little goop out to the audience so talk about from know to now how'd you come up with that theme and you know give us a little color behind you know it's it's actually not easy for for us to communicate about service now desk to to lay people in sight unless you have lived in sight I t you just most people don't even know what I t really does on the day-to-day basis right so we've lived a fairly insular existence because you know everybody knows what sales people do and to some degree about HR doesn't finance people but I t it's a bit of a you know a bit of a mystery to what most folks do right but most people do know however is that the service experience with IT has been and challenging what's all we say I mean it's been you know sort of a service experience where if you have to ask the answer was going to be no right because IT organizations have been super preoccupied with infrastructure rapid change in the infrastructure for the last 30 40 years nothing ever set still long enough for us to really master the architecture and the platforms are really stabilizing mature our systems and they have to keep moving so you get pretty cranky it's back to your organization having to live that kind of life so their their their reputation for service has not been stellar and I love making the joke during the keynote their ranking right down there with legal in the basement you know of the corporate enterprise you know so well so talk a little bit about sort of how you guys you know go into an organism's you start with the IT organization right in helping them sort of automated processes connect all these different processes but you've been through your platform expanding out to other parts of the organization the irony is that I T which is the most technology savvy organization in the price as the least management sophistication in terms of managing their own activity which you know I duck to the CIO of a very large consumer gets company he said where does she make her son it's inexcusable right here here we are running milk that going in dollar budgets and staffs with tens of thousands of people and we're running it on spreadsheets email excel project management tools this is ridiculous right we don't have real information in near real time and show that we can drive our business as opposed to being driven by it right i key executives have a tendency to run from one crisis to another with their hair on fire and that's sort of the mental model and a note of now message is about out of a get these people out of this you know reactive crisis mode to where they become full-blown business partners and they start you know bring your guide to enterprise and in a very transformative way or they become the people that bring innovation to the enterprise you know here's so much Frank about shadow I teach my colleague Jeff Frick and I were at the AWS some of the few weeks and you see a lot of these cloud companies you mentioned your keynote Salesforce the salespeople workday talk to HR people they sort n run IT certainly amazon is the poster child for shadow IT but you know Jeff we have that sort of notion where IT people are not the center of the new cloud universe but that's different for service now yes it's very different but the other thing brought up amazon your keynote and how they've kind of fine what kind of a user expectation experiences with an application on the web a level of service a level of delivery and then you've got AWS its kind of the girl child of shadow IT but you guys are coming in really as the enabler to let the internal IT guys actually have the tools to compete with with guys trying to go around it really exact with delivery platform I mean we're trying to turn the tables here right because the entire history of IT is one big end around righty the many computer was an end-around of the glasshouse client-server was really pcs you know dribbling into departmental environments suffer as a service was an incredible end around people in there didn't realize it was seeping into the enterprise right now things like 80 lbs now infrastructure right is actually finding its way so we're saying look you know worthy Enterprise IT cloud company right we are going to empower and enable IT to be driving rather than just being driven and being taken over and run over by by events because that's what's been happening here's the goodness IT can start withdrawing and getting out of the business of infrastructure which is what they've been doing forever infrastructure is very challenging pretty soon that's going to be somebody else's problem right infrastructure goes behind the cooking all you have to do is in network connection so that means that the role of IT is moving from you know keeping the lights on to you know we're going to be the people who are experts at defining structuring and automating service relationships and so does relationship management I mean at this and I make a joke about you know your hole in the inbox of email you know it's full of basically service relationships that are unstructured and unlimited and undefined right right and there is this incredible opportunity to go aptet with record-keeping workflow systems and that's what we want to enable and empower IT to do right we had to give you a quick example actually very interesting we talked to our one of our very large retail customers and the supply chain office unbeknownst to us went to IT and said hey we want to build this app what should we use and Ikey said no you should try and do that on service now what's the app a supply chain office in a retail environment what they do is they take requests all day long stores distribution centers suppliers and they're rebalancing you know product right place right time right right product and they were doing that everybody running spreadsheets and emails and people constantly calling what's the update on my request and they decide no we're going to go to a record-keeping workflow system and from the moment you know they started using that system all of a sudden they had full visibility to a what the volume was of issues that was coming in but the nature of the volume was how well they were doing on their SOS relative to their storage and distribution centers and they were able to structurally go after you know the things that were a constant them grief because they just didn't know right so very simply in very short period of time you know they transformed themselves from the supply chain all those Devils running around like a chicken with his head cut off the people that were actually driving to supply chain now now supply chain management in the retail organization it's super mission-critical right because their results are directly impacted by having right product right time right place simple example where we moving from email and Excel to a record-keeping workflow system any impact with literally within 30 40 days is enormous yeah you hear that a lot of people just using Excel using email we talked to we talking some customers last night we talked to some perspective customers that were in so to check it out and they were big Lotus no shop and is describing sort of the difficulties and challenges of it you will sign them up I can almost see it but the other thing so so this notion of your customer base is very powerful in fact I tweeted out I said the service now has a sick logo basis and we said is that a typo said no sick like that sick touchdown catch it isn't good yeah sick is it good but I mean which I we hear from land o lakes Red Hat metropcs KPM nor Brent I mean just on and on and on at Facebook Intel google or customers what are some other favorite customer stories you hear a lot of the same themes Frank you know we used to use spreadsheets with using email or reliant on all these disparate processes bringing them all together getting some some other you know favorite stories of yours for customers I I relayed a bunch of him on stage this morning right beasties it's just extraordinary to me the the corporate America I mean you mentioned some of them but you know the people we had on stage you know AIG you know coca-cola company's general electric demand this is United States Army right and they owe is yeah New York Stock Exchange eli lilly big pharmaceuticals bristol-myers squibb they all have the same set of issues they have a completely fractured fragmented sprawled acti environment right and here's the interesting history we have not had CIOs that long you know I T used to report into a division next sag or a regional exact and there really wasn't one person that was responsible for running IT throughout the global enterprise because it was just a decentralized function by the way example when you in Europe yeah I ray mighty and I certainly wasn't IT guy stuff and by the way it wasn't my priority either you know it was just by the way that's for some of the history you know comes from so CIO comes in and they are now charged with you're going to run this thing they're not running anything they're being run by it right so until you get to global IT processes I mean City another you know big name they set to as rogue global bank that we don't have global IT right it is the inefficiency and the lack of ability to drive and manage is unacceptable for these very sophisticated large institutions it's embarrassing really you know yeah I mean you really can't go global as a come you can't scale your business not having all these surprises so to me it's about global scaling and it's about the business value of both having ITB accountable but also have the metrics and the visibility to be able to demonstrate the value to the organization you see i SAT with our executive sponsor from bristol-myers squibb last night and she said i got data and i got it in real time and i know it's good so I'm not putting my service providers on their heels you know before they were you know everything was you know in the realm of you know interpretation and fuzzy fuzzy right and now it's like I have data and I'm driving and I'm changing behavior right so the empowering effective it has mighty organizations it's just stomach right I thought that empowering note that came up in your keynote was interesting how the IT organizations themselves and their presentation now to their internal customers are looking more like a company you know they're they're being cute there yeah I'm taking branding they're there they're not just button pushers in and as you said you know infrastructure operators they are trying to be contributors to the business and keeping some this automobile shade of nail them to it's even stronger than now yes they want to be contributors to the business but they want to be the playmakers they wanted me to go to guys give me the ball you know that that's where we want to you know take itt there that people that really understand how to change how work gets done the enterprise I thought you characterize the dwelling experience in IT people have been running from crisis to crisis and they need to be more proactive so talk about how your system allows them to be more proactive well it's all about going from a message oriented environment to a system or an a message or environment is the one way l know it's email it's text you know it's voice right that doesn't work because you know we're just talking right systems have the ability to drive behavior because you know every time you send an email you should think to yourself could i create a service request instead right because a service request has a defined data ship it goes into a database it gets assigned you know in a workflow operation it has metrics around it if it doesn't get responded to a certain amount of time it gets accelerated to the escalator to the next level or management right so the process is defined structure to automate it is going to run its course right whether you know people are participating in it or not with this great example one of our customers equinix delilah or Brian Lily's here actually is a CIO and he said they will sell funny you know we have a system that all my life cycle application where our developers check-in fixes and enhancement to a particular software release for an application and he says because they know to work flows is completely structured an automated everybody knows that they don't get their fixes enhancement in by a certain time poof the dashboards pop the higher-ups see you know who's behind and who's not and that the threat alone of the transparency and visibility that the process introduces causes everybody there run harder right so people won't have to run around with the whip like where are you you know the process is driving is like a hamster on a treadmill you know so Freki used amazon as an example of the user experience that you know you covet as a CEO of this company and you believe you're your customer base desires at the back end also when you talk about companies like Amazon and Facebook and Google they are super highly automated you also talked about lights out automation yeah now normally IT organizations are managed now they're managed by humans they're not highly automated are you are you seeing your customers able to get to that sort of vision that you're talking about that lights-out automation almost like the hyperscale guys you know it's a super important custody I said during the cleanup or were overstaffed and under automated NIT we have reams of people on staff any large financial institutions have tens of thousands of people on staff they're bigger than any technology company right why is that it's because things are very laborious laborious and manual right the processes that they run require so many touch points I mean one of the things that we always tell our customers when you can reimplement these processes do not take your legacy forward because your legacy is very manual you remember the inbox in the outbox when we have physical in boxes and other boxes and now we know we have our laptop why do we have an inbox and outbox right does this message really this cross why are you even involved in this process right so we have to invert the process it's not like wouldn't it be nice for you to be involved in this process there'd better be a very good reason for you to touch this process because the moment you touch it you know we're going from the speed of light to you know the speed of the dirt road that Franco so service now is really in a rocket ship right now and you've demonstrated you've got a track record of being able to be sometimes call jump three myself throwing gasoline on the fire you look very good at that you got 1,600 customers you're growing like crazy but you're under penetrated in your target which is the global 2000 you're only fourteen percent penetrated in the global 2000 so get a long way to go in this journey we're very excited to be you know covering this event really appreciate you guys having us here Frank's loot Minh will give you the last word and then we'll wrap you know this is actually one of the great things that we are so on the front hood and they're penetrated because our investors are like wow you've got a lot of runway you know considering the size company that we we already are and you know the rate of monetization of our business is is extraordinarily I in other words the share of wallet that service now represents and the enterprise is so much larger than people had ever considered or thought because it was not an existing category that was fully metastasized and visible it's new it's emergent it is really transforming how people you know look at technology and process automation and so on now we're gonna be here all week covering knowledge we've got it we're going to double-click on so how is it that service now is able to deliver this cloud functionality the secret is in the single system of record the CMDB and that is not a trivial thing to do we didn't talk about that with Frankie could talk about it but we don't want to steal you know the name of thunder yeah fred muddies going to be on RNA Justin who's the CTO we're going to go deep into sort of how service now actually accomplishes this architecture Lee what their vision is so Frank thanks very much for spending so much time I know you're busy you got to run but appreciate you coming on terrific thanks for having me alright thanks for watching everybody keep it right there we'll be right back with more we're live from Las Vegas ServiceNow knowledge we'll be right back this is the Q cute baby rock and roll

>> wait. >> Okay, We're back. Live a V M. World twenty twelve. I'm John for the founder's silicon angle dot com. This is the Cube silicon angle dot TV's flagship telecast. We go out to the events and extracted signal from the noise CEOs, entrepreneurs, analysts, marketing people, developers, whoever has the signal, we want extract that share that with you. We have a special guest today. Frank's Leutnant is a sea of service. Now again, I'm John Furry. I'm joined my co host >> of Dave Alonso, a wicked bond dog. Frank, Last time we saw Europe on the stage, you had these glasses on the hat. Remember that, Elwood? So, uh, welcome to the Cube. First time on Thank you. Too many of'Em worlds. I'm sure. A little different angle now. Yeah, Service now. Very exciting. Just went public solving a big problem on DH. Added again? Yes. So tell us. How do you feel? >> That's interesting. A lot of people ask me, how did you end up in, you know, in a in an application software tap a category you spent all this time in storage. The reality is that most of my life, you know, being in the application, development, dusting and system management. So this is actually close to my wheelhouse. Stories was actually a pretty good diversion for me. Careerwise >> service now, relatively, you know, not not a household name but solving that problem. Really, There's no system of record for i t. What activities air doing? Whether it's finance, it's whether it's application portfolio project portfolio. You guys were attacking that whole nut with a software service model. I mean, it used to be a lot of point tools to do that. And you guys seem to be having a lot of success bringing that all to the cloud. >> Yeah, the irony is, is that you look at all the corporate functions, you know, finance, sales, marketing HR, I sort of ranks, you know, last or near last in terms of management sophistication, right compared to the other functional areas, because the most mighty organization have to show for themselves. They helped US management system for their work. For right now, they are to keep track of what's running in their their operation, and that service model is typical of infrastructure providers. Right? You see it, you know, with tell coast like looking t you see it with power. You tell these, like PG and E their infrastructure providers first and the service model. It is not particularly compelling, right? So what we tried to dio it's really take it from a D M V style service model standing in line waiting to be helped. Do you want this more like amazon dot com, where I help myself, It's into it. If it's online, it's productive. It's where I want to go. Teo to make requests as well. Let's receive service >> So you're selling primarily to the organization. Who you sell to in the theory is that the CEO is that the project management offices all the above >> as the servicers management is a very well defined center of responsibility in i t organization. So there's always a group of people who is in charge of that that disciplined. They're easy to find, But CEOs are always involved, and the reason is these air very high profile system rollout because everybody in it is an actor or participant, the workflow as well as the broader employee population, the enterprise, touchy systems, So you better believe that people are sensitive about this being a successful practical and it looks more like a neo system. Dan. It does an infrastructure type system >> without the AARP complexity of it. >> Yes, it's it's a mixed >> metaphor, but so So here are your roughly a hundred fifty million dollar company, you know, annualized, you nice market. >> Either way, we've we've guided to about two. Thirty five, >> thirty five this year. Okay, Great. That's >> want to make sure that their investors don't get >> background. We're sorry about that. Es to thirty five, which is why your market cap about three point six billion. I think >> way had about ninety eight percent growth and buildings in the last quarter. So the high growth, obviously it's what drives >> what's driving that. So how big is the business that you guys playing? What's your tan? >> So we think that the tam just for the narrow definition around service management is a is a multi billion dollar opportunity Because of the nature ofthe work flows, we're also expanding into the operations management area. Right? This is this is where HP lives and BMC and IBM and CIA with these very large open view Tivoli Well, because their work flows between services system management are all becoming integrator that used to be suffered spheres. Not anymore. >> And that's an enormous market. >> It i d. C. Thanks. It's about a thirteen fourteen doing dollar market, and then you have the platform is a service opportunity because our customers have just gone wild, building all kinds of spoke applications on a platform just because they could. So >> you kind of betting on the intersection of systems management, operations, management >> and the platform. >> Okay, and it's kind of jump ball, really, with the dynamic of the cloud coming in, isn't it? In terms of the competitive, it's >> Ah, it's interesting because we look another assassin categories like HR marketing. You see a whole host of players you're looking in our category on the only breakout play there has been serviced now way have predominately compete against legacy vendors, people that I just mentioned. So >> you've got some experience doing that I want >> I want to ask you about the discipline side of the market. You guys are public companies, so yeah, you're out there is all exposed and then talk about some of the product directions because out yesterday they were really showcasing the vision within VM where old way a new way, a access APS infrastructure. You know the classic in the old way. New Way, Modern era. We've been calling it in your world. You're actually replacing some pretty old stuff. I mean, I remember back in the late eighties, early nineties health testing people had that's headsets on and, you know, homegrown software developers and quit a lot of this legacy kind of mindset. So first question is, Is that true? Is there still that much baggage in that services business? From an infrastructure standpoint? And the second part, the question is, what's the new stuff that's really disrupting the market? So in the new way, what is the key features that that's happening in the services industry? >> So, you know, I already started to allude to it, right. So you want to evolve that service model from that help death centric DNP style of service experience to one that's on the line looks more consumer style. You know, the way we've learned from Apple and Yahoo and Google and people like that help yourself. If you have a problem at home with your apple TV, you're really gonna try and call Apple know you're going to go online and you find years of communities you get Teo answers ten times faster, that weight and then following these needy old models the way you reference there is an awful lot of that still living in the world off because they're focuses infrastructure, not service. That's change it, right? I mean, CEOs, I read somewhere, have a shelf life of about eighteen months, right? There's incredible impatience and dissatisfaction with how that function is running. It's costing too much money in the service is not exactly to to write home about. People are really ready to move their service malls. >> The largest answer was, Just hire someone else to do it. That was the outsourcing boom, right? So that's still brought problems, right? Legacy. So how is that still in play? So if the notion is okay, outsource it, and then the outsources has some warts on it that's got to be tweaked. What's the new version? Because you know amazon dot com and you know this new environment availability, instant access, the information we don't service etcetera is that changing it >> way believed that the move to cloud computing is really going to change the role of the CIA, all right, because infrastructure is going to become something that's behind Courtney, and it's becoming less of an infrastructure centric job. CEOs and T organizations become Mohr service engineering organizations, people that understand work flows. People understand how to automate work, flows right out. And, you know, I know how to run a database or a network or, you know, all the security dimensions and so on because we're just breaking as an industry. There just isn't enough competency and skill sets for everybody to be confident at the level that we need to be at structure. It's not scaling, right. It's sort of the way telephone switching centers were in the nineteen fifties >> means one of those things to with the CIA. Attention, I'LL get to that later. But now, with big data in real time analytics is more pressure on the service delivery side. As a business driver, you seeing that pressure as well, or is it more? We just gotta fix it now. I got to do it >> Well, nighty organizations in the lift from one crisis to the next, completely event driven, you know we haven't out its were all over it. Trying to restore service on DH. You know, we sort of live that life day in, day out. But I've never changes right So waken get ahead of this game. You know, if we start structuring, you know, the interaction model that we have with our users how we communicate with them. I mean, simple things, right when you were, you haven't out it. It would be helpful if we were able to pull status. You know, every twenty minutes us to what? What we're doing, What's going on. Right? But having infrastructure be ableto push data out? No, like that. Most organizations don't do that. They live pretty much in the dark, >> so share with our audience out there. That's watching. We have a lot of professionals and data scientists and analyst type audience that we've that we've that follows. Looking angle with Yvonne on DH. Some CEOs as well on early adopters share the folks out there. The pitch, How bad is it that their environment and how easy is it to change? It is just a norther. A magnitude sense of is a turnkey. How do you guys roll in? What's he engagement look like? It's not as hard as the things that most people might have the opinion. I don't want to get just ugly. It's painful or is it not painful? Is it quick pop now? Is it like how fast a roll in and out the infrastructure that you >> the's are extraordinarily sticky systems the system that were that we replace >> your systems of the old systems. >> The old systems are on the reason that they've been around for ten, fifteen years. They're very difficult to replace. And if you look at our girls, that's certainly testament to our compelling. The value proposition has been people have said, you know, a pain is becoming unbearable and be the view of the promised Land is looking pretty good, right? So there's both an incentive to change and to move, and secondly, there is something to move towards that is this compelling inspiring. And it really is going to change my game right, because now we tell people said, Look, if you just tryingto get to a snazzier, more modern help desk, we're not your guy, okay? Because we don't find out a compelling vision of the world. We wantto wholesale transform how you deliver service just >> take us to some of those cats you were talking before you came on about your growth tripling inside. But talk about a zoo company, which is a whole nother conversation. We could talk about it yet you have expertise in, but talk more about the customer deployments. You got some fresh funding with the AIPO. You're geared up. You go out to the market place. What are the conversations like, What are some of the stats and one of the conversation with the CIA? >> Well, the CIA is obviously are interested, first and foremost of the transformation of the service model, right? I mean, we have to get Teo service experience that's more reminiscent of people experience on the consumer side. Now we typically have to do that, that an economic equation that's very similar to what they're having right now. They're not interested in spend more. They just want to get completely refreshed, you know, platform for similar amounts of money that they're already spending because Versace, you know, we're not just taking the software, not off the after after table. We're also taking the entire infrastructure, all the operating staff, everything it takes to run that environment becomes ours, right? It's no longer in the I T department, so that looks pretty compelling to them. >> How about some of the numbers in terms of uptake with customers recently? What's the growth rate was? Can you share some numbers? >> Way have about twelve hundred price customers? We had about one hundred twenty seven the last quarter. That's that is a huge number of customers. Tio Tio ad we have. Most of our focus is on global two thousand enterprises. We have about two hundred thirty global two thousand enterprises, and they're all you know who's who names that, that people recognize Starting up Ticket's been been strong. We're running very, very hard to make sure that we have two services infrastructure. Both there's people and infrastructure to be able to accommodate that. >> Well, I'm excited to interview you because I want to ask you kind of more of a personal question. And although we just met for the first time here, your name's been kicked around as kind of a maverick operational executive who knows how to scale organization. So we're in kind of living in an era where the business value focused, whether startups and has been a lot of talk about, you know, the Facebook idea, the young kids under thirty running a billion dollar market gap, companies trying to actually move from hyped to real scale. And Palmer. It's made a comment yesterday kind of dissing Facebook of in terms of the value proposition relative to say, you know, bm where. But the question I want to ask you is, um, what's your success model for scaling an organization on DH for the younger execs out there? And for people who don't know you just chairs up on the camera? What's your philosophy as the repeatable sales, lower cost leverage model? I mean variety of different kind of ingredients. What's the Franks Lukman formula for success and scaling? Bringing a product to market and growing it? >> Well, the first order of business for for a start up venture of any sort is growth. I find that a lot of people come on a business school in trying to balance girl for profitability. Um, that mentality makes no sense to me, right? It's economics. Before accounting, accounting becomes the bastardization of economics, we run our ventures cash on booking their economic concepts, not accounting constructs, right people are trying to show profit prematurely when they can invest that money to grow. We tripled our head count over the last year. We got very far over our skis. No, we're burning a hole in our gas pals but were very clear with investors that look, we are still increasing our productivity for head. Why, when we apply to resource is to grow this franchise Growth expands our multiples, expands valuation. That's what everybody is in the business for, so so sort of summarize. Knowing your question. Most people hold back on growth, and they don't really know why they're not all out trying to drive growth and the reason that growth is so important. You need to be a breakout player. Nobody wants to be the in between player. That's neither fish nor fowl and doesn't become a dominant entity into space that it wants to be in >> and have the financing in the dry powder behind you that you were a venture capital Greylock, which no something into about investing. So that's also important part right? >> Well, you don't. That's why I said to you manage on cash you managed on bookings. Those are the economics in the business essentially, >> and you've been looking up, have some really good finances behind you, trust you who get the concepts and that's key well, continue in the right >> way went public. We also explain to investors Look, this is what we're trying to do, and this is what we need you to buy into. Otherwise, find somebody else's talk. So >> what is the going public affect? You know the perception amongst the CEO's when you chose to list on the way we had them on earlier this week? But how is that affected? The brand perception? >> That was the whole reason for us to go public, right? We didn't need to cash liquidity. Obviously, it's good for employees and investors when I pose fundamentally a branding event. You know, I used the analogy. We went from playing on Saturday to playing on Sunday. You know, all of a sudden you know you're transparent, you know, all the all the thud that gets spread about you by competition. People cannot punch you up on Iand. See what the truth is around your balance sheet. You know how abot your last quarter was? It's been three. I po was tremendous for us from a branding standpoint, >> and you've been known Teo have a reputation of really getting the product in this case, the service, right? And then really getting aggressive on the sales side. Can you talk about what you've done in the sales side? I know you've aggressively hired. >> Yeah, we You know, as I said, we tripled our head count. We went from three shells. Reasons to twelve insight. One year we spread out all over Europe today. This is a ground war. You need an army to fight it. This is not Facebook. We cannot sign up annoying people in a week. It is a business that runs over the ground so you cannot scale and drive growth business unless you have two people to run it. >> And you're selling belly to belly. That right? Absolutely. So you know, >> we're going through the front door of the elevator >> way. Okay, We're getting the hook here. We're getting hooked, but I have to quit final questions. One is just put a plug out there for service's angle dot com that Silicon Angles separate publication. We launched last year, thanks to E m. C. For helping us sponsor that but really dedicated to the new era of services. And there is some disruption. We're excited to cover you guys, so I just wanted to say Go, go check out sources angle. So Franklin asked two questions. One. What's the big disruption in the services business that most people aren't getting right now? General, you know, man and tech on the street, not the insider inside the ropes. So that's the first question. The second question. What's your goals for the year? For the business? >> Well, the interesting thing about the services business is how it's one of these areas that is sort of the least automated. Write. It runs on the concept of institutional knowledge. Phone conversations, informal communications, email and the frontier in service management is that those become software automated structure processes that is not just happening in I t able sticks. It's happening everywhere, right? What do you want to request? Food. You know, from the hotel you knew what a Virgin America, right? You know, request from your seat, something that's just, you know, on an example of how >> that's the story, you know, debate about that. >> That's how it's gonna go, right? So services it's going to become, really that I call the service fabric right? Essentially how thes processes get conducted. So we're super excited because our platform sits right in the middle of that trend and we're going to try and make that trend. >> It's eleven. Platform to the economics are fantastic and no real customs agents were brought up exactly so good margins. >> And it's just >> like the stock immediately. >> It's much more scalable in the district. Disintermediation. You know, all the all the manual effort goes into this. >> Okay, so now I know your public CEO and everything now, so you really can't be as wild as you could have you a private. But what's the outlook for year? Your personal goals for the year >> Wait, given guns from or get one quarter for years. So check with your favorite analysts. >> Okay? Growth is on the horizon. Congratulations. Frank's been great to have your leadership in the Cube. Thank you. Time Cuban great to have you. This is silicon angle dot coms. The cube will be right back with our next guest, Cynthia Stoddard from Netapp CIA, Another CIA. We're gonna get into the trenches and hear about the transformation again. We'LL be right back

(gentle music) >> Narrator: "TheCUBE's" live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Hello everybody, welcome back to day four of "theCUBE's" coverage of MWC '23. We're here live at the Fira in Barcelona. Wall-to-wall coverage, John Furrier is in our Palo Alto studio, banging out all the news. Really, the whole week we've been talking about the disaggregation of the telco network, the new opportunities in telco. We're really excited to have AT&T and Snowflake here. Dave Whittington is the AVP, at the Chief Data Office at AT&T. Roddy Tranum is the Assistant Vice President, for Channel Performance Data and Tools at AT&T. And Phil Kippen, the Global Head Of Industry-Telecom at Snowflake, Snowflake's new telecom business. Snowflake just announced earnings last night. Typical Scarpelli, they beat earnings, very conservative guidance, stocks down today, but we like Snowflake long term, they're on that path to 10 billion. Guys, welcome to "theCUBE." Thanks so much >> Phil: Thank you. >> for coming on. >> Dave and Roddy: Thanks Dave. >> Dave, let's start with you. The data culture inside of telco, We've had this, we've been talking all week about this monolithic system. Super reliable. You guys did a great job during the pandemic. Everything shifting to landlines. We didn't even notice, you guys didn't miss a beat. Saved us. But the data culture's changing inside telco. Explain that. >> Well, absolutely. So, first of all IoT and edge processing is bringing forth new and exciting opportunities all the time. So, we're bridging the world between a lot of the OSS stuff that we can do with edge processing. But bringing that back, and now we're talking about working, and I would say traditionally, we talk data warehouse. Data warehouse and big data are now becoming a single mesh, all right? And the use cases and the way you can use those, especially I'm taking that edge data and bringing it back over, now I'm running AI and ML models on it, and I'm pushing back to the edge, and I'm combining that with my relational data. So that mesh there is making all the difference. We're getting new use cases that we can do with that. And it's just, and the volume of data is immense. >> Now, I love ChatGPT, but I'm hoping your data models are more accurate than ChatGPT. I never know. Sometimes it's really good, sometimes it's really bad. But enterprise, you got to be clean with your AI, don't you? >> Not only you have to be clean, you have to monitor it for bias and be ethical about it. We're really good about that. First of all with AT&T, our brand is Platinum. We take care of that. So, we may not be as cutting-edge risk takers as others, but when we go to market with an AI or an ML or a product, it's solid. >> Well hey, as telcos go, you guys are leaning into the Cloud. So I mean, that's a good starting point. Roddy, explain your role. You got an interesting title, Channel Performance Data and Tools, what's that all about? >> So literally anything with our consumer, retail, concenters' channels, all of our channels, from a data perspective and metrics perspective, what it takes to run reps, agents, all the way to leadership levels, scorecards, how you rank in the business, how you're driving the business, from sales, service, customer experience, all that data infrastructure with our great partners on the CDO side, as well as Snowflake, that comes from my team. >> And that's traditionally been done in a, I don't mean the pejorative, but we're talking about legacy, monolithic, sort of data warehouse technologies. >> Absolutely. >> We have a love-hate relationship with them. It's what we had. It's what we used, right? And now that's evolving. And you guys are leaning into the Cloud. >> Dramatic evolution. And what Snowflake's enabled for us is impeccable. We've talked about having, people have dreamed of one data warehouse for the longest time and everything in one system. Really, this is the only way that becomes a reality. The more you get in Snowflake, we can have golden source data, and instead of duplicating that 50 times across AT&T, it's in one place, we just share it, everybody leverages it, and now it's not duplicated, and the process efficiency is just incredible. >> But it really hinges on that separation of storage and compute. And we talk about the monolithic warehouse, and one of the nightmares I've lived with, is having a monolithic warehouse. And let's just go with some of my primary, traditional customers, sales, marketing and finance. They are leveraging BSS OSS data all the time. For me to coordinate a deployment, I have to make sure that each one of these units can take an outage, if it's going to be a long deployment. With the separation of storage, compute, they own their own compute cluster. So I can move faster for these people. 'Cause if finance, I can implement his code without impacting finance or marketing. This brings in CI/CD to more reality. It brings us faster to market with more features. So if he wants to implement a new comp plan for the field reps, or we're reacting to the marketplace, where one of our competitors has done something, we can do that in days, versus waiting weeks or months. >> And we've reported on this a lot. This is the brilliance of Snowflake's founders, that whole separation >> Yep. >> from compute and data. I like Dave, that you're starting with sort of the business flexibility, 'cause there's a cost element of this too. You can dial down, you can turn off compute, and then of course the whole world said, "Hey, that's a good idea." And a VC started throwing money at Amazon, but Redshift said, "Oh, we can do that too, sort of, can't turn off the compute." But I want to ask you Phil, so, >> Sure. >> it looks from my vantage point, like you're taking your Data Cloud message which was originally separate compute from storage simplification, now data sharing, automated governance, security, ultimately the marketplace. >> Phil: Right. >> Taking that same model, break down the silos into telecom, right? It's that same, >> Mm-hmm. >> sorry to use the term playbook, Frank Slootman tells me he doesn't use playbooks, but he's not a pattern matcher, but he's a situational CEO, he says. But the situation in telco calls for that type of strategy. So explain what you guys are doing in telco. >> I think there's, so, what we're launching, we launched last week, and it really was three components, right? So we had our platform as you mentioned, >> Dave: Mm-hmm. >> and that platform is being utilized by a number of different companies today. We also are adding, for telecom very specifically, we're adding capabilities in marketplace, so that service providers can not only use some of the data and apps that are in marketplace, but as well service providers can go and sell applications or sell data that they had built. And then as well, we're adding our ecosystem, it's telecom-specific. So, we're bringing partners in, technology partners, and consulting and services partners, that are very much focused on telecoms and what they do internally, but also helping them monetize new services. >> Okay, so it's not just sort of generic Snowflake into telco? You have specific value there. >> We're purposing the platform specifically for- >> Are you a telco guy? >> I am. You are, okay. >> Total telco guy absolutely. >> So there you go. You see that Snowflake is actually an interesting organizational structure, 'cause you're going after verticals, which is kind of rare for a company of your sort of inventory, I'll say, >> Absolutely. >> I don't mean that as a negative. (Dave laughs) So Dave, take us through the data journey at AT&T. It's a long history. You don't have to go back to the 1800s, but- (Dave laughs) >> Thank you for pointing out, we're a 149-year-old company. So, Jesse James was one of the original customers, (Dave laughs) and we have no longer got his data. So, I'll go back. I've been 17 years singular AT&T, and I've watched it through the whole journey of, where the monolithics were growing, when the consolidation of small, wireless carriers, and we went through that boom. And then we've gone through mergers and acquisitions. But, Hadoop came out, and it was going to solve all world hunger. And we had all the aspects of, we're going to monetize and do AI and ML, and some of the things we learned with Hadoop was, we had this monolithic warehouse, we had this file-based-structured Hadoop, but we really didn't know how to bring this all together. And we were bringing items over to the relational, and we were taking the relational and bringing it over to the warehouse, and trying to, and it was a struggle. Let's just go there. And I don't think we were the only company to struggle with that, but we learned a lot. And so now as tech is finally emerging, with the cloud, companies like Snowflake, and others that can handle that, where we can create, we were discussing earlier, but it becomes more of a conducive mesh that's interoperable. So now we're able to simplify that environment. And the cloud is a big thing on that. 'Cause you could not do this on-prem with on-prem technologies. It would be just too cost prohibitive, and too heavy of lifting, going back and forth, and managing the data. The simplicity the cloud brings with a smaller set of tools, and I'll say in the data space specifically, really allows us, maybe not a single instance of data for all use cases, but a greatly reduced ecosystem. And when you simplify your ecosystem, you simplify speed to market and data management. >> So I'm going to ask you, I know it's kind of internal organizational plumbing, but it'll inform my next question. So, Dave, you're with the Chief Data Office, and Roddy, you're kind of, you all serve in the business, but you're really serving the, you're closer to those guys, they're banging on your door for- >> Absolutely. I try to keep the 130,000 users who may or may not have issues sometimes with our data and metrics, away from Dave. And he just gets a call from me. >> And he only calls when he has a problem. He's never wished me happy birthday. (Dave and Phil laugh) >> So the reason I asked that is because, you describe Dave, some of the Hadoop days, and again love-hate with that, but we had hyper-specialized roles. We still do. You've got data engineers, data scientists, data analysts, and you've got this sort of this pipeline, and it had to be this sequential pipeline. I know Snowflake and others have come to simplify that. My question to you is, how is that those roles, how are those roles changing? How is data getting closer to the business? Everybody talks about democratizing business. Are you doing that? What's a real use example? >> From our perspective, those roles, a lot of those roles on my team for years, because we're all about efficiency, >> Dave: Mm-hmm. >> we cut across those areas, and always have cut across those areas. So now we're into a space where things have been simplified, data processes and copying, we've gone from 40 data processes down to five steps now. We've gone from five steps to one step. We've gone from days, now take hours, hours to minutes, minutes to seconds. Literally we're seeing that time in and time out with Snowflake. So these resources that have spent all their time on data engineering and moving data around, are now freed up more on what they have skills for and always have, the data analytics area of the business, and driving the business forward, and new metrics and new analysis. That's some of the great operational value that we've seen here. As this simplification happens, it frees up brain power. >> So, you're pumping data from the OSS, the BSS, the OKRs everywhere >> Everywhere. >> into Snowflake? >> Scheduling systems, you name it. If you can think of what drives our retail and centers and online, all that data, scheduling system, chat data, call center data, call detail data, all of that enters into this common infrastructure to manage the business on a day in and day out basis. >> How are the roles and the skill sets changing? 'Cause you're doing a lot less ETL, you're doing a lot less moving of data around. There were guys that were probably really good at that. I used to joke in the, when I was in the storage world, like if your job is bandaging lungs, you need to look for a new job, right? So, and they did and people move on. So, are you able to sort of redeploy those assets, and those people, those human resources? >> These folks are highly skilled. And we were talking about earlier, SQL hasn't gone away. Relational databases are not going away. And that's one thing that's made this migration excellent, they're just transitioning their skills. Experts in legacy systems are now rapidly becoming experts on the Snowflake side. And it has not been that hard a transition. There are certainly nuances, things that don't operate as well in the cloud environment that we have to learn and optimize. But we're making that transition. >> Dave: So just, >> Please. >> within the Chief Data Office we have a couple of missions, and Roddy is a great partner and an example of how it works. We try to bring the data for democratization, so that we have one interface, now hopefully know we just have a logical connection back to these Snowflake instances that we connect. But we're providing that governance and cleansing, and if there's a business rule at the enterprise level, we provide it. But the goal at CDO is to make sure that business units like Roddy or marketing or finance, that they can come to a platform that's reliable, robust, and self-service. I don't want to be in his way. So I feel like I'm providing a sub-level of platform, that he can come to and anybody can come to, and utilize, that they're not having to go back and undo what's in Salesforce, or ServiceNow, or in our billers. So, I'm sort of that layer. And then making sure that that ecosystem is robust enough for him to use. >> And that self-service infrastructure is predominantly through the Azure Cloud, correct? >> Dave: Absolutely. >> And you work on other clouds, but it's predominantly through Azure? >> We're predominantly in Azure, yeah. >> Dave: That's the first-party citizen? >> Yeah. >> Okay, I like to think in terms sometimes of data products, and I know you've mentioned upfront, you're Gold standard or Platinum standard, you're very careful about personal information. >> Dave: Yeah. >> So you're not trying to sell, I'm an AT&T customer, you're not trying to sell my data, and make money off of my data. So the value prop and the business case for Snowflake is it's simpler. You do things faster, you're in the cloud, lower cost, et cetera. But I presume you're also in the business, AT&T, of making offers and creating packages for customers. I look at those as data products, 'cause it's not a, I mean, yeah, there's a physical phone, but there's data products behind it. So- >> It ultimately is, but not everybody always sees it that way. Data reporting often can be an afterthought. And we're making it more on the forefront now. >> Yeah, so I like to think in terms of data products, I mean even if the financial services business, it's a data business. So, if we can think about that sort of metaphor, do you see yourselves as data product builders? Do you have that, do you think about building products in that regard? >> Within the Chief Data Office, we have a data product team, >> Mm-hmm. >> and by the way, I wouldn't be disingenuous if I said, oh, we're very mature in this, but no, it's where we're going, and it's somewhat of a journey, but I've got a peer, and their whole job is to go from, especially as we migrate from cloud, if Roddy or some other group was using tables three, four and five and joining them together, it's like, "Well look, this is an offer for data product, so let's combine these and put it up in the cloud, and here's the offer data set product, or here's the opportunity data product," and it's a journey. We're on the way, but we have dedicated staff and time to do this. >> I think one of the hardest parts about that is the organizational aspects of it. Like who owns the data now, right? It used to be owned by the techies, and increasingly the business lines want to have access, you're providing self-service. So there's a discussion about, "Okay, what is a data product? Who's responsible for that data product? Is it in my P&L or your P&L? Somebody's got to sign up for that number." So, it sounds like those discussions are taking place. >> They are. And, we feel like we're more the, and CDO at least, we feel more, we're like the guardians, and the shepherds, but not the owners. I mean, we have a role in it all, but he owns his metrics. >> Yeah, and even from our perspective, we see ourselves as an enabler of making whatever AT&T wants to make happen in terms of the key products and officers' trade-in offers, trade-in programs, all that requires this data infrastructure, and managing reps and agents, and what they do from a channel performance perspective. We still ourselves see ourselves as key enablers of that. And we've got to be flexible, and respond quickly to the business. >> I always had empathy for the data engineer, and he or she had to service all these different lines of business with no business context. >> Yeah. >> Like the business knows good data from bad data, and then they just pound that poor individual, and they're like, "Okay, I'm doing my best. It's just ones and zeros to me." So, it sounds like that's, you're on that path. >> Yeah absolutely, and I think, we do have refined, getting more and more refined owners of, since Snowflake enables these golden source data, everybody sees me and my organization, channel performance data, go to Roddy's team, we have a great team, and we go to Dave in terms of making it all happen from a data infrastructure perspective. So we, do have a lot more refined, "This is where you go for the golden source, this is where it is, this is who owns it. If you want to launch this product and services, and you want to manage reps with it, that's the place you-" >> It's a strong story. So Chief Data Office doesn't own the data per se, but it's your responsibility to provide the self-service infrastructure, and make sure it's governed properly, and in as automated way as possible. >> Well, yeah, absolutely. And let me tell you more, everybody talks about single version of the truth, one instance of the data, but there's context to that, that we are taking, trying to take advantage of that as we do data products is, what's the use case here? So we may have an entity of Roddy as a prospective customer, and we may have a entity of Roddy as a customer, high-value customer over here, which may have a different set of mix of data and all, but as a data product, we can then create those for those specific use cases. Still point to the same data, but build it in different constructs. One for marketing, one for sales, one for finance. By the way, that's where your data engineers are struggling. >> Yeah, yeah, of course. So how do I serve all these folks, and really have the context-common story in telco, >> Absolutely. >> or are these guys ahead of the curve a little bit? Or where would you put them? >> I think they're definitely moving a lot faster than the industry is generally. I think the enabling technologies, like for instance, having that single copy of data that everybody sees, a single pane of glass, right, that's definitely something that everybody wants to get to. Not many people are there. I think, what AT&T's doing, is most definitely a little bit further ahead than the industry generally. And I think the successes that are coming out of that, and the learning experiences are starting to generate momentum within AT&T. So I think, it's not just about the product, and having a product now that gives you a single copy of data. It's about the experiences, right? And now, how the teams are getting trained, domains like network engineering for instance. They typically haven't been a part of data discussions, because they've got a lot of data, but they're focused on the infrastructure. >> Mm. >> So, by going ahead and deploying this platform, for platform's purpose, right, and the business value, that's one thing, but also to start bringing, getting that experience, and bringing new experience in to help other groups that traditionally hadn't been data-centric, that's also a huge step ahead, right? So you need to enable those groups. >> A big complaint of course we hear at MWC from carriers is, "The over-the-top guys are killing us. They're riding on our networks, et cetera, et cetera. They have all the data, they have all the client relationships." Do you see your client relationships changing as a result of sort of your data culture evolving? >> Yes, I'm not sure I can- >> It's a loaded question, I know. >> Yeah, and then I, so, we want to start embedding as much into our network on the proprietary value that we have, so we can start getting into that OTT play, us as any other carrier, we have distinct advantages of what we can do at the edge, and we just need to start exploiting those. But you know, 'cause whether it's location or whatnot, so we got to eat into that. Historically, the network is where we make our money in, and we stack the services on top of it. It used to be *69. >> Dave: Yeah. >> If anybody remembers that. >> Dave: Yeah, of course. (Dave laughs) >> But you know, it was stacked on top of our network. Then we stack another product on top of it. It'll be in the edge where we start providing distinct values to other partners as we- >> I mean, it's a great business that you're in. I mean, if they're really good at connectivity. >> Dave: Yeah. >> And so, it sounds like it's still to be determined >> Dave: Yeah. >> where you can go with this. You have to be super careful with private and for personal information. >> Dave: Yep. >> Yeah, but the opportunities are enormous. >> There's a lot. >> Yeah, particularly at the edge, looking at, private networks are just an amazing opportunity. Factories and name it, hospital, remote hospitals, remote locations. I mean- >> Dave: Connected cars. >> Connected cars are really interesting, right? I mean, if you start communicating car to car, and actually drive that, (Dave laughs) I mean that's, now we're getting to visit Xen Fault Tolerance people. This is it. >> Dave: That's not, let's hold the traffic. >> Doesn't scare me as much as we actually learn. (all laugh) >> So how's the show been for you guys? >> Dave: Awesome. >> What're your big takeaways from- >> Tremendous experience. I mean, someone who doesn't go outside the United States much, I'm a homebody. The whole experience, the whole trip, city, Mobile World Congress, the technologies that are out here, it's been a blast. >> Anything, top two things you learned, advice you'd give to others, your colleagues out in general? >> In general, we talked a lot about technologies today, and we talked a lot about data, but I'm going to tell you what, the accelerator that you cannot change, is the relationship that we have. So when the tech and the business can work together toward a common goal, and it's a partnership, you get things done. So, I don't know how many CDOs or CIOs or CEOs are out there, but this connection is what accelerates and makes it work. >> And that is our audience Dave. I mean, it's all about that alignment. So guys, I really appreciate you coming in and sharing your story in "theCUBE." Great stuff. >> Thank you. >> Thanks a lot. >> All right, thanks everybody. Thank you for watching. I'll be right back with Dave Nicholson. Day four SiliconANGLE's coverage of MWC '23. You're watching "theCUBE." (gentle music)

(light music) >> Hi everybody. Welcome to this Cube Conversation. I'm really pleased to announce a collaboration with Rob Strechay. He's a guest cube analyst, and we'll be working together to extract the signal from the noise. Rob is a long-time product pro, working at a number of firms including AWS, HP, HPE, NetApp, Snowplow. I did a stint as an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. Rob, good to see you. Thanks for coming into our Marlboro Studios. >> Well, thank you for having me. It's always great to be here. >> I'm really excited about working with you. We've known each other for a long time. You've been in the Cube a bunch. You know, you're in between gigs, and I think we can have a lot of fun together. Covering events, covering trends. So. let's get into it. What's happening out there? We're sort of exited the isolation economy. Things were booming. Now, everybody's tapping the brakes. From your standpoint, what are you seeing out there? >> Yeah. I'm seeing that people are really looking how to get more out of their data. How they're bringing things together, how they're looking at the costs of Cloud, and understanding how are they building out their SaaS applications. And understanding that when they go in and actually start to use Cloud, it's not only just using the base services anymore. They're looking at, how do I use these platforms as a service? Some are easier than others, and they're trying to understand, how do I get more value out of that relationship with the Cloud? They're also consolidating the number of Clouds that they have, I would say to try to better optimize their spend, and getting better pricing for that matter. >> Are you seeing people unhook Clouds, or just reduce maybe certain Cloud activities and going maybe instead of 60/40 going 90/10? >> Correct. It's more like the 90/10 type of rule where they're starting to say, Hey I'm not going to get rid of Azure or AWS or Google. I'm going to move a portion of this over that I was using on this one service. Maybe I got a great two-year contract to start with on this platform as a service or a database as a service. I'm going to unhook from that and maybe go with an independent. Maybe with something like a Snowflake or a Databricks on top of another Cloud, so that I can consolidate down. But it also gives them more flexibility as well. >> In our last breaking analysis, Rob, we identified six factors that were reducing Cloud consumption. There were factors and customer tactics. And I want to get your take on this. So, some of the factors really, you got fewer mortgage originations. FinTech, obviously big Cloud user. Crypto, not as much activity there. Lower ad spending means less Cloud. And then one of 'em, which you kind of disagreed with was less, less analytics, you know, fewer... Less frequency of calculations. I'll come back to that. But then optimizing compute using Graviton or AMD instances moving to cheaper storage tiers. That of course makes sense. And then optimize pricing plans. Maybe going from On Demand, you know, to, you know, instead of pay by the drink, buy in volume. Okay. So, first of all, do those make sense to you with the exception? We'll come back and talk about the analytics piece. Is that what you're seeing from customers? >> Yeah, I think so. I think that was pretty much dead on with what I'm seeing from customers and the ones that I go out and talk to. A lot of times they're trying to really monetize their, you know, understand how their business utilizes these Clouds. And, where their spend is going in those Clouds. Can they use, you know, lower tiers of storage? Do they really need the best processors? Do they need to be using Intel or can they get away with AMD or Graviton 2 or 3? Or do they need to move in? And, I think when you look at all of these Clouds, they always have pricing curves that are arcs from the newest to the oldest stuff. And you can play games with that. And understanding how you can actually lower your costs by looking at maybe some of the older generation. Maybe your application was written 10 years ago. You don't necessarily have to be on the best, newest processor for that application per se. >> So last, I want to come back to this whole analytics piece. Last June, I think it was June, Dev Ittycheria, who's the-- I call him Dev. Spelled Dev, pronounced Dave. (chuckles softly) Same pronunciation, different spelling. Dev Ittycheria, CEO of Mongo, on the earnings call. He was getting, you know, hit. Things were starting to get a little less visible in terms of, you know, the outlook. And people were pushing him like... Because you're in the Cloud, is it easier to dial down? And he said, because we're the document database, we support transaction applications. We're less discretionary than say, analytics. Well on the Snowflake earnings call, that same month or the month after, they were all over Slootman and Scarpelli. Oh, the Mongo CEO said that they're less discretionary than analytics. And Snowflake was an interesting comment. They basically said, look, we're the Cloud. You can dial it up, you can dial it down, but the area under the curve over a period of time is going to be the same, because they get their customers to commit. What do you say? You disagreed with the notion that people are running their calculations less frequently. Is that because they're trying to do a better job of targeting customers in near real time? What are you seeing out there? >> Yeah, I think they're moving away from using people and more expensive marketing. Or, they're trying to figure out what's my Google ad spend, what's my Meta ad spend? And what they're trying to do is optimize that spend. So, what is the return on advertising, or the ROAS as they would say. And what they're looking to do is understand, okay, I have to collect these analytics that better understand where are these people coming from? How do they get to my site, to my store, to my whatever? And when they're using it, how do they they better move through that? What you're also seeing is that analytics is not only just for kind of the retail or financial services or things like that, but then they're also, you know, using that to make offers in those categories. When you move back to more, you know, take other companies that are building products and SaaS delivered products. They may actually go and use this analytics for making the product better. And one of the big reasons for that is maybe they're dialing back how many product managers they have. And they're looking to be more data driven about how they actually go and build the product out or enhance the product. So maybe they're, you know, an online video service and they want to understand why people are either using or not using the whiteboard inside the product. And they're collecting a lot of that product analytics in a big way so that they can go through that. And they're doing it in a constant manner. This first party type tracking within applications is growing rapidly by customers. >> So, let's talk about who wins in that. So, obviously the Cloud guys, AWS, Google and Azure. I want to come back and unpack that a little bit. Databricks and Snowflake, we reported on our last breaking analysis, it kind of on a collision course. You know, a couple years ago we were thinking, okay, AWS, Snowflake and Databricks, like perfect sandwich. And then of course they started to become more competitive. My sense is they still, you know, compliment each other in the field, right? But, you know, publicly, they've got bigger aspirations, they get big TAMs that they're going after. But it's interesting, the data shows that-- So, Snowflake was off the charts in terms of spending momentum and our EPR surveys. Our partner down in New York, they kind of came into line. They're both growing in terms of market presence. Databricks couldn't get to IPO. So, we don't have as much, you know, visibility on their financials. You know, Snowflake obviously highly transparent cause they're a public company. And then you got AWS, Google and Azure. And it seems like AWS appears to be more partner friendly. Microsoft, you know, depends on what market you're in. And Google wants to sell BigQuery. >> Yeah. >> So, what are you seeing in the public Cloud from a data platform perspective? >> Yeah. I think that was pretty astute in what you were talking about there, because I think of the three, Google is definitely I think a little bit behind in how they go to market with their partners. Azure's done a fantastic job of partnering with these companies to understand and even though they may have Synapse as their go-to and where they want people to go to do AI and ML. What they're looking at is, Hey, we're going to also be friendly with Snowflake. We're also going to be friendly with a Databricks. And I think that, Amazon has always been there because that's where the market has been for these developers. So, many, like Databricks' and the Snowflake's have gone there first because, you know, Databricks' case, they built out on top of S3 first. And going and using somebody's object layer other than AWS, was not as simple as you would think it would be. Moving between those. >> So, one of the financial meetups I said meetup, but the... It was either the CEO or the CFO. It was either Slootman or Scarpelli talking at, I don't know, Merrill Lynch or one of the other financial conferences said, I think it was probably their Q3 call. Snowflake said 80% of our business goes through Amazon. And he said to this audience, the next day we got a call from Microsoft. Hey, we got to do more. And, we know just from reading the financial statements that Snowflake is getting concessions from Amazon, they're buying in volume, they're renegotiating their contracts. Amazon gets it. You know, lower the price, people buy more. Long term, we're all going to make more money. Microsoft obviously wants to get into that game with Snowflake. They understand the momentum. They said Google, not so much. And I've had customers tell me that they wanted to use Google's AI with Snowflake, but they can't, they got to go to to BigQuery. So, honestly, I haven't like vetted that so. But, I think it's true. But nonetheless, it seems like Google's a little less friendly with the data platform providers. What do you think? >> Yeah, I would say so. I think this is a place that Google looks and wants to own. Is that now, are they doing the right things long term? I mean again, you know, you look at Google Analytics being you know, basically outlawed in five countries in the EU because of GDPR concerns, and compliance and governance of data. And I think people are looking at Google and BigQuery in general and saying, is it the best place for me to go? Is it going to be in the right places where I need it? Still, it's still one of the largest used databases out there just because it underpins a number of the Google services. So you almost get, like you were saying, forced into BigQuery sometimes, if you want to use the tech on top. >> You do strategy. >> Yeah. >> Right? You do strategy, you do messaging. Is it the right call by Google? I mean, it's not a-- I criticize Google sometimes. But, I'm not sure it's the wrong call to say, Hey, this is our ace in the hole. >> Yeah. >> We got to get people into BigQuery. Cause, first of all, BigQuery is a solid product. I mean it's Cloud native and it's, you know, by all, it gets high marks. So, why give the competition an advantage? Let's try to force people essentially into what is we think a great product and it is a great product. The flip side of that is, they're giving up some potential partner TAM and not treating the ecosystem as well as one of their major competitors. What do you do if you're in that position? >> Yeah, I think that that's a fantastic question. And the question I pose back to the companies I've worked with and worked for is, are you really looking to have vendor lock-in as your key differentiator to your service? And I think when you start to look at these companies that are moving away from BigQuery, moving to even, Databricks on top of GCS in Google, they're looking to say, okay, I can go there if I have to evacuate from GCP and go to another Cloud, I can stay on Databricks as a platform, for instance. So I think it's, people are looking at what platform as a service, database as a service they go and use. Because from a strategic perspective, they don't want that vendor locking. >> That's where Supercloud becomes interesting, right? Because, if I can run on Snowflake or Databricks, you know, across Clouds. Even Oracle, you know, they're getting into business with Microsoft. Let's talk about some of the Cloud players. So, the big three have reported. >> Right. >> We saw AWSs Cloud growth decelerated down to 20%, which is I think the lowest growth rate since they started to disclose public numbers. And they said they exited, sorry, they said January they grew at 15%. >> Yeah. >> Year on year. Now, they had some pretty tough compares. But nonetheless, 15%, wow. Azure, kind of mid thirties, and then Google, we had kind of low thirties. But, well behind in terms of size. And Google's losing probably almost $3 billion annually. But, that's not necessarily a bad thing by advocating and investing. What's happening with the Cloud? Is AWS just running into the law, large numbers? Do you think we can actually see a re-acceleration like we have in the past with AWS Cloud? Azure, we predicted is going to be 75% of AWS IAS revenues. You know, we try to estimate IAS. >> Yeah. >> Even though they don't share that with us. That's a huge milestone. You'd think-- There's some people who have, I think, Bob Evans predicted a while ago that Microsoft would surpass AWS in terms of size. You know, what do you think? >> Yeah, I think that Azure's going to keep to-- Keep growing at a pretty good clip. I think that for Azure, they still have really great account control, even though people like to hate Microsoft. The Microsoft sellers that are out there making those companies successful day after day have really done a good job of being in those accounts and helping people. I was recently over in the UK. And the UK market between AWS and Azure is pretty amazing, how much Azure there is. And it's growing within Europe in general. In the states, it's, you know, I think it's growing well. I think it's still growing, probably not as fast as it is outside the U.S. But, you go down to someplace like Australia, it's also Azure. You hear about Azure all the time. >> Why? Is that just because of the Microsoft's software state? It's just so convenient. >> I think it has to do with, you know, and you can go with the reasoning they don't break out, you know, Office 365 and all of that out of their numbers is because they have-- They're in all of these accounts because the office suite is so pervasive in there. So, they always have reasons to go back in and, oh by the way, you're on these old SQL licenses. Let us move you up here and we'll be able to-- We'll support you on the old version, you know, with security and all of these things. And be able to move you forward. So, they have a lot of, I guess you could say, levers to stay in those accounts and be interesting. At least as part of the Cloud estate. I think Amazon, you know, is hitting, you know, the large number. Laws of large numbers. But I think that they're also going through, and I think this was seen in the layoffs that they were making, that they're looking to understand and have profitability in more of those services that they have. You know, over 350 odd services that they have. And you know, as somebody who went there and helped to start yet a new one, while I was there. And finally, it went to beta back in September, you start to look at the fact that, that number of services, people, their own sellers don't even know all of their services. It's impossible to comprehend and sell that many things. So, I think what they're going through is really looking to rationalize a lot of what they're doing from a services perspective going forward. They're looking to focus on more profitable services and bringing those in. Because right now it's built like a layer cake where you have, you know, S3 EBS and EC2 on the bottom of the layer cake. And then maybe you have, you're using IAM, the authorization and authentication in there and you have all these different services. And then they call it EMR on top. And so, EMR has to pay for that entire layer cake just to go and compete against somebody like Mongo or something like that. So, you start to unwind the costs of that. Whereas Azure, went and they build basically ground up services for the most part. And Google kind of falls somewhere in between in how they build their-- They're a sort of layer cake type effect, but not as many layers I guess you could say. >> I feel like, you know, Amazon's trying to be a platform for the ecosystem. Yes, they have their own products and they're going to sell. And that's going to drive their profitability cause they don't have to split the pie. But, they're taking a piece of-- They're spinning the meter, as Ziyas Caravalo likes to say on every time Snowflake or Databricks or Mongo or Atlas is, you know, running on their system. They take a piece of the action. Now, Microsoft does that as well. But, you look at Microsoft and security, head-to-head competitors, for example, with a CrowdStrike or an Okta in identity. Whereas, it seems like at least for now, AWS is a more friendly place for the ecosystem. At the same time, you do a lot of business in Microsoft. >> Yeah. And I think that a lot of companies have always feared that Amazon would just throw, you know, bodies at it. And I think that people have come to the realization that a two pizza team, as Amazon would call it, is eight people. I think that's, you know, two slices per person. I'm a little bit fat, so I don't know if that's enough. But, you start to look at it and go, okay, if they're going to start out with eight engineers, if I'm a startup and they're part of my ecosystem, do I really fear them or should I really embrace them and try to partner closer with them? And I think the smart people and the smart companies are partnering with them because they're realizing, Amazon, unless they can see it to, you know, a hundred million, $500 million market, they're not going to throw eight to 16 people at a problem. I think when, you know, you could say, you could look at the elastic with OpenSearch and what they did there. And the licensing terms and the battle they went through. But they knew that Elastic had a huge market. Also, you had a number of ecosystem companies building on top of now OpenSearch, that are now domain on top of Amazon as well. So, I think Amazon's being pretty strategic in how they're doing it. I think some of the-- It'll be interesting. I think this year is a payout year for the cuts that they're making to some of the services internally to kind of, you know, how do we take the fat off some of those services that-- You know, you look at Alexa. I don't know how much revenue Alexa really generates for them. But it's a means to an end for a number of different other services and partners. >> What do you make of this ChatGPT? I mean, Microsoft obviously is playing that card. You want to, you want ChatGPT in the Cloud, come to Azure. Seems like AWS has to respond. And we know Google is, you know, sharpening its knives to come up with its response. >> Yeah, I mean Google just went and talked about Bard for the first time this week and they're in private preview or I guess they call it beta, but. Right at the moment to select, select AI users, which I have no idea what that means. But that's a very interesting way that they're marketing it out there. But, I think that Amazon will have to respond. I think they'll be more measured than say, what Google's doing with Bard and just throwing it out there to, hey, we're going into beta now. I think they'll look at it and see where do we go and how do we actually integrate this in? Because they do have a lot of components of AI and ML underneath the hood that other services use. And I think that, you know, they've learned from that. And I think that they've already done a good job. Especially for media and entertainment when you start to look at some of the ways that they use it for helping do graphics and helping to do drones. I think part of their buy of iRobot was the fact that iRobot was a big user of RoboMaker, which is using different models to train those robots to go around objects and things like that, so. >> Quick touch on Kubernetes, the whole DevOps World we just covered. The Cloud Native Foundation Security, CNCF. The security conference up in Seattle last week. First time they spun that out kind of like reinforced, you know, AWS spins out, reinforced from reinvent. Amsterdam's coming up soon, the CubeCon. What should we expect? What's hot in Cubeland? >> Yeah, I think, you know, Kubes, you're going to be looking at how OpenShift keeps growing and I think to that respect you get to see the momentum with people like Red Hat. You see others coming up and realizing how OpenShift has gone to market as being, like you were saying, partnering with those Clouds and really making it simple. I think the simplicity and the manageability of Kubernetes is going to be at the forefront. I think a lot of the investment is still going into, how do I bring observability and DevOps and AIOps and MLOps all together. And I think that's going to be a big place where people are going to be looking to see what comes out of CubeCon in Amsterdam. I think it's that manageability ease of use. >> Well Rob, I look forward to working with you on behalf of the whole Cube team. We're going to do more of these and go out to some shows extract the signal from the noise. Really appreciate you coming into our studio. >> Well, thank you for having me on. Really appreciate it. >> You're really welcome. All right, keep it right there, or thanks for watching. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube. And we'll see you next time. (light music)

(upbeat music beginning) >> From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from the Cube and ETR, this is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Making predictions about the future of enterprise tech is more challenging if you strive to lay down forecasts that are measurable. In other words, if you make a prediction, you should be able to look back a year later and say, with some degree of certainty, whether the prediction came true or not, with evidence to back that up. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights, powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we aim to do just that, with predictions about the macro IT spending environment, cost optimization, security, lots to talk about there, generative AI, cloud, and of course supercloud, blockchain adoption, data platforms, including commentary on Databricks, snowflake, and other key players, automation, events, and we may even have some bonus predictions around quantum computing, and perhaps some other areas. To make all this happen, we welcome back, for the third year in a row, my colleague and friend Eric Bradley from ETR. Eric, thanks for all you do for the community, and thanks for being part of this program. Again. >> I wouldn't miss it for the world. I always enjoy this one. Dave, good to see you. >> Yeah, so let me bring up this next slide and show you, actually come back to me if you would. I got to show the audience this. These are the inbounds that we got from PR firms starting in October around predictions. They know we do prediction posts. And so they'll send literally thousands and thousands of predictions from hundreds of experts in the industry, technologists, consultants, et cetera. And if you bring up the slide I can show you sort of the pattern that developed here. 40% of these thousands of predictions were from cyber. You had AI and data. If you combine those, it's still not close to cyber. Cost optimization was a big thing. Of course, cloud, some on DevOps, and software. Digital... Digital transformation got, you know, some lip service and SaaS. And then there was other, it's kind of around 2%. So quite remarkable, when you think about the focus on cyber, Eric. >> Yeah, there's two reasons why I think it makes sense, though. One, the cybersecurity companies have a lot of cash, so therefore the PR firms might be working a little bit harder for them than some of their other clients. (laughs) And then secondly, as you know, for multiple years now, when we do our macro survey, we ask, "What's your number one spending priority?" And again, it's security. It just isn't going anywhere. It just stays at the top. So I'm actually not that surprised by that little pie chart there, but I was shocked that SaaS was only 5%. You know, going back 10 years ago, that would've been the only thing anyone was talking about. >> Yeah. So true. All right, let's get into it. First prediction, we always start with kind of tech spending. Number one is tech spending increases between four and 5%. ETR has currently got it at 4.6% coming into 2023. This has been a consistently downward trend all year. We started, you know, much, much higher as we've been reporting. Bottom line is the fed is still in control. They're going to ease up on tightening, is the expectation, they're going to shoot for a soft landing. But you know, my feeling is this slingshot economy is going to continue, and it's going to continue to confound, whether it's supply chains or spending. The, the interesting thing about the ETR data, Eric, and I want you to comment on this, the largest companies are the most aggressive to cut. They're laying off, smaller firms are spending faster. They're actually growing at a much larger, faster rate as are companies in EMEA. And that's a surprise. That's outpacing the US and APAC. Chime in on this, Eric. >> Yeah, I was surprised on all of that. First on the higher level spending, we are definitely seeing it coming down, but the interesting thing here is headlines are making it worse. The huge research shop recently said 0% growth. We're coming in at 4.6%. And just so everyone knows, this is not us guessing, we asked 1,525 IT decision-makers what their budget growth will be, and they came in at 4.6%. Now there's a huge disparity, as you mentioned. The Fortune 500, global 2000, barely at 2% growth, but small, it's at 7%. So we're at a situation right now where the smaller companies are still playing a little bit of catch up on digital transformation, and they're spending money. The largest companies that have the most to lose from a recession are being more trepidatious, obviously. So they're playing a "Wait and see." And I hope we don't talk ourselves into a recession. Certainly the headlines and some of their research shops are helping it along. But another interesting comment here is, you know, energy and utilities used to be called an orphan and widow stock group, right? They are spending more than anyone, more than financials insurance, more than retail consumer. So right now it's being driven by mid, small, and energy and utilities. They're all spending like gangbusters, like nothing's happening. And it's the rest of everyone else that's being very cautious. >> Yeah, so very unpredictable right now. All right, let's go to number two. Cost optimization remains a major theme in 2023. We've been reporting on this. You've, we've shown a chart here. What's the primary method that your organization plans to use? You asked this question of those individuals that cited that they were going to reduce their spend and- >> Mhm. >> consolidating redundant vendors, you know, still leads the way, you know, far behind, cloud optimization is second, but it, but cloud continues to outpace legacy on-prem spending, no doubt. Somebody, it was, the guy's name was Alexander Feiglstorfer from Storyblok, sent in a prediction, said "All in one becomes extinct." Now, generally I would say I disagree with that because, you know, as we know over the years, suites tend to win out over, you know, individual, you know, point products. But I think what's going to happen is all in one is going to remain the norm for these larger companies that are cutting back. They want to consolidate redundant vendors, and the smaller companies are going to stick with that best of breed and be more aggressive and try to compete more effectively. What's your take on that? >> Yeah, I'm seeing much more consolidation in vendors, but also consolidation in functionality. We're seeing people building out new functionality, whether it's, we're going to talk about this later, so I don't want to steal too much of our thunder right now, but data and security also, we're seeing a functionality creep. So I think there's further consolidation happening here. I think niche solutions are going to be less likely, and platform solutions are going to be more likely in a spending environment where you want to reduce your vendors. You want to have one bill to pay, not 10. Another thing on this slide, real quick if I can before I move on, is we had a bunch of people write in and some of the answer options that aren't on this graph but did get cited a lot, unfortunately, is the obvious reduction in staff, hiring freezes, and delaying hardware, were three of the top write-ins. And another one was offshore outsourcing. So in addition to what we're seeing here, there were a lot of write-in options, and I just thought it would be important to state that, but essentially the cost optimization is by and far the highest one, and it's growing. So it's actually increased in our citations over the last year. >> And yeah, specifically consolidating redundant vendors. And so I actually thank you for bringing that other up, 'cause I had asked you, Eric, is there any evidence that repatriation is going on and we don't see it in the numbers, we don't see it even in the other, there was, I think very little or no mention of cloud repatriation, even though it might be happening in this in a smattering. >> Not a single mention, not one single mention. I went through it for you. Yep. Not one write-in. >> All right, let's move on. Number three, security leads M&A in 2023. Now you might say, "Oh, well that's a layup," but let me set this up Eric, because I didn't really do a great job with the slide. I hid the, what you've done, because you basically took, this is from the emerging technology survey with 1,181 responses from November. And what we did is we took Palo Alto and looked at the overlap in Palo Alto Networks accounts with these vendors that were showing on this chart. And Eric, I'm going to ask you to explain why we put a circle around OneTrust, but let me just set it up, and then have you comment on the slide and take, give us more detail. We're seeing private company valuations are off, you know, 10 to 40%. We saw a sneak, do a down round, but pretty good actually only down 12%. We've seen much higher down rounds. Palo Alto Networks we think is going to get busy. Again, they're an inquisitive company, they've been sort of quiet lately, and we think CrowdStrike, Cisco, Microsoft, Zscaler, we're predicting all of those will make some acquisitions and we're thinking that the targets are somewhere in this mess of security taxonomy. Other thing we're predicting AI meets cyber big time in 2023, we're going to probably going to see some acquisitions of those companies that are leaning into AI. We've seen some of that with Palo Alto. And then, you know, your comment to me, Eric, was "The RSA conference is going to be insane, hopping mad, "crazy this April," (Eric laughing) but give us your take on this data, and why the red circle around OneTrust? Take us back to that slide if you would, Alex. >> Sure. There's a few things here. First, let me explain what we're looking at. So because we separate the public companies and the private companies into two separate surveys, this allows us the ability to cross-reference that data. So what we're doing here is in our public survey, the tesis, everyone who cited some spending with Palo Alto, meaning they're a Palo Alto customer, we then cross-reference that with the private tech companies. Who also are they spending with? So what you're seeing here is an overlap. These companies that we have circled are doing the best in Palo Alto's accounts. Now, Palo Alto went and bought Twistlock a few years ago, which this data slide predicted, to be quite honest. And so I don't know if they necessarily are going to go after Snyk. Snyk, sorry. They already have something in that space. What they do need, however, is more on the authentication space. So I'm looking at OneTrust, with a 45% overlap in their overall net sentiment. That is a company that's already existing in their accounts and could be very synergistic to them. BeyondTrust as well, authentication identity. This is something that Palo needs to do to move more down that zero trust path. Now why did I pick Palo first? Because usually they're very inquisitive. They've been a little quiet lately. Secondly, if you look at the backdrop in the markets, the IPO freeze isn't going to last forever. Sooner or later, the IPO markets are going to open up, and some of these private companies are going to tap into public equity. In the meantime, however, cash funding on the private side is drying up. If they need another round, they're not going to get it, and they're certainly not going to get it at the valuations they were getting. So we're seeing valuations maybe come down where they're a touch more attractive, and Palo knows this isn't going to last forever. Cisco knows that, CrowdStrike, Zscaler, all these companies that are trying to make a push to become that vendor that you're consolidating in, around, they have a chance now, they have a window where they need to go make some acquisitions. And that's why I believe leading up to RSA, we're going to see some movement. I think it's going to pretty, a really exciting time in security right now. >> Awesome. Thank you. Great explanation. All right, let's go on the next one. Number four is, it relates to security. Let's stay there. Zero trust moves from hype to reality in 2023. Now again, you might say, "Oh yeah, that's a layup." A lot of these inbounds that we got are very, you know, kind of self-serving, but we always try to put some meat in the bone. So first thing we do is we pull out some commentary from, Eric, your roundtable, your insights roundtable. And we have a CISO from a global hospitality firm says, "For me that's the highest priority." He's talking about zero trust because it's the best ROI, it's the most forward-looking, and it enables a lot of the business transformation activities that we want to do. CISOs tell me that they actually can drive forward transformation projects that have zero trust, and because they can accelerate them, because they don't have to go through the hurdle of, you know, getting, making sure that it's secure. Second comment, zero trust closes that last mile where once you're authenticated, they open up the resource to you in a zero trust way. That's a CISO of a, and a managing director of a cyber risk services enterprise. Your thoughts on this? >> I can be here all day, so I'm going to try to be quick on this one. This is not a fluff piece on this one. There's a couple of other reasons this is happening. One, the board finally gets it. Zero trust at first was just a marketing hype term. Now the board understands it, and that's why CISOs are able to push through it. And what they finally did was redefine what it means. Zero trust simply means moving away from hardware security, moving towards software-defined security, with authentication as its base. The board finally gets that, and now they understand that this is necessary and it's being moved forward. The other reason it's happening now is hybrid work is here to stay. We weren't really sure at first, large companies were still trying to push people back to the office, and it's going to happen. The pendulum will swing back, but hybrid work's not going anywhere. By basically on our own data, we're seeing that 69% of companies expect remote and hybrid to be permanent, with only 30% permanent in office. Zero trust works for a hybrid environment. So all of that is the reason why this is happening right now. And going back to our previous prediction, this is why we're picking Palo, this is why we're picking Zscaler to make these acquisitions. Palo Alto needs to be better on the authentication side, and so does Zscaler. They're both fantastic on zero trust network access, but they need the authentication software defined aspect, and that's why we think this is going to happen. One last thing, in that CISO round table, I also had somebody say, "Listen, Zscaler is incredible. "They're doing incredibly well pervading the enterprise, "but their pricing's getting a little high," and they actually think Palo Alto is well-suited to start taking some of that share, if Palo can make one move. >> Yeah, Palo Alto's consolidation story is very strong. Here's my question and challenge. Do you and me, so I'm always hardcore about, okay, you've got to have evidence. I want to look back at these things a year from now and say, "Did we get it right? Yes or no?" If we got it wrong, we'll tell you we got it wrong. So how are we going to measure this? I'd say a couple things, and you can chime in. One is just the number of vendors talking about it. That's, but the marketing always leads the reality. So the second part of that is we got to get evidence from the buying community. Can you help us with that? >> (laughs) Luckily, that's what I do. I have a data company that asks thousands of IT decision-makers what they're adopting and what they're increasing spend on, as well as what they're decreasing spend on and what they're replacing. So I have snapshots in time over the last 11 years where I can go ahead and compare and contrast whether this adoption is happening or not. So come back to me in 12 months and I'll let you know. >> Now, you know, I will. Okay, let's bring up the next one. Number five, generative AI hits where the Metaverse missed. Of course everybody's talking about ChatGPT, we just wrote last week in a breaking analysis with John Furrier and Sarjeet Joha our take on that. We think 2023 does mark a pivot point as natural language processing really infiltrates enterprise tech just as Amazon turned the data center into an API. We think going forward, you're going to be interacting with technology through natural language, through English commands or other, you know, foreign language commands, and investors are lining up, all the VCs are getting excited about creating something competitive to ChatGPT, according to (indistinct) a hundred million dollars gets you a seat at the table, gets you into the game. (laughing) That's before you have to start doing promotion. But he thinks that's what it takes to actually create a clone or something equivalent. We've seen stuff from, you know, the head of Facebook's, you know, AI saying, "Oh, it's really not that sophisticated, ChatGPT, "it's kind of like IBM Watson, it's great engineering, "but you know, we've got more advanced technology." We know Google's working on some really interesting stuff. But here's the thing. ETR just launched this survey for the February survey. It's in the field now. We circle open AI in this category. They weren't even in the survey, Eric, last quarter. So 52% of the ETR survey respondents indicated a positive sentiment toward open AI. I added up all the sort of different bars, we could double click on that. And then I got this inbound from Scott Stevenson of Deep Graham. He said "AI is recession-proof." I don't know if that's the case, but it's a good quote. So bring this back up and take us through this. Explain this chart for us, if you would. >> First of all, I like Scott's quote better than the Facebook one. I think that's some sour grapes. Meta just spent an insane amount of money on the Metaverse and that's a dud. Microsoft just spent money on open AI and it is hot, undoubtedly hot. We've only been in the field with our current ETS survey for a week. So my caveat is it's preliminary data, but I don't care if it's preliminary data. (laughing) We're getting a sneak peek here at what is the number one net sentiment and mindshare leader in the entire machine-learning AI sector within a week. It's beating Data- >> 600. 600 in. >> It's beating Databricks. And we all know Databricks is a huge established enterprise company, not only in machine-learning AI, but it's in the top 10 in the entire survey. We have over 400 vendors in this survey. It's number eight overall, already. In a week. This is not hype. This is real. And I could go on the NLP stuff for a while. Not only here are we seeing it in open AI and machine-learning and AI, but we're seeing NLP in security. It's huge in email security. It's completely transforming that area. It's one of the reasons I thought Palo might take Abnormal out. They're doing such a great job with NLP in this email side, and also in the data prep tools. NLP is going to take out data prep tools. If we have time, I'll discuss that later. But yeah, this is, to me this is a no-brainer, and we're already seeing it in the data. >> Yeah, John Furrier called, you know, the ChatGPT introduction. He said it reminded him of the Netscape moment, when we all first saw Netscape Navigator and went, "Wow, it really could be transformative." All right, number six, the cloud expands to supercloud as edge computing accelerates and CloudFlare is a big winner in 2023. We've reported obviously on cloud, multi-cloud, supercloud and CloudFlare, basically saying what multi-cloud should have been. We pulled this quote from Atif Kahn, who is the founder and CTO of Alkira, thanks, one of the inbounds, thank you. "In 2023, highly distributed IT environments "will become more the norm "as organizations increasingly deploy hybrid cloud, "multi-cloud and edge settings..." Eric, from one of your round tables, "If my sources from edge computing are coming "from the cloud, that means I have my workloads "running in the cloud. "There is no one better than CloudFlare," That's a senior director of IT architecture at a huge financial firm. And then your analysis shows CloudFlare really growing in pervasion, that sort of market presence in the dataset, dramatically, to near 20%, leading, I think you had told me that they're even ahead of Google Cloud in terms of momentum right now. >> That was probably the biggest shock to me in our January 2023 tesis, which covers the public companies in the cloud computing sector. CloudFlare has now overtaken GCP in overall spending, and I was shocked by that. It's already extremely pervasive in networking, of course, for the edge networking side, and also in security. This is the number one leader in SaaSi, web access firewall, DDoS, bot protection, by your definition of supercloud, which we just did a couple of weeks ago, and I really enjoyed that by the way Dave, I think CloudFlare is the one that fits your definition best, because it's bringing all of these aspects together, and most importantly, it's cloud agnostic. It does not need to rely on Azure or AWS to do this. It has its own cloud. So I just think it's, when we look at your definition of supercloud, CloudFlare is the poster child. >> You know, what's interesting about that too, is a lot of people are poo-pooing CloudFlare, "Ah, it's, you know, really kind of not that sophisticated." "You don't have as many tools," but to your point, you're can have those tools in the cloud, Cloudflare's doing serverless on steroids, trying to keep things really simple, doing a phenomenal job at, you know, various locations around the world. And they're definitely one to watch. Somebody put them on my radar (laughing) a while ago and said, "Dave, you got to do a breaking analysis on CloudFlare." And so I want to thank that person. I can't really name them, 'cause they work inside of a giant hyperscaler. But- (Eric laughing) (Dave chuckling) >> Real quickly, if I can from a competitive perspective too, who else is there? They've already taken share from Akamai, and Fastly is their really only other direct comp, and they're not there. And these guys are in poll position and they're the only game in town right now. I just, I don't see it slowing down. >> I thought one of your comments from your roundtable I was reading, one of the folks said, you know, CloudFlare, if my workloads are in the cloud, they are, you know, dominant, they said not as strong with on-prem. And so Akamai is doing better there. I'm like, "Okay, where would you want to be?" (laughing) >> Yeah, which one of those two would you rather be? >> Right? Anyway, all right, let's move on. Number seven, blockchain continues to look for a home in the enterprise, but devs will slowly begin to adopt in 2023. You know, blockchains have got a lot of buzz, obviously crypto is, you know, the killer app for blockchain. Senior IT architect in financial services from your, one of your insight roundtables said quote, "For enterprises to adopt a new technology, "there have to be proven turnkey solutions. "My experience in talking with my peers are, "blockchain is still an open-source component "where you have to build around it." Now I want to thank Ravi Mayuram, who's the CTO of Couchbase sent in, you know, one of the predictions, he said, "DevOps will adopt blockchain, specifically Ethereum." And he referenced actually in his email to me, Solidity, which is the programming language for Ethereum, "will be in every DevOps pro's playbook, "mirroring the boom in machine-learning. "Newer programming languages like Solidity "will enter the toolkits of devs." His point there, you know, Solidity for those of you don't know, you know, Bitcoin is not programmable. Solidity, you know, came out and that was their whole shtick, and they've been improving that, and so forth. But it, Eric, it's true, it really hasn't found its home despite, you know, the potential for smart contracts. IBM's pushing it, VMware has had announcements, and others, really hasn't found its way in the enterprise yet. >> Yeah, and I got to be honest, I don't think it's going to, either. So when we did our top trends series, this was basically chosen as an anti-prediction, I would guess, that it just continues to not gain hold. And the reason why was that first comment, right? It's very much a niche solution that requires a ton of custom work around it. You can't just plug and play it. And at the end of the day, let's be very real what this technology is, it's a database ledger, and we already have database ledgers in the enterprise. So why is this a priority to move to a different database ledger? It's going to be very niche cases. I like the CTO comment from Couchbase about it being adopted by DevOps. I agree with that, but it has to be a DevOps in a very specific use case, and a very sophisticated use case in financial services, most likely. And that's not across the entire enterprise. So I just think it's still going to struggle to get its foothold for a little bit longer, if ever. >> Great, thanks. Okay, let's move on. Number eight, AWS Databricks, Google Snowflake lead the data charge with Microsoft. Keeping it simple. So let's unpack this a little bit. This is the shared accounts peer position for, I pulled data platforms in for analytics, machine-learning and AI and database. So I could grab all these accounts or these vendors and see how they compare in those three sectors. Analytics, machine-learning and database. Snowflake and Databricks, you know, they're on a crash course, as you and I have talked about. They're battling to be the single source of truth in analytics. They're, there's going to be a big focus. They're already started. It's going to be accelerated in 2023 on open formats. Iceberg, Python, you know, they're all the rage. We heard about Iceberg at Snowflake Summit, last summer or last June. Not a lot of people had heard of it, but of course the Databricks crowd, who knows it well. A lot of other open source tooling. There's a company called DBT Labs, which you're going to talk about in a minute. George Gilbert put them on our radar. We just had Tristan Handy, the CEO of DBT labs, on at supercloud last week. They are a new disruptor in data that's, they're essentially making, they're API-ifying, if you will, KPIs inside the data warehouse and dramatically simplifying that whole data pipeline. So really, you know, the ETL guys should be shaking in their boots with them. Coming back to the slide. Google really remains focused on BigQuery adoption. Customers have complained to me that they would like to use Snowflake with Google's AI tools, but they're being forced to go to BigQuery. I got to ask Google about that. AWS continues to stitch together its bespoke data stores, that's gone down that "Right tool for the right job" path. David Foyer two years ago said, "AWS absolutely is going to have to solve that problem." We saw them start to do it in, at Reinvent, bringing together NoETL between Aurora and Redshift, and really trying to simplify those worlds. There's going to be more of that. And then Microsoft, they're just making it cheap and easy to use their stuff, you know, despite some of the complaints that we hear in the community, you know, about things like Cosmos, but Eric, your take? >> Yeah, my concern here is that Snowflake and Databricks are fighting each other, and it's allowing AWS and Microsoft to kind of catch up against them, and I don't know if that's the right move for either of those two companies individually, Azure and AWS are building out functionality. Are they as good? No they're not. The other thing to remember too is that AWS and Azure get paid anyway, because both Databricks and Snowflake run on top of 'em. So (laughing) they're basically collecting their toll, while these two fight it out with each other, and they build out functionality. I think they need to stop focusing on each other, a little bit, and think about the overall strategy. Now for Databricks, we know they came out first as a machine-learning AI tool. They were known better for that spot, and now they're really trying to play catch-up on that data storage compute spot, and inversely for Snowflake, they were killing it with the compute separation from storage, and now they're trying to get into the MLAI spot. I actually wouldn't be surprised to see them make some sort of acquisition. Frank Slootman has been a little bit quiet, in my opinion there. The other thing to mention is your comment about DBT Labs. If we look at our emerging technology survey, last survey when this came out, DBT labs, number one leader in that data integration space, I'm going to just pull it up real quickly. It looks like they had a 33% overall net sentiment to lead data analytics integration. So they are clearly growing, it's fourth straight survey consecutively that they've grown. The other name we're seeing there a little bit is Cribl, but DBT labs is by far the number one player in this space. >> All right. Okay, cool. Moving on, let's go to number nine. With Automation mixer resurgence in 2023, we're showing again data. The x axis is overlap or presence in the dataset, and the vertical axis is shared net score. Net score is a measure of spending momentum. As always, you've seen UI path and Microsoft Power Automate up until the right, that red line, that 40% line is generally considered elevated. UI path is really separating, creating some distance from Automation Anywhere, they, you know, previous quarters they were much closer. Microsoft Power Automate came on the scene in a big way, they loom large with this "Good enough" approach. I will say this, I, somebody sent me a results of a (indistinct) survey, which showed UiPath actually had more mentions than Power Automate, which was surprising, but I think that's not been the case in the ETR data set. We're definitely seeing a shift from back office to front soft office kind of workloads. Having said that, software testing is emerging as a mainstream use case, we're seeing ML and AI become embedded in end-to-end automations, and low-code is serving the line of business. And so this, we think, is going to increasingly have appeal to organizations in the coming year, who want to automate as much as possible and not necessarily, we've seen a lot of layoffs in tech, and people... You're going to have to fill the gaps with automation. That's a trend that's going to continue. >> Yep, agreed. At first that comment about Microsoft Power Automate having less citations than UiPath, that's shocking to me. I'm looking at my chart right here where Microsoft Power Automate was cited by over 60% of our entire survey takers, and UiPath at around 38%. Now don't get me wrong, 38% pervasion's fantastic, but you know you're not going to beat an entrenched Microsoft. So I don't really know where that comment came from. So UiPath, looking at it alone, it's doing incredibly well. It had a huge rebound in its net score this last survey. It had dropped going through the back half of 2022, but we saw a big spike in the last one. So it's got a net score of over 55%. A lot of people citing adoption and increasing. So that's really what you want to see for a name like this. The problem is that just Microsoft is doing its playbook. At the end of the day, I'm going to do a POC, why am I going to pay more for UiPath, or even take on another separate bill, when we know everyone's consolidating vendors, if my license already includes Microsoft Power Automate? It might not be perfect, it might not be as good, but what I'm hearing all the time is it's good enough, and I really don't want another invoice. >> Right. So how does UiPath, you know, and Automation Anywhere, how do they compete with that? Well, the way they compete with it is they got to have a better product. They got a product that's 10 times better. You know, they- >> Right. >> they're not going to compete based on where the lowest cost, Microsoft's got that locked up, or where the easiest to, you know, Microsoft basically give it away for free, and that's their playbook. So that's, you know, up to UiPath. UiPath brought on Rob Ensslin, I've interviewed him. Very, very capable individual, is now Co-CEO. So he's kind of bringing that adult supervision in, and really tightening up the go to market. So, you know, we know this company has been a rocket ship, and so getting some control on that and really getting focused like a laser, you know, could be good things ahead there for that company. Okay. >> One of the problems, if I could real quick Dave, is what the use cases are. When we first came out with RPA, everyone was super excited about like, "No, UiPath is going to be great for super powerful "projects, use cases." That's not what RPA is being used for. As you mentioned, it's being used for mundane tasks, so it's not automating complex things, which I think UiPath was built for. So if you were going to get UiPath, and choose that over Microsoft, it's going to be 'cause you're doing it for more powerful use case, where it is better. But the problem is that's not where the enterprise is using it. The enterprise are using this for base rote tasks, and simply, Microsoft Power Automate can do that. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I've had people on theCube that are both Microsoft Power Automate customers and UiPath customers, and I've asked them, "Well you know, "how do you differentiate between the two?" And they've said to me, "Look, our users and personal productivity users, "they like Power Automate, "they can use it themselves, and you know, "it doesn't take a lot of, you know, support on our end." The flip side is you could do that with UiPath, but like you said, there's more of a focus now on end-to-end enterprise automation and building out those capabilities. So it's increasingly a value play, and that's going to be obviously the challenge going forward. Okay, my last one, and then I think you've got some bonus ones. Number 10, hybrid events are the new category. Look it, if I can get a thousand inbounds that are largely self-serving, I can do my own here, 'cause we're in the events business. (Eric chuckling) Here's the prediction though, and this is a trend we're seeing, the number of physical events is going to dramatically increase. That might surprise people, but most of the big giant events are going to get smaller. The exception is AWS with Reinvent, I think Snowflake's going to continue to grow. So there are examples of physical events that are growing, but generally, most of the big ones are getting smaller, and there's going to be many more smaller intimate regional events and road shows. These micro-events, they're going to be stitched together. Digital is becoming a first class citizen, so people really got to get their digital acts together, and brands are prioritizing earned media, and they're beginning to build their own news networks, going direct to their customers. And so that's a trend we see, and I, you know, we're right in the middle of it, Eric, so you know we're going to, you mentioned RSA, I think that's perhaps going to be one of those crazy ones that continues to grow. It's shrunk, and then it, you know, 'cause last year- >> Yeah, it did shrink. >> right, it was the last one before the pandemic, and then they sort of made another run at it last year. It was smaller but it was very vibrant, and I think this year's going to be huge. Global World Congress is another one, we're going to be there end of Feb. That's obviously a big big show, but in general, the brands and the technology vendors, even Oracle is going to scale down. I don't know about Salesforce. We'll see. You had a couple of bonus predictions. Quantum and maybe some others? Bring us home. >> Yeah, sure. I got a few more. I think we touched upon one, but I definitely think the data prep tools are facing extinction, unfortunately, you know, the Talons Informatica is some of those names. The problem there is that the BI tools are kind of including data prep into it already. You know, an example of that is Tableau Prep Builder, and then in addition, Advanced NLP is being worked in as well. ThoughtSpot, Intelius, both often say that as their selling point, Tableau has Ask Data, Click has Insight Bot, so you don't have to really be intelligent on data prep anymore. A regular business user can just self-query, using either the search bar, or even just speaking into what it needs, and these tools are kind of doing the data prep for it. I don't think that's a, you know, an out in left field type of prediction, but it's the time is nigh. The other one I would also state is that I think knowledge graphs are going to break through this year. Neo4j in our survey is growing in pervasion in Mindshare. So more and more people are citing it, AWS Neptune's getting its act together, and we're seeing that spending intentions are growing there. Tiger Graph is also growing in our survey sample. I just think that the time is now for knowledge graphs to break through, and if I had to do one more, I'd say real-time streaming analytics moves from the very, very rich big enterprises to downstream, to more people are actually going to be moving towards real-time streaming, again, because the data prep tools and the data pipelines have gotten easier to use, and I think the ROI on real-time streaming is obviously there. So those are three that didn't make the cut, but I thought deserved an honorable mention. >> Yeah, I'm glad you did. Several weeks ago, we did an analyst prediction roundtable, if you will, a cube session power panel with a number of data analysts and that, you know, streaming, real-time streaming was top of mind. So glad you brought that up. Eric, as always, thank you very much. I appreciate the time you put in beforehand. I know it's been crazy, because you guys are wrapping up, you know, the last quarter survey in- >> Been a nuts three weeks for us. (laughing) >> job. I love the fact that you're doing, you know, the ETS survey now, I think it's quarterly now, right? Is that right? >> Yep. >> Yep. So that's phenomenal. >> Four times a year. I'll be happy to jump on with you when we get that done. I know you were really impressed with that last time. >> It's unbelievable. This is so much data at ETR. Okay. Hey, that's a wrap. Thanks again. >> Take care Dave. Good seeing you. >> All right, many thanks to our team here, Alex Myerson as production, he manages the podcast force. Ken Schiffman as well is a critical component of our East Coast studio. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hoof is our editor-in-chief. He's at siliconangle.com. He's just a great editing for us. Thank you all. Remember all these episodes that are available as podcasts, wherever you listen, podcast is doing great. Just search "Breaking analysis podcast." Really appreciate you guys listening. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, or you can email me directly if you want to get in touch, david.vellante@siliconangle.com. That's how I got all these. I really appreciate it. I went through every single one with a yellow highlighter. It took some time, (laughing) but I appreciate it. You could DM me at dvellante, or comment on our LinkedIn post and please check out etr.ai. Its data is amazing. Best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCube Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis." (upbeat music beginning) (upbeat music ending)