(bright music) >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in San Francisco, California for AWS Summit 2022. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Two days of coverage, AWS Summit 2022 in New York city's coming up this summer, we'll be there as well. Events are back. theCUBE is back. Of course, with theCUBE virtual, CUBE hybrid, the cube.net. Check it out, a lot of content this year more than ever. A lot more cloud data, cloud native, modern applications, all happening. Got a great guest here. Jeremy Burton, CUBE alumni, CEO of Observe, Inc. in the middle of all the cloud scale, big data, observability. Jeremy, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Always great to come and talk to you on theCUBE man. It's been a few years. >> Well, you got your hands. You're in the trenches with great startup, good funding, great board, great people involved in the observability space, hot area, but also you've been a senior executive. President of Dell, EMC, 11 years ago you had a vision and you actually had an event called cloud meets big data. >> Jeremy: Yeah. >> And it's here. You predicted it 11 years ago. Look around, it's cloud meets big data. >> Yeah, the cloud thing I think was probably already a thing, but the big data thing I do claim credit for sort of catching that bus early, We were on the bus early and I think it was only inevitable. Like if you could bring the economics and the compute of cloud to big data, you could find out things you could never possibly imagine. >> So you're close to a lot of companies that we've been covering deeply. Snowflake obviously are involved. The board level, the founders, the people there, cloud, Amazon, what's going on here? You're doing a startup as the CEO at the helm, chief of Observe, Inc., which is an observability, which is to me in the center of this confluence of data, engineering, large scale integrations, data as code, integrating into applications. It's a whole another world developing, like you see with Snowflake, it means Snowflake is super cloud as we call it. So a whole nother wave is here. What's this wave we're on? How would you describe the wave? >> Well, a couple of things. People are, I think, riding more software than ever before. Why? Because they've realized that if you don't take your business online and offer a service, then you become largely irrelevant. And so you you've got a whole set of new applications. I think more applications now than any point, not just ever, but the mid nineties. I always looked at as the golden age of application development. Now, back then people were building for Windows. Well now they're building for things like, AWS is now the platform. So you've got all of that going on. And then at the same time, the side effect of these applications is they generate data and lots of data and the transactions, what you bought today or something like that. But then there's what we do, which is all the telemetry data, all the exhaust fumes. And I think people really are realizing that their differentiation is not so much their application. It's their understanding of the data. Can I understand who my best customers are? What I sell today? If people came to my website and didn't buy, then why not? Where did they drop off? All of that they want to analyze. And the answers are all in the data. The question is, can you understand it? >> In our last startup showcase, we featured data as code. One of the insights that we got out of that, and I want to get your opinion on or reaction to is, is that data used to be put into a data lake and turns into a data swamp or throw into the data warehouse, and then we'll do some queries, maybe a report once in a while. And so data, once it was done, unless it was real time, even real time was not good anymore after real time. That was the old way. Now you're seeing more and more effort to say, let's go look at the data, 'cause now machine learning is getting better. Not just train once, they're iterating. This notion of iterating and then pivoting, iterating and pivoting That's a Silicon Valley story. That's like how startups were, but now you're seeing data being treated the same way. So now you have this data concept that's now part of a new way to create more value for the apps. So this whole new cycle of data being reused and repurposed, then figure it out. >> Yeah, yeah, I'm a big fan of, years ago, just an amazing guy, Andy McAfee, at the MIT labs. I spent time with and he had this line, which still sticks to me this day, which is look, he said, I'm part of a body, which believes that everything is a matter of data. Like if you have enough data, you can answer any question. And this has going back 10 years when he was saying these kind of things and certainly, research is on the forefront. But I think starting to see that mindset of the MIT research be mainstream in enterprises. They're realizing that, yeah, it is about the data. If I can better understand my data better than competitor, then I've got an advantage. And so the question is how? What technologies and what skills do I need in my organization to allow me to do that? >> So let's talk about Observe, Inc. You're the CEO. Given you've seen the waves before, you're in the front lines of observability, which again is in the center of all this action. What's going on with the company? Give a quick minute to explain Observe for the folks who don't know what you guys do. What's the company doing? What's the funding status? What's the product status? And what's the customer status? >> Yeah, so we realized, a handful of years ago, let's say five years ago. Look, the way people are building applications is different. They're way more functional. They change every day. But in some respects there are a lot more complicated. They're distributed, microservices architectures. And when something goes wrong, the old way of troubleshooting and solving problems was not going to fly because you had so much change going into production on a daily basis. It was hard to tell like where the problem was. And so we thought, okay, it's about time. Somebody looks at the exhaust fumes from this application and all the telemetry data and helps people troubleshoot and make sense of the problems that they're seeing. So that's observability. It's actually a term that goes back to the 1960s. It was, a guy called, like everything in tech, it's a reinvention of something from years gone by, but there's a guy called Rudy Coleman in 1960s, kind of term. And the term was been able to determine the state of a system by looking at its external outputs. And so we've been going on this for the best part of four years now. It took us three years just to build the product. I think what people don't appreciate these days often is the barrier to entry in a lot of these markets is quite high. You need a lot of functionality to have something that's credible with a customer. So yeah, this last year, we did our first year selling. We've got about 40 customers now. We got great investors Sutter Hill Ventures. Mike Speiser who was really the first guy in the Snowflake and the initial investor. We're fortunate enough to have Mike on our board. And part of the Observe story is closely knit with Snowflake because all of that telemetry data, we store in there. >> So I want to pivot to that. Mike Speiser, Snowflake, Jeremy Burton, theCUBE kind of same thinking. This idea of a super cloud or what Snowflake became. >> Jeremy: Yeah. >> Snowflake is massively successful on top of AWS. And now you're seeing startups and companies build on top of Snowflake. >> Jeremy: Yeah. >> So that's become an entrepreneurial story that we think that to go big in the cloud, you can have a cloud on a cloud, like as Jerry Chen in Greylock calls it, castles in the cloud where there are moats in the cloud. So you're close to it. I know you're doing some stuff with Snowflake's. So as a startup, what's your view on building on top of say a Snowflake or an AWS, because again, you got to go where the data is. You need all the data. >> Jeremy: Yeah. >> What's your take on that? >> Having enough gray hair now. Again, in tech, I think if you want to predict the future, look at the past. And 20 years ago, 25 years ago, I was at a smaller company called Oracle. And an Oracle was the database company and their ambition was to manage all of the world's transactional data. And they built on a platform or a couple of platforms. One, Windows, and the other main one was Solaris. And so at that time, the operating system was the platform. And then that was the ecosystem that you would compete on top of. And then there were companies like SAP that built applications on top of Oracle. So then wind the clock forward 25 years, gray hairs, the platform isn't the operating system anymore. The platform is AWS, Google cloud. I probably look around if I say that in. >> It's okay. But Hyperscale. >> Yeah. >> CapEx built out. >> That is the new platform. And then Snowflake comes along. Well, their aspiration is to manage all of the, not just human generated data, but machine generated data in the world of cloud. And I think they they've done an amazing job doing for the, I'd say the big data world, what Oracle did for the relational data world way back 25 years ago. And then there are folks like us come along and of course my ambition would be, look, if we can be as successful as an SAP building on top of Snowflake, as they were on top of Oracle, then we'd probably be quite happy. >> So you're building on top of Snowflake? >> We're building on top of Snowflake a hundred percent. And I've had folks say to me, well, aren't you worried about that? Isn't that a risk? It's like, well, that's a risk. >> Are you still on the board? >> Yeah, I'm still on the board. Yeah. That's a risk I'm prepared to take. I am long on Snowflake. >> It sounds, well, you're in a good spot. Stay on the board then you'll know as going on. Okay, seriously, this is a real dynamic. >> Jeremy: It is. >> It's not a one off. >> Well, and I do believe as well that the platform that you see now with AWS, if you look at the revenues of AWS, it is an order of magnitude more than Microsoft was 25 years ago with windows. And so I believe the opportunity for folks like Snowflake and folks like Observe, it's an order magnitude more than it was for the Oracle and the SAPs of the old world. >> Yeah, and I think this is something that this next generation of entrepreneurship is the go big scenario is you got to be on a platform. >> Yeah and it's quite easy. >> Or be the platform, but it's hard. There's only like how many seats are at that table left. >> Well, value migrates up over time. So when the cloud thing got going, there were probably 10, 20, 30, rack space and there's 1,000,001 infrastructure for service, platform as a service. My old employee EMC, we had Pivotal. Pivotal was a platform as a service. You don't hear so much about it these days, but initially there's a lot of players and then it consolidates. And then to extract a real business, you got to move up, you got to add value, you got to build databases, then you got to build applications. >> It's interesting. Moving from the data center to the cloud was a dream for starters 'cause they didn't have to provision the CapEx. Now the CapEx is in the cloud. Then you build on top of that, you got Snowflake. Now you got on top of that. >> The assumption is almost that compute and storage is free. I know it's not quite free. >> Yeah, it's almost free. >> But as an application vendor, you think, well, what can I do if I assume compute and storage is free, that's the mindset you've got to get into. >> And I think the platform enablement to value. So if I'm an entrepreneur, I'm going to get a serious multiple of value in what I'm paying. Most people don't even blink at their AWS bills unless they're like massively huge. Then it's a repatriation question or whatever discount question. But for most startups or any growing company, the Amazon bill should be a small factor. >> Yeah, a lot of people ask me like, look, you're building on Snowflake. You're going to be paying their money. How does that work with your business model? If you're paying them money, do you have a viable business? And it's like, well, okay. We could build a database as well in Observe, but then I've got half the development team working on something that will never be as good as Snowflake. And so we made the call early on that, no, we want to innovate above the database. Snowflake are doing a great job of innovating on the database and the same is true with something like Amazon, like Snowflake could have built their own cloud and their own platform, but they didn't. >> Yeah and what's interesting is that Dave Vellante and I have been pointing this out and he's obviously more on Snowflake. I've been looking at Databricks and the same dynamics happening. The proof is the ecosystem. >> Yeah. >> If you look at Snowflake's ecosystem right now and Databricks, it's exploding. The shows are selling out. This floor space is booked. That's the old days at VMware. The old days at AWS. >> One and for Snowflake and any platform provider, it's a beautiful thing because we build on Snowflake and we pay their money. They don't have to sell to us. And we do a lot of the support. And so the economics work out really, really well if you're a platform provider and you've got a lot of ecosystems. >> And then also you get a trajectory of economies of scale with the institutional knowledge of Snowflake, integrations, new products, you're scaling and step function with them. >> Yeah, we manage 10 petabytes of data right now. When I arrived at EMC in 2010, we had one petabyte customer. And so at Observe, we've been only selling the product for a year. We have 10 petabytes of data under management. And so being able to rely on a platform that can manage that is invaluable. >> Well, Jeremy, great conversation. Thanks for sharing your insights on the industry. We got a couple minutes left, put a plug in for Observe. What do you guys do? You got some good funding, great partners. I don't know if you can talk about your POC customers, but you got a lot of high ends folks that are working with you. You get in traction. >> Yeah >> Scales around the corner sounds like. Is that where you at? Pre-scale? >> We've got a big announcement coming up in two or three weeks. We've got new funding, which is always great. The product is really, really close. I think, as a startup, you always strive for market fit, at which point can you just start hiring salespeople and the revenue keeps going. We're getting pretty close to that right now. We've got about 40 SaaS companies that run on the platform. They're almost all AWS Kubernetes, which is our sweet spot to begin with, but we're starting to get some really interesting enterprise type customers. We're F5 networks. We're POC in right now with Capital One. We've got some interesting news around Capital One coming up. I can't share too much, but it's going to be exciting. And like I said, Sutter Hill continue to stick. >> And I think Capital One's a big Snowflake customer as well, right? >> They were early and one of the things that attracted me to Capital One was they were very, very good with Snowflake early on and they put Snowflake in a position in the bank where they thought that snowflake could be successful. And today that is one of Snowflake's biggest accounts. >> Capital One, very innovative cloud. Obviously, AWS customer and very innovative. certainly in the CISO and CIO. On another point on where you're at. So you're pre-scale meaning you're about to scale. >> Jeremy: Right. >> So you got POCs. What's that trajectory look like? And you see around the corner, what's going on? What's around the corner that you're going to hit the straight and narrow and gas it fast? >> Yeah, the key thing for us is we got to get the product right. The nice thing about having a guy like Mike Speiser on the board is he doesn't obsess about revenue at this stage. His questions at the board are always about like, is the product right? Is the product right? Have you got the product right? 'Cause we know when the product's right, we can then scale the sales team and the revenue will take care of itself. So right now all the attention is on the product. This year, the exciting thing is we're adding all the tracing visualizations. So people will be able to the kind of things that back in the day you could do with the New Relics and AppDynamics, the last generation of APM tools. You're going to be able to do that within Observe. And we've already got the logs and the metrics capability in there. So for us this year is a big one 'cause we complete the trifecta, the logs. >> What's the secret sauce of observe if you put it into a sentence, what's the secret sauce? >> I think, an amazing founding engineering team, number one. At the end of the day, you have to build an amazing product and you have to solve a problem in a different way and we've got great long term investors. And the biggest thing our investors give is, actually it's not just money, it gives us time to get the product right. Because if we get the product right, then we can get the growth. >> Got it. Final question while I got you here. You've been on the enterprise business for a long time. What's the buyer landscape out there? You got people doing POCs, Capital One scale. So we know that goes on. What's the appetite at the buyer side for startups and what are their requirements that you're seeing? Obviously, we're seeing people go in and dip into the startup pool because new ways to refactor their business, restructure. So a lot of happening in cloud. What's the criteria? How are enterprises engaging in with startups? >> Yeah, enterprises, they know they've got to spend money transforming the business. I almost feel like my old Dell or EMC self there, but what we were saying five years ago is happening. Everybody needs to figure out a way to take their business to this digital world. Everybody has to do it. So the nice thing from a startup standpoint is they know at times they need to risk or take a bet on new technology in order to help them do that. So I think you've got buyers that A, have money, B, are prepared to take risks, and it's a race against time to get their offerings in this new digital footprint. >> Final, final question. What's the state of AWS? Where do you see them going next? Obviously, they're continuing to be successful. How does cloud 3.0? Or they always say it's day one, but it's maybe more like day 10, but what's next for AWS? Where do they go from here? Obviously, they're doing well and they're getting bigger and bigger. >> Yeah, it's an amazing story. We are on AWS as well. And so I think if they keep nurturing the builders and the ecosystem, then that is their superpower. They have an early leads. And if you look at where, maybe the likes of Microsoft lost the plot in the late nineties, it was they stopped really caring about developers and the folks who are building on top of their ecosystem. In fact, they started buying up their ecosystem and competing with people in their ecosystem. And I see with AWS, they have an amazing head start. And if they did more, if they do more than that, that's what's going to keep this juggernaut rolling for many years to come. >> They got the Silicon and they got the Stack developing. Jeremy Burton inside theCUBE, great resource for commentary, but also founding with the CEO of a company called Observe, Inc. In the middle of all the action and the board of Snowflake as well. Great startup. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Always a pleasure. >> Live from San Francisco's theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. Stay with us. More coverage from San Francisco, California after the short break. (soft music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE in ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Despite the more than $100 billion spent each year fighting Cyber-crime. When we do an end-of-the year look back and ask "How did we do?" The answer is invariably the same, "Worse than last year." Pre pandemic, the picture was disheartening, but since March of 2020 the situation has only worsened as cyber-criminals have become increasingly sophisticated, better funded and more brazen. SecOps pros continue to fight, but unlike conventional wars, this one has no end. Now the flip side of course, is that markets continue to value cybersecurity firms at significant premiums. Because this huge market will continue to grow by double digits for the foreseeable future. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we look at the state of cybersecurity in 2021 and beyond. We'll update you with the latest survey data from enterprise technology research and share the fundamentals that have investors piling into the security space like never before. Let's start with the customer view. Cybersecurity remains the number one priority for CIOs and CSOs. This latest ETR survey, once again asked IT buyers to rank their top priorities for the next 12 months. Now the last three polling period dating back to last March. Cybersecurity has outranked every top spending category, including cloud, data analytics, productivity software, networking, AI, and automation or RPA. Now this shouldn't surprise anybody, but it underscores the challenges that organizations face. Not only are they in the midst of a non-optional digital transformation, but they have to also fund a cyber war that has no ceasefires, no truces, and no exit path. Now there's much more going on in cybersecurity than ransomware, but certainly that has the attention of executives. And it's becoming more and more lucrative for attackers. Here's a snapshot of some of the more well-documented attacks this decade many which have occurred in very recent months. CNA Financial, they got hit earlier this year and paid a $40 million ransom. The Ireland Health Service also got hit this year and refused to pay the ransom, but it's estimated that the cost to recover and the damage to the organization exceeded half a billion dollars. The request was for a $20 million ransom. The JBS meat company hack, they paid $11 million. CWT travel paid $5 million. The disruption from the Colonial Pipeline company, was widely reported they paid more than $4 million, as the Brenntag, the chemical company. The NBA got hit. Computer makers, Quanta and Acer also. More than 2,000 random attacks were reported to the FBI in the first seven months of 2021. Up more than 60% from 2020. Now, as I've said many times, you don't have to be a genius to be a ransomware as today. Anyone can go on the dark web, tap into ransomware as a service. Attackers, they have insidious names like darkside, evil, the cobalt, crime gang, wizard spider, the Lazarus gang, and numerous others. Criminals they have negotiation services is most typically the attackers, they'll demand a specific amount of money but they're willing to compromise in an exchange of cryptocurrency for decryption keys. And as mentioned, it's not just ransomware supply chain attacks like the solar winds hack hit organizations within the U.S government and companies like Mimecast this year. Now, while these attacks often do end up in a ransom situation. The attackers sometimes find it more lucrative to live off the land and stealth fashion and ex filtrates sensitive data that can be sold or in the case of many financial institution attacks they'll steal information from say a chief investment officer that signals an upcoming trading strategy and then the attackers will front run that trade in the stock market. Now, of course phishing, remains one of the most prominent threats. Only escalated by the work from home trend as users bring their own devices and of course home networks are less secure. So it's bad, worse than ever before. But you know, if there's a problem, entrepreneurs and investors, they're going to be there to solve it. So here's a LinkedIn post from one of the top investors in the business, Mike Speiser. He was a founding investor in Snowflake. He helped get pure storage to escape velocity and many, many other successes. This hit my LinkedIn feed the other day, his company Sutter Hill Ventures is co-leading a 1.3 Series D on an $8.3 billion valuation. They're putting in over $200 million. Now Lacework is a threat detection software company that looks at security as a data problem and they monitor exposures across clouds. So very timely. So watch that company. They're going to soar. Now the right hand chart shows venture investments in cybersecurity over the past several years. You can see it exploded in 2019 to $7.6 billion. And people thought the market was peaking at that time, if you recall. But then investments rose a little bit to $7.8 billion in 2020 right in the middle of lockdown. And then the hybrid work, the cloud, the new normal thesis kicked in big time. It's in full gear this year. You can see nearly $12 billion invested in cybersecurity in the first half of 2021 alone. So the money keeps coming in as the problem gets worse and the market gets more crowded. Now we'd like to show this slide from Optiv, it's their security taxonomy. It'll make your eyes cross. It's so packed with companies in different sectors. We'll put a link in our posts, so you can stare at this. We've used this truck before. It's pretty good. It's comprehensive and it's worth spending some time to see what that landscape looks like. But now let's reduce this down a bit and bring in some of the ETR data. This is survey data from October that shows net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share or pervasiveness in the dataset on the horizontal axis. That's a measure of mentioned share if you will. Now this is just isolated on the information security sector within the ETR taxonomies. No filters in terms of the number of responses. So it's every company that ETR picks up in cybersecurity from its buyer surveys. Now companies above that red line, we consider them to have a highly elevated spending momentum for their products and services. And you can see, there are a lot of companies that are in this map first of all, and several above that magic mark. So you can see the momentum of Microsoft and Palo Alto. That's most impressive because of their size, their pervasiveness in the study, Cisco and Splunk are also quite prominent. They don't have as much spending momentum, but they're pretty respectable. And you can see the companies that have been real movers in this market that we've been reporting on for a while. Okta, CrowdStrike, Zscaler, CyberArk, SailPoint, Authzero, all companies that we've extensively covered in previous breaking analysis episodes as the up and comers. And isn't it interesting that Datadog is now showing up in the vertical axis. You see that in the left-hand side up high, they're becoming more and more competitive to Splunk in this space as an alternative and lines are blurring between observability, log analytics, security, and as we previously reported even backup and recovery. But now let's simplify this picture a bit more and filter down a little bit further. This chart shows the same X, Y view. Same data construct and framework, but we required more than a hundred responses to hit the chart. So the companies, they have to have a notable market presence in the ETR survey. It's perhaps a bit less crowded, but still very packed. Isn't it? You can see firms that are less prominent in the space like Datadog fell off. The big companies we mentioned, obviously still prominent Microsoft, Palo Alto, Cisco and Splunk and then those with real momentum, they stand out a little bit. There's somewhat smaller, but they're gaining traction in the market. As we felt they would Okta and Auth zero, which Okta acquired as we reported on earlier this year, both showing strength as our CrowdStrike, Zscaler, CyberArk, which does identity and competition with Okta and SentinelOne, which went public mid this year. The company SentinelOne uses AI to do threat detection and has been doing quite well. SalePoint and Proofpoint are right on that red elevated line and then there's a big pack in the middle. Look, this is not an easy market to track. It's virtually every company plays in security. Look, AWS says some of the most advanced security in the business but they're not in the chart specifically, but you see Microsoft is. Because much of AWS security is built into services. Amazon customers heavily rely on the Amazon ecosystem which is in the Amazon marketplace for security products. And often they associate their security spend with those partners and not necessarily Amazon. And you'll see networking companies you see right there, like Juniper and the bottom there and in the ETR data set and the players like VMware in the middle of the pack. They've been really acquisitive for example, with carbon black. And the, of course, you've got a lot of legacy players like McAfee and RSA and IBM. Look, virtually every company has a security story and that will only become more common in the coming years. Now here's another look at the ETR data it's in the raw form, but it'll give you a sense of two things; One is how the data from the previous chart is plotted. And two, it gives you a time series of the data. So the data lists the top companies in the ETR data sets sorted by the October net score in the right most column. Again, that measures spending momentum. So to make the cut here, you had to have more than a hundred mentions which is shown on the left-hand side of the chart that shared N, IE that's shared accounts in the dataset. And you can track the data from last October, July of this year and the most recent October, 2021 survey. So we, drew that red line just about at the 40% net score market coincidentally, there are 10 companies that are over that figure over that bar. We sometimes call out the four star companies. We give four stars to those companies that both are in the top 10 and spending momentum and the top in prominence are shared N in the dataset. So some of these 10 would fit into that profile by that methodology, specifically, Microsoft, Okta, CrowdStrike, and Palo Alto networks. They would be the four star companies. Now a couple of other things to point out here, DDoS attacks, they're still relevant, and they're real threat. So a company like CloudFlare which is just above that red line they play in that space. Now we've also shaded the companies in the fat middle. A lot of these companies like Cisco and Splunk for example, they're major players in the security space with very strong offerings and customer affinity. We sometimes give them two stars. So this is what makes this market so interesting. It's not like the high end discourage market where literally every vendor in the Gartner magic quadrant is up in the right, okay. And there's only five or four or five, six vendors there. This market is diverse with many, many segments and sub segments, and it's such a vital space. And there's so many holes to fill with an ever changing threat landscape as we've seen in the last two years. So this is in part which makes it such a good market for investors. There's a lot of room for growth and not just from stealing market share. That's certainly an opportunity there, but things like cloud, multi-cloud, shifting end points, the edge ,and so forth make this space really ripe for investments. And to underscore this, we put together this little chart of some of the pure play security firms to see how their stock performance has done recently. So you can see that here, you know, it's a little hard to read, but it's not hard to see that Okta, CrowdStrike, Zscaler on the left have been big movers. These charts where possible all show a cross here, starting at the lockdown last year. The only exception is SentinelOne which IPO mid this year. So that's the point March, 2020 when the whole world changed and security priorities really started to shift to accommodate the work from home. But it's quite obvious that since the pandemic, these six companies have been on a tear for the fundamental reason that hybrid work has created a shift in spending priorities for CSOs. No longer are organizations just spending on hardening a perimeter, that perimeter has been blown away. The network is flattening. Work is what you do, it's no longer a place. As such threats are on the rise and cloud, endpoint security, identity access tools there become increasingly vital and the vendors who provide them are on the rise. So it's no surprise that the players that we've listed here which play quite prominently in those markets are all on fire. So now in summary, I want to stress that while the picture is sometimes discouraging. The entire world is becoming more and more tuned in to the cyber threat. And that's a good thing. Money is pouring in. Look, technology got us into this problem and technology is a defensive weapon that will help us continue this fight. But it's going to take more than technology. And I want to share something. We get dozens and dozens of in bounds this time of the year because we do an annual predictions posts. So folks and they want to help us out. So now most of the in bounds and the predictions that we get, they're just kind of observations or frankly, non predictions that can't really be measured as like where you right, or where you're wrong. So for the most part I like predictions that are binary. For example, last December we predicted their IT spending in 2021 would rebound and grow at 4% relative to 2020. Well, it did rebound but that prediction really wasn't as accurate as I'd like. It was frankly wrong. We think it's actually the market's going to actually grow. Spending's going to grow more like 7% this year. Not to worry plenty of our predictions came true, but we'll leave that for another day. Anyway, I got an email from Dean Fisk of Fisk partners. It's a PR firm representing an individual named Lyndon Brown chief of strategy officer of Pondurance. Pondurance is a security consultancy. And the email had the standard, Hey, in case you're working on a predictions post this year end, blah, blah, blah. But instead of sharing with me, a bunch of non predictions, the notes said here's some trends in cybersecurity that might be worth thinking about. And there were a few predictions sprinkled in there, but I wanted to call it a couple of the comments from Linden Brown, whom I don't know, I never met the guy, but I really thought his trends were spot on. The first was a stat I'll share that the United Nations report cyber crime is up 600% due to the pandemic. If as if I couldn't feel worse already. His first point though was that the hybrid workplace will be the new frontier for cyber. Yes, we totally agree. There are permanent shifts taking place. And we actually predicted that last year, but he further cited that many companies went from zero to full digital transformation overnight and many are still on that journey. And his point is that hybrid work is going to require a complete overhaul of how we think about security. We think this is very true. Now the other point that stood out is that governments are going to crack down on this behavior. And we've seen this where criminals have had their critical infrastructure dismantled by governments. No doubt the U.S government has the capabilities to do so. And it is very much focused on this issue. But it's tricky as Robert Gates, who was the former defense secretary, told me a few years back in theCUBE. He said, well, we have the best offense. We also have the most to lose. So we have to be very careful, but Linden's key point was you are going to see a much more forward and aggressive public policy and new laws that give crime fighters more latitude . Again, it's tricky kind of like the Patriot act was tricky but it's coming. Now, another call-out from Linden shares his assertion that natural disasters will bring increased cyber risk. And I thought this was a really astute point because natural disasters they're on the rise. And when there's chaos, there's cash opportunities for criminals. And I'll add to this that the supply chain risk is far from over. This is going to be continuing theme this coming year and beyond. And one of the things that Linden Brown said in his note to me is essentially you can't take humans out of the equation. Automation alone can't solve the problem, but some companies operate as though they can. Just as bad human behavior, can tramp good security, Good human education and behavior is going to be a key weapon in this endless war. Now the last point is we're going to see continued escalation government crackdowns are going to bring retaliation and to Gates' point. The U.S has a lot at stake. So expect insurance premiums are going to go through the roof. That's assuming you can even get cyber insurance. And so we got to hope for the best, but for sure, we have to plan for the worst because it's coming. Deploy technology aggressively but people in process will ultimately be the other ingredients that allow us to live to battle for another day. Okay. That's a wrap for today. Remember these episodes they're all available as podcasts, wherever you listen just search "breaking analysis" podcast. Check out ETR his website at ETR.plus. We also publish a full report every week on Wikibond.com and siliconangle.com. You can get in touch. Email me @david.volante@tsiliconangle.com or you can DM me @dvellante. Comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Have a great week. everybody stay safe, be well. And we'll see you next time. (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE here in our Palo Alto studio. We got a great conversation with the CEO of Lacework, David Hatfield. Who's in on theCUBE remote. David great to see you guys, a security platform at Lacework, you're at the helm as CEO. Welcome to theCUBE conversation. >> Thank you, John. Great to see you congrats to you and the team and all the success. I think what you guys are doing is really important so happy to be part of it. >> Great to have you in the community and you guys are doing great work. I know about Lacework I've done some due diligence on you guys. I love your business model, but for the folks who don't know what you guys do, take a minute to explain who is Lacework? What do you guys do? What's your positioning? And what's your focus? >> Yeah, well, we're a modern data security platform for the cloud. And so I think data science meets cloud security ultimately. The company has been around since 2015. We received one of the largest financing rounds that we're aware of I think in history in security business, $525 million in January. Led by Sutter Hill Ventures which many people may know about they founded PureStorage with the notion that we're going to go fundamentally change and revamp the ownership model for a high speed data storage using flash versus using spinning disc drives. I spent eight years with that company. Love with what we built there. Then Mike Speiser considered an investment in a company called Snowflake computing. I think you're aware of what Snowflake does which is bringing data warehousing into the cloud. And the third big investment that Sutter Hill made is really to help disrupt security, and that's in Lacework. So north of a billion dollar valuation a 300% year over year growth and have a ton of momentum. So at the core of what we do, it's really trying to merge, when we look at we look at security as a data problem, security and compliance the data problem. And when you apply that to the cloud, it's a massive data problem. you literally have trillions of data points across shared infrastructure that we need to be able to ingest and capture and then you need to be able to process efficiently and provide context back to the end-user. And so we approached it very differently than how legacy approaches have been in place, you know largely rules-based engines that are written to be able to try and stop the bad guys. And they miss a lot of things. And so our data-driven approach that we patented is called a polygraph. It's a, it's a security architecture and there are three primary benefits. It does a lot of things, but the three things that we think are most profound first is it eliminates the need for, you know dozens of point solutions. I was shocked when I, you know kind of learned about security. I was at Symantec back in the day. And just to see how fragmented this market is, it's one of the biggest markets in tech. $124 billion in annual spend growing at, to $300 billion in the next three years. And it's massively fragmented. And the average number of point solutions that customers have to deal with is dozens. Like literally 75 is the average number. And so we wanted to take a platform approach to solve this problem where the larger the attack surface that you put in the more data that you put into our machine learning algorithms the smarter it gets and the higher, the efficacy. So eliminating point solutions is his value proposition one. Point two is that we have to be 10 X better than everybody else in the business. Otherwise the merchant companies don't get a breakout and become long and during companies. And so there's a number of different dimensions. The first dimension that I think is probably the most important is efficacy, you know in anomaly detection or in, you know threat detection where you're trying to identify what risks we have in the business. It's, it's generally a very noisy activity. And so rules-based approaches on average will produce a hundred alerts to our one or two. Those, the signal to noise ratio, is, is, you know is a massive a 100x, but call it 10x a reduction. And so we're actually delivering the needle versus the haystack for security administrators and dev developers to actually solve the problem. So it's 10x, higher efficacy it's 10x faster to be able to resolve the problems. And obviously the ROI is, is a no-brainer because you're eliminating all these points which is in having to manage it. And the third, and probably the thing that I'm most excited about what we're doing and what our customers are already realizing is that we're transforming security and compliance teams from kind of compliance into business enablers. when you automate all these processes and you build it into, you know the CICD platforms for the developers you actually enable the developers to write code to differentiate their business, you know to create new customer experiences to get competitive advantage and drive revenue for their businesses. And, and you know that's not what security has done up to this point. We oftentimes, they're the ones we're the ones having to say, no, you know we're slow down or it's too risky, etc. But when you automate that and you increase the efficacy you can enable the developers to do their thing. And it allows the CSOs and allows the security professionals to up level their responsibility into selling and driving revenue. And that is increasingly going to become more and more important for supply chains and partners of these cloud native businesses of how secure am I working with you, etc. And so we think that that transformation of the role of security is going to be as, as meaningful as the technology that we're providing the business. So we're super excited about it. >> I could tell you have so much going on this investment team Sutter Hill, you mentioned big time players huge success track record. Just saw them written up in the wall street journal as one of the best venture capital firms and returns. It's just that the bets are all coming home, but their bet strategy is simple. Disrupting the market that's growing and changing PureStorage, you mentioned company you've worked for, you know people were saying, oh, they'll never get escape velocity. They disrupted an existing, boring storage market changed the game there, security, right for change. A lot of tools, a lot of people have buying tools off the shelf, you know and everyone fighting for the platform. That seems to be the conversation. So I have to ask you, you guys want to be the player that that platform you are, that platform what's different in this platform where everyone's trying to be a security platform, what's makes you different. >> Yeah. So I mean, I think the platform wars are, are clearly, upon us, you know I think what's different about our approach is that we were built on the cloud, for the cloud so we're a cloud native business that, you know runs our business on AWS and everything that we do. We don't have hardware, we don't own data centers. we don't have any of the legacy elements that are there. we use software run on the cloud to enable this. So that's point number one point number two is we did the hard work of mapping the data elements that are out there and adjusting them in and then have this polygraph, you know behavioral anomaly detection, that is it can be applied to today. It's being applied to vulnerability and discovery management and containers and Kubernetes. But over time we believe it extends very naturally to a larger part of the attack server. So we don't have to rewrite the data engine to develop solutions across broader attack services. We already have that, you know so I think our time to develop and innovate will be profound. And I think the third thing that we're seeing companies do and largely the legacy bigger companies is that they're just acquiring their way there. And, it's very, very difficult to acquire 8 to 10 to 20, 30 companies, 30 different CTOs 30 different code bases and try and integrate them to provide a delightful customer experience. And, the parallels, you know in the storage business are, are are pretty similar actually, Dell bought EMC, EMC bought a hundred companies. And, we went after a platform approach to be able to go attack them with a unified file system in a in a unified customer experience that was native for the media that we're working with. We're doing the same playbook here, you know which is you have to have the hard work of the foundation elements in place to be cloud native to deliver great outcomes, great efficacy and and a really great customer experience. So when we get head to head with any of these points coming out and trying to solve something for containers or Kubernetes, or just vulnerability discovery and management, etc, or we're competing with the legacy companies that have, a hodgepodge of acquisitions that they're trying to pull together we went North of 95% of the time. our POC win rates are phenomenal better than anything I've ever seen. We had a pretty good one to appear too. And the, the product and the experience and the efficacy kind of stand on their own once we're in those fights. So part of why we enjoy working with AWS and are really focused on building the partnership together is that it creates awareness of what could be and what possibilities all we want is a shot. And, our approach is such that you can be up and running in minutes, you know and every single one of our customers does a POC. So we'll stand behind our technology as our real differentiator compared to anybody else that's out there. >> Great. You guys had great traction going on with the company certainly saw the investment news that you mentioned earlier at the top. Why did you come on as CEO? And when did you come on and join the team? And what was the reason? What, what, what attracted you to join as the CEO of Lacework? >> Well, I've been involved in the company for since the beginning actually I invested in the early rounds participated on the board and I've always bought into this. The thesis that security is fundamentally a data problem. And if we can get the data problem and the data processing right, you know you can fundamentally change the industry but you need to have a major inflection. And that inflection is people moving to the cloud. And we all have seen it during the pandemic. things are accelerating. AWS just did their earnings yesterday. I think they increased their top-line guidance from 46 billion to 56 billion this year. I mean, it's a machine that is continuing to move forward. They have 30% market share. Azure's investing at 20% GCP still investing people are moving their businesses online aggressively. And as they shift to the cloud the rules-based approach just doesn't work. It doesn't scale. And so a new approach needs to be done. And so by being cloud native and best of breed and solving the thorny problem of this data processing problem first, you know it gives us an opportunity to use that to then extend and build a business, you know at an enduring level over the next 10 to 20 years. And that's Sutter's model, that's their playbook. They don't invest in 400 companies and kind of spray and pray, which is what most venture funds do. And I love them. They're great. And we appreciate the investment in tech, but Sutter's focus is find a really big market find a catalyst for change. In our case, it's moving to the cloud and then build a modern approach. that is 10x better in every dimension. And that attracted to me. I mean, it's, it's a, it's one of the biggest markets in tech and it's one of the most important things that we can do is a digital business is to ensure that we're secure and we're safe and the threats are becoming much more skilled much more deliberate, much better funded. And so the importance for us to ensure that company's security is really tight is, is increasingly critical. So the combination of those factors, and then as I dove back into it and talked to a bunch of customers and talk to partners and seeing the outcomes and enthusiasm that they had and the, the team is phenomenal. And so talking to them, and I just kind of got energized by the opportunity to go build a really important company that really delivers great outcomes. So I'm having a ball great to be back into it. >> Yeah. It's great to have leadership that has experienced that you have and go to the next level because this is classic next level. When you talk about Amazon's earnings and cloud scale and hybrid and edge right around the corner at scale as well. So you start to see that transformation really hit the tipping point, which is changing the landscape on the developer side, which I think is super valuable. I think you hit that. You mentioned core problem. You guys look at that through the lens of data problem. How does this trend of everything going hybrid and soon to be, you know edge core to edge impact your businesses of tailwind? How do you see you capturing that next level of scale from a business perspective for lease work? >> Well, I think that the trend, you know from core to edge, you know, hybrid and, you know ultimately cloud a hundred percent, there we've started with the cloud native businesses. Like, we've been focusing on those companies that are already there, you know and so now we're we just had finished a phenomenal record-breaking Q1 and multiple seven figure deals, you know with very complex global environments where they do have a hybrid environment and they are leveraging the edge. And we're perfect for that. I mean, as you think about what we deliver in its most simplistic context, you know we're effectively delivering a security solution from the container to control plane, right. You know we want to be able to have a granular understanding of operated trillions of data points coming in and those can be collected in the core. They can be collected on-prem. They can be collected in the cloud. Ultimately they need to be collected and then contextualized so, you know and this is where our behavioral polygraph technology transitions data into information that's useful via the polygraph. And so we think that, the complexity that's added with environments that are hybrid environments that are leveraging the edge environments that are leveraging the cloud native all need a control plane to run across that to deliver efficacy, you know, for our customers. And, we work with, you know AWS has their own security tools. Azure has some security tools UCPs security tools, but ultimately, our, our challenge and opportunity is to be best of breed to deliver incremental value on top of that and that horizontal value across it. so customers have choice but they know that their security posture is, is, is secure. And so we, we see it as a tailwind for our businesses as we go forward. >> I always said the companies that have the horizontal scalability with cloud and then have that vertical AI kind of vibe where you can get in the context of the data is there to win it all. And I think that you guys have a great solution potentially there. I want to get more information if you don't mind double clicking on that with me, this is kind of a different take on cloud security because you've got the scalability, which gives you the observation space. And then you got to get the context to get the right patterns or whatever magic you guys have in the, in the secret sauce. But you doing that on top of massive exponential velocity. >> Yeah. >> Where's that secret sauce? Is it in the compute? Is it in the software? What's different about what you guys have in security to give us a- >> It's all in the, it's all in the software. Ultimately, it's the intelligence of how you capture it how you ingest it, how you, you process it but then ultimately how you, how you contextualize it and then how you apply it to different problems. and so the attack surface area and security is a very broad, that's why there's so many point solutions that are out there. And so the breadth of solutions, you know we just want to continue to add solutions and capabilities on top of this polygraph security architecture that allows for the same kind of simple experience, the same kind of 10x value proposition, but, but, but wider. And so we can eliminate more and more of those of those point solutions. So, our, our thinking on it is that, you know we can participate once we have a customer the land and expand motion of what we have. We want to make it really really frictionless for customers to try our technology. And so that's why we do POC. That's why it only takes a couple of minutes and you can do it for just Kubernetes or just containers or just vulnerability discovery and managed like wherever your specific pain point is. We want to help identify what that is, you know give you a chance to try it. And then once we prove ourselves it's very easy to extend that across the board. So we get natural growth in velocity from people moving to cloud and just, you know more usage of, of compute and storage and sort of etc, but breadth of actually the security or posture or a tax service that they have as well. So, you know so I think we have an opportunity to benefit from, from both the depth and the breadth, you know but the value that we're delivering is ultimately the software that we're running on top of the infrastructure. And you mentioned observability, there's a number of companies that are leveraging the data and insights collected in different ways to converge security and observability over time. And, we see that, you know that ultimately there's a very very big security company that needs to be built. That really is best of breed, but the data and the insights that we're providing to our primary customer, which is really DevOps. I mean, it's really the development communities and the builders or who we're changing security for and enabling, in addition to the security teams, you know we think that we're going to continue to drive software that adds value on that data set and it can be applied to multiple problems in the future. So today security is a massive market. We're going to focus there, but it does. It does extend pretty naturally to other markets >> It's a hot market security. Everyone needs to have the latest and greatest and also has to be effective. I got to ask you specifically around startup transition to a rapidly growing company to now you're going to the next level where you're starting to having to get into some serious, big complex enterprise go to market sales motions. So what's in it for the customer. What's the, what's the pain point? What's the customer orientation. What do you marketing into as a solution? Is it the developer? Is it the CSO? Is it the CXO, what's in it for the enterprise? Why Lacework, why are they engaging? You guys get record numbers. What's the, what's in it for them. What's the, if I'm the customer what's in it for me? >> Ultimately efficacy, which is your security posture is it goes up significantly, simplicity, which is makes it easier for you to do your other jobs, you know and I'll have to look for those needles in a haystack and ROI, you know which is it's just compelling, and much, much more efficient than what, what you're doing today. So that that's a pretty universal value proposition and applies to cloud native businesses that are high growth that applies to government agencies. It applies to a large complex enterprises. We have a wonderful kind of go to market motion right now. I think Andy Byron and the team who've been here have really done a wonderful job of really making the customer buying experience and the journey really efficient, you know and help them quantify the impact and the risks and then deliver value. And I think, that that applies in sort of the commercial mid-market and cloud native space. And like I mentioned, we had, a number of deals in the quarter that were seven figure deals, you know in very complex organizations with massive demands. And, you know it ultimately selling is a team sport and, you know and still having the process and the rigor, that's there fine tuning that to make sure you have the people and the partnerships, you know, that deliver solutions in the way that customers want to buy them and then ultimately deliver a value proposition that is just unquestionably better. And I think we have all of those elements, you know we'll be entering the, the large enterprise very aggressively in the quarters to come. I that's where I've come from, you know running a multi-tool, you know, kind of go to market engines where you've got mid-market commercial enterprise large enterprise government across all geographies is, is really fun to expand. And, we're we're hiring as fast as we can maintain quality, you know? And so we're out of that startup phase now and entering into real scale. And, I think that, you know in the AWS marketplace I think we're the number one startup vendor. If I, if I got my facts, right. for, for private offers, we're one of the top security players and top 50 ISBs in the marketplace overall. And so in order for us to get the motion we need to make sure that we're delivering our value in the context of how companies want to buy it. And people want to use AWS credits, you know to apply to their solutions. And so it's really important for us to make that frictionless buying experience occur. And so we're excited about it. I think we've got a really nice start and it's the fun part of building companies, which is how do you attune things to make sure you're making it really really easy for the market to absorb your technology. And then once you're there, delight the hell out of them and just make sure that, that there's that they're excited in our, our net retention rates are the best I've seen in the marketplace. Our net promoter scores, you know, are in the high fifties low sixties, which, which is fantastic in this space. I think it's best in class by order of magnitude some players, big SIM players that are out there, you know have a customer in net promoter score of four. You know that means 96% of the people or 96 boats that says they wouldn't recommend the solution to their, to their peers. So, at pure, we've got this at scale. So from 70 to, in the, in the low eighties I think we have the opportunity to do the same thing here. So, combination of tailoring the motion that we have making it really easy for the buyer to buy what they want with whom they want from whom they want, you know and then just spreading a value proposition. That is a no brainer is, is I think the secret recipe >> If anything, it's interesting, you know you're so much experience in the enterprise and tech with cloud native you're basically laying out the success formula, which is if you have a value proposition you should be able to get it in quickly. You don't need the top down. win everything you can have a value proposition that can be enabled for usage and then grow rapidly when it's successful and that's cloud, that's the cloud business model. So it's not so much about organic versus this. It's really what the preferred motion is. >> It's speed, and I think developers in particular it's why the cloud happened, right? I.T wasn't delivering services in, in the speed and the efficacy that, that, that the developers wanted. And so in order to appeal to the developer community you need to deliver something that's frictionless and easy and fits into JIRA and fits into their workflow processes and speaks their language. And so we built our platform and our solutions for builders because that's where the money is. That's where the pain point is and that's and they want to build secure code. They just don't want to be told no. And so, we want to automate that process and make code secure and do that, you know in the build phase and then do it in the runtime. And then across the CICD pipeline we want to continuously be adding value across that. And, and the developers, candidly when pure bought the solution, many years ago and I introduced him to the company, it was it was the general manager of our software business unit that bought it not the security team. And I think that's a trend that is continuing that we're going to focus on. >> A lot of people realize that security and compliance and automation kind of all go together where you don't want to disrupt developers to kind of engineer something just to do an integration, for instance. So there's a real business model impact that you're hitting on here. That's not just a technical solution. It's really how the business is operating. And I think that to me is super interesting use case. What's your reaction to that? Do you see this as a, as a- >> No it's, that's that's that third part that I was talking about, you know which is that's most exciting is that, you know people are calling shift left, right. so moving, you know security into the development pipeline as it's happening and in integrating security architects as value added into the development organizations themselves and leveraging automated machine learning tools like ours to be able to simplify and automate the process versus slowing it down. So we think that shift left is, is super exciting and, and will continue. And we actually think we're the leaders in that space. We want to continue to be the leaders in that. >> Congratulations, great insight. Awesome to have you on and to hear from your experience and also the great venture that your scaling up and to the next level. Lacework, David thanks for coming on, but I'll give you the last minute to close us out. Give us a quick plug for the company vitals, what you're working on now, what you're looking for, you're obviously hiring give a quick plug for Lacework. What you, what are you working on? >> So, number one, we love our partnership with AWS. And so we're going to continue to invest, invest there. Two the businesses growing North of 300% year over year. That means that we've got record breaking growth and lots of hiring. So we're hiring across all functions. And three give us an opportunity. I, I think that, you know, you can fundamentally we want to be the bar of what you define all other security companies and all the technology companies. So it's a high bar. We want to make it frictionless, frictionless to try give us a shot, give us some feedback. And I'm grateful and privileged to be part of this, this wonderful team. So look forward to spending more time with you, John, in the future. >> Man, looking forward to a lot lots of talk about David Hatfield CEO of Lacework great company scaling up again. Another success story in cloud, cloud native as Po, COVID comes to a close, if you will for this phase and people get back to real life. The scale of cloud is going to be leading it and a new technology is going to be powering it. This is theCube conversation. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (soft music playing) (music fades)