(upbeat music) >> Everybody welcome back to theCUBE, continuous coverage of AWS 2021. This is the biggest hybrid event of the year, theCUBEs ninth year covering AWS re:Invent. My name is Dave Vellante. Arwa Kaddoura is here CUBE alumni, chief revenue officer now of InfluxData and Brian Mullen, who's the chief marketing officer. Folks good to see you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Dave: All right, great to see you face to face. >> It's great to meet you in person finally. >> So Brian, tell us about InfluxData. People might not be familiar with the company. >> Sure, yes. InfluxData, we're the company behind a pretty well-known project called Influx DB. And we're a platform for handling time series data. And so what time series data is, is really it's any, we think of it as any data that's stamped in time in some way. That could be every second, every two minutes, every five minutes, every nanosecond, whatever it might be. And typically that data comes from, you know, of course, sources and the sources are, you know, they could be things in the physical world like devices and sensors, you know, temperature gauges, batteries. Also things in the virtual world and, you know, software that you're building and running in the cloud, you know, containers, microservices, virtual machines. So all of these, whether in the physical world or the virtual world are kind of generating a lot of time series data and our platforms are designed specifically to handle that. >> Yeah so, lots to unpack here Arwa, I mean, I've kind of followed you since we met on virtually. Kind of followed your career and I know when you choose to come to a company, you start with the customer that's what your that's your... Those are your peeps. >> Arwa: Absolutely. >> So what was it that drew you to InfluxData, the customers were telling you? >> Yeah, I think what I saw happening from a marketplace is a few paradigm shifts, right? And the first paradigm shift is obviously what the cloud is enabling, right? So everything that we used to take for granted, when you know, Andreessen Horowitz said, "software was eating the world", right? And then we moved into apps are eating the world. And now you look at the cloud infrastructure that, you know, folks like AWS have empowered, they've allowed services like ours and databases, and sort of querying capabilities like Influx DB to basically run at a scale that we never would have been able to do. Just sort of with, you know, you host it yourself type of a situation. And then the other thing that it's enabled is again, if you go back to sort of database history, relational, right? Was humongous, totally transformed what we could do in terms of transactional systems. Then you moved into sort of the big data, the Hadoops, the search, right. The elastic. And now what we're seeing is time series is becoming the new paradigm. That's enabling a whole set of new use cases that have never been enabled before, right? So people that are generating these large volumes of data, like Brian talked about and needing a platform that can ingest millions of points per second. And then the ability to query that in real time in order to take that action and in order to power things like ML and things like sort of, you know, autonomous type capabilities now need this type of capability. So that's all to know >> Okay so, it's the real timeness, right? It's the use cases. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about those use cases and--- >> Sure, sure. So, yeah so we have kind of thinking about things as both the kind of virtual world where people are pulling data off of sources that are in infrastructure, software infrastructure. We have a number like PayPal is a customer of ours, and Apple. They pull a time series data from the infrastructure that runs their payments platform. So you can imagine the volume that they're dealing with. Think about how much data you might have in like a regular relational scenario now multiply every that, every piece of data times however, often you're looking at it. Every one second, every 10 minutes, whatever it might be. You're talking about an order of magnitude, larger volume, higher volume of data. And so the tools that people were using were just not really equipped to handle that kind of volume, which is unique to time series. So we have customers like PayPal in kind of the software infrastructure side. We also have quite a bit of activity among customers on the IOT side. So Tesla is a customer they're pulling telematics and battery data off of the vehicle, pulling that back into their cloud platform. Nest is also our customer. So we're pretty used to seeing, you know, connected thermostats in homes. Think of all the data that's coming from those individual units and their, it's all time series data and they're pulling it into their platform using Influx. >> So, that's interesting. So Tesla take that example they will maybe persist some of the data, maybe not all of it. It's a femoral and end up putting some of it back to the cloud, probably a small portion percentage wise but it's a huge amount of data of data, right? >> Brian: Yeah. >> So, if they might want to track some anomalies okay, capture every time animal runs across, you know, and put that back into the cloud. So where do you guys fit in that analysis and what makes you sort of the best platform for time series data base. >> Yeah, it's interesting you say that because it is a femoral and there are really two parts of it. This is one of the reasons that time series is such a challenge to handle with something that's not really designed to handle it. In a moment, in that minute, in the last hour, you have, you really want to see all the data you want all of what's happening and have full context for what's going on and seeing these fluctuations but then maybe a day later, a week later, you may not care about that level of fidelity. And so you down sample it, you have like a, kind of more of a summarized view of what happened in that moment. So being able to kind of toggle between high fidelity and low fidelity, it's a super hard problem to solve. And so our platform Influx DB really allows you to do that. >> So-- >> And that is different from relational databases, which are great at ingesting, but not great at kicking data out. >> Right. >> And I think what you're pointing to is in order to optimize these platforms, you have to ingest and get rid of data as quickly as you can. And that is not something that a traditional database can do. >> So, who do you sell to? Who's your ideal customer profile? I mean, pretty diverse. >> Yeah, It, so it tends to focus on builders, right? And builders is now obviously a much wider audience, right? We used to say developers, right. Highly technical folks that are building applications. And part of what we love about InfluxData is we're not necessarily trying to only make it for the most sophisticated builders, right? We are trying to allow you to build an application with the minimum amount of code and the greatest amount of integrations, right. So we really power you to do more with less and get rid of unnecessary code or, you know, give you that simplicity. Because for us, it's all about speed to market. You want an application, you have an idea of what it is that you're trying to measure or monitor or instrument, right? We give you the tools, we give you the integrations. We allow you to have to work in the IDE that you prefer. We just launched VS Code Integration, for example. And that then allows these technical audiences that are solving really hard problems, right? With today's technologies to really take our product to market very quickly. >> So, I want to follow up on that. So I like the term builder. It's an AWS kind of popularized that term, but there's sort of two vectors of that. There's the hardcore developers, but there's also increasingly domain experts that are building data products and then more generalists. And I think you're saying you serve both of those, but you do integrations that maybe make it easier for the latter. And of course, if the former wants to go crazy they can. Is that a right understanding? >> Yes absolutely. It is about accessibility and meeting developers where they are. For example, you probably still need a solid technical foundation to use a product like ours, but increasingly we're also investing in education, in videos and templates. Again, integrations that make it easier for people to maybe just bring a visualization layer that they themselves don't have to build. So it is about accessibility, but yes obviously with builders they're a technical foundation is pretty important. But, you know, right now we're at almost 500,000 active instances of Influx DB sort of being out there in the wild. So that to me shows, that it's a pretty wide variety of audiences that are using us. >> So, you're obviously part of the AWS ecosystem, help us understand that partnership they announced today of Serverless for Kinesis. Like, what does that mean to you as you compliment that, is that competitive? Maybe you can address that. >> Yeah, so we're a long-time partner of AWS. We've been in the partner network for several years now. And we think about it now in a couple of ways. First it's an important channel, go to market channel for us with our customers. So as you know, like AWS is an ecosystem unto itself and so many developers, many of these builders are building their applications for their own end users in, on AWS, in that ecosystem. And so it's important for us to number one, have an offering that allows them to put Influx on that bill so we're offered in the marketplace. You can sign up for and purchase and pay for Influx DB cloud using or via AWS marketplace. And then as Arwa mentioned, we have a number of integrations with all the kind of adjacent products and services from Amazon that many of our developers are using. And so when we think about kind of quote and quote, going to where the developer, meeting developers where they are that's an important part of it. If you're an AWS focused developer, then we want to give you not only an easy way to pay for and use our product but also an easy way to integrate it into all the other things that you're using. >> And I think it was 2012, it might've even been 11 on theCUBE, Jerry Chen of Greylock. We were asking him, you think AWS is going to move up the stack and develop applications. He said, no I don't think so. I think they're going to enable developers and builders to do that and then they'll compete with the traditional SaaS vendors. And that's proved to be true, at least thus far. You never say never with AWS. But then recently he wrote a piece called "Castles on the Cloud." And the premise was essentially the ISV's will build on top of clouds. And that seems to be what you're doing with Influx DB. Maybe you could tell us a little bit more about that. We call it super clouds. >> Arwa: That's right. >> you know, leveraging the 100 billion dollars a year that the hyperscalers spend to develop an abstraction layer that solves a particular problem but maybe you could describe what that is from your perspective, Influx DB. >> Yeah, well increasingly we grew up originally as an open source software company. >> Dave: Yeah, right. >> People downloaded the download Influx DB ran it locally on a laptop, put up on the server. And, you know, that's our kind of origin as a company, but increasingly what we recognize is our customers, our developers were building on the building in and on the cloud. And so it was really important for us to kind of meet them there. And so we think about, first of all, offering a product that is easily consumed in the cloud and really just allows them to essentially hit an end point. So with Influx DB cloud, they really have, don't have to worry about any of that kind of deployment and operation of a cluster or anything like that. Really, they just from a usage perspective, just pay for three things. The first is data in, how much data are you putting in? Second is query count. How many queries are you making against? And then third is storage. How much data do you have and how long are you storing it? And really, it's a pretty simple proposition for the developer to kind of see and understand what their costs are going to be as they grow their workload. >> So it's a managed service is that right? >> Brian: It is a managed service. >> Okay and how do you guys price? Is it kind of usage based. >> Total usage based, yeah, again data ingestion. We've got the query count and the storage that Brian talked about, but to your point, back to the sort of what the hyperscalers are doing in terms of creating this global infrastructure that can easily be tapped into. We then extend above that, right? We effectively become a platform as a service builder tool. Many of our customers actually use InfluxData to then power their own products, which they then commercialize into a SaaS application. Right, we've got customers that are doing, you know, Kubernetes monitoring or DevOps monitoring solutions, right? That monitor, you know, people's infrastructure or web applications or any of those things. We've got people building us into, you know, Industrial IoT such as PTC's ThingWorx, right? Where they've developed their own platform >> Dave: Very cool. >> Completely backed up by our time series database, right. Rather than them having to build everything, we become that key ingredient. And then of course the fully cloud managed service means that they could go to market that much quicker. Nobody's for procuring servers, nobody is managing, you know, security patches any of that, it's all fully done for you. And it scales up beautifully, which is the key. And to some of our customers, they also want to scale up or down, right. They know when their peak hours are or peak times they need something that can handle that load. >> So looking ahead to next year, so anyway, I'm glad AWS decided to do re:Invent live. (Arwa mumbling) >> You know, that's weird, right? We thought in June, at Mobile World Congress, we were going to, it was going to be the gateway to returning but who knows? It's like two steps forward, one step back. One step forward, two steps back but we're at least moving in the right direction. So what about for you guys InfluxData? Looking ahead for the coming year, Brian, what can we expect? You know, give us a little view of sharp view of (mumbles) >> Well kind of a keeping in the theme of meeting developers where they are, we want to build out more in the Amazon ecosystem. So more integrations, more kind of ease of use for kind of adjacent products. Another is just availability. So we've been, we're now on actually three clouds. In addition to AWS, we're on Azure and Google cloud, but now expanding horizontally and showing up so we can meet our customers that are working in Europe, expanding into Asia-Pacific which we did earlier this year. And so I think we'll continue to expand the platform globally to bring it closer to where our customers are. >> Arwa: Can I. >> All right go ahead, please. >> And I would say also the hybrid capabilities probably will also be important, right? Some of our customers run certain workloads locally and then other workloads in the cloud. That ability to have that seamless experience regardless, I think is another really critical advancement that we're continuing to invest in. So that as far as the customer is concerned, it's just an API endpoint and it doesn't matter where they're deploying. >> So where do they go, can they download a freebie version? Give us the last word. >> They go to influxdata.com. We do have a free account that anyone can sign up for. It's again, fully cloud hosted and managed. It's a great place to get started. Just learn more about our capabilities and if you're here at AWS re:Invent, we'd love to see you as well. >> Check it out. All right, guys thanks for coming on theCUBEs. >> Thank you. >> Dave: Great to see you. >> All right, thank you. >> Awesome. >> All right, and thank you for watching. Keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBEs coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. You're watching the leader in high-tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>> From Boston Massachusetts, it's The Cube! Covering LiveWorx 18. Brought to you by PTC. >> Welcome to Boston everybody. You're watching The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. And we're here with a special presentation in coverage of the LiveWorx show sponsored by PTC of Needham, soon to be of Boston. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host Stu Miniman. And Stu, this is quite a show. There's 6,000 people here. Jim Heppelmann this morning was up giving the keynote. PTC is a company that kind of hit the doldrums in the early 2000s. A company that as manufacturing moved offshore, its core business was CAD software for manufacturers, and it went through a pretty dramatic transformation that we're going to be talking about today. Well, fast forward 10 years, 12 years, 15 years on, this company is smokin, the stock's up 50 percent this year. They got a billion dollars plus in revenue. They're growing at 10 to 15 percent a year. They've shifted their software business from a perpetual software license to a recurring revenue model. And they're booming. And we're here at the original site of The Cube, as you remember well in 2010, the Boston Convention Center down at the seaport. And Stu, what are your initial impressions of LiveWorx? >> Yeah, it's great to be here, Dave. Good to be here with you and they dub this the largest digital transformation conference in the world. (laughing) So, I mean, Dave, you and I have been to much bigger conferences and we've been to a lot of conferences that are talking about digital transformation. But, IOT, AI, Augmented Reality, Block Chain, Robotics, all of these things really are about software, it's about digital transformation, and a really interesting space as you mentioned kind of the legacy of PTC. I have been around long enough. I remember when we used to call them Parametric Technologies. They kind of rebranded themselves as PTC. Windchill brings back some memories for me. When I worked for a high tech manufacturing company, it was that's the life cycle management tool that we used back in the early 2000s. So, I had a little bit of background in them. And, as you said, they're based in Needham, and they're moving to the Seaport. Hot area, especially, as we've said Dave, Boston has the opportunity to be the hub of IOT. And it's companies like PTC that are going to help bring those partnerships and lots of companies to an event like this. >> Well PTC has always been an inquisitive company, as you were pointing out to me off camera. They brought Prime Computer, Computer Vision. A number of acquisitions that they made back in the late 90s, which essentially didn't pan out the way they had hoped. But now again, fast forward to the modern era, Jim Heppelmann came in I think around 2010, exceeded ThingWorx, a company called Cold Light, Kept Ware is another company that they purchased. And took these really sort of independent software components and put them together and created a platform. Everybody talks about platform. We'll be talking about that a lot today, where the number of customers and partners of PTC. And we even have some folks from PTC on. But, basically, talking about digital transformation earlier, Stu, IOT is a huge tailwind for a company like PTC. But they had to really deliberately pivot to take advantage of this market. And if you think about it, yes, it's about connecting and instrumenting devices and machines, it's about reaching them, creating whatever wireless connections. But it's also about the data. We talk about that all the time. And constructing data that goes from edge to core, and even into the cloud, whether that cloud's on prem or in the data center. So you're seeing the transformation of this company. Obviously, I talked about some of the financials. We'll go into some of that. But an evolving ecosystem we heard Accenture's here, Infosys is here, Deloitte is here. As I like to say, the SI's like to eat at the trough. If the SI's are here, that means there's money here, right? >> Yeah Dave and actually a number that jumped out at me when Microsoft was up on stage, and it wasn't that Microsoft is investing five billion dollars in diode, the number that caught my ear was the 20 to 25 partners that it takes to deploy a single IOT solution. So, anybody that's been in tech for a long time, when you see these complicated stack solutions, the SIs need to be here. It takes a long time to work through them, and integration is a big challenge. How do I get all of these pieces together? It's not something that I just tit buy off the shelf. It's not shrink wrap software. This is complicated solution. It is very fragmented in how we make them up. Very specific to the industry that we're building, so really fascinating stuff that's going on. But we are still very early in the life-cycle of IOT. Huge, huge, huge opportunities but big players like Microsoft, like Google, like Amazon are going to be here making sure that they're going to simplify that environment over time. Huge, you know Dave, what's the original forecast I think we did at Wiki Bon, was a 1.2 trillion dollar opportunity, which most of that, that was actually for the industrial Internet, which is not the commercial things that we think about all the time, when we talk about the home sensors and some of the things, some of the consumer stuff, but also the industrial here. >> Well, I think a couple of key points that you're making here. First of all, the market is absolutely enormous. It's almost impossible to size. I mean you're talking about a trillion dollars in sort of spending on hardware, software, services, virtually everything. But to your point, Stu. It's highly highly fragmented, virtually every industry. And a lot of different segmented technologies. But it's also important to point out this is the mashing together of operations technology, OT with Information Technology, IT, and those four leading companies IT is actually leaning in and embracing this notion of edge, computing, and IOT. Now, I wouldn't even say that IT and OT are Hatfield and McCoy's. They're not. They're parts of the organization that don't talk to each other. So they are cultural differences. They use different languages. They think differently. One is largely engineers who make machines work. The other IT guys, which we obviously know what they do, they keep information technology systems running. They deploy a lot of new IT projects. So, really different worlds that have to start coming together. Jim Heppelmann today I thought did a really good job in his keynote. He talked about innovation. Usually you start with okay we're here at point A, we want to go here. We want to get to point B. And we're going to take a straight line and have a bunch of linear steps and milestones to get there. He pointed out that innovation today is really sort of a non-linear process. And he talked about the combinatorial effects of really three things. Machines, or the physical, computers and humans. Machines are strong, they can do heavy lifting. Computers are fast, and they can do repetitive tasks very accurately. And humans are creative. And he talked about innovation in this new world coming together by combining those three aspects, finding new ways to attack problems, to solve nature's challenges. And bringing nature into that problem solving. He gave a lot of examples of how mother nature mimicking mother nature is now possible with AI and other technologies. Pretty cool. >> Yeah, absolutely Dave. I'm sure we'll be talking a lot today about the fourth Industrial Revolution. A lot of discussion as to what jobs are Robots going to take. I look around the show floor here and there's a lot of cool robotics going on. But as Eric Manou said and Aaron McAfee, the folks from MIT that we've interviewed a couple of times talked about the second machine age. Really the marring of people and machines that are going to be powerful. And absolutely Jim Heppelmann talked about that a lot. It's humans, it's physical, and it's digital. Putting those together and then, the other thing that he talked about is we're talking a lot about voice lightly with all of these assistants, but, you're really limited as to how much input and how fast you can take information in from an auditory standpoint. I mean, I know that I listen to podcasts at 1.5 to 2 X to try to get more information in faster, but it is sight that we're going to get 80 percent of the information in, and therefore, it's the VR and AR that are huge opportunities. I know when I've been talking to some of the large manufacturers, what they used to have in written documentations and then they went digital with, they're now getting you inside to be able to configure the systems with the hollow lens, or some of the AR headsets, the VR headsets, to be able to play with that. So, we're really early but excited to see where this technology has come so far. >> Yeah, we're seeing a lot of practical applications of VR and AR. We go to a lot of these shows and they'll have the demos, and you go, okay, what will I do with this? Well, you're really seeing here at LiveWorx some of the things you actually can do. One good example I thought they did was BEA Systems up in Nashua, actually showing the folks that are doing the manufacturing, little tutorial in how to do that. We're going to see some surgical examples today. Remote surgery. There are thousands, literally thousands of examples. In the time we have remaining, I want to just do the rundown on PTC. Cause it really is quite an amazing transformation story. You're talking about a company with 1.1 billion dollars in revenue. Their aspiration is by 2021 to be a two billion dollar company. They're growing at ten percent a year, their software business has grown at 12 to 15 percent a year. 15 percent is that annual recurring revenue. So this is an example of a company that has successfully shifted from that perpetual model to that recurring model. They got 200 million dollars this year in free cash flow. Their stock, as I said, is up 50 percent this year. They got 350 million dollars in cash, but they just got a billion dollar investment from Rockwell Automation that took about 8.4 percent of the company given them an implied evaluation of almost 11 billion dollars, which has got a little uplift from the stock market there. They're selling a lot of seven figure deals. Really, the core is manufacturing product life-cycle management, CAD. That's the stuff that we know PTC well from. And I talked about some of those acquisitions that they made. They sell products like Creo, which is their 3D CAD software. I think they're on Rev five or six by now. So they've taken their sort of legacy software and sort of updated that for the digital world. >> Yep ,it is version five that they were just announced today. Talking about really the 3D effort they're doing there. Some partnerships around it, and like every other software Dave that we've been hearing about AI is getting infused in here because with so many devices and so much data, we really need the machines to help us process that and do things that humans can't keep up with. >> And the ecosystem's grown. This is a complicated marketplace. If you look at the Gartner Magic Quadrant, there is no leader, even though PTC is the leader. But there is no leader. They're all sort of in the lower right, PTC is up highest. GE is interestingly is not in there, because it doesn't have an on prem solution. I don't know why GE doesn't have an on prem solution. And I don't know why they're not in there. >> Is there another version of the magic quadrant that includes the Amazons and GEs of the world? >> I don't know. So that's kind of interesting. We'll try to unpack that as we go on here. PTC announced today a relationship with a company called Ansys, which does simulation software. Normally, simulation comes sort of after the design. They're bringing those two worlds together. The CAD design piece and the simulation piece, sort of closer to real time. So, there's a lot of stuff going on. As you said, it's data, analytics, edge computing. It's cloud, it's on prim, it's block chain for security. We haven't talked about security. A lot bigger threat metrix, so block chain comes into play. >> Yeah, Dave. I saw a great joke. Do you realize that the S in IOT stands for security? Did you know that? (laughing) Oh wait, there's no S in IOT. Well, that's the point. >> All right, good. So Stu and I will be here all day today. This is actually a three day conference. The Cube will only be there for day one. Keep right there everybody. And we'll be right back. You're watching The Cube, Live from Liveworx in Boston. (upbeat music)