(bright upbeat music) >> Greetings, brilliant community and thank you so much for tuning in to theCUBE here for the last three days where we've been live from Detroit, Michigan. I've had the pleasure of spending this week with Lisa Martin and John Furrier. Thank you both so much for hanging out, for inviting me into the CUBE family. It's our first show together, it's been wonderful. >> Thank you. >> You nailed it. >> Oh thanks, sweetheart. >> Great job. Great job team, well done. Free wall to wall coverage, it's what we do. We stay till everyone else-- >> Savannah: 100 percent. >> Everyone else leaves, till they pull the plug. >> Lisa: Till they turn the lights out. We're still there. >> Literally. >> Literally last night. >> Still broadcasting. >> Whatever takes to get the stories and get 'em out there at scale. >> Yeah. >> Great time. >> 33. 33 different segments too. Very impressive. John, I'm curious, you're a trend watcher and you've been at every single KubeCon. >> Yep. >> What are the trends this year? Give us the breakdown. >> I think CNCF does this, it's a hard job to balance all the stakeholders. So one, congratulations to the CNCF for another great KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. It is really hard to balance bringing in the experts who, as time goes by, seven years we've been all of, as you said, you get experts, you get seniority, and people who can be mentors, 60% new people. You have vendors who are sponsoring and there's always people complaining and bitching and moaning. They want this, they want that. It's always hard and they always do a good job of balancing it. We're lucky that we get to scale the stories with CUBE and that's been great. We had some great stories here, but it's a great community and again, they're inclusive. As I've said before, we've talked about it. This year though is an inflection point in my opinion, because you're seeing the developer ecosystem growing so fast. It's global. You're seeing events pop up, you're seeing derivative events. CNCF is at the center point and they have to maintain the culture of developer experts, maintainers, while balancing the newbies. And that's going to be >> Savannah: Mm-hmm. really hard. And they've done a great job. We had a great conversation with them. So great job. And I think it's going to continue. I think the attendance metric is a little bit of a false positive. There's a lot of online people who didn't come to Detroit this year. And I think maybe the combination of the venue, the city, or just Covid preferences may not look good on paper, on the numbers 'cause it's not a major step up in attendance. It's still bigger, but the community, I think, is going to continue to grow. I'm bullish on it. >> Yeah, I mean at least we did see double the number of people that we had in Los Angeles. Very curious. I think Amsterdam, where we'll be next with CNCF in the spring, in April. I think that's actually going to be a better pulse check. We'll be in Europe, we'll see what's going on. >> John: Totally. >> I mean, who doesn't like Amsterdam in the springtime? Lisa, what have been some of your observations? >> Oh, so many observations. The evolution of the conference, the hallway track conversations really shifting towards adjusting to the enterprise. The enterprise momentum that we saw here as well. We had on the show, Ford. >> Savannah: Yes. We had MassMutual, we had ING, that was today. Home Depot is here. We are seeing all these big companies that we know and love, become software companies right before our eyes. >> Yeah. Well, and I think we forget that software powers our entire world. And so of course they're going to have to be here. So much running on Kubernetes. It's on-prem, it's at the edge, it's everywhere. It's exciting. Woo, I'm excited. John, what do you think is the number one story? This is your question. I love asking you this question. What is the number one story out KubeCon? >> Well, I think the top story is a combination of two things. One is the evolution of Cloud Native. We're starting to see web assembly. That's a big hyped up area. It got a lot of attention. >> Savannah: Yeah. That's kind of teething out the future. >> Savannah: Rightfully so. The future of this kind of lightweight. You got the heavy duty VMs, you got Kubernetes and containers, and now this web assembly, shows a trajectory of apps, server-like environment. And then the big story is security. Software supply chain is, to me, was the number one consistent theme. At almost all the interviews, in the containers, and the workflows, >> Savannah: Very hot. software supply chain is real. The CD Foundation mentioned >> Savannah: Mm-hmm. >> they had 16,000 vulnerabilities identified in their code base. They were going to automate that. So again, >> Savannah: That was wild. >> That's the top story. The growth of open source exposes potential vulnerabilities with security. So software supply chain gets my vote. >> Did you hear anything that surprised you? You guys did this great preview of what you thought we were going to hear and see and feel and touch at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2022. You talked about, for example, the, you know, healthcare financial services being early adopters of this. Anything surprise either one of you in terms of what you predicted versus what we saw? Savannah, let's start with you. >> You know what really surprised me, and this is ironic, so I'm a community gal by trade. But I was really just impressed by the energy that everyone brought here and the desire to help. The thing about the open source community that always strikes me is, I mean 187 different countries participating. You've got, I believe it's something like 175,000 people contributing to the 140 projects plus that CNCF is working on. But that culture of collaboration extends far beyond just the CNCF projects. Everyone here is keen to help each other. We had the conversation just before about the teaching and the learnings that are going on here. They brought in Detroit's students to come and learn, which is just the most heartwarming story out of this entire thing. And I think it's just the authenticity of everyone in this community and their passion. Even though I know it's here, it still surprises me to see it in the flesh. Especially in a place like Detroit. >> It's nice. >> Yeah. >> It's so nice to see it. And you bring up a good point. It's very authentic. >> Savannah: It's super authentic. >> I mean, what surprised me is one, the Wasm, or web assembly. I didn't see that coming at the scale of the conversation. It sucked a lot of options out of the room in my opinion, still hyped up. But this looks like it's got a good trajectory. I like that. The other thing that surprised me that was a learning was my interview with Solo.io, Idit, and Brian Gracely, because he's a CUBE alumni and former host of theCUBE, and analyst at Wikibon, was how their go-to-market was an example of a modern company in Covid with a clean sheet of paper and smart people, they're just doing things different. They're in Slack with their customers. And I walked away with, "Wow that's like a playbook that's not, was never, in the go-to-market VC-backed company playbook." I thought that was, for me, a personal walk away saying that's important. I like how they did that. And there's a lot of companies I think could learn from that. Especially as the recession comes where partnering with customers has always been a top priority. And how they did that was very clever, very effective, very efficient. So I walked away with that saying, "I think that's going to be a standard." So that was a pleasant surprise. >> That was a great surprise. Also, that's a female-founded company, which is obviously not super common. And the growth that they've experienced, to your point, really being catalyzed by Covid, is incredibly impressive. I mean they have some massive brand name customers, Amex, BMW for example. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> Great point. >> And I interviewed her years ago and I remember saying to myself, "Wow, she's impressive." I liked her. She's a player. A player for sure. And she's got confidence. Even on the interview she said, "We're just better, we have better product." And I just like the point of view. Very customer-focused but confident. And I just took, that's again, a great company. And again, I'm not surprised that Brian Gracely left Red Hat to go work there. So yeah, great, great call there. And of course other things that weren't surprising that I predicted, Red Hat continued to invest. They continue to bring people on theCUBE, they support theCUBE but more importantly they have a good strategy. They're in that multicloud positioning. They're going to have an opportunity to get a bite at the apple. And I what I call the supercloud. As enterprises try to go and be mainstream, Cloud Native, they're going to need some help. And Red Hat is always has the large enterprise customers. >> Savannah: What surprised you, Lisa? >> Oh my gosh, so many things. I think some of the memorable conversations that we had. I love talking with some of the enterprises that we mentioned, ING Bank for example. You know, or institutions that have been around for 100 plus years. >> Savannah: Oh, yeah. To see not only how much they've innovated and stayed relevant to meet the demands of the consumer, which are only increasing, but they're doing so while fostering a culture of innovation and a culture that allows these technology leaders to really grow within the organization. That was a really refreshing conversation that I think we had. 'Cause you can kind of >> Savannah: Absolutely. think about these old stodgy companies. Nah, of course they're going to digitize. >> Thinking about working for the bank, I think it's boring. >> Right? >> Yeah. And they were talking about, in fact, those great t-shirts that they had on, >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. were all about getting more people to understand how fun it is to work in tech for ING Bank in different industries. You don't just have to work for the big tech companies to be doing really cool stuff in technology. >> What I really liked about this show is we had two female hosts. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> How about that? Come on. >> Hey, well done, well done on your recruitment there, champ. >> Yes, thank you boss. (John laughs) >> And not to mention we have a really all-star production team. I do just want to give them a little shout out. To all the wonderful folks behind the lines here. (people clapping) >> John: Brendan. Good job. >> Yeah. Without Brendan, Anderson, Noah, and Andrew, we would be-- >> Of course Frank Faye holding it back there too. >> Yeah, >> Of course, Frank. >> I mean, without the business development wheels on the ship we'd really be in an unfortunate spot. I almost just swore on television. We're not going to do that. >> It's okay. No one's regulating. >> Yeah. (all laugh) >> Elon Musk just took over Twitter. >> It was a close call. >> That's right! >> It's going to be a hellscape. >> Yeah, I mean it's, shit's on fire. So we'll just see what happens next. I do, I really want to talk about this because I think it's really special. It's an ethos and some magic has happened here. Let's talk about Detroit. Let's talk about what it means to be here. We saw so many, and I can't stress this enough, but I think it really matters. There was a commitment to celebrating place here. Lisa, did you notice this too? >> Absolutely. And it surprised me because we just don't see that at conferences. >> Yeah. We're so used to going to the same places. >> Right. >> Vegas. Vegas, Vegas. More Vegas. >> Your tone-- >> San Francisco >> (both laugh) sums up my feelings. Yes. >> Right? >> Yeah. And, well, it's almost robotic but, and the fact that we're like, oh Detroit, really? But there was so much love for this city and recognizing and supporting its residents that we just don't see at conferences. You uncovered a lot of that with your swag-savvy segments, >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And you got more of that to talk about today. >> Don't worry, it's coming. Yeah. (laughs) >> What about you? Have you enjoyed Detroit? I know you hadn't been here in a long time, when we did our intro session. >> I think it's a bold move for the CNCF to come here and celebrate. What they did, from teaching the kids in the city some tech, they had a session. I thought that was good. >> Savannah: Loved that. I think it was a risky move because a lot of people, like, weren't sure if they were going to fly to Detroit. So some say it might impact the attendance. I thought they did a good job. Their theme, Road Ahead. Nice tie in. >> Savannah: Yeah. And so I think I enjoyed Detroit. The weather was great. It didn't rain. Nice breeze outside. >> Yeah. >> The weather was great, the restaurants are phenomenal. So Detroit's a good city. I missed some hockey games. I'd love to see the Red Wings play. Missed that game. But we always come back. >> I think it's really special. I mean, every time I talked to a company about their swag, that had sourced it locally, there was a real reason for this story. I mean even with Kasten in that last segment when I noticed that they had done Carhartt beanies, Carhartt being a Michigan company. They said, "I'm so glad you noticed. That's why we did it." And I think that type of, the community commitment to place, it all comes back to community. One of the bigger themes of the show. But that passion and that support, we need more of that. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> And the thing about the guests we've had this past three days have been phenomenal. We had a diverse set of companies, individuals come on theCUBE, you know, from Scott Johnston at Docker. A really one on one. We had a great intense conversation. >> Savannah: Great way to kick it off. >> We shared a lot of inside baseball, about Docker, super important company. You know, impressed with companies like Platform9 it's been around since the OpenStack days who are now in a relevant position. Rafi Systems, hot startup, they don't have a lot of resources, a lot of guerilla marketing going on. So I love to see the mix of startups really contributing. The big players are here. So it's a real great mix of companies. And I thought the interviews were phenomenal, like you said, Ford. We had, Kubia launched on theCUBE. >> Savannah: Yes. >> That's-- >> We snooped the location for KubeCon North America. >> You did? >> Chicago, everyone. In case you missed it, Bianca was nice enough to share that with us. >> We had Sarbjeet Johal, CUBE analyst came on, Keith Townsend, yesterday with you guys. >> We had like analyst speed dating last night. (all laugh) >> How'd that go? (laughs) >> It was actually great. One of the things that they-- >> Did they hug and kiss at the end? >> Here's the funny thing is that they were debating the size of the CNC app. One thinks it's too big, one thinks it's too small. And I thought, is John Goldilocks? (John laughs) >> Savannah: Yeah. >> What is John going to think about that? >> Well I loved that segment. I thought, 'cause Keith and Sarbjeet argue with each other on Twitter all the time. And I heard Keith say before, he went, "Yeah let's have it out on theCUBE." So that was fun to watch. >> Thank you for creating this forum for us to have that kind of discourse. >> Lisa: Yes, thank you. >> Well, it wouldn't be possible without the sponsors. Want to thank the CNCF. >> Absolutely. >> And all the ecosystem partners and sponsors that make theCUBE possible. We love doing this. We love getting the stories. No story's too small for theCUBE. We'll go with it. Do whatever it takes. And if it wasn't for the sponsors, the community wouldn't get all the great knowledge. So, and thank you guys. >> Hey. Yeah, we're, we're happy to be here. Speaking of sponsors and vendors, should we talk a little swag? >> Yeah. >> What do you guys think? All right. Okay. So now this is becoming a tradition on theCUBE so I'm very delighted, the savvy swag segment. I do think it's interesting though. I mean, it's not, this isn't just me shouting out folks and showing off t-shirts and socks. It's about standing out from the noise. There's a lot of players in this space. We got a lot of CNCF projects and one of the ways to catch the attention of people walking the show floor is to have interesting swag. So we looked for the most unique swag on Wednesday and I hadn't found this yet, but I do just want to bring it up. Oops, I think I might have just dropped it. This is cute. Is, most random swag of the entire show goes to this toothbrush. I don't really have more in terms of the pitch there because this is just random. (Lisa laughs) >> But so, everyone needs that. >> John: So what's their tagline? >> And you forget these. >> Yeah, so the idea was to brush your cloud bills. So I think they're reducing the cost of-- >> Kind of a hygiene angle. >> Yeah, yeah. Very much a hygiene angle, which I found a little ironic in this crowd to be completely honest with you. >> John: Don't leave the lights on theCUBE. That's what they say. >> Yeah. >> I mean we are theCUBE so it would be unjust of me not to show you a Rubik's cube. This is actually one of those speed cubes. I'm not going to be able to solve this for you with one hand on camera, but apparently someone did it in 17 seconds at the booth. Knowing this audience, not surprising to me at all. Today we are, and yesterday, was the t-shirt contest. Best t-shirt contest. Today we really dove into the socks. So this is, I noticed this trend at KubeCon in Los Angeles last year. Lots of different socks, clouds obviously a theme for the cloud. I'm just going to lay these out. Lots of gamers in the house. Not surprising. Here on this one. >> John: Level up. >> Got to level up. I love these 'cause they say, "It's not a bug." And anyone who's coded has obviously had to deal with that. We've got, so Star Wars is a huge theme here. There's Lego sets. >> John: I think it's Star Trek. But. >> That's Star Trek? >> John: That's okay. >> Could be both. (Lisa laughs) >> John: Nevermind, I don't want to. >> You can flex your nerd and geek with us anytime you want, John. I don't mind getting corrected. I'm all about, I'm all about the truth. >> Star Trek. Star Wars. Okay, we're all the same. Okay, go ahead. >> Yeah, no, no, this is great. Slim.ai was nice enough to host us for dinner on Tuesday night. These are their lovely cloud socks. You can see Cloud Native, obviously Cloud Native Foundation, cloud socks, whole theme here. But if we're going to narrow it down to some champions, I love these little bee elephants from Raft. And when I went up to these guys, I actually probably would've called these my personal winner. They said, again, so community focused and humble here at CNCF, they said that Wiz was actually the champion according to the community. These unicorn socks are pretty excellent. And I have to say the branding is flawless. So we'll go ahead and give Wiz the win on the best sock contest. >> John: For the win. >> Yeah, Wiz for the win. However, the thing that I am probably going to use the most is this really dope Detroit snapback from Kasten. So I'm going to be rocking this from now on for the rest of the segment as well. And I feel great about this snapback. >> Looks great. Looks good on you. >> Yeah. >> Thanks John. (John laughs) >> So what are we expecting between now and KubeCon in Amsterdam? >> Well, I think it's going to be great to see how they, the European side, it's a chill show. It's great. Brings in the European audience from the global perspective. I always love the EU shows because one, it's a great destination. Amsterdam's going to be a great location. >> Savannah: I'm pumped. >> The American crowd loves going over there. All the event cities that they choose are always awesome. I missed Valencia cause I got Covid. I'm really bummed about that. But I love the European shows. It's just a little bit, it's high intensity, but it's the European chill. They got a little bit more of that siesta vibe going on. >> Yeah. >> And it's just awesome. >> Yeah, >> And I think that the mojo that carried throughout this week, it's really challenging to not only have a show that's five days, >> but to go through all week, >> Savannah: Seriously. >> to a Friday at 4:00 PM Eastern Time, and still have the people here, the energy and all the collaboration. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> The conversations that are still happening. I think we're going to see a lot more innovation come spring 2023. >> Savannah: Mm-hmm. >> Yeah. >> So should we do a bet, somebody's got to buy dinner? Who, well, I guess the folks who lose this will buy dinner for the other one. How many attendees do you think we'll see in Amsterdam? So we had 4,000, >> Oh, I'm going to lose this one. >> roughly in Los Angeles. Priyanka was nice enough to share with us, there was 8,000 here in Detroit. And I'm talking in person, we're not going to meddle this with the online. >> 6500. >> Lisa: I was going to say six, six K. >> I'm going 12,000. >> Ooh! >> I'm going to go ahead and go big I'm going to go opposite Price Is Right. >> One dollar. >> Yeah. (all laugh) That's exactly where I was driving with it. I'm going, I'm going absolutely all in. I think the momentum here is building. I think if we look at the numbers from-- >> John: You could go Family Feud >> Yeah, yeah, exactly. And they mentioned that they had 11,000 people who have taken their Kubernetes course in that first year. If that's a benchmark and an indicator, we've got the veteran players here. But I do think that, I personally think that the hype of Kubernetes has actually preceded adoption. If you look at the data and now we're finally tipping over. I think the last two years we were on the fringe and right now we're there. It's great. (voice blares loudly on loudspeaker) >> Well, on that note (all laugh) On that note, actually, on that note, as we are talking, so I got to give cred to my cohosts. We deal with a lot of background noise here on theCUBE. It is a live show floor. There's literally someone on an e-scooter behind me. There's been Pong going on in the background. The sound will haunt the three of us for the rest of our lives, as well as the production crew. (Lisa laughs) And, and just as we're sitting here doing this segment last night, they turned the lights off on us, today they're letting everyone know that the event is over. So on that note, I just want to say, Lisa, thank you so much. Such a warm welcome to the team. >> Thank you. >> John, what would we do without you? >> You did an amazing job. First CUBE, three days. It's a big show. You got staying power, I got to say. >> Lisa: Absolutely. >> Look at that. Not bad. >> You said it on camera now. >> Not bad. >> So you all are stuck with me. (all laugh) >> A plus. Great job to the team. Again, we do so much flow here. Brandon, Team, Andrew, Noah, Anderson, Frank. >> They're doing our hair, they're touching up makeup. They're helping me clean my teeth, staying hydrated. >> We look good because of you. >> And the guests. Thanks for coming on and spending time with us. And of course the sponsors, again, we can't do it without the sponsors. If you're watching this and you're a sponsor, support theCUBE, it helps people get what they need. And also we're do a lot more segments around community and a lot more educational stuff. >> Savannah: Yeah. So we're going to do a lot more in the EU and beyond. So thank you. >> Yeah, thank you. And thank you to everyone. Thank you to the community, thank you to theCUBE community and thank you for tuning in, making it possible for us to have somebody to talk to on the other side of the camera. My name is Savannah Peterson for the last time in Detroit, Michigan. Thanks for tuning into theCUBE. >> Okay, we're done. (bright upbeat music)

(digital music) >> And we're back live in New York. It's theCUBE. It's not SNL, it's better than SNL. Lisa Martin and John Furrier here with about 10,000 to 12,000 folks. (John chuckles) There is a ton of energy here. There's a ton of interest in what's going on. But one of the things that we know that AWS is really well-known for is its massive ecosystem. And one of its ecosystem partners is joining us. Please welcome Domenic Ravita, the VP of Product Marketing from SingleStore. Dominic, great to have you on the program. >> Well, thank you. Glad to be here. >> It's a nice opening, wasn't it? (Lisa and John laughing) >> I love SNL. Who doesn't? >> Right? I know. So some big news came out today. >> Yes. >> Funding. Good number. Talk to us a little bit about that before we dig in to SingleStore and what you guys are doing with AWS. >> Right, yeah. Thank you. We announced this morning our latest round, 116 million. We're really grateful to our customers and our investors and the partners and employees and making SingleStore a success to go on this journey of, really, to fulfill our mission to unify and simplify modern, real time data. >> So talk to us about SingleStore. Give us the value prop, the key differentiators, 'cause obviously customers have choice. Help us understand where you're nailing it. >> SingleStore is all about, what we like to say, the moments that matter. When you have an analytical question about what's happening in the moment, SingleStore is your best way to solve that cost-effectively. So that is for, in the case of Thorn, where they're helping to protect and save children from online trafficking or in the case of True Digital, which early in the pandemic, was a company in Southeast Asia that used anonymized phone pings to identify real time population density changes and movements across Thailand to have a proactive response. So really real time data in the moment can help to save lives quite literally. But also it does things that are just good commercially that gives you an advantage like what we do with Uber to help real time pricing and things like this. >> It's interesting this data intensity happening right now. We were talking earlier on theCUBE with another guest and we said, "Why is it happening now?" The big data has been around since the dupe days. That was hard to work with, then data lakes kicked in. But we seem to be, in the past year, everyone's now aware like, "Wow, I got a lot of data." Is it the pandemic? Now we're seeing customers understand the consequences. So how do you look at that? Because is it just timing, evolution? Are they now getting it or is the technology better? Is machine learning better? What's the forces driving the massive data growth acceleration in terms of implementing and getting stuff out, done? (chuckles) >> We think it's the confluence of a lot of those things you mentioned there. First of all, we just celebrate the 15-year anniversary of the iPhone, so that is like wallpaper now. It's just faded into our daily lives. We don't even think of that as a separate thing. So there's an expectation that we all have instant information and not just for the consumer interactions, for the business interactions. That permeates everything. I think COVID with the pandemic forced everyone, every business to try to move to digital first and so that put pressure on the digital service economy to mature even faster and to be digital first. That is what drives what we call data intensity. And more generally, the economic phenomenon is the data intensive era. It's a continuous competition and game for customers. In every moment in every location, in every dimension, the more data hat you have, the better value prop you can give. And so SingleStore is uniquely positioned to and focused on solving this problem of data intensity by bringing and unifying data together. >> What's the big customer success story? Can you share any examples that highlight that? What are some cool things that are happening that can illustrate this new, I won't say bit that's been flipped, that's been happening for a while, but can you share some cutting edge customer successes? >> It's happening across a lot of industries. So I would say first in financial services, FinTech. FinTech is always at the leading edge of these kind of technology adaptions for speeds and things like that. So we have a customer named IEX Cloud and they're focused on providing real time financial data as an API. So it's a data product, API-first. They're providing a lot of historical information on instruments and that sort of thing, as well as real time trending information. So they have customers like Seeking Alpha, for instance, who are providing real time updates on massive, massive data sets. They looked at lots of different ways to do this and there's the traditional, transactionals, LTP database and then maybe if you want to scale an API like theirs, you might have a separate end-memory cache and then yet another database for analytics. And so we bring all that together and simplify that and the benefit of simplification, but it's also this unification and lower latency. Another example is GE who basically uses us to bring together lots of financial information to provide quicker close to the end-of-month process across many different systems. >> So we think about special purpose databases, you mentioned one of the customers having those. We were in the keynote this morning where AWS is like, "We have the broadest set of special purpose databases," but you're saying the industry can't afford them anymore. Why and would it make SingleStore unique in terms of what you deliver? >> It goes back to this data intensity, in that the new business models that are coming out now are all about giving you this instant context and that's all data-driven and it's digital and it's also analytical. And so the reason that's you can't afford to do this, otherwise, is data's getting so big. Moving that data gets expensive, 'cause in the cloud you pay for every byte you store, every byte you process, every byte you move. So data movement is a cost in dollars and cents. It's a cost in time. It's also a cost in skill sets. So when you have many different specialized data sets or data-based technologies, you need skilled people to manage those. So that's why we think the industry needs to be simplified and then that's why you're seeing this unification trend across the database industry and other parts of the stack happening. With AWS, I mean, they've been a great partner of ours for years since we launched our first cloud database product and their perspective is a little bit different. They're offering choice of the specialty, 'cause many people build this way. But if you're going after real time data, you need to bring it. They also offer a SingleStore as a service on AWS. We offer it that way. It's in the AWS Marketplace. So it's easily consumable that way. >> Access to real time data is no longer a nice-to-have for any company, it's table stakes. We saw that especially in the last 20 months or so with companies that needed to pivot so quickly. What is it about SingleStore that delivers, that you talked about moments that matter? Talk about the access to real time data. How that's a differentiator as well? >> I think businesses need to be where their customers are and in the moments their customers are interacting. So that is the real time business-driver. As far as technology wise, it's not easy to do this. And you think about what makes a database fast? A major way of what makes it fast is how you store the data. And so since 2014, when we first released this, what Gartner called at the time, hybrid transaction/analytical processing or HTAP, where we brought transactional data and analytical data together. Fast forward five years to 2019, we released this innovation called Universal Storage, which does that in a single unified table type. Why that matters is because, I would say, basically cost efficiency and better speed. Again, because you pay for the storage and you pay for the movement. If you're not duplicating that data, moving it across different stores, you're going to have a better experience. >> One of the things you guys pioneered is unifying workloads. You mentioned some of the things you've done. Others are now doing it. Snowflake, Google and others. What does that mean for you guys? I mean, 'cause are they copying you? Are they trying to meet the functionality? >> I think. >> I mean, unification. I mean, people want to just store things and make it, get all the table stakes, check boxes, compliance, security and just keep coding and keep building. >> We think it's actually great 'cause they're validating what we've been seeing in the market for years. And obviously, they see that it's needed by customers. And so we welcome them to the party in terms of bringing these unified workloads together. >> Is it easy or hard? >> It's a difficult thing. We started this in 2014. And we've now have lots of production workloads on this. So we know where all the production edge cases are and that capability is also a building block towards a broader, expansive set of capabilities that we've moved onto that next phase and tomorrow actually we have an event called, The Real Time Data Revolution, excuse me, where we're announcing what's in that new product of ours. >> Is that a physical event or virtual? >> It's a virtual event. >> So we'll get the URL on the show notes, or if you know, just go to the new site. >> Absolutely. SingleStore Real Time Data Revolution, you'll find it. >> Can you tease us with the top three takeaways from Revolution tomorrow? >> So like I said, what makes a database fast? It's the storage and we completed that functionality three years ago with Universal Storage. What we're now doing for this next phase of the evolution is making enterprise features available and Workspaces is one of the foundational capabilities there. What SingleStore Workspaces does is it allows you to have this isolation of compute between your different workloads. So that's often a concern to new users to SingleStore. How can I combine transactions and analytics together? That seems like something that might be not a good thing. Well, there are multiple ways we've been doing that with resource governance, workload management. Workspaces offers another management capability and it's also flexible in that you can scale those workloads independently, or if you have a multi-tenant application, you can segment your application, your customer tenant workloads by each workspace. Another capability we're releasing is called Wasm, which is W-A-S-M, Web Assembly. This is something that's really growing in the open source community and SingleStore's contributing to that open source scene, CF project with WASI and Wasm. Where it's been mentioned mostly in the last few years has been in the browser as a more efficient way to run code in the browser. We're adapting that technology to allow you to run any language of your choice in the database and why that's important, again, it's for data movement. As data gets large in petabyte sizes, you can't move it in and out of Pandas in Python. >> Great innovation. That's real valuable. >> So we call this Code Engine with Wasm and- >> What do you call it? >> Code Engine Powered by Wasm. >> Wow. Wow. And that's open source? >> We contribute to the Wasm open source community. >> But you guys have a service that you- >> Yes. It's our implementation and our database. But Wasm allows you to have code that's portable, so any sort of runtime, which is... At release- >> You move the code, not the data. >> Exactly. >> With the compute. (chuckles) >> That's right, bring the compute to the data is what we say. >> You mentioned a whole bunch of great customer examples, GE, Uber, Thorn, you talked about IEX Cloud. When you're in customer conversations, are you dealing mostly with customers that are looking to you to help replace an existing database that was struggling from a performance perspective? Or are you working with startups who are looking to build a product on SingleStore? Is it both? >> It is a mix of both. I would say among SaaS scale up companies, their API, for instance, is their product or their SaaS application is their product. So quite literally, we're the data engine and the database powering their scale to be able to sign that next big customer or to at least sleep at night to know that it's not going to crash if they sign that next big costumer. So in those cases, we're mainly replacing a lot of databases like MySQL, Postgre, where they're typically starting, but more and more we're finding, it's free to start with SingleStore. You can run it in production for free. And in our developer community, we see a lot of customers running in that way. We have a really interesting community member who has a Minecraft server analytics that he's building based on that SingleStore free tier. In the enterprise, it's different, because there are many incumbent databases there. So it typically is a case where there is a, maybe a new product offering, they're maybe delivering a FinTech API or a new SaaS digital offering, again, to better participate in this digital service economy and they're looking for a better price performance for that real time experience in the app. That's typically the starting point, but there are replacements of traditional incumbent databases as well. >> How has the customer conversation evolved the last couple of years? As we talked about, one of the things we learned in the pandemic was access to real time data and those moments that matter isn't a nice-to-have anymore for businesses. There was that force march to digital. We saw the survivors, we're seeing the thrivers, but want to get your perspective on that. From the customers, how has the conversation evolved or elevated, escalated within an organization as every company has to be a data company? >> It really depends on their business strategy, how they are adapting or how they have adapted to this new digital first orientation and what does that mean for them in the direct interaction with their customers and partners. Often, what it means is they realize that they need to take advantage of using more data in the customer and partner interaction and when they come to those new ideas for new product introductions, they find that it's complicated and expensive to build in the old way. And if you're going to have these real time interactions, interactive applications, APIs, with all this context, you're going to have to find a better, more cost-effective approach to get that to market faster, but also not to have a big sprawling data-based technology infrastructure. We find that in those situations, we're replacing four or five different database technologies. A specialized database for key value, a specialized database for search- >> Because there's no unification before? Is that one of the reasons? >> I think it's an awareness thing. I think technology awareness takes a little bit of time, that there's a new way to do things. I think the old saying about, "Don't pave cow paths when the car..." You could build a straight road and pave it. You don't have to pave along the cow path. I think that's the natural course of technology adaption and so as more- >> And the- pandemic, too, highlighted a lot of the things, like, "Do we really need that?" (chuckles) "Who's going to service that?" >> That's right. >> So it's an awakening moment there where it's like, "Hey, let's look at what's working." >> That's right. >> Double down on it. >> Absolutely. >> What are you excited about new round of funding? We talked about, obviously, probably investments in key growth areas, but what excites you about being part of SingleStore and being a partner of AWS? >> SingleStore is super exciting. I've been in this industry a long time as an engineer and an engineering leader. At the time, we were MemSQL, came into SingleStore. And just that unification and simplification, the systems that I had built as a system engineer and helped architect did the job. They could get the speed and scale you needed to do track and trace kinds of use cases in real time, but it was a big trade off you had to make in terms of the complexity, the skill sets you needed and the cost and just hard to maintain. What excites me most about SingleStore is that it really feels like the iPhone moment for databases because it's not something you asked for, but once your friend has it and shows it to you, why would you have three different devices in your pocket with a flip phone, a calculator? (Lisa and Domenic chuckles) Remember these days? >> Yes. >> And a Blackberry pager. (all chuckling) You just suddenly- >> Or a computer. That's in there. >> That's right. So you just suddenly started using iPhone and that is sort of the moment. It feels like we're at it in the database market where there's a growing awareness and those announcements you mentioned show that others are seeing the same. >> And your point earlier about the iPhone throwing off a lot of data. So now you have data explosions at levels that unprecedented, we've never seen before and the fact that you want to have that iPhone moment, too, as a database. >> Absolutely. >> Great stuff. >> The other part of your question, what excites us about AWS. AWS has been a great partner since the beginning. I mean, when we first released our database, it was the cloud database. It was on AWS by customer demand. That's where our customers were. That's where they were building other applications. And now we have integrations with other native services like AWS Glue and we're in the Marketplace. We've expanded, that said we are a multi-cloud system. We are available in any cloud of your choice and on premise and in hybrid. So we're multi-cloud, hybrid and SaaS distribution. >> Got it. All right. >> Got it. So the event is tomorrow, Revolution. Where can folks go to register? What time does it start? >> 1:00 PM Eastern and- >> 1:00 PM. Eastern. >> Just Google SingleStore Real Time Data Revolution and you'll find it. Love for everyone to join us. >> All right. We look forward to it. Domenic, thank you so much for joining us, talking about SingleStore, the value prop, the differentiators, the validation that's happening in the market and what you guys are doing with AWS. We appreciate it. >> Thanks so much for having me. >> Our pleasure. For Domenic Ravita and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, live from New York at AWS Summit 22. John and I are going to be back after a short break, so come back. (digital pulsing music)

(upbeat music) >> Every company needs great salespeople, it's one of the most lucrative professions out there. And there's plenty of wisdom and knowledge that's been gathered over the years about selling. We've heard it all, famous quotes from the greatest salespeople of our time, like Zig Ziglar and Jeffrey Gitomer, and Dale Carnegie and Jack Welch, and many others. Things like, "Each of us has only 24 hours in a day, "it's all about how we use our time." And, "You don't have to be great to start, "but you have to start to be great." And then I love this one, "People hate to be sold, but they love to buy." "There are no traffic jams on the extra mile, "make change before you have to." And the all time classic, "Put that coffee down. "Coffee is for closers." Thousands of pieces of sales advice are readily available in books, videos, on blogs and in podcasts, and many of these are free of charge. So why would entrepreneurs start a company to train salespeople? And how is it that sharp investors are pouring millions of dollars into this space? Hello everyone, and welcome to this Cube Video Exclusive, my name is Dave Vellante, and today we welcome Paul Fifield who's the co-founder and CEO of Sales Impact Academy who's going to answer these questions and share some exciting news on the startups. Paul, welcome to "The Cube" good to see you again. >> Yeah, good to see you again, Dave, great to be here. >> Hey, so before we get into the hard news, tell us a little bit about the Sales Impact Academy, why'd you start the company, maybe some of the fundamentals of this market, your total available market, who you're targeting, you know, what's the premise behind the company? >> Yeah sure. So I mean, I started the company, it was actually pretty organic in the way it began. I had a 10 year career as a CRO and it was, you know, had a couple of great hits with two companies, but it was a real struggle to basically, you know, operate as a CRO and learn your craft at the same time. And so when I left my last company, I kind of got out there, I wanted to kind of give back a little bit and I started doing some voluntary teaching in and around London, and I actually, one of the companies I started was in New York so I got schooled very much on a sort of US approach to how you build a modern you know, go to market and sales operation. Started going out there, doing some teaching, realized that so many people just didn't have a clue about how to build a scalable and predictable revenue function, and I kind of felt sorry for them. So I literally started doing some, you know, online classes myself, got my co-founder Alex to put curriculum together as well and we literally started just doing online classes, very live, very organic, just a Google Drive and some decks, and it really just blew up from there. >> That's amazing. I mean, so you've my, you know, tongue and cheek up front, but people might wonder, why do you need a platform 'cause there's so much free information out there? Is it to organize, is it a discipline thing? Explain that. >> Well, I think the way I sort of see this is that is that the lack of structured learning and education is actually one of the greatest educational travesties, I think, of the last 50 years, okay. Now sales and go to market is a huge global profession, right? Half the world's companies are B2B, so roughly that's a proxy for half the world's GDP, right? Which is $40 trillion of GDP. Now that 40 trillion rests on kind of the success of the growth and the sales functions of all those companies. Yet in its infinite wisdom, the global education system literally just ignored sales and go to market as a profession. Some universities are kind of catching up, but it's really too little too late. So what I sort of say to people, you imagine this Dave, right. You imagine if the way that law worked as a profession let's say, is that there's no law school, there's no law training, there's no even in work professional continuous professional development in law. The way that it works is you leave university, join a company, start practicing law and just use like YouTube just to maybe like, you know, where you're struggling, just use YouTube to like work out what's going on. The legal profession would be in absolute chaos. And that's what's happened in the sales and go to market profession, okay. What this profession desperately desperately needs is structured learning, good pedagogy, good well designed course and curriculum. And here's the other thing, right? Is the sort of paradox of infinite information is that just because all the information is out there, right, doesn't mean it's actually a good learning experience. Like, where do you find it? What's good? What's not good? And also the other thing I'd point out is that there is this kind of myth that all the information is out there on the internet. But actually what we do, and we'll come into it in a second is, the people teaching on our platform are the elite people from the industry. They haven't got time to do blog posts and just explain to people how they operate. They're going from company to company working at like, you know, working at these kind of elite companies. And they're the people that teach, and that information is not readily available and freely out there on the internet. >> Yeah, real opportunity, you made some great points there. I think business schools are finally starting to teach a little bit about public speaking and presenting, but nobody's teaching us how to sell. As Earl Nightingale says, "To some degree we're all salespeople, "selling our family on living the good life" or whatever. What movie we want to see tonight. But okay, let's get to the hard news. You got fresh funding of 22 million, tell us about that, congratulations. You know, the investors, what else can you share with us? >> Sure. Well, I mean, obviously, you know, immensely proud. We started from very sort of humble beginnings, as I said, we've now scaled very rapidly, we're a subscription business, we're a SaaS business. We'll come onto some of the growth metrics shortly, but just in a couple of years, you know, the last year which ended January, we grew 500% from year one, we're now well over 125 people, and I'm very, very, very honored, flattered, humbled that MIT, obviously one of those prestigious universities in the world, has taken a direct investment by their endowment fund, HubSpot Ventures. Another Boston great has also taken a direct investment as well. They actually began as a customer and loved what we were doing so much that they then decided to make an investment. Stage 2 Capital who invested in our seed round pretty much tripled down, played a huge role in helping us assemble MIT and HubSpot ventures as investors, and they continue to be an incredible VC giving us amazing, amazing support that their LP network of go to market leaders is second to none. And then Emerge Education, who is our pre-seed investor, they're actually based in London, also joined this round as well. >> Great, well actually, let's jump ahead. Let's talk about the metrics. I mean, if Stage Two is involved, they're hardcore. What can you share with us about, you know, everybody's chasing AR and NR and the like, what can you share with us? >> They are both pretty important. Well, I think from a headcount perspective, so as I mentioned our fiscal ends at the end of January, each year. We've gone from 25 to over 125 employees in that time. We've gone from 82 to 260 customers also in that time. And customers now include HubSpot, Gong, Klaviyo, GitHub, GT, Six Cents, so some really sort of major SaaS companies in the space. Our revenue's grown significantly with 5X. So 500% increase in revenue year over year, which is pretty fast, very proud of that. Our learning community has gone from over 3000 people to almost 15,000 professionals, and that makes us comfortably, the largest go to market learning community in the world. >> How did you decide when to scale? What were the sort of signals that said to you, "Okay, we're ready, "we have product market fit, "we can now scale the go to market." What were the signals there, Paul? >> Yeah. Well, I mean, I think for a very small team to achieve that level of growth in customers, to be kind of honest with you, like it's the pull that we're getting from the market. And I think the thing that has surprised me the most, perhaps in the last 12 months, is the pull we're getting from the enterprise. We're you know, I can't really announce, we've actually got a huge pilot with one of the largest companies actually in the world which is going fantastically well, our pipeline for enterprise customers is absolutely huge. But as you can imagine, if you've got distributed teams all over the world, we're living and working in this kind of hybrid world, how on earth do you kind of upscale all those people, right, that are, like I say, that are so distributed. It's impossible. Like in work, in the office delivery of training is pretty much dead, right? And so we sort of fill this really big pain, we solved this really, really big pain of how to effectively upskill people through this kind of live curriculum and this live teaching approach that we have. So I think for me, it's the pull that we're getting from the market really meant that you know, we have to double down. There is such a massive TAM, it is absolutely ridiculous. I mean, I think there are 20 million people just in sales and go to market in tech alone, right. And I mentioned to you earlier, half the world's companies effectively, you know, are B2B and therefore represent, you know, at its largest scope, our TAM. >> Excellent, thank you for that. Tell us more about the product and the platform. How's it work if I'm a customer, what type of investment do I have to make both financially? And what's my time commitment? How do you structure that? >> So the model is basically on a seat model. So roughly speaking, every seat's about a thousand dollars per year per rep. The lift is light. So we've got a very low onboarding, it's not a highly complex technical product, right? We've got a vast curriculum of learning that covers learning for, you know, SDRs, and the AEs, and CS reps, and leadership management training. We're developing curriculum for technical pre-sales, we're developing curriculum for revenue operations. And so it's very, very simple. We basically, it's a seat model, people literally just send us the seats and the details, we get people up and running in the platform, they start then enrolling and we have a customer success team that then plots out learning journeys and learning pathways for all of our customers. And actually what's starting to happen now, which is very, very exciting is that, you know, we're actually a key part of people's career development pathway. So to go from you know, SDR1 let's say to SDR2, you have to complete these three courses with Sales Impact Academy, and let's say, get 75% in your exam and it becomes a very powerful and simple way of developing career pathway. >> Yeah, so really detailed curriculum. So I was going to say, do I as a sales professional, do I pick and choose the things that are most relevant for me? Or are people actually going through a journey in career progression, or maybe both? >> Yeah, it's a mixture of both. We tend to see now, we're sort of starting to standardize, but really we're developing enough curriculum that over, let's say a 15 year period, you could start with us as an SDR and then end as a chief revenue officer, you know, running the entire function. This is the other thing about the crazy world of go to market. Very often, people are put into roles and it's sink or swim. There's no real learning that happens, there's no real development that happens before people take these big steps. And what this platform does so beautifully is is it equips people with the right skills and knowledge before they take that next step in their profession and in their career. And it just dramatically improves their chances of succeeding. >> Who are the trainers? Who's leading the classes, how do you find these guys, how do you structure? What are the content, you know, vectors, where's all that come from? >> Yeah. So the sort of secret source of what we do, beyond just the live instruction, beyond the significant amount of peer to peer learning that goes on, is that we go and source the absolute most elite people in go to market to teach, okay. Now I mentioned to you before, you've got these people that are going from like job to job at the very like the sort of peak of their careers, working for these incredible companies, it's that knowledge that we want to get access to, right. And so Stage 2 Capital is an incredible resource. The interesting thing about Stage 2 Capital as you know Dave, you know, run by Mark Roberge, who was on when we spoke last year and also Jay Po is all the LPs of Stage 2 Capital represent 3 to 400 of the most elite go to market professionals in the world. So, you know, about seven or eight of those are now on an advisory board. And so we have access to this incredible pool of talent. And so we know by consulting these amazing people who are the best people in certain aspects of go to market. We reach out to them and very often they're at a stage in their career where they're really kind of willing to give back, of course there are commercials around it as well, and there's lots of other benefits that we provide our teachers and our faculty, and what we call our coaches. But yeah, we source the very, very best people in the world to teach. >> Now, how does it work as a user of your service? Is it all on demand? Do you do live content or a combination? >> Yeah look, one of the big differentiators is this is a live delivery of learning, okay. Most learning online is typically done on demand, self-directed, and there's a ton of research. There's a great blog post on Andrew's recent site. A short time ago, which is talking about how the completion rates of on demand learning are somewhere between 3 and 6%. That is like, that's awful. >> Terrible. >> I was like why bother? However, we're seeing through that live instruction. So we teach two, one hour classes a week, that's it. We're upskilling very busy people, they're stressed, they've got targets. We have to be very, very cognizant of that. So we teach two, one hour classes a week. Typically, you know, Monday and a Wednesday, or a Tuesday and a Thursday. And that pace of learning is about right, it's kind of how humans learn as well. You know, short bursts of information, and then put that learning and those skills that you've acquired in class literally to work minutes after the class finishes. And so through that, and it sits in your calendar like a meeting, it doesn't feel overwhelming, you're learning together as a team as well. And all that combined, we see completion rates often in excess of 80% for our courses. >> Okay, so they block that time out- >> In the calendar, yeah. >> And they make an investment. Go ahead, please. >> Yeah yeah, exactly, sorry Dave. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So like, you know, we have course lengths. So one of our shorter courses are like four hours long over two weeks. And again, it's just literally in the calendar. We also teach what we call The Magic Learning Hour. And the magic learning hour is this one specific hour in the day that enables teams all over the western hemisphere to join the same class. And that magic learning hour is eight o'clock Pacific 11 o'clock Eastern, >> 4: 00 PM over in the UK, and 5:00 PM in the rest of Europe. And that one time in the day means that these enterprises have got teams all over the western hemisphere joining that class, learning together as a team, plus it's in the calendar and it's that approach is why we're seeing such high engagement and completion. >> That's very cool, the time zone thing. Now who's the target buyer? Are you selling only to sales teams? Can I as an individual purchase your service? >> Yeah, that's a good question. Currently it's a very much like a B2B motion. As I mentioned earlier on, we're getting an enormous pull from the enterprise, which is very exciting. You know, we have an enterprise segment, we have sort of more of a startup earlier stage segment, and then we have a mid-market segment that we call our sort of strategic, and that's typically and most of like venture backed, fast growth tech companies. So very much at the moment a B2B motion. We're launching our own technology platform in the early summer, and then later on this year we're going to be adding what's called PLG or a product led growth, so individuals can actually sign up to SIA. >> Yeah, I mean, I think you said $1,000 per year per rep, is that right? I mean, that's- >> Yeah. >> That's a small investment for an individual that wants to be part of, you know, this community and grow his or her career. So that's the growth plan? You go down market I would imagine, you talked about the western hemisphere, there's international opportunities maybe, local language. What's the growth plan? >> Yeah, I mean look, we've identified the magic learning hour for the middle east and APAC, which is eight o'clock in the morning in Istanbul, right. Is 5:00 PM in Auckland, it's quite fun trying to work out like what this optimum magic learning hour is. What's incredible is we teach in that time and that opens up the whole of the middle east and the whole of APAC, right, right down to Australia. And so once we're teaching the curriculum in those two slots, that means literally you can have teams in any country in the world, I think apart from Hawaii, you can actually access our live learning products in work time and that's incredibly powerful. So we have so many like axis of growth, we've got single users as I mentioned, but really Dave that's single users we'll be winning from the enterprise and that will represent pipeline that we could then potentially convert as well. And look, you make a very good point. You know, we've seen students are now leaving university with over $100,000 dollars in debt. We've got a massive, massive debt problem here in the US with student debt. You could absolutely sign up to our platform at let's say a hundred bucks a month, right. And probably within six months, gain enough knowledge and skill to walk into a $60,000 a year based salary job as an SDR, that's a huge entry level salary. And you could do that without even going to university. So there could be a time here where we become a really viable alternative to actually even going to university. >> I love it. The cost education going through the roof, it's out of reach for so many people. Paul, congratulations on the progress, the fresh funding. Great to have you back in "The Cube." We'd love to have you back and follow your ascendancy. I think great things ahead for you guys. >> Thank you very much, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for "The Cube, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(gentle upbeat music) >> People hate to be sold, but they love to buy. We become what we think about, think, and grow rich. If you want to gather honey, don't kick over the beehive. The world is replete with time-tested advice and motivational ideas for aspiring salespeople, Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, Norman Vincent Peale, Earl Nightingale, and many others have all published classics with guidance that when followed closely, almost always leads to success. More modern personalities have emerged in the internet era, like Tony Robbins, and Gary Vaynerchuk, and Angela Duckworth. But for the most part, they've continued to rely on book publishing, seminars, and high value consulting to peddle their insights and inspire action. Welcome to this video exclusive on theCUBE. This is Dave Vellante, and I'm pleased to welcome back Professor Mark Roberge, who is one of the Managing Directors at Stage 2 Capital, and Paul Fifield, who's the CEO and Co-Founder of Sales Impact Academy. Gentlemen, welcome. Great to see you. >> You too Dave and thanks. >> All right, let's get right into it. Paul, you guys are announcing today a $4 million financing round. It comprises $3 million in a seed round led by Stage 2 and a million dollar in debt financing. So, first of all, congratulations. Paul, why did you start Sales Impact Academy? >> Cool, well, I think my background is sort of two times CRO, so I've built two reasonably successful companies. Built a hundred plus person teams. And so I've got kind of this firsthand experience of having to learn literally everything on the job whilst delivering these very kind of rapid, like achieving these very rapid growth targets. And so when I came out of those two journeys, I literally just started doing some voluntary teaching in and around London where I now live. I spend a bunch of time over in New York, and literally started this because I wanted to sort of kind of give back, but just really wanted to start helping people who were just really, really struggling in high pressure environments. And that's both leadership from sense of revenue leadership people, right down to sort of frontline SDRs. And I think as I started just doing this voluntary teaching, I kind of realized that actually the sort of global education system has done is a massive, massive disservice, right? I actually call it the greatest educational travesty of the last 50 years, where higher education has entirely overlooked sales as a profession. And the knock-on consequences of that have been absolutely disastrous for our profession. Partly that the profession is seen as a bit sort of embarrassing to be a part of. You kind of like go get a sales job if you can't get a degree. But more than that, the core fundamental within revenue teams and within sales people is now completely lacking 'cause there's no structured formal kind of like learning out there. So that's really the problem we're trying to solve on the kind of like the skill side. >> Great. Okay. And mark, always good to have you on, and I got to ask you. So even though, I know this is the wheelhouse for you and your partners, and of course, you've got a deep bench of LPs, but lay out the investment thesis here. What's the core problem that you saw and how are you looking at the market? >> Yeah, sure, Dave. So this one was a special one for me. We've spoken in the past. I mean, just personally I've always had a similar passion to Paul that it's amazing how important sales execution is to all companies, nevermind just the startup ecosystem. And I've always personally been motivated by anything that can help the startup ecosystem increase their success. Part of why I teach at Harvard and try to change some of the stuff that Paul's talking about, which is like, it's amazing how little education is done around sales. But in this particular one, not only personally was I excited about, but from a fun perspective, we've got to look at the economic outcomes. And we've been thinking a lot about the sales tech stack. It's evolved a ton in the last couple of decades. We've gone from the late '90s where every sales VP was just, they had a thing called the CRM that none of their reps even used, right? And we've come so far in 20 years, we've got all these amazing tools that help us cold call, that help us send emails efficiently and automatically and track everything, but nothing's really happened on the education side. And that's really the enormous gap that we've seen is, these organizations being much more proactive around adopting technology that can prove sales execution, but nothing on the education side. And the other piece that we saw is, it's almost like all these companies are reinventing the wheel of looking in the upcoming year, having a dozen sales people to hire, and trying to put together a sales enablement program within their organization to teach salespeople sales 101. Like how to find a champion, how to develop a budget, how to develop sense of urgency. And what Paul and team can do in the first phase of essay, is can sort of centralize that, so that all of these organizations can benefit from the best content and the best instructors for their team. >> So Paul, exactly, thank you, mark. Exactly what do you guys do? What do you sell? I'm curious, is this sort of, I'm thinking in my head, is this E-learning, is it really part of the sales stack? Maybe you could help us understand that better. >> Well, I think this problem of having to upscale teams has been around like forever. And kind of going back to the kind of education problem, it's what's wild is that we would never accept this of our lawyers, our accountants, or HR professionals. Imagine like someone in your finance team arriving on day one and they're searching YouTube to try and work out how to like put a balance sheet together. So it's a chronic, chronic problem. And so the way that we're addressing this, and I think the problem is well understood, but there's always been a terrible market, sort of product market fit for how the problem gets solved. So as mark was saying, typically it's in-house revenue leaders who themselves have got massive gaps in their knowledge, hack together some internal learning that is just pretty poor, 'cause it's not really their skillset. The other alternative is bringing in really expensive consultants, but they're consultants with a very single worldview and the complexity of a modern revenue organization is very, very high these days. And so one consultant is not going to really kind of like cover every topic you need. And then there's the kind of like fairly old fashioned sales training companies that just come in, one big hit, super expensive and then sort of leave again. So the sort of product market fit to solve, has always been a bit pretty bad. So what we've done is we've created a subscription model. We've essentially productized skills development. The way that we've done that is we teach live instruction. So one of the big challenges Andreessen Horowitz put a post out around this so quite recently, one of the big problems of online learning is that this kind of huge repository of online learning, which puts all the onus on the learner to have the discipline to go through these courses and consume them in an on-demand way is actually they're pretty ineffective. We see sort of completion rates of like 7 to 8%. So we've always gone from a live instruction model. So the sort of ingredients are the absolute very best people in the world in their very specific skill teaching live classes just two hours per week. So we're not overwhelming the learners who are already in work, and they have targets, and they've got a lot of pressure. And we have courses that last maybe four to like 12 hours over two to sort of six to seven weeks. So highly practical live instruction. We have 70, 80, sometimes even 90% completion rates of the sort of live class experience, and then teams then rapidly put that best practice into practice and see amazing results in things like top of funnel, or conversion, or retention. >> So live is compulsory and I presume on-demand? If you want to refresh you have an on demand option? >> Yeah, everything's recorded, so you can kind of catch up on a class if you've missed it, But that live instruction is powerful because it's kind of in your calendar, right? So you show up. But the really powerful thing, actually, is that entire teams within companies can actually learn at exactly the same pace. So we teach it eight o'clock Pacific, 11 o'clock Eastern, >> 4: 00 PM in the UK, and 5:00 PM Europe. So your entire European and North American teams can literally learn in the same class with a world-class expert, like a Mark, or like a Kevin Dorsey, or like Greg Holmes from Zoom. And you're learning from these incredible people. Class finishes, teams can come back together, talk about this incredible best practice they've just learned, and then immediately put it into practice. And that's where we're seeing these incredible, kind of almost instant impact on performance at real scale. >> So, Mark, in thinking about your investment, you must've been thinking about, okay, how do we scale this thing? You've got an instructor component, you've got this live piece. How are you thinking about that at scale? >> Yeah, there's a lot of different business model options there. And I actually think multiple of them are achievable in the longer term. That's something we've been working with Paul quite a bit, is like, they're all quite compelling. So just trying to think about which two to start with. But I think you've seen a lot of this in education models today. Is a mixture of on-demand with prerecorded. And so I think that will be the starting point. And I think from a scalability standpoint, we were also, we don't always try to do this with our investments, but clearly our LP base or limited partner base was going to be a key ingredient to at least the first cycle of this business. You know, our VC firm's backed by over 250 CRO CMOs heads of customer success, all of which are prospective instructors, prospective content developers, and prospective customers. So that was a little nicety around the scale and investment thesis for this one. >> And what's in it for them? I mean, they get paid. Obviously, you have a stake in the game, but what's in it for the instructors. They get paid on a sort of a per course basis? How does that model work? >> Yeah, we have a development fee for each kind of hour of teaching that gets created So we've mapped out a pretty significant curriculum. And we have about 250 hours of life teaching now already written. We actually think it's going to be about 3000 hours of learning before you get even close to a complete curriculum for every aspect of a revenue organization from revenue operations, to customer success, to marketing, to sales, to leadership, and management. But we have a development fee per class, and we have a teaching fee as well. >> Yeah, so, I mean, I think you guys, it's really an underserved market, and then when you think about it, most organizations, they just don't invest in training. And so, I mean, I would think you'd want to take it, I don't know what the right number is, 5, 10% of your sales budget and actually put it on this and the return would be enormous. How do you guys think about the market size? Like I said before, is it E-learning, is it part of the CRM stack? How do you size this market? >> Well, I think for us it's service to people. A highly skilled sales rep with an email address, a phone and a spreadsheet would do really well, okay? You don't need this world-class tech stack to do well in sales. You need the skills to be able to do the job. But the reverse, that's not true, right? An unskilled person with a world-class tech stack won't do well. And so fundamentally, the skill level of your team is the number one most important thing to get right to be successful in revenue. But as I said before, the product market for it to solve that problem, has been pretty terrible. So we see ourselves 100%. And so if you're looking at like a com, you look at Gong, who we've just signed as a customer, which is fantastic. Gong has a technology that helps salespeople do better through call recording. You have Outreach, who is also a customer. They have technologies that help SDRs be more efficient in outreach. And now you have Sales Impact Academy, and we help with skills development of your team, of the entirety of your revenue function. So we absolutely see ourselves as a key part of that stack. In terms of the TAM, 60 million people in sales are on, according to LinkedIn. You're probably talking 150 million people in go to market to include all of the different roles. 50% of the world's companies are B2B. The TAM is huge. But what blows my mind, and this kind of goes back to this why the global education system has overlooked this because essentially if half the world's companies are B2B, that's probably a proxy for the half of the world's GDP, Half of the world's economic growth is relying on the revenue function of half the world's companies, and they don't really know what they're doing, (laughs) which is absolutely staggering. And if we can solve that in a meaningfully meaningful way at massive scale, then the impact should be absolutely enormous. >> So, Mark, no lack of TAM. I know that you guys at Stage 2, you're also very much focused on the metrics. You have a fundamental philosophy that your product market fit and retention should come before hyper growth. So what were the metrics that enticed you to make this investment? >> Yeah, it's a good question, Dave, 'cause that's where we always look first, which I think is a little different than most early stage investors. There's a big, I guess, meme, triple, triple, double, double that's popular in Silicon Valley these days, which refers to triple your revenue in year one, triple your revenue in year two, double in year three, and four, and five. And that type of a hyper growth is critical, but it's often jumped too quickly in our opinion. That there's a premature victory called on product market fit, which kills a larger percentage of businesses than is necessary. And so with all our investments, we look very heavily first at user engagement, any early indicators of user retention. And the numbers were just off the charts for SIA in terms of the customers, in terms of the NPS scores that they were getting on their sessions, in terms of the completion rate on their courses, in terms of the customers that started with a couple of seats and expanded to more seats once they got a taste of the program. So that's where we look first as a strong foundation to build a scalable business, and it was off the charts positive for SIA. >> So how about the competition? If I Google sales training software, I'll get like dozens of companies. Lessonly, and MindTickle, or Brainshark will come up, that's not really a fit. So how do you think about the competition? How are you different? >> Yeah, well, one thing we try and avoid is any reference to sales training, 'cause that really sort of speaks to this very old kind of fashioned way of doing this. And I actually think that from a pure pedagogy perspective, so from a pure learning design perspective, the old fashioned way of doing sales training was pull a whole team off site, usually in a really terrible hotel with no windows for a day or two. And that's it, that's your learning experience. And that's not how human beings learn, right? So just even if the content was fantastic, the learning experience was so terrible, it was just very kind of ineffective. So we sort of avoid kind of like sales training, The likes of MindTickle, we're actually talking to them at the moment about a partnership there. They're a platform play, and we're certainly building a platform, but we're very much about the live instruction and creating the biggest curriculum and the broadest curriculum on the internet, in the world, basically, for revenue teams. So the competition is kind of interesting 'cause there is not really a direct subscription-based live like learning offering out there. There's some similar ish companies. I honestly think at the moment it's kind of status quo. We're genuinely creating a new category of in-work learning for revenue teams. And so we're in this kind of semi and sort of evangelical sort of phase. So really, status quo is one of the biggest sort of competitors. But if you think about some of those old, old fashioned sort of Miller Heimans, and then perhaps even like Sandlers, there's an analogy perhaps here, which is kind of interesting, which is a little bit like Siebel and Salesforce in the sort of late '90s, where in Siebel you have this kind of old way of doing things. It was a little bit ineffective. It was really expensive. Not accessible to a huge space of the market. And Salesforce came along and said, "Hey, we're going to create this cool thing. It's going to be through the browser, it's going to be accessible to everyone, and it's going to be really, really effective." And so there's some really kind of interesting parallels almost between like Siebel and Salesforce and what we're doing to completely kind of upend the sort of the old fashioned way of delivering sort of sales training, if you like. >> And your target customer profile is, you're selling to teams, right? B2B teams, right? It's not for individuals. Is that correct, Paul? >> Currently. Yeah, yeah. So currently we've got a big foothold in series A to series B. So broadly speaking out, our target market currently is really fast growth technology companies. That's the sector that we're really focusing on. We've got a very good strong foothold in series A series B companies. We've now won some much larger later stage companies. We've actually even won a couple of corporates, I can't say names yet, but names that are very, very, very familiar and we're incredibly excited by them, which could end up being thousand plus seat deals 'cause we do this on a per seat basis. But yeah, very much at the moment it's fast growth tech companies, and we're sort of moving up the chain towards enterprise. >> And how do you deal with the sort of maturity curve, if you will, of your students? You've got some that are brand new, just fresh out of school. You've got others that are more seasoned. What do you do, pop them into different points of the curriculum? How do you handle it? >> Yeah we have, I'll say we have about 30 courses right now. We have about another 15 in development where post this fundraise, we want to be able to get to around about 20 courses that we're developing every quarter and getting out to market. So we're literally, we've sort of identified about 20 to 25 key roles across everything within revenue. That's, let's say revenue ops, customer success, account management, sales, engineering, all these different kinds of roles. And we are literally plotting the sort of skills development for these individuals over multiple, multiple years. And I think what we've never ceases to amaze me is actually the breadth of learning in revenue is absolutely enormous. And what kind of just makes you laugh is, this is all of this knowledge that we're now creating it's what companies just hope that their teams somehow acquire through osmosis, through blogs, through events. And it's just kind of crazy that there is... It's absolutely insane that we don't already exist, basically. >> And if I understand it correctly, just from looking at your website, you've got the entry level package. I think it's up to 15 seats, and then you scale up from there, correct? Is it sort of as a seat-based license model? >> Yeah, it's a seat-based model, as Mark mentioned. In some cases we sell, let's say 20 or $30,000 deal out the gate and that's most of the team. That will be maybe a series A, series B deal, but then we've got these land and expand models that are working tremendously well. We have seven, eight customers in Q1 that have doubled their spend Q2. That's the impact that they're seeing. And our net revenue retention number for Q2 is looking like it's going to be 177% to think exceeds companies like Snowflakes. Well, our underlying retention metrics, because people are seeing this incredible impact on teams and performance, is really, really strong. >> That's a nice metric compare with Snowflake (Paul laughs) It's all right. (Dave and Paul laugh) >> So, Mark, this is a larger investment for Stage 2 You guys have been growing and sort of upping your game. And maybe talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, we're in the middle of Fund II right now. So, Fund I was in 2018. We were doing smaller checks. It was our first time out of the gate. The mission has really taken of, our LP base has really taken off. And so this deal looks a lot like more like our second fund. We'll actually make an announcement in a few weeks now that we've closed that out. But it's a much larger fund and our first investments should be in that 2 to $3 million range. >> Hey, Paul, what are you going to do with the money? What are the use of funds? >> Put it on black, (chuckles) we're going to like- (Dave laughs) >> Saratoga is open. (laughs) (Mark laughs) >> We're going to, look, the curriculum development for us is absolutely everything, but we're also going to be investing in building our own technology platform as well. And there are some other really important aspects to the kind of overall offering. We're looking at building an assessment tool so we can actually kind of like start to assess skills across teams. We certify every course has an exam, so we want to get more robust around the certification as well, because we're hoping that our certification becomes the global standard in understanding for the first time in the industry what individual competencies and skills people have, which will be huge. So we have a broad range of things that we want to start initiating now. But I just wanted to quickly say Stage 2 has been nothing short of incredible in every kind of which way. Of course, this investment, the fit is kind of insane, but the LPs have been extraordinary in helping. We've got a huge number of them are now customers very quickly. Mark and the team are helping enormously on our own kind of like go to market and metrics. I've been doing this for 20 years. I've raised over 100 million myself in venture capital. I've never known a venture capital firm with such value add like ever, or even heard of other people getting the kind of value add that we're getting. So I just wanted to a quick shout out for Stage 2. >> Quite a testimony of you guys. Definitely Stage 2 punches above its weight. Guys, we'll leave it there. Thanks so much for coming on. Good luck and we'll be watching. Appreciate your time. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Thank you very much. >> All right, thank you everybody for watching this Cube conversation. This is Dave Vellante, and we'll see you next time.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting Cuban cloud brought to you by silicon angle, everybody to Cuban cloud. My name is Dave Volonte, and I'll be here throughout the day with my co host, John Ferrier, who was quarantined in an undisclosed location in California. He's all good. Don't worry. Just precautionary. John, how are you doing? >>Hey, great to see you. John. Quarantine. My youngest daughter had covitz, so contact tracing. I was negative in quarantine at a friend's location. All good. >>Well, we wish you the best. Yeah, well, right. I mean, you know what's it like, John? I mean, you're away from your family. Your basically shut in, right? I mean, you go out for a walk, but you're really not in any contact with anybody. >>Correct? Yeah. I mean, basically just isolation, Um, pretty much what everyone's been kind of living on, kind of suffering through, but hopefully the vaccines are being distributed. You know, one of the things we talked about it reinvent the Amazon's cloud conference. Was the vaccine on, but just the whole workflow around that it's gonna get better. It's kind of really sucky. Here in the California area, they haven't done a good job, a lot of criticism around, how that's rolling out. And, you know, Amazon is now offering to help now that there's a new regime in the U. S. Government S o. You know, something to talk about, But certainly this has been a terrible time for Cove it and everyone in the deaths involved. But it's it's essentially pulled back the covers, if you will, on technology and you're seeing everything. Society. In fact, um, well, that's big tech MIT disinformation campaigns. All these vulnerabilities and cyber, um, accelerated digital transformation. We'll talk about a lot today, but yeah, it's totally changed the world. And I think we're in a new generation. I think this is a real inflection point, Dave. You know, modern society and the geo political impact of this is significant. You know, one of the benefits of being quarantined you'd be hanging out on these clubhouse APS, uh, late at night, listening to experts talk about what's going on, and it's interesting what's happening with with things like water and, you know, the island of Taiwan and China and U. S. Sovereignty, data, sovereignty, misinformation. So much going on to talk about. And, uh, meanwhile, companies like Mark injuries in BC firm starting a media company. What's going on? Hell freezing over. So >>we're gonna be talking about a lot of that stuff today. I mean, Cuba on cloud. It's our very first virtual editorial event we're trying to do is bring together our community. It's a it's an open forum and we're we're running the day on our 3 65 software platform. So we got a great lineup. We got CEO Seo's data Practitioners. We got a hard core technologies coming in, cloud experts, investors. We got some analysts coming in and we're creating this day long Siri's. And we've got a number of sessions that we've developed and we're gonna unpack. The future of Cloud computing in the coming decade is, John said, we're gonna talk about some of the public policy new administration. What does that mean for tech and for big tech in General? John, what can you add to that? >>Well, I think one of the things that we talked about Cove in this personal impact to me but other people as well. One of the things that people are craving right now is information factual information, truth texture that we call it. But hear this event for us, Davis, our first inaugural editorial event. Robbo, Kristen, Nicole, the entire Cube team Silicon angle, really trying to put together Morva cadence we're gonna doom or of these events where we can put out feature the best people in our community that have great fresh voices. You know, we do interview the big names Andy Jassy, Michael Dell, the billionaires with people making things happen. But it's often the people under there that are the rial newsmakers amid savory, for instance, that Google one of the most impressive technical people, he's gotta talk. He's gonna present democratization of software development in many Mawr riel people making things happen. And I think there's a communal element. We're going to do more of these. Obviously, we have, uh, no events to go to with the Cube. So we have the cube virtual software that we have been building and over years and now perfecting and we're gonna introduce that we're gonna put it to work, their dog footing it. We're gonna put that software toe work. We're gonna do a lot mawr virtual events like this Cuban cloud Cuban startup Cuban raising money. Cuban healthcare, Cuban venture capital. Always think we could do anything. Question is, what's the right story? What's the most important stories? Who's telling it and increase the aperture of the lens of the industry that we have and and expose that and fastest possible. That's what this software, you'll see more of it. So it's super exciting. We're gonna add new features like pulling people up on stage, Um, kind of bring on the clubhouse vibe and more of a community interaction with people to meet each other, and we'll roll those out. But the goal here is to just showcase it's cloud story in a way from people that are living it and providing value. So enjoy the day is gonna be chock full of presentations. We're gonna have moderated chat in these sessions, so it's an all day event so people can come in, drop out, and also that's everything's on demand immediately after the time slot. But you >>want to >>participate, come into the time slot into the cube room or breakout session. Whatever you wanna call it, it's a cube room, and the people in there chatting and having a watch party. So >>when you're in that home page when you're watching, there's a hero video there. Beneath that, there's a calendar, and you'll see that red line is that red horizontal line of vertical line is rather, it's a linear clock that will show you where we are in the day. If you click on any one of those sessions that will take you into the chat, we'll take you through those in a moment and share with you some of the guests that we have upcoming and and take you through the day what I wanted to do. John is trying to set the stage for the conversations that folks are gonna here today. And to do that, I wanna ask the guys to bring up a graphic. And I want to talk to you, John, about the progression of cloud over time and maybe go back to the beginning and review the evolution of cloud and then really talk a little bit about where we think it Z headed. So, guys, if you bring up that graphic when a W S announced s three, it was March of 2000 and six. And as you recall, John you know, nobody really. In the vendor and user community. They didn't really pay too much attention to that. And then later that year, in August, it announced E C two people really started. They started to think about a new model of computing, but they were largely, you know, chicken tires. And it was kind of bleeding edge developers that really leaned in. Um what? What were you thinking at the time? When when you saw, uh, s three e c to this retail company coming into the tech world? >>I mean, I thought it was totally crap. I'm like, this is terrible. But then at that time, I was thinking working on I was in between kind of start ups and I didn't have a lot of seed funding. And then I realized the C two was freaking awesome. But I'm like, Holy shit, this is really great because I don't need to pay a lot of cash, the Provisional Data center, or get a server. Or, you know, at that time, state of the art startup move was to buy a super micro box or some sort of power server. Um, it was well past the whole proprietary thing. But you have to assemble probably anyone with 5 to 8 grand box and go in, and we'll put a couple ghetto rack, which is basically, uh, you know, you put it into some coasting location. It's like with everybody else in the tech ghetto of hosting, still paying monthly fees and then maintaining it and provisioning that's just to get started. And then Amazon was just really easy. And then from there you just It was just awesome. I just knew Amazon would be great. They had a lot of things that they had to fix. You know, custom domains and user interface Council got better and better, but it was awesome. >>Well, what we really saw the cloud take hold from my perspective anyway, was the financial crisis in, you know, 709 It put cloud on the radar of a number of CFOs and, of course, shadow I T departments. They wanted to get stuff done and and take I t in in in, ah, pecs, bite sized chunks. So it really was. There's cloud awakening and we came out of that financial crisis, and this we're now in this 10 year plus boom um, you know, notwithstanding obviously the economic crisis with cove it. But much of it was powered by the cloud in the decade. I would say it was really about I t transformation. And it kind of ironic, if you will, because the pandemic it hits at the beginning of this decade, >>and it >>creates this mandate to go digital. So you've you've said a lot. John has pulled forward. It's accelerated this industry transformation. Everybody talks about that, but and we've highlighted it here in this graphic. It probably would have taken several more years to mature. But overnight you had this forced march to digital. And if you weren't a digital business, you were kind of out of business. And and so it's sort of here to stay. How do you see >>You >>know what this evolution and what we can expect in the coming decades? E think it's safe to say the last 10 years defined by you know, I t transformation. That's not gonna be the same in the coming years. How do you see it? >>It's interesting. I think the big tech companies are on, but I think this past election, the United States shows um, the power that technology has. And if you look at some of the main trends in the enterprise specifically around what clouds accelerating, I call the second wave of innovations coming where, um, it's different. It's not what people expect. Its edge edge computing, for instance, has talked about a lot. But industrial i o t. Is really where we've had a lot of problems lately in terms of hacks and malware and just just overall vulnerabilities, whether it's supply chain vulnerabilities, toe actual disinformation, you know, you know, vulnerabilities inside these networks s I think this network effects, it's gonna be a huge thing. I think the impact that tech will have on society and global society geopolitical things gonna be also another one. Um, I think the modern application development of how applications were written with data, you know, we always been saying this day from the beginning of the Cube data is his integral part of the development process. And I think more than ever, when you think about cloud and edge and this distributed computing paradigm, that cloud is now going next level with is the software and how it's written will be different. You gotta handle things like, where's the compute component? Is it gonna be at the edge with all the server chips, innovations that Amazon apple intel of doing, you're gonna have compute right at the edge, industrial and kind of human edge. How does that work? What's Leighton see to that? It's it really is an edge game. So to me, software has to be written holistically in a system's impact on the way. Now that's not necessarily nude in the computer science and in the tech field, it's just gonna be deployed differently. So that's a complete rewrite, in my opinion of the software applications. Which is why you're seeing Amazon Google VM Ware really pushing Cooper Netease and these service messes in the micro Services because super critical of this technology become smarter, automated, autonomous. And that's completely different paradigm in the old full stack developer, you know, kind of model. You know, the full stack developer, his ancient. There's no such thing as a full stack developer anymore, in my opinion, because it's a half a stack because the cloud takes up the other half. But no one wants to be called the half stack developer because it doesn't sound as good as Full Stack, but really Cloud has eliminated the technology complexity of what a full stack developer used to dio. Now you can manage it and do things with it, so you know, there's some work to done, but the heavy lifting but taking care of it's the top of the stack that I think is gonna be a really critical component. >>Yeah, and that that sort of automation and machine intelligence layer is really at the top of the stack. This this thing becomes ubiquitous, and we now start to build businesses and new processes on top of it. I wanna I wanna take a look at the Big Three and guys, Can we bring up the other The next graphic, which is an estimate of what the revenue looks like for the for the Big three. And John, this is I asked and past spend for the Big Three Cloud players. And it's It's an estimate that we're gonna update after earning seasons, and I wanna point a couple things out here. First is if you look at the combined revenue production of the Big Three last year, it's almost 80 billion in infrastructure spend. I mean, think about that. That Z was that incremental spend? No. It really has caused a lot of consolidation in the on Prem data center business for guys like Dell. And, you know, um, see, now, part of the LHP split up IBM Oracle. I mean, it's etcetera. They've all felt this sea change, and they had to respond to it. I think the second thing is you can see on this data. Um, it's true that azure and G C P they seem to be growing faster than a W s. We don't know the exact numbers >>because >>A W S is the only company that really provides a clean view of i s and pass. Whereas Microsoft and Google, they kind of hide the ball in their numbers. I mean, I don't blame them because they're behind, but they do leave breadcrumbs and clues about growth rates and so forth. And so we have other means of estimating, but it's it's undeniable that azure is catching up. I mean, it's still quite distance the third thing, and before I want to get your input here, John is this is nuanced. But despite the fact that Azure and Google the growing faster than a W s. You can see those growth rates. A W s I'll call this out is the only company by our estimates that grew its business sequentially last quarter. Now, in and of itself, that's not significant. But what is significant is because AWS is so large there $45 billion last year, even if the slower growth rates it's able to grow mawr and absolute terms than its competitors, who are basically flat to down sequentially by our estimates. Eso So that's something that I think is important to point out. Everybody focuses on the growth rates, but it's you gotta look at also the absolute dollars and, well, nonetheless, Microsoft in particular, they're they're closing the gap steadily, and and we should talk more about the competitive dynamics. But I'd love to get your take on on all this, John. >>Well, I mean, the clouds are gonna win right now. Big time with the one the political climate is gonna be favoring Big check. But more importantly, with just talking about covert impact and celebrating the digital transformation is gonna create a massive rising tide. It's already happening. It's happening it's happening. And again, this shift in programming, uh, models are gonna really kinda accelerating, create new great growth. So there's no doubt in my mind of all three you're gonna win big, uh, in the future, they're just different, You know, the way they're going to market position themselves, they have to be. Google has to be a little bit different than Amazon because they're smaller and they also have different capabilities, then trying to catch up. So if you're Google or Microsoft, you have to have a competitive strategy to decide. How do I wanna ride the tide If you will put the rising tide? Well, if I'm Amazon, I mean, if I'm Microsoft and Google, I'm not going to try to go frontal and try to copy Amazon because Amazon is just pounding lead of features and scale and they're different. They were, I would say, take advantage of the first mover of pure public cloud. They really awesome. It passed and I, as they've integrated in Gardner, now reports and integrated I as and passed components. So Gardner finally got their act together and said, Hey, this is really one thing. SAS is completely different animal now Microsoft Super Smart because they I think they played the right card. They have a huge installed base converted to keep office 3 65 and move sequel server and all their core jewels into the cloud as fast as possible, clarified while filling in the gaps on the product side to be cloud. So you know, as you're doing trends job, they're just it's just pedal as fast as you can. But Microsoft is really in. The strategy is just go faster trying. Keep pedaling fast, get the features, feature velocity and try to make it high quality. Google is a little bit different. They have a little power base in terms of their network of strong, and they have a lot of other big data capabilities, so they have to use those to their advantage. So there is. There is there is competitive strategy game application happening with these companies. It's not like apples, the apples, In my opinion, it never has been, and I think that's funny that people talk about it that way. >>Well, you're bringing up some great points. I want guys bring up the next graphic because a lot of things that John just said are really relevant here. And what we're showing is that's a survey. Data from E. T. R R Data partners, like 1400 plus CEOs and I T buyers and on the vertical axis is this thing called Net score, which is a measure of spending momentum. And the horizontal axis is is what's called market share. It's a measure of the pervasiveness or, you know, number of mentions in the data set. There's a couple of key points I wanna I wanna pick up on relative to what John just said. So you see A W S and Microsoft? They stand alone. I mean, they're the hyper scale er's. They're far ahead of the pack and frankly, they have fall down, toe, lose their lead. They spend a lot on Capex. They got the flywheel effects going. They got both spending velocity and large market shares, and so, but they're taking a different approach. John, you're right there living off of their SAS, the state, their software state, Andi, they're they're building that in to their cloud. So they got their sort of a captive base of Microsoft customers. So they've got that advantage. They also as we'll hear from from Microsoft today. They they're building mawr abstraction layers. Andy Jassy has said We don't wanna be in that abstraction layer business. We wanna have access to those, you know, fine grain primitives and eso at an AP level. So so we can move fast with the market. But but But so those air sort of different philosophies, John? >>Yeah. I mean, you know, people who know me know that I love Amazon. I think their product is superior at many levels on in its way that that has advantages again. They have a great sass and ecosystem. They don't really have their own SAS play, although they're trying to add some stuff on. I've been kind of critical of Microsoft in the past, but one thing I'm not critical of Microsoft, and people can get this wrong in the marketplace. Actually, in the journalism world and also in just some other analysts, Microsoft has always had large scale eso to say that Microsoft never had scale on that Amazon owned the monopoly on our franchise on scales wrong. Microsoft had scale from day one. Their business was always large scale global. They've always had infrastructure with MSN and their search and the distributive how they distribute browsers and multiple countries. Remember they had the lock on the operating system and the browser for until the government stepped in in 1997. And since 1997 Microsoft never ever not invested in infrastructure and scale. So that whole premise that they don't compete well there is wrong. And I think that chart demonstrates that there, in there in the hyper scale leadership category, hands down the question that I have. Is that there not as good and making that scale integrate in because they have that legacy cards. This is the classic innovator's dilemma. Clay Christensen, right? So I think they're doing a good job. I think their strategy sound. They're moving as fast as they can. But then you know they're not gonna come out and say We don't have the best cloud. Um, that's not a marketing strategy. Have to kind of hide in this and get better and then double down on where they're winning, which is. Clients are converting from their legacy at the speed of Microsoft, and they have a huge client base, So that's why they're stopping so high That's why they're so good. >>Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna give you a little preview. I talked to gear up your f Who's gonna come on today and you'll see I I asked him because the criticism of Microsoft is they're, you know, they're just good enough. And so I asked him, Are you better than good enough? You know, those are fighting words if you're inside of Microsoft, but so you'll you'll have to wait to see his answer. Now, if you guys, if you could bring that that graphic back up I wanted to get into the hybrid zone. You know where the field is. Always got >>some questions coming in on chat, Dave. So we'll get to those >>great Awesome. So just just real quick Here you see this hybrid zone, this the field is bunched up, and the other companies who have a large on Prem presence and have been forced to initiate some kind of coherent cloud strategy included. There is Michael Michael, multi Cloud, and Google's there, too, because they're far behind and they got to take a different approach than a W s. But as you can see, so there's some real progress here. VM ware cloud on AWS stands out, as does red hat open shift. You got VM Ware Cloud, which is a VCF Cloud Foundation, even Dell's cloud. And you'd expect HP with Green Lake to be picking up momentum in the future quarters. And you've got IBM and Oracle, which there you go with the innovator's dilemma. But there, at least in the cloud game, and we can talk about that. But so, John, you know, to your point, you've gotta have different strategies. You're you're not going to take out the big too. So you gotta play, connect your print your on Prem to your cloud, your hybrid multi cloud and try to create new opportunities and new value there. >>Yeah, I mean, I think we'll get to the question, but just that point. I think this Zeri Chen's come on the Cube many times. We're trying to get him to come on lunch today with Features startup, but he's always said on the Q B is a V C at Greylock great firm. Jerry's Cloud genius. He's been there, but he made a point many, many years ago. It's not a winner. Take all the winner. Take most, and the Big Three maybe put four or five in there. We'll take most of the markets here. But I think one of the things that people are missing and aren't talking about Dave is that there's going to be a second tier cloud, large scale model. I don't want to say tear to cloud. It's coming to sound like a sub sub cloud, but a new category of cloud on cloud, right? So meaning if you get a snowflake, did I think this is a tale? Sign to what's coming. VM Ware Cloud is a native has had huge success, mainly because Amazon is essentially enabling them to be successful. So I think is going to be a wave of a more of a channel model of indirect cloud build out where companies like the Cube, potentially for media or others, will build clouds on top of the cloud. So if Google, Microsoft and Amazon, whoever is the first one to really enable that okay, we'll do extremely well because that means you can compete with their scale and create differentiation on top. So what snowflake did is all on Amazon now. They kind of should go to azure because it's, you know, politically correct that have multiple clouds and distribution and business model shifts. But to get that kind of performance they just wrote on Amazon. So there's nothing wrong with that. Because you're getting paid is variable. It's cap ex op X nice categorization. So I think that's the way that we're watching. I think it's super valuable, I think will create some surprises in terms of who might come out of the woodwork on be a leader in a category. Well, >>your timing is perfect, John and we do have some questions in the chat. But before we get to that, I want to bring in Sargi Joe Hall, who's a contributor to to our community. Sargi. Can you hear us? All right, so we got, uh, while >>bringing in Sarpy. Let's go down from the questions. So the first question, Um, we'll still we'll get the student second. The first question. But Ronald ask, Can a vendor in 2021 exist without a hybrid cloud story? Well, story and capabilities. Yes, they could live with. They have to have a story. >>Well, And if they don't own a public cloud? No. No, they absolutely cannot. Uh hey, Sergey. How you doing, man? Good to see you. So, folks, let me let me bring in Sergeant Kohala. He's a He's a cloud architect. He's a practitioner, He's worked in as a technologist. And there's a frequent guest on on the Cube. Good to see you, my friend. Thanks for taking the time with us. >>And good to see you guys to >>us. So we were kind of riffing on the competitive landscape we got. We got so much to talk about this, like, it's a number of questions coming in. Um, but Sargi we wanna talk about you know, what's happening here in Cloud Land? Let's get right into it. I mean, what do you guys see? I mean, we got yesterday. New regime, new inaug inauguration. Do you do you expect public policy? You'll start with you Sargi to have What kind of effect do you think public policy will have on, you know, cloud generally specifically, the big tech companies, the tech lash. Is it gonna be more of the same? Or do you see a big difference coming? >>I think that there will be some changing narrative. I believe on that. is mainly, um, from the regulators side. A lot has happened in one month, right? So people, I think are losing faith in high tech in a certain way. I mean, it doesn't, uh, e think it matters with camp. You belong to left or right kind of thing. Right? But parlor getting booted out from Italy s. I think that was huge. Um, like, how do you know that if a cloud provider will not boot you out? Um, like, what is that line where you draw the line? What are the rules? I think that discussion has to take place. Another thing which has happened in the last 23 months is is the solar winds hack, right? So not us not sort acknowledging that I was Russia and then wish you watching it now, new administration might have a different sort of Boston on that. I think that's huge. I think public public private partnership in security arena will emerge this year. We have to address that. Yeah, I think it's not changing. Uh, >>economics economy >>will change gradually. You know, we're coming out off pandemic. The money is still cheap on debt will not be cheap. for long. I think m and a activity really will pick up. So those are my sort of high level, Uh, >>thank you. I wanna come back to them. And because there's a question that chat about him in a But, John, how do you see it? Do you think Amazon and Google on a slippery slope booting parlor off? I mean, how do they adjudicate between? Well, what's happening in parlor? Uh, anything could happen on clubhouse. Who knows? I mean, can you use a I to find that stuff? >>Well, that's I mean, the Amazons, right? Hiding right there bunkered in right now from that bad, bad situation. Because again, like people we said Amazon, these all three cloud players win in the current environment. Okay, Who wins with the U. S. With the way we are China, Russia, cloud players. Okay, let's face it, that's the reality. So if I wanted to reset the world stage, you know what better way than the, you know, change over the United States economy, put people out of work, make people scared, and then reset the entire global landscape and control all with cash? That's, you know, conspiracy theory. >>So you see the riches, you see the riches, get the rich, get richer. >>Yeah, well, that's well, that's that. That's kind of what's happening, right? So if you start getting into this idea that you can't actually have an app on site because the reason now I'm not gonna I don't know the particular parlor, but apparently there was a reason. But this is dangerous, right? So what? What that's gonna do is and whether it's right or wrong or not, whether political opinion is it means that they were essentially taken offline by people that weren't voted for that. Weren't that when people didn't vote for So that's not a democracy, right? So that's that's a different kind of regime. What it's also going to do is you also have this groundswell of decentralized thinking, right. So you have a whole wave of crypto and decentralized, um, cyber punks out there who want to decentralize it. So all of this stuff in January has created a huge counterculture, and I had predicted this so many times in the Cube. David counterculture is coming and and you already have this kind of counterculture between centralized and decentralized thinking and so I think the Amazon's move is dangerous at a fundamental level. Because if you can't get it, if you can't get buy domain names and you're completely blackballed by by organized players, that's a Mafia, in my opinion. So, uh, and that and it's also fuels the decentralized move because people say, Hey, if that could be done to them, it could be done to me. Just the fact that it could be done will promote a swing in the other direction. I >>mean, independent of of, you know, again, somebody said your political views. I mean Parlor would say, Hey, we're trying to clean this stuff up now. Maybe they didn't do it fast enough, but you think about how new parlor is. You think about the early days of Twitter and Facebook, so they were sort of at a disadvantage. Trying to >>have it was it was partly was what it was. It was a right wing stand up job of standing up something quick. Their security was terrible. If you look at me and Cory Quinn on be great to have him, and he did a great analysis on this, because if you look the lawsuit was just terrible. Security was just a half, asshole. >>Well, and the experience was horrible. I mean, it's not It was not a great app, but But, like you said, it was a quick stew. Hand up, you know, for an agenda. But nonetheless, you know, to start, get to your point earlier. It's like, you know, Are they gonna, you know, shut me down? If I say something that's, you know, out of line, or how do I control that? >>Yeah, I remember, like, 2019, we involved closing sort of remarks. I was there. I was saying that these companies are gonna be too big to fail. And also, they're too big for other nations to do business with. In a way, I think MNCs are running the show worldwide. They're running the government's. They are way. Have seen the proof of that in us this year. Late last year and this year, um, Twitter last night blocked Chinese Ambassador E in us. Um, from there, you know, platform last night and I was like, What? What's going on? So, like, we used to we used to say, like the Chinese company, tech companies are in bed with the Chinese government. Right. Remember that? And now and now, Actually, I think Chinese people can say the same thing about us companies. Uh, it's not a good thing. >>Well, let's >>get some question. >>Let's get some questions from the chat. Yeah. Thank you. One is on M and a subject you mentioned them in a Who do you see is possible emanate targets. I mean, I could throw a couple out there. Um, you know, some of the cdn players, maybe aka my You know, I like I like Hashi Corp. I think they're doing some really interesting things. What do you see? >>Nothing. Hashi Corp. And anybody who's doing things in the periphery is a candidate for many by the big guys, you know, by the hyper scholars and number two tier two or five hyper scholars. Right. Uh, that's why sales forces of the world and stuff like that. Um, some some companies, which I thought there will be a target, Sort of. I mean, they target they're getting too big, because off their evaluations, I think how she Corpuz one, um, >>and >>their bunch in the networking space. Uh, well, Tara, if I say the right that was acquired by at five this week, this week or last week, Actually, last week for $500 million. Um, I know they're founder. So, like I found that, Yeah, there's a lot going on on the on the network side on the anything to do with data. Uh, that those air too hard areas in the cloud arena >>data, data protection, John, any any anything you could adhere. >>And I think I mean, I think ej ej is gonna be where the gaps are. And I think m and a activity is gonna be where again, the bigger too big to fail would agree with you on that one. But we're gonna look at white Spaces and say a white space for Amazon is like a monster space for a start up. Right? So you're gonna have these huge white spaces opportunities, and I think it's gonna be an M and a opportunity big time start ups to get bought in. Given the speed on, I think you're gonna see it around databases and around some of these new service meshes and micro services. I mean, >>they there's a There's a question here, somebody's that dons asking why is Google who has the most pervasive tech infrastructure on the planet. Not at the same level of other to hyper scale is I'll give you my two cents is because it took him a long time to get their heads out of their ads. I wrote a piece of around that a while ago on they just they figured out how to learn the enterprise. I mean, John, you've made this point a number of times, but they just and I got a late start. >>Yeah, they're adding a lot of people. If you look at their who their hiring on the Google Cloud, they're adding a lot of enterprise chops in there. They realized this years ago, and we've talked to many of the top leaders, although Curry and hasn't yet sit down with us. Um, don't know what he's hiding or waiting for, but they're clearly not geared up to chicken Pete. You can see it with some some of the things that they're doing, but I mean competed the level of Amazon, but they have strength and they're playing their strength, but they definitely recognize that they didn't have the enterprise motions and people in the DNA and that David takes time people in the enterprise. It's not for the faint of heart. It's unique details that are different. You can't just, you know, swing the Google playbook and saying We're gonna home The enterprises are text grade. They knew that years ago. So I think you're going to see a good year for Google. I think you'll see a lot of change. Um, they got great people in there. On the product marketing side is Dev Solution Architects, and then the SRE model that they have perfected has been strong. And I think security is an area that they could really had a lot of value it. So, um always been a big fan of their huge network and all the intelligence they have that they could bring to bear on security. >>Yeah, I think Google's problem main problem that to actually there many, but one is that they don't They don't have the boots on the ground as compared to um, Microsoft, especially an Amazon actually had a similar problem, but they had a wide breath off their product portfolio. I always talk about feature proximity in cloud context, like if you're doing one thing. You wanna do another thing? And how do you go get that feature? Do you go to another cloud writer or it's right there where you are. So I think Amazon has the feature proximity and they also have, uh, aske Compared to Google, there's skills gravity. Larger people are trained on AWS. I think Google is trying there. So second problem Google is having is that that they're they're more focused on, I believe, um, on the data science part on their sort of skipping the cool components sort of off the cloud, if you will. The where the workloads needs, you know, basic stuff, right? That's like your compute storage and network. And that has to be well, talk through e think e think they will do good. >>Well, so later today, Paul Dillon sits down with Mids Avery of Google used to be in Oracle. He's with Google now, and he's gonna push him on on the numbers. You know, you're a distant third. Does that matter? And of course, you know, you're just a preview of it's gonna say, Well, no, we don't really pay attention to that stuff. But, John, you said something earlier that. I think Jerry Chen made this comment that, you know, Is it a winner? Take all? No, but it's a winner. Take a lot. You know the number two is going to get a big chunk of the pie. It appears that the markets big enough for three. But do you? Does Google have to really dramatically close the gap on be a much, much closer, you know, to the to the leaders in orderto to compete in this race? Or can they just kind of continue to bump along, siphon off the ad revenue? Put it out there? I mean, I >>definitely can compete. I think that's like Google's in it. Then it they're not. They're not caving, right? >>So But But I wrote I wrote recently that I thought they should even even put mawr oven emphasis on the cloud. I mean, maybe maybe they're already, you know, doubling down triple down. I just I think that is a multi trillion dollar, you know, future for the industry. And, you know, I think Google, believe it or not, could even do more. Now. Maybe there's just so much you could dio. >>There's a lot of challenges with these company, especially Google. They're in Silicon Valley. We have a big Social Justice warrior mentality. Um, there's a big debate going on the in the back channels of the tech scene here, and that is that if you want to be successful in cloud, you have to have a good edge strategy, and that involves surveillance, use of data and pushing the privacy limits. Right? So you know, Google has people within the country that will protest contract because AI is being used for war. Yet we have the most unstable geopolitical seen that I've ever witnessed in my lifetime going on right now. So, um, don't >>you think that's what happened with parlor? I mean, Rob Hope said, Hey, bar is pretty high to kick somebody off your platform. The parlor went over the line, but I would also think that a lot of the employees, whether it's Google AWS as well, said, Hey, why are we supporting you know this and so to your point about social justice, I mean, that's not something. That >>parlor was not just social justice. They were trying to throw the government. That's Rob e. I think they were in there to get selfies and being protesters. But apparently there was evidence from what I heard in some of these clubhouse, uh, private chats. Waas. There was overwhelming evidence on parlor. >>Yeah, but my point is that the employee backlash was also a factor. That's that's all I'm saying. >>Well, we have Google is your Google and you have employees to say we will boycott and walk out if you bid on that jet I contract for instance, right, But Microsoft one from maybe >>so. I mean, that's well, >>I think I think Tom Poole's making a really good point here, which is a Google is an alternative. Thio aws. The last Google cloud next that we were asked at they had is all virtual issue. But I saw a lot of I T practitioners in the audience looking around for an alternative to a W s just seeing, though, we could talk about Mano Cloud or Multi Cloud, and Andy Jassy has his his narrative around, and he's true when somebody goes multiple clouds, they put you know most of their eggs in one basket. Nonetheless, I think you know, Google's got a lot of people interested in, particularly in the analytic side, um, in in an alternative, hedging their bets eso and particularly use cases, so they should be able to do so. I guess my the bottom line here is the markets big enough to have Really? You don't have to be the Jack Welch. I gotta be number one and number two in the market. Is that the conclusion here? >>I think so. But the data gravity and the skills gravity are playing against them. Another problem, which I didn't want a couple of earlier was Google Eyes is that they have to boot out AWS wherever they go. Right? That is a huge challenge. Um, most off the most off the Fortune 2000 companies are already using AWS in one way or another. Right? So they are the multi cloud kind of player. Another one, you know, and just pure purely somebody going 200% Google Cloud. Uh, those cases are kind of pure, if you will. >>I think it's gonna be absolutely multi cloud. I think it's gonna be a time where you looked at the marketplace and you're gonna think in terms of disaster recovery, model of cloud or just fault tolerant capabilities or, you know, look at the parlor, the next parlor. Or what if Amazon wakes up one day and said, Hey, I don't like the cubes commentary on their virtual events, so shut them down. We should have a fail over to Google Cloud should Microsoft and Option. And one of people in Microsoft ecosystem wants to buy services from us. We have toe kind of co locate there. So these are all open questions that are gonna be the that will become certain pretty quickly, which is, you know, can a company diversify their computing An i t. In a way that works. And I think the momentum around Cooper Netease you're seeing as a great connective tissue between, you know, having applications work between clouds. Right? Well, directionally correct, in my opinion, because if I'm a company, why wouldn't I wanna have choice? So >>let's talk about this. The data is mixed on that. I'll share some data, meaty our data with you. About half the companies will say Yeah, we're spreading the wealth around to multiple clouds. Okay, That's one thing will come back to that. About the other half were saying, Yeah, we're predominantly mono cloud we didn't have. The resource is. But what I think going forward is that that what multi cloud really becomes. And I think John, you mentioned Snowflake before. I think that's an indicator of what what true multi cloud is going to look like. And what Snowflake is doing is they're building abstraction, layer across clouds. Ed Walsh would say, I'm standing on the shoulders of Giants, so they're basically following points of presence around the globe and building their own cloud. They call it a data cloud with a global mesh. We'll hear more about that later today, but you sign on to that cloud. So they're saying, Hey, we're gonna build value because so many of Amazon's not gonna build that abstraction layer across multi clouds, at least not in the near term. So that's a really opportunity for >>people. I mean, I don't want to sound like I'm dating myself, but you know the date ourselves, David. I remember back in the eighties, when you had open systems movement, right? The part of the whole Revolution OS I open systems interconnect model. At that time, the networking stacks for S N A. For IBM, decadent for deck we all know that was a proprietary stack and then incomes TCP I p Now os I never really happened on all seven layers, but the bottom layers standardized. Okay, that was huge. So I think if you look at a W s or some of the comments in the chat AWS is could be the s n a. Depends how you're looking at it, right? And you could say they're open. But in a way, they want more Amazon. So Amazon's not out there saying we love multi cloud. Why would they promote multi cloud? They are a one of the clouds they want. >>That's interesting, John. And then subject is a cloud architect. I mean, it's it is not trivial to make You're a data cloud. If you're snowflake, work on AWS work on Google. Work on Azure. Be seamless. I mean, certainly the marketing says that, but technically, that's not trivial. You know, there are latent see issues. Uh, you know, So that's gonna take a while to develop. What? Do your thoughts there? >>I think that multi cloud for for same workload and multi cloud for different workloads are two different things. Like we usually put multiple er in one bucket, right? So I think you're right. If you're trying to do multi cloud for the same workload, that's it. That's Ah, complex, uh, problem to solve architecturally, right. You have to have a common ap ice and common, you know, control playing, if you will. And we don't have that yet, and then we will not have that for a for at least one other couple of years. So, uh, if you if you want to do that, then you have to go to the lower, lowest common denominator in technical sort of stock, if you will. And then you're not leveraging the best of the breed technology off their from different vendors, right? I believe that's a hard problem to solve. And in another thing, is that that that I always say this? I'm always on the death side, you know, developer side, I think, uh, two deaths. Public cloud is a proxy for innovative culture. Right. So there's a catch phrase I have come up with today during shower eso. I think that is true. And then people who are companies who use the best of the breed technologies, they can attract the these developers and developers are the Mazen's off This digital sort of empires, amazingly, is happening there. Right there they are the Mazen's right. They head on the bricks. I think if you don't appeal to developers, if you don't but extensive for, like, force behind educating the market, you can't you can't >>put off. It's the same game Stepping story was seeing some check comments. Uh, guard. She's, uh, linked in friend of mine. She said, Microsoft, If you go back and look at the Microsoft early days to the developer Point they were, they made their phones with developers. They were a software company s Oh, hey, >>forget developers, developers, developers. >>You were if you were in the developer ecosystem, you were treated his gold. You were part of the family. If you were outside that world, you were competitors, and that was ruthless times back then. But they again they had. That was where it was today. Look at where the software defined businesses and starve it, saying it's all about being developer lead in this new way to program, right? So the cloud next Gen Cloud is going to look a lot like next Gen Developer and all the different tools and techniques they're gonna change. So I think, yes, this kind of developer ecosystem will be harnessed, and that's the power source. It's just gonna look different. So, >>Justin, Justin in the chat has a comment. I just want to answer the question about elastic thoughts on elastic. Um, I tell you, elastic has momentum uh, doing doing very well in the market place. Thea Elk Stack is a great alternative that people are looking thio relative to Splunk. Who people complain about the pricing. Of course it's plunks got the easy button, but it is getting increasingly expensive. The problem with elk stack is you know, it's open source. It gets complicated. You got a shard, the databases you gotta manage. It s Oh, that's what Ed Walsh's company chaos searches is all about. But elastic has some riel mo mentum in the marketplace right now. >>Yeah, you know, other things that coming on the chat understands what I was saying about the open systems is kubernetes. I always felt was that is a bad metaphor. But they're with me. That was the TCP I peep In this modern era, C t c p I p created that that the disruptor to the S N A s and the network protocols that were proprietary. So what KUBERNETES is doing is creating a connective tissue between clouds and letting the open source community fill in the gaps in the middle, where kind of way kind of probably a bad analogy. But that's where the disruption is. And if you look at what's happened since Kubernetes was put out there, what it's become kind of de facto and standard in the sense that everyone's rallying around it. Same exact thing happened with TCP was people were trashing it. It is terrible, you know it's not. Of course they were trashed because it was open. So I find that to be very interesting. >>Yeah, that's a good >>analogy. E. Thinks the R C a cable. I used the R C. A cable analogy like the VCRs. When they started, they, every VC had had their own cable, and they will work on Lee with that sort of plan of TV and the R C. A cable came and then now you can put any TV with any VCR, and the VCR industry took off. There's so many examples out there around, uh, standards And how standards can, you know, flair that fire, if you will, on dio for an industry to go sort of wild. And another trend guys I'm seeing is that from the consumer side. And let's talk a little bit on the consuming side. Um, is that the The difference wouldn't be to B and B to C is blood blurred because even the physical products are connected to the end user Like my door lock, the August door lock I didn't just put got get the door lock and forget about that. Like I I value the expedience it gives me or problems that gives me on daily basis. So I'm close to that vendor, right? So So the middle men, uh, middle people are getting removed from from the producer off the technology or the product to the consumer. Even even the sort of big grocery players they have their APs now, uh, how do you buy stuff and how it's delivered and all that stuff that experience matters in that context, I think, um, having, uh, to be able to sell to thes enterprises from the Cloud writer Breuder's. They have to have these case studies or all these sample sort off reference architectures and stuff like that. I think whoever has that mawr pushed that way, they are doing better like that. Amazon is Amazon. Because of that reason, I think they have lot off sort off use cases about on top of them. And they themselves do retail like crazy. Right? So and other things at all s. So I think that's a big trend. >>Great. Great points are being one of things. There's a question in there about from, uh, Yaden. Who says, uh, I like the developer Lead cloud movement, But what is the criticality of the executive audience when educating the marketplace? Um, this comes up a lot in some of my conversations around automation. So automation has been a big wave to automate this automate everything. And then everything is a service has become kind of kind of the the executive suite. Kind of like conversation we need to make everything is a service in our business. You seeing people move to that cloud model. Okay, so the executives think everything is a services business strategy, which it is on some level, but then, when they say Take that hill, do it. Developers. It's not that easy. And this is where a lot of our cube conversations over the past few months have been, especially during the cova with cute virtual. This has come up a lot, Dave this idea, and start being around. It's easy to say everything is a service but will implement it. It's really hard, and I think that's where the developer lead Connection is where the executive have to understand that in order to just say it and do it are two different things. That digital transformation. That's a big part of it. So I think that you're gonna see a lot of education this year around what it means to actually do that and how to implement it. >>I'd like to comment on the as a service and subject. Get your take on it. I mean, I think you're seeing, for instance, with HP Green Lake, Dell's come out with Apex. You know IBM as its utility model. These companies were basically taking a page out of what I what I would call a flawed SAS model. If you look at the SAS players, whether it's salesforce or workday, service now s a P oracle. These models are They're really They're not cloud pricing models. They're they're basically you got to commit to a term one year, two year, three year. We'll give you a discount if you commit to the longer term. But you're locked in on you. You probably pay upfront. Or maybe you pay quarterly. That's not a cloud pricing model. And that's why I mean, they're flawed. You're seeing companies like Data Dog, for example. Snowflake is another one, and they're beginning to price on a consumption basis. And that is, I think, one of the big changes that we're going to see this decade is that true cloud? You know, pay by the drink pricing model and to your point, john toe, actually implement. That is, you're gonna need a whole new layer across your company on it is quite complicated it not even to mention how you compensate salespeople, etcetera. The a p. I s of your product. I mean, it is that, but that is a big sea change that I see coming. Subject your >>thoughts. Yeah, I think like you couldn't see it. And like some things for this big tech exacts are hidden in the plain >>sight, right? >>They don't see it. They they have blind spots, like Look at that. Look at Amazon. They went from Melissa and 200 millisecond building on several s, Right, Right. And then here you are, like you're saying, pay us for the whole year. If you don't use the cloud, you lose it or will pay by month. Poor user and all that stuff like that that those a role models, I think these players will be forced to use that term pricing like poor minute or for a second, poor user. That way, I think the Salesforce moral is hybrid. They're struggling in a way. I think they're trying to bring the platform by doing, you know, acquisition after acquisition to be a platform for other people to build on top off. But they're having a little trouble there because because off there, such pricing and little closeness, if you will. And, uh, again, I'm coming, going, going back to developers like, if you are not appealing to developers who are writing the latest and greatest code and it is open enough, by the way open and open source are two different things that we all know that. So if your platform is not open enough, you will have you know, some problems in closing the deals. >>E. I want to just bring up a question on chat around from Justin didn't fitness. Who says can you touch on the vertical clouds? Has your offering this and great question Great CP announcing Retail cloud inventions IBM Athena Okay, I'm a huge on this point because I think this I'm not saying this for years. Cloud computing is about horizontal scalability and vertical specialization, and that's absolutely clear, and you see all the clouds doing it. The vertical rollouts is where the high fidelity data is, and with machine learning and AI efforts coming out, that's accelerated benefits. There you have tow, have the vertical focus. I think it's super smart that clouds will have some sort of vertical engine, if you will in the clouds and build on top of a control playing. Whether that's data or whatever, this is clearly the winning formula. If you look at all the successful kind of ai implementations, the ones that have access to the most data will get the most value. So, um if you're gonna have a data driven cloud you have tow, have this vertical feeling, Um, in terms of verticals, the data on DSO I think that's super important again, just generally is a strategy. I think Google doing a retail about a super smart because their whole pitches were not Amazon on. Some people say we're not Google, depending on where you look at. So every of these big players, they have dominance in the areas, and that's scarce. Companies and some companies will never go to Amazon for that reason. Or some people never go to Google for other reasons. I know people who are in the ad tech. This is a black and we're not. We're not going to Google. So again, it is what it is. But this idea of vertical specialization relevant in super >>forts, I want to bring to point out to sessions that are going on today on great points. I'm glad you asked that question. One is Alan. As he kicks off at 1 p.m. Eastern time in the transformation track, he's gonna talk a lot about the coming power of ecosystems and and we've talked about this a lot. That that that to compete with Amazon, Google Azure, you've gotta have some kind of specialization and vertical specialization is a good one. But of course, you see in the big Big three also get into that. But so he's talking at one o'clock and then it at 3 36 PM You know this times are strange, but e can explain that later Hillary Hunter is talking about she's the CTO IBM I B M's ah Financial Cloud, which is another really good example of specifying vertical requirements and serving. You know, an audience subject. I think you have some thoughts on this. >>Actually, I lost my thought. E >>think the other piece of that is data. I mean, to the extent that you could build an ecosystem coming back to Alan Nancy's premise around data that >>billions of dollars in >>their day there's billions of dollars and that's the title of the session. But we did the trillion dollar baby post with Jazzy and said Cloud is gonna be a trillion dollars right? >>And and the point of Alan Answer session is he's thinking from an individual firm. Forget the millions that you're gonna save shifting to the cloud on cost. There's billions in ecosystems and operating models. That's >>absolutely the business value. Now going back to my half stack full stack developer, is the business value. I've been talking about this on the clubhouses a lot this past month is for the entrepreneurs out there the the activity in the business value. That's the new the new intellectual property is the business logic, right? So if you could see innovations in how work streams and workflow is gonna be a configured differently, you have now large scale cloud specialization with data, you can move quickly and take territory. That's much different scenario than a decade ago, >>at the point I was trying to make earlier was which I know I remember, is that that having the horizontal sort of features is very important, as compared to having vertical focus. You know, you're you're more healthcare focused like you. You have that sort of needs, if you will, and you and our auto or financials and stuff like that. What Google is trying to do, I think that's it. That's a good thing. Do cook up the reference architectures, but it's a bad thing in a way that you drive drive away some developers who are most of the developers at 80 plus percent, developers are horizontal like you. Look at the look into the psyche of a developer like you move from company to company. And only few developers will say I will stay only in health care, right? So I will only stay in order or something of that, right? So they you have to have these horizontal capabilities which can be applied anywhere on then. On top >>of that, I think that's true. Sorry, but I'll take a little bit different. Take on that. I would say yes, that's true. But remember, remember the old school application developer Someone was just called in Application developer. All they did was develop applications, right? They pick the framework, they did it right? So I think we're going to see more of that is just now mawr of Under the Covers developers. You've got mawr suffer defined networking and software, defined storage servers and cloud kubernetes. And it's kind of like under the hood. But you got your, you know, classic application developer. I think you're gonna see him. A lot of that come back in a way that's like I don't care about anything else. And that's the promise of cloud infrastructure is code. So I think this both. >>Hey, I worked. >>I worked at people solved and and I still today I say into into this context, I say E r P s are the ultimate low code. No code sort of thing is right. And what the problem is, they couldn't evolve. They couldn't make it. Lightweight, right? Eso um I used to write applications with drag and drop, you know, stuff. Right? But But I was miserable as a developer. I didn't Didn't want to be in the applications division off PeopleSoft. I wanted to be on the tools division. There were two divisions in most of these big companies ASAP. Oracle. Uh, like companies that divisions right? One is the cooking up the tools. One is cooking up the applications. The basketball was always gonna go to the tooling. Hey, >>guys, I'm sorry. We're almost out of time. I always wanted to t some of the sections of the day. First of all, we got Holder Mueller coming on at lunch for a power half hour. Um, you'll you'll notice when you go back to the home page. You'll notice that calendar, that linear clock that we talked about that start times are kind of weird like, for instance, an appendix coming on at 1 24. And that's because these air prerecorded assets and rather than having a bunch of dead air, we're just streaming one to the other. So so she's gonna talk about people, process and technology. We got Kathy Southwick, whose uh, Silicon Valley CEO Dan Sheehan was the CEO of Dunkin Brands and and he was actually the c 00 So it's C A CEO connecting the dots to the business. Daniel Dienes is the CEO of you I path. He's coming on a 2:47 p.m. East Coast time one of the hottest companies, probably the fastest growing software company in history. We got a guy from Bain coming on Dave Humphrey, who invested $750 million in Nutanix. He'll explain why and then, ironically, Dheeraj Pandey stew, Minuteman. Our friend interviewed him. That's 3 35. 1 of the sessions are most excited about today is John McD agony at 403 p. M. East Coast time, she's gonna talk about how to fix broken data architectures, really forward thinking stuff. And then that's the So that's the transformation track on the future of cloud track. We start off with the Big Three Milan Thompson Bukovec. At one oclock, she runs a W s storage business. Then I mentioned gig therapy wrath at 1. 30. He runs Azure is analytics. Business is awesome. Paul Dillon then talks about, um, IDs Avery at 1 59. And then our friends to, um, talks about interview Simon Crosby. I think I think that's it. I think we're going on to our next session. All right, so keep it right there. Thanks for watching the Cuban cloud. Uh huh.

>> Joy: Welcome to the Virtual Big Data Conference. Vertica is so excited to host this event. I'm Joy King, and I'll be your host for today's Big Data Conference Keynote Session. It's my honor and my genuine pleasure to lead Vertica's product and go-to-market strategy. And I'm so lucky to have a passionate and committed team who turned our Vertica BDC event, into a virtual event in a very short amount of time. I want to thank the thousands of people, and yes, that's our true number who have registered to attend this virtual event. We were determined to balance your health, safety and your peace of mind with the excitement of the Vertica BDC. This is a very unique event. Because as I hope you all know, we focus on engineering and architecture, best practice sharing and customer stories that will educate and inspire everyone. I also want to thank our top sponsors for the virtual BDC, Arrow, and Pure Storage. Our partnerships are so important to us and to everyone in the audience. Because together, we get things done faster and better. Now for today's keynote, you'll hear from three very important and energizing speakers. First, Colin Mahony, our SVP and General Manager for Vertica, will talk about the market trends that Vertica is betting on to win for our customers. And he'll share the exciting news about our Vertica 10 announcement and how this will benefit our customers. Then you'll hear from Amy Fowler, VP of strategy and solutions for FlashBlade at Pure Storage. Our partnership with Pure Storage is truly unique in the industry, because together modern infrastructure from Pure powers modern analytics from Vertica. And then you'll hear from John Yovanovich, Director of IT at AT&T, who will tell you about the Pure Vertica Symphony that plays live every day at AT&T. Here we go, Colin, over to you. >> Colin: Well, thanks a lot joy. And, I want to echo Joy's thanks to our sponsors, and so many of you who have helped make this happen. This is not an easy time for anyone. We were certainly looking forward to getting together in person in Boston during the Vertica Big Data Conference and Winning with Data. But I think all of you and our team have done a great job, scrambling and putting together a terrific virtual event. So really appreciate your time. I also want to remind people that we will make both the slides and the full recording available after this. So for any of those who weren't able to join live, that is still going to be available. Well, things have been pretty exciting here. And in the analytic space in general, certainly for Vertica, there's a lot happening. There are a lot of problems to solve, a lot of opportunities to make things better, and a lot of data that can really make every business stronger, more efficient, and frankly, more differentiated. For Vertica, though, we know that focusing on the challenges that we can directly address with our platform, and our people, and where we can actually make the biggest difference is where we ought to be putting our energy and our resources. I think one of the things that has made Vertica so strong over the years is our ability to focus on those areas where we can make a great difference. So for us as we look at the market, and we look at where we play, there are really three recent and some not so recent, but certainly picking up a lot of the market trends that have become critical for every industry that wants to Win Big With Data. We've heard this loud and clear from our customers and from the analysts that cover the market. If I were to summarize these three areas, this really is the core focus for us right now. We know that there's massive data growth. And if we can unify the data silos so that people can really take advantage of that data, we can make a huge difference. We know that public clouds offer tremendous advantages, but we also know that balance and flexibility is critical. And we all need the benefit that machine learning for all the types up to the end data science. We all need the benefits that they can bring to every single use case, but only if it can really be operationalized at scale, accurate and in real time. And the power of Vertica is, of course, how we're able to bring so many of these things together. Let me talk a little bit more about some of these trends. So one of the first industry trends that we've all been following probably now for over the last decade, is Hadoop and specifically HDFS. So many companies have invested, time, money, more importantly, people in leveraging the opportunity that HDFS brought to the market. HDFS is really part of a much broader storage disruption that we'll talk a little bit more about, more broadly than HDFS. But HDFS itself was really designed for petabytes of data, leveraging low cost commodity hardware and the ability to capture a wide variety of data formats, from a wide variety of data sources and applications. And I think what people really wanted, was to store that data before having to define exactly what structures they should go into. So over the last decade or so, the focus for most organizations is figuring out how to capture, store and frankly manage that data. And as a platform to do that, I think, Hadoop was pretty good. It certainly changed the way that a lot of enterprises think about their data and where it's locked up. In parallel with Hadoop, particularly over the last five years, Cloud Object Storage has also given every organization another option for collecting, storing and managing even more data. That has led to a huge growth in data storage, obviously, up on public clouds like Amazon and their S3, Google Cloud Storage and Azure Blob Storage just to name a few. And then when you consider regional and local object storage offered by cloud vendors all over the world, the explosion of that data, in leveraging this type of object storage is very real. And I think, as I mentioned, it's just part of this broader storage disruption that's been going on. But with all this growth in the data, in all these new places to put this data, every organization we talk to is facing even more challenges now around the data silo. Sure the data silos certainly getting bigger. And hopefully they're getting cheaper per bit. But as I said, the focus has really been on collecting, storing and managing the data. But between the new data lakes and many different cloud object storage combined with all sorts of data types from the complexity of managing all this, getting that business value has been very limited. This actually takes me to big bet number one for Team Vertica, which is to unify the data. Our goal, and some of the announcements we have made today plus roadmap announcements I'll share with you throughout this presentation. Our goal is to ensure that all the time, money and effort that has gone into storing that data, all the data turns into business value. So how are we going to do that? With a unified analytics platform that analyzes the data wherever it is HDFS, Cloud Object Storage, External tables in an any format ORC, Parquet, JSON, and of course, our own Native Roth Vertica format. Analyze the data in the right place in the right format, using a single unified tool. This is something that Vertica has always been committed to, and you'll see in some of our announcements today, we're just doubling down on that commitment. Let's talk a little bit more about the public cloud. This is certainly the second trend. It's the second wave maybe of data disruption with object storage. And there's a lot of advantages when it comes to public cloud. There's no question that the public clouds give rapid access to compute storage with the added benefit of eliminating data center maintenance that so many companies, want to get out of themselves. But maybe the biggest advantage that I see is the architectural innovation. The public clouds have introduced so many methodologies around how to provision quickly, separating compute and storage and really dialing-in the exact needs on demand, as you change workloads. When public clouds began, it made a lot of sense for the cloud providers and their customers to charge and pay for compute and storage in the ratio that each use case demanded. And I think you're seeing that trend, proliferate all over the place, not just up in public cloud. That architecture itself is really becoming the next generation architecture for on-premise data centers, as well. But there are a lot of concerns. I think we're all aware of them. They're out there many times for different workloads, there are higher costs. Especially if some of the workloads that are being run through analytics, which tend to run all the time. Just like some of the silo challenges that companies are facing with HDFS, data lakes and cloud storage, the public clouds have similar types of siloed challenges as well. Initially, there was a belief that they were cheaper than data centers, and when you added in all the costs, it looked that way. And again, for certain elastic workloads, that is the case. I don't think that's true across the board overall. Even to the point where a lot of the cloud vendors aren't just charging lower costs anymore. We hear from a lot of customers that they don't really want to tether themselves to any one cloud because of some of those uncertainties. Of course, security and privacy are a concern. We hear a lot of concerns with regards to cloud and even some SaaS vendors around shared data catalogs, across all the customers and not enough separation. But security concerns are out there, you can read about them. I'm not going to jump into that bandwagon. But we hear about them. And then, of course, I think one of the things we hear the most from our customers, is that each cloud stack is starting to feel even a lot more locked in than the traditional data warehouse appliance. And as everybody knows, the industry has been running away from appliances as fast as it can. And so they're not eager to get locked into another, quote, unquote, virtual appliance, if you will, up in the cloud. They really want to make sure they have flexibility in which clouds, they're going to today, tomorrow and in the future. And frankly, we hear from a lot of our customers that they're very interested in eventually mixing and matching, compute from one cloud with, say storage from another cloud, which I think is something that we'll hear a lot more about. And so for us, that's why we've got our big bet number two. we love the cloud. We love the public cloud. We love the private clouds on-premise, and other hosting providers. But our passion and commitment is for Vertica to be able to run in any of the clouds that our customers choose, and make it portable across those clouds. We have supported on-premises and all public clouds for years. And today, we have announced even more support for Vertica in Eon Mode, the deployment option that leverages the separation of compute from storage, with even more deployment choices, which I'm going to also touch more on as we go. So super excited about our big bet number two. And finally as I mentioned, for all the hype that there is around machine learning, I actually think that most importantly, this third trend that team Vertica is determined to address is the need to bring business critical, analytics, machine learning, data science projects into production. For so many years, there just wasn't enough data available to justify the investment in machine learning. Also, processing power was expensive, and storage was prohibitively expensive. But to train and score and evaluate all the different models to unlock the full power of predictive analytics was tough. Today you have those massive data volumes. You have the relatively cheap processing power and storage to make that dream a reality. And if you think about this, I mean with all the data that's available to every company, the real need is to operationalize the speed and the scale of machine learning so that these organizations can actually take advantage of it where they need to. I mean, we've seen this for years with Vertica, going back to some of the most advanced gaming companies in the early days, they were incorporating this with live data directly into their gaming experiences. Well, every organization wants to do that now. And the accuracy for clickability and real time actions are all key to separating the leaders from the rest of the pack in every industry when it comes to machine learning. But if you look at a lot of these projects, the reality is that there's a ton of buzz, there's a ton of hype spanning every acronym that you can imagine. But most companies are struggling, do the separate teams, different tools, silos and the limitation that many platforms are facing, driving, down sampling to get a small subset of the data, to try to create a model that then doesn't apply, or compromising accuracy and making it virtually impossible to replicate models, and understand decisions. And if there's one thing that we've learned when it comes to data, prescriptive data at the atomic level, being able to show end of one as we refer to it, meaning individually tailored data. No matter what it is healthcare, entertainment experiences, like gaming or other, being able to get at the granular data and make these decisions, make that scoring applies to machine learning just as much as it applies to giving somebody a next-best-offer. But the opportunity has never been greater. The need to integrate this end-to-end workflow and support the right tools without compromising on that accuracy. Think about it as no downsampling, using all the data, it really is key to machine learning success. Which should be no surprise then why the third big bet from Vertica is one that we've actually been working on for years. And we're so proud to be where we are today, helping the data disruptors across the world operationalize machine learning. This big bet has the potential to truly unlock, really the potential of machine learning. And today, we're announcing some very important new capabilities specifically focused on unifying the work being done by the data science community, with their preferred tools and platforms, and the volume of data and performance at scale, available in Vertica. Our strategy has been very consistent over the last several years. As I said in the beginning, we haven't deviated from our strategy. Of course, there's always things that we add. Most of the time, it's customer driven, it's based on what our customers are asking us to do. But I think we've also done a great job, not trying to be all things to all people. Especially as these hype cycles flare up around us, we absolutely love participating in these different areas without getting completely distracted. I mean, there's a variety of query tools and data warehouses and analytics platforms in the market. We all know that. There are tools and platforms that are offered by the public cloud vendors, by other vendors that support one or two specific clouds. There are appliance vendors, who I was referring to earlier who can deliver package data warehouse offerings for private data centers. And there's a ton of popular machine learning tools, languages and other kits. But Vertica is the only advanced analytic platform that can do all this, that can bring it together. We can analyze the data wherever it is, in HDFS, S3 Object Storage, or Vertica itself. Natively we support multiple clouds on-premise deployments, And maybe most importantly, we offer that choice of deployment modes to allow our customers to choose the architecture that works for them right now. It still also gives them the option to change move, evolve over time. And Vertica is the only analytics database with end-to-end machine learning that can truly operationalize ML at scale. And I know it's a mouthful. But it is not easy to do all these things. It is one of the things that highly differentiates Vertica from the rest of the pack. It is also why our customers, all of you continue to bet on us and see the value that we are delivering and we will continue to deliver. Here's a couple of examples of some of our customers who are powered by Vertica. It's the scale of data. It's the millisecond response times. Performance and scale have always been a huge part of what we have been about, not the only thing. I think the functionality all the capabilities that we add to the platform, the ease of use, the flexibility, obviously with the deployment. But if you look at some of the numbers they are under these customers on this slide. And I've shared a lot of different stories about these customers. Which, by the way, it still amaze me every time I talk to one and I get the updates, you can see the power and the difference that Vertica is making. Equally important, if you look at a lot of these customers, they are the epitome of being able to deploy Vertica in a lot of different environments. Many of the customers on this slide are not using Vertica just on-premise or just in the cloud. They're using it in a hybrid way. They're using it in multiple different clouds. And again, we've been with them on that journey throughout, which is what has made this product and frankly, our roadmap and our vision exactly what it is. It's been quite a journey. And that journey continues now with the Vertica 10 release. The Vertica 10 release is obviously a massive release for us. But if you look back, you can see that building on that native columnar architecture that started a long time ago, obviously, with the C-Store paper. We built it to leverage that commodity hardware, because it was an architecture that was never tightly integrated with any specific underlying infrastructure. I still remember hearing the initial pitch from Mike Stonebreaker, about the vision of Vertica as a software only solution and the importance of separating the company from hardware innovation. And at the time, Mike basically said to me, "there's so much R&D in innovation that's going to happen in hardware, we shouldn't bake hardware into our solution. We should do it in software, and we'll be able to take advantage of that hardware." And that is exactly what has happened. But one of the most recent innovations that we embraced with hardware is certainly that separation of compute and storage. As I said previously, the public cloud providers offered this next generation architecture, really to ensure that they can provide the customers exactly what they needed, more compute or more storage and charge for each, respectively. The separation of compute and storage, compute from storage is a major milestone in data center architectures. If you think about it, it's really not only a public cloud innovation, though. It fundamentally redefines the next generation data architecture for on-premise and for pretty much every way people are thinking about computing today. And that goes for software too. Object storage is an example of the cost effective means for storing data. And even more importantly, separating compute from storage for analytic workloads has a lot of advantages. Including the opportunity to manage much more dynamic, flexible workloads. And more importantly, truly isolate those workloads from others. And by the way, once you start having something that can truly isolate workloads, then you can have the conversations around autonomic computing, around setting up some nodes, some compute resources on the data that won't affect any of the other data to do some things on their own, maybe some self analytics, by the system, etc. A lot of things that many of you know we've already been exploring in terms of our own system data in the product. But it was May 2018, believe it or not, it seems like a long time ago where we first announced Eon Mode and I want to make something very clear, actually about Eon mode. It's a mode, it's a deployment option for Vertica customers. And I think this is another huge benefit that we don't talk about enough. But unlike a lot of vendors in the market who will dig you and charge you for every single add-on like hit-buy, you name it. You get this with the Vertica product. If you continue to pay support and maintenance, this comes with the upgrade. This comes as part of the new release. So any customer who owns or buys Vertica has the ability to set up either an Enterprise Mode or Eon Mode, which is a question I know that comes up sometimes. Our first announcement of Eon was obviously AWS customers, including the trade desk, AT&T. Most of whom will be speaking here later at the Virtual Big Data Conference. They saw a huge opportunity. Eon Mode, not only allowed Vertica to scale elastically with that specific compute and storage that was needed, but it really dramatically simplified database operations including things like workload balancing, node recovery, compute provisioning, etc. So one of the most popular functions is that ability to isolate the workloads and really allocate those resources without negatively affecting others. And even though traditional data warehouses, including Vertica Enterprise Mode have been able to do lots of different workload isolation, it's never been as strong as Eon Mode. Well, it certainly didn't take long for our customers to see that value across the board with Eon Mode. Not just up in the cloud, in partnership with one of our most valued partners and a platinum sponsor here. Joy mentioned at the beginning. We announced Vertica Eon Mode for Pure Storage FlashBlade in September 2019. And again, just to be clear, this is not a new product, it's one Vertica with yet more deployment options. With Pure Storage, Vertica in Eon mode is not limited in any way by variable cloud, network latency. The performance is actually amazing when you take the benefits of separate and compute from storage and you run it with a Pure environment on-premise. Vertica in Eon Mode has a super smart cache layer that we call the depot. It's a big part of our secret sauce around Eon mode. And combined with the power and performance of Pure's FlashBlade, Vertica became the industry's first advanced analytics platform that actually separates compute and storage for on-premises data centers. Something that a lot of our customers are already benefiting from, and we're super excited about it. But as I said, this is a journey. We don't stop, we're not going to stop. Our customers need the flexibility of multiple public clouds. So today with Vertica 10, we're super proud and excited to announce support for Vertica in Eon Mode on Google Cloud. This gives our customers the ability to use their Vertica licenses on Amazon AWS, on-premise with Pure Storage and on Google Cloud. Now, we were talking about HDFS and a lot of our customers who have invested quite a bit in HDFS as a place, especially to store data have been pushing us to support Eon Mode with HDFS. So as part of Vertica 10, we are also announcing support for Vertica in Eon Mode using HDFS as the communal storage. Vertica's own Roth format data can be stored in HDFS, and actually the full functionality of Vertica is complete analytics, geospatial pattern matching, time series, machine learning, everything that we have in there can be applied to this data. And on the same HDFS nodes, Vertica can actually also analyze data in ORC or Parquet format, using External tables. We can also execute joins between the Roth data the External table holds, which powers a much more comprehensive view. So again, it's that flexibility to be able to support our customers, wherever they need us to support them on whatever platform, they have. Vertica 10 gives us a lot more ways that we can deploy Eon Mode in various environments for our customers. It allows them to take advantage of Vertica in Eon Mode and the power that it brings with that separation, with that workload isolation, to whichever platform they are most comfortable with. Now, there's a lot that has come in Vertica 10. I'm definitely not going to be able to cover everything. But we also introduced complex types as an example. And complex data types fit very well into Eon as well in this separation. They significantly reduce the data pipeline, the cost of moving data between those, a much better support for unstructured data, which a lot of our customers have mixed with structured data, of course, and they leverage a lot of columnar execution that Vertica provides. So you get complex data types in Vertica now, a lot more data, stronger performance. It goes great with the announcement that we made with the broader Eon Mode. Let's talk a little bit more about machine learning. We've been actually doing work in and around machine learning with various extra regressions and a whole bunch of other algorithms for several years. We saw the huge advantage that MPP offered, not just as a sequel engine as a database, but for ML as well. Didn't take as long to realize that there's a lot more to operationalizing machine learning than just those algorithms. It's data preparation, it's that model trade training. It's the scoring, the shaping, the evaluation. That is so much of what machine learning and frankly, data science is about. You do know, everybody always wants to jump to the sexy algorithm and we handle those tasks very, very well. It makes Vertica a terrific platform to do that. A lot of work in data science and machine learning is done in other tools. I had mentioned that there's just so many tools out there. We want people to be able to take advantage of all that. We never believed we were going to be the best algorithm company or come up with the best models for people to use. So with Vertica 10, we support PMML. We can import now and export PMML models. It's a huge step for us around that operationalizing machine learning projects for our customers. Allowing the models to get built outside of Vertica yet be imported in and then applying to that full scale of data with all the performance that you would expect from Vertica. We also are more tightly integrating with Python. As many of you know, we've been doing a lot of open source projects with the community driven by many of our customers, like Uber. And so now with Python we've integrated with TensorFlow, allowing data scientists to build models in their preferred language, to take advantage of TensorFlow. But again, to store and deploy those models at scale with Vertica. I think both these announcements are proof of our big bet number three, and really our commitment to supporting innovation throughout the community by operationalizing ML with that accuracy, performance and scale of Vertica for our customers. Again, there's a lot of steps when it comes to the workflow of machine learning. These are some of them that you can see on the slide, and it's definitely not linear either. We see this as a circle. And companies that do it, well just continue to learn, they continue to rescore, they continue to redeploy and they want to operationalize all that within a single platform that can take advantage of all those capabilities. And that is the platform, with a very robust ecosystem that Vertica has always been committed to as an organization and will continue to be. This graphic, many of you have seen it evolve over the years. Frankly, if we put everything and everyone on here wouldn't fit on a slide. But it will absolutely continue to evolve and grow as we support our customers, where they need the support most. So, again, being able to deploy everywhere, being able to take advantage of Vertica, not just as a business analyst or a business user, but as a data scientists or as an operational or BI person. We want Vertica to be leveraged and used by the broader organization. So I think it's fair to say and I encourage everybody to learn more about Vertica 10, because I'm just highlighting some of the bigger aspects of it. But we talked about those three market trends. The need to unify the silos, the need for hybrid multiple cloud deployment options, the need to operationalize business critical machine learning projects. Vertica 10 has absolutely delivered on those. But again, we are not going to stop. It is our job not to, and this is how Team Vertica thrives. I always joke that the next release is the best release. And, of course, even after Vertica 10, that is also true, although Vertica 10 is pretty awesome. But, you know, from the first line of code, we've always been focused on performance and scale, right. And like any really strong data platform, the execution engine, the optimizer and the execution engine are the two core pieces of that. Beyond Vertica 10, some of the big things that we're already working on, next generation execution engine. We're already actually seeing incredible early performance from this. And this is just one example, of how important it is for an organization like Vertica to constantly go back and re-innovate. Every single release, we do the sit ups and crunches, our performance and scale. How do we improve? And there's so many parts of the core server, there's so many parts of our broader ecosystem. We are constantly looking at coverages of how we can go back to all the code lines that we have, and make them better in the current environment. And it's not an easy thing to do when you're doing that, and you're also expanding in the environment that we are expanding into to take advantage of the different deployments, which is a great segue to this slide. Because if you think about today, we're obviously already available with Eon Mode and Amazon, AWS and Pure and actually MinIO as well. As I talked about in Vertica 10 we're adding Google and HDFS. And coming next, obviously, Microsoft Azure, Alibaba cloud. So being able to expand into more of these environments is really important for the Vertica team and how we go forward. And it's not just running in these clouds, for us, we want it to be a SaaS like experience in all these clouds. We want you to be able to deploy Vertica in 15 minutes or less on these clouds. You can also consume Vertica, in a lot of different ways, on these clouds. As an example, in Amazon Vertica by the Hour. So for us, it's not just about running, it's about taking advantage of the ecosystems that all these cloud providers offer, and really optimizing the Vertica experience as part of them. Optimization, around automation, around self service capabilities, extending our management console, we now have products that like the Vertica Advisor Tool that our Customer Success Team has created to actually use our own smarts in Vertica. To take data from customers that give it to us and help them tune automatically their environment. You can imagine that we're taking that to the next level, in a lot of different endeavors that we're doing around how Vertica as a product can actually be smarter because we all know that simplicity is key. There just aren't enough people in the world who are good at managing data and taking it to the next level. And of course, other things that we all hear about, whether it's Kubernetes and containerization. You can imagine that that probably works very well with the Eon Mode and separating compute and storage. But innovation happens everywhere. We innovate around our community documentation. Many of you have taken advantage of the Vertica Academy. The numbers there are through the roof in terms of the number of people coming in and certifying on it. So there's a lot of things that are within the core products. There's a lot of activity and action beyond the core products that we're taking advantage of. And let's not forget why we're here, right? It's easy to talk about a platform, a data platform, it's easy to jump into all the functionality, the analytics, the flexibility, how we can offer it. But at the end of the day, somebody, a person, she's got to take advantage of this data, she's got to be able to take this data and use this information to make a critical business decision. And that doesn't happen unless we explore lots of different and frankly, new ways to get that predictive analytics UI and interface beyond just the standard BI tools in front of her at the right time. And so there's a lot of activity, I'll tease you with that going on in this organization right now about how we can do that and deliver that for our customers. We're in a great position to be able to see exactly how this data is consumed and used and start with this core platform that we have to go out. Look, I know, the plan wasn't to do this as a virtual BDC. But I really appreciate you tuning in. Really appreciate your support. I think if there's any silver lining to us, maybe not being able to do this in person, it's the fact that the reach has actually gone significantly higher than what we would have been able to do in person in Boston. We're certainly looking forward to doing a Big Data Conference in the future. But if I could leave you with anything, know this, since that first release for Vertica, and our very first customers, we have been very consistent. We respect all the innovation around us, whether it's open source or not. We understand the market trends. We embrace those new ideas and technologies and for us true north, and the most important thing is what does our customer need to do? What problem are they trying to solve? And how do we use the advantages that we have without disrupting our customers? But knowing that you depend on us to deliver that unified analytics strategy, it will deliver that performance of scale, not only today, but tomorrow and for years to come. We've added a lot of great features to Vertica. I think we've said no to a lot of things, frankly, that we just knew we wouldn't be the best company to deliver. When we say we're going to do things we do them. Vertica 10 is a perfect example of so many of those things that we from you, our customers have heard loud and clear, and we have delivered. I am incredibly proud of this team across the board. I think the culture of Vertica, a customer first culture, jumping in to help our customers win no matter what is also something that sets us massively apart. I hear horror stories about support experiences with other organizations. And people always seem to be amazed at Team Vertica's willingness to jump in or their aptitude for certain technical capabilities or understanding the business. And I think sometimes we take that for granted. But that is the team that we have as Team Vertica. We are incredibly excited about Vertica 10. I think you're going to love the Virtual Big Data Conference this year. I encourage you to tune in. Maybe one other benefit is I know some people were worried about not being able to see different sessions because they were going to overlap with each other well now, even if you can't do it live, you'll be able to do those sessions on demand. Please enjoy the Vertica Big Data Conference here in 2020. Please you and your families and your co-workers be safe during these times. I know we will get through it. And analytics is probably going to help with a lot of that and we already know it is helping in many different ways. So believe in the data, believe in data's ability to change the world for the better. And thank you for your time. And with that, I am delighted to now introduce Micro Focus CEO Stephen Murdoch to the Vertica Big Data Virtual Conference. Thank you Stephen. >> Stephen: Hi, everyone, my name is Stephen Murdoch. I have the pleasure and privilege of being the Chief Executive Officer here at Micro Focus. Please let me add my welcome to the Big Data Conference. And also my thanks for your support, as we've had to pivot to this being virtual rather than a physical conference. Its amazing how quickly we all reset to a new normal. I certainly didn't expect to be addressing you from my study. Vertica is an incredibly important part of Micro Focus family. Is key to our goal of trying to enable and help customers become much more data driven across all of their IT operations. Vertica 10 is a huge step forward, we believe. It allows for multi-cloud innovation, genuinely hybrid deployments, begin to leverage machine learning properly in the enterprise, and also allows the opportunity to unify currently siloed lakes of information. We operate in a very noisy, very competitive market, and there are people, who are in that market who can do some of those things. The reason we are so excited about Vertica is we genuinely believe that we are the best at doing all of those things. And that's why we've announced publicly, you're under executing internally, incremental investment into Vertica. That investments targeted at accelerating the roadmaps that already exist. And getting that innovation into your hands faster. This idea is speed is key. It's not a question of if companies have to become data driven organizations, it's a question of when. So that speed now is really important. And that's why we believe that the Big Data Conference gives a great opportunity for you to accelerate your own plans. You will have the opportunity to talk to some of our best architects, some of the best development brains that we have. But more importantly, you'll also get to hear from some of our phenomenal Roth Data customers. You'll hear from Uber, from the Trade Desk, from Philips, and from AT&T, as well as many many others. And just hearing how those customers are using the power of Vertica to accelerate their own, I think is the highlight. And I encourage you to use this opportunity to its full. Let me close by, again saying thank you, we genuinely hope that you get as much from this virtual conference as you could have from a physical conference. And we look forward to your engagement, and we look forward to hearing your feedback. With that, thank you very much. >> Joy: Thank you so much, Stephen, for joining us for the Vertica Big Data Conference. Your support and enthusiasm for Vertica is so clear, and it makes a big difference. Now, I'm delighted to introduce Amy Fowler, the VP of Strategy and Solutions for FlashBlade at Pure Storage, who was one of our BDC Platinum Sponsors, and one of our most valued partners. It was a proud moment for me, when we announced Vertica in Eon mode for Pure Storage FlashBlade and we became the first analytics data warehouse that separates compute from storage for on-premise data centers. Thank you so much, Amy, for joining us. Let's get started. >> Amy: Well, thank you, Joy so much for having us. And thank you all for joining us today, virtually, as we may all be. So, as we just heard from Colin Mahony, there are some really interesting trends that are happening right now in the big data analytics market. From the end of the Hadoop hype cycle, to the new cloud reality, and even the opportunity to help the many data science and machine learning projects move from labs to production. So let's talk about these trends in the context of infrastructure. And in particular, look at why a modern storage platform is relevant as organizations take on the challenges and opportunities associated with these trends. The answer is the Hadoop hype cycles left a lot of data in HDFS data lakes, or reservoirs or swamps depending upon the level of the data hygiene. But without the ability to get the value that was promised from Hadoop as a platform rather than a distributed file store. And when we combine that data with the massive volume of data in Cloud Object Storage, we find ourselves with a lot of data and a lot of silos, but without a way to unify that data and find value in it. Now when you look at the infrastructure data lakes are traditionally built on, it is often direct attached storage or data. The approach that Hadoop took when it entered the market was primarily bound by the limits of networking and storage technologies. One gig ethernet and slower spinning disk. But today, those barriers do not exist. And all FlashStorage has fundamentally transformed how data is accessed, managed and leveraged. The need for local data storage for significant volumes of data has been largely mitigated by the performance increases afforded by all Flash. At the same time, organizations can achieve superior economies of scale with that segregation of compute and storage. With compute and storage, you don't always scale in lockstep. Would you want to add an engine to the train every time you add another boxcar? Probably not. But from a Pure Storage perspective, FlashBlade is uniquely architected to allow customers to achieve better resource utilization for compute and storage, while at the same time, reducing complexity that has arisen from the siloed nature of the original big data solutions. The second and equally important recent trend we see is something I'll call cloud reality. The public clouds made a lot of promises and some of those promises were delivered. But cloud economics, especially usage based and elastic scaling, without the control that many companies need to manage the financial impact is causing a lot of issues. In addition, the risk of vendor lock-in from data egress, charges, to integrated software stacks that can't be moved or deployed on-premise is causing a lot of organizations to back off the all the way non-cloud strategy, and move toward hybrid deployments. Which is kind of funny in a way because it wasn't that long ago that there was a lot of talk about no more data centers. And for example, one large retailer, I won't name them, but I'll admit they are my favorites. They several years ago told us they were completely done with on-prem storage infrastructure, because they were going 100% to the cloud. But they just deployed FlashBlade for their data pipelines, because they need predictable performance at scale. And the all cloud TCO just didn't add up. Now, that being said, well, there are certainly challenges with the public cloud. It has also brought some things to the table that we see most organizations wanting. First of all, in a lot of cases applications have been built to leverage object storage platforms like S3. So they need that object protocol, but they may also need it to be fast. And the said object may be oxymoron only a few years ago, and this is an area of the market where Pure and FlashBlade have really taken a leadership position. Second, regardless of where the data is physically stored, organizations want the best elements of a cloud experience. And for us, that means two main things. Number one is simplicity and ease of use. If you need a bunch of storage experts to run the system, that should be considered a bug. The other big one is the consumption model. The ability to pay for what you need when you need it, and seamlessly grow your environment over time totally nondestructively. This is actually pretty huge and something that a lot of vendors try to solve for with finance programs. But no finance program can address the pain of a forklift upgrade, when you need to move to next gen hardware. To scale nondestructively over long periods of time, five to 10 years plus is a crucial architectural decisions need to be made at the outset. Plus, you need the ability to pay as you use it. And we offer something for FlashBlade called Pure as a Service, which delivers exactly that. The third cloud characteristic that many organizations want is the option for hybrid. Even if that is just a DR site in the cloud. In our case, that means supporting appplication of S3, at the AWS. And the final trend, which to me represents the biggest opportunity for all of us, is the need to help the many data science and machine learning projects move from labs to production. This means bringing all the machine learning functions and model training to the data, rather than moving samples or segments of data to separate platforms. As we all know, machine learning needs a ton of data for accuracy. And there is just too much data to retrieve from the cloud for every training job. At the same time, predictive analytics without accuracy is not going to deliver the business advantage that everyone is seeking. You can kind of visualize data analytics as it is traditionally deployed as being on a continuum. With that thing, we've been doing the longest, data warehousing on one end, and AI on the other end. But the way this manifests in most environments is a series of silos that get built up. So data is duplicated across all kinds of bespoke analytics and AI, environments and infrastructure. This creates an expensive and complex environment. So historically, there was no other way to do it because some level of performance is always table stakes. And each of these parts of the data pipeline has a different workload profile. A single platform to deliver on the multi dimensional performances, diverse set of applications required, that didn't exist three years ago. And that's why the application vendors pointed you towards bespoke things like DAS environments that we talked about earlier. And the fact that better options exists today is why we're seeing them move towards supporting this disaggregation of compute and storage. And when it comes to a platform that is a better option, one with a modern architecture that can address the diverse performance requirements of this continuum, and allow organizations to bring a model to the data instead of creating separate silos. That's exactly what FlashBlade is built for. Small files, large files, high throughput, low latency and scale to petabytes in a single namespace. And this is importantly a single rapid space is what we're focused on delivering for our customers. At Pure, we talk about it in the context of modern data experience because at the end of the day, that's what it's really all about. The experience for your teams in your organization. And together Pure Storage and Vertica have delivered that experience to a wide range of customers. From a SaaS analytics company, which uses Vertica on FlashBlade to authenticate the quality of digital media in real time, to a multinational car company, which uses Vertica on FlashBlade to make thousands of decisions per second for autonomous cars, or a healthcare organization, which uses Vertica on FlashBlade to enable healthcare providers to make real time decisions that impact lives. And I'm sure you're all looking forward to hearing from John Yavanovich from AT&T. To hear how he's been doing this with Vertica and FlashBlade as well. He's coming up soon. We have been really excited to build this partnership with Vertica. And we're proud to provide the only on-premise storage platform validated with Vertica Eon Mode. And deliver this modern data experience to our customers together. Thank you all so much for joining us today. >> Joy: Amy, thank you so much for your time and your insights. Modern infrastructure is key to modern analytics, especially as organizations leverage next generation data center architectures, and object storage for their on-premise data centers. Now, I'm delighted to introduce our last speaker in our Vertica Big Data Conference Keynote, John Yovanovich, Director of IT for AT&T. Vertica is so proud to serve AT&T, and especially proud of the harmonious impact we are having in partnership with Pure Storage. John, welcome to the Virtual Vertica BDC. >> John: Thank you joy. It's a pleasure to be here. And I'm excited to go through this presentation today. And in a unique fashion today 'cause as I was thinking through how I wanted to present the partnership that we have formed together between Pure Storage, Vertica and AT&T, I want to emphasize how well we all work together and how these three components have really driven home, my desire for a harmonious to use your word relationship. So, I'm going to move forward here and with. So here, what I'm going to do the theme of today's presentation is the Pure Vertica Symphony live at AT&T. And if anybody is a Westworld fan, you can appreciate the sheet music on the right hand side. What we're going to what I'm going to highlight here is in a musical fashion, is how we at AT&T leverage these technologies to save money to deliver a more efficient platform, and to actually just to make our customers happier overall. So as we look back, and back as early as just maybe a few years ago here at AT&T, I realized that we had many musicians to help the company. Or maybe you might want to call them data scientists, or data analysts. For the theme we'll stay with musicians. None of them were singing or playing from the same hymn book or sheet music. And so what we had was many organizations chasing a similar dream, but not exactly the same dream. And, best way to describe that is and I think with a lot of people this might resonate in your organizations. How many organizations are chasing a customer 360 view in your company? Well, I can tell you that I have at least four in my company. And I'm sure there are many that I don't know of. That is our problem because what we see is a repetitive sourcing of data. We see a repetitive copying of data. And there's just so much money to be spent. This is where I asked Pure Storage and Vertica to help me solve that problem with their technologies. What I also noticed was that there was no coordination between these departments. In fact, if you look here, nobody really wants to play with finance. Sales, marketing and care, sure that you all copied each other's data. But they actually didn't communicate with each other as they were copying the data. So the data became replicated and out of sync. This is a challenge throughout, not just my company, but all companies across the world. And that is, the more we replicate the data, the more problems we have at chasing or conquering the goal of single version of truth. In fact, I kid that I think that AT&T, we actually have adopted the multiple versions of truth, techno theory, which is not where we want to be, but this is where we are. But we are conquering that with the synergies between Pure Storage and Vertica. This is what it leaves us with. And this is where we are challenged and that if each one of our siloed business units had their own stories, their own dedicated stories, and some of them had more money than others so they bought more storage. Some of them anticipating storing more data, and then they really did. Others are running out of space, but can't put anymore because their bodies aren't been replenished. So if you look at it from this side view here, we have a limited amount of compute or fixed compute dedicated to each one of these silos. And that's because of the, wanting to own your own. And the other part is that you are limited or wasting space, depending on where you are in the organization. So there were the synergies aren't just about the data, but actually the compute and the storage. And I wanted to tackle that challenge as well. So I was tackling the data. I was tackling the storage, and I was tackling the compute all at the same time. So my ask across the company was can we just please play together okay. And to do that, I knew that I wasn't going to tackle this by getting everybody in the same room and getting them to agree that we needed one account table, because they will argue about whose account table is the best account table. But I knew that if I brought the account tables together, they would soon see that they had so much redundancy that I can now start retiring data sources. I also knew that if I brought all the compute together, that they would all be happy. But I didn't want them to tackle across tackle each other. And in fact that was one of the things that all business units really enjoy. Is they enjoy the silo of having their own compute, and more or less being able to control their own destiny. Well, Vertica's subclustering allows just that. And this is exactly what I was hoping for, and I'm glad they've brought through. And finally, how did I solve the problem of the single account table? Well when you don't have dedicated storage, and you can separate compute and storage as Vertica in Eon Mode does. And we store the data on FlashBlades, which you see on the left and right hand side, of our container, which I can describe in a moment. Okay, so what we have here, is we have a container full of compute with all the Vertica nodes sitting in the middle. Two loader, we'll call them loader subclusters, sitting on the sides, which are dedicated to just putting data onto the FlashBlades, which is sitting on both ends of the container. Now today, I have two dedicated storage or common dedicated might not be the right word, but two storage racks one on the left one on the right. And I treat them as separate storage racks. They could be one, but i created them separately for disaster recovery purposes, lashing work in case that rack were to go down. But that being said, there's no reason why I'm probably going to add a couple of them here in the future. So I can just have a, say five to 10, petabyte storage, setup, and I'll have my DR in another 'cause the DR shouldn't be in the same container. Okay, but I'll DR outside of this container. So I got them all together, I leveraged subclustering, I leveraged separate and compute. I was able to convince many of my clients that they didn't need their own account table, that they were better off having one. I eliminated, I reduced latency, I reduced our ticketing I reduce our data quality issues AKA ticketing okay. I was able to expand. What is this? As work. I was able to leverage elasticity within this cluster. As you can see, there are racks and racks of compute. We set up what we'll call the fixed capacity that each of the business units needed. And then I'm able to ramp up and release the compute that's necessary for each one of my clients based on their workloads throughout the day. And so while they compute to the right before you see that the instruments have already like, more or less, dedicated themselves towards all those are free for anybody to use. So in essence, what I have, is I have a concert hall with a lot of seats available. So if I want to run a 10 chair Symphony or 80, chairs, Symphony, I'm able to do that. And all the while, I can also do the same with my loader nodes. I can expand my loader nodes, to actually have their own Symphony or write all to themselves and not compete with any other workloads of the other clusters. What does that change for our organization? Well, it really changes the way our database administrators actually do their jobs. This has been a big transformation for them. They have actually become data conductors. Maybe you might even call them composers, which is interesting, because what I've asked them to do is morph into less technology and more workload analysis. And in doing so we're able to write auto-detect scripts, that watch the queues, watch the workloads so that we can help ramp up and trim down the cluster and subclusters as necessary. There has been an exciting transformation for our DBAs, who I need to now classify as something maybe like DCAs. I don't know, I have to work with HR on that. But I think it's an exciting future for their careers. And if we bring it all together, If we bring it all together, and then our clusters, start looking like this. Where everything is moving in harmonious, we have lots of seats open for extra musicians. And we are able to emulate a cloud experience on-prem. And so, I want you to sit back and enjoy the Pure Vertica Symphony live at AT&T. (soft music) >> Joy: Thank you so much, John, for an informative and very creative look at the benefits that AT&T is getting from its Pure Vertica symphony. I do really like the idea of engaging HR to change the title to Data Conductor. That's fantastic. I've always believed that music brings people together. And now it's clear that analytics at AT&T is part of that musical advantage. So, now it's time for a short break. And we'll be back for our breakout sessions, beginning at 12 pm Eastern Daylight Time. We have some really exciting sessions planned later today. And then again, as you can see on Wednesday. Now because all of you are already logged in and listening to this keynote, you already know the steps to continue to participate in the sessions that are listed here and on the previous slide. In addition, everyone received an email yesterday, today, and you'll get another one tomorrow, outlining the simple steps to register, login and choose your session. If you have any questions, check out the emails or go to www.vertica.com/bdc2020 for the logistics information. There are a lot of choices and that's always a good thing. Don't worry if you want to attend one or more or can't listen to these live sessions due to your timezone. All the sessions, including the Q&A sections will be available on demand and everyone will have access to the recordings as well as even more pre-recorded sessions that we'll post to the BDC website. Now I do want to leave you with two other important sites. First, our Vertica Academy. Vertica Academy is available to everyone. And there's a variety of very technical, self-paced, on-demand training, virtual instructor-led workshops, and Vertica Essentials Certification. And it's all free. Because we believe that Vertica expertise, helps everyone accelerate their Vertica projects and the advantage that those projects deliver. Now, if you have questions or want to engage with our Vertica engineering team now, we're waiting for you on the Vertica forum. We'll answer any questions or discuss any ideas that you might have. Thank you again for joining the Vertica Big Data Conference Keynote Session. Enjoy the rest of the BDC because there's a lot more to come