>>And good afternoon. Welcome back here on the Cub as to continue our coverage at aws Reinvent 22, win the Venetian here in Las Vegas, day two, it's Wednesday. Thanks. Still rolling. Quite a along. We have another segment for you as part of the Global Startup program, which is under the AWS Startup Showcase. I'm joined now by Vink at Viera, who is the CEO and co-founder of R Set. And good to see you, >>Sir. Thanks for having me here. Yeah, >>No, a real pleasure. Looking forward to it. So first off, for some of, for yours who might not be familiar with Roxette, I know you've been on the cube a little bit, so you're, you're an alum, but, but why don't you set the stage a little bit for Rock set and you know, where you're engaged with in terms of, with aws? >>Definitely. Rock Set is a realtime analytics database that is built for the cloud. You know, we make realtime applications possible in the cloud. You know, realtime applications need high concurrency, low latency query processing data needs to be fresh, your analytic needs to be fast. And, you know, we built on aws and that's why we are here. We are very, very proud partners of aws. We are in the AWS Accelerate program, and also we are in the startup program of aws. We are strategic ISV partner. And so yeah, we make real time analytics possible without all the cost and complexity barriers that are usually associated with it. And very, very happy to be part of this movement from batch to real time that is happening in the world. >>Right. Which is certainly an exciting trend. Right. I know great news for you, you made news yesterday, had an announcement involved with the intel with aws, who wants to share some of that >>With us too? Definitely. So, you know, one, one question that I always ask people is like, you know, if you go perspective that I share is like, if you go ask a hundred people, do you want fast analytics on fresh data or slow analytics on stale data? You know, a hundred out of a hundred would say fast and fresh, right? Sure. So then the question is, why hasn't this happened already? Why is this still a new trend that is emerging as opposed to something that everybody's taking for granted? It really comes down to compute efficiency, right? I think, you know, at the end of the day, real time analytics was always in using, you know, technologies that are, let's say 10 years ago using let's say processors that were available 10 years ago to, you know, three cloud, you know, days. There was a lot of complexity barriers associated with realtime analytics and also a lot of cost and, and performance barriers associated with it. >>And so Rox said from the, you know, from the very beginning, has been obsessing about building the most compute efficient realtime database in the world. And, you know, AWS on one hand, you know, allows us to make a consumption based pricing model. So you only pay for what you use. Sure. And that shatters all the cost barriers. But in terms of computer efficiency, what we announced yesterday is the Intel's third generation Zon scalable processors, it's code named Intel Ice Lake. When we port it over Rock said to that architecture, taking advantage of some of the instructions sets that Intel has, we got an 84% performance boost, 84, 84, 84. >>It's, it's incredible, right? >>It's, it's an incredible charts, it's an incredible milestone. It reduces the barrier even more in terms of cost and, you know, and, and pushes the efficiency and sets a, a really new record for how efficient realtime, you know, data processing can be in the cloud. And, and it's very, very exciting news. And so we used to benchmark ourselves against some of our other, you know, realtime, you know, did up providers and we were already faster and now we've set a, a much, much higher bar for other people to follow. >>Yep. And, and so what is, or what was it about real time that, that, you know, was such a barrier because, and now you've got the speed of, of course, obviously, and maybe that's what it was, but I think cost is probably part of that too, right? That's all part of that equation. I mean, real time, so elusive. >>Yeah. So real time has this inherent pattern that your data never stops coming. And when your data never stops coming, and you can now actually do analytics on that. Now, initially people start with saying, oh, I just want a real time dashboard. And then very quickly they realize, well, the dashboard is actually in real time. I'm not gonna be staring at the 24 7. Can you tap on my shoulder when something is off, something needs to be looked at. So in which case you're constantly also asking the question, is everything okay? Is everything all right? Do I need to, is is that something that I need to be, you know, double clicking on and, and following up on? So essentially very quickly in real time analytics, what happens is your queries never stop. The questions that you're asking on your data never stops. And it's often a program asking the question to detect anomalies and things like that. >>And your data never stops coming. And so compute is running 24 7. If you look at traditional data warehouses and data lakes, they're not really optimized for these kinds of workloads. They're optimized to store massive volumes of data and in a storage efficient format. And when an analyst comes and asks a question to generate a report, you can spin up a whole bunch of compute, generate the report and tear it all down when you're done. Well, that is not compute running 24 7 to continuously, you know, you know, keep ingesting the data or continuously keep answering questions. So the compute efficiency that is needed is, is much, much, much higher. Right? And that is why, you know, Rox was born. So from the very beginning, we're only built, you know, for these use cases, we have a, an extremely powerful SQL engine that can give you full feature SQL analytics in a very, very compute efficient way in the cloud. >>Right. So, so let's talk about the leap that you've made, say in the last two years and, and, and what's been the spur of that? What has been allowed you to, to create this, you know, obviously a, a different kind of an array for your customers from which to choose, but, but what's been the spark you think >>We touched upon this a little earlier, right? This spark is really, you know, the world going from batch to real time. So if you look at mainstream adoption of technologies like Apache, Kafka and Confluent doing a really good job at that. In, in, in growing that community and, and use cases, now businesses are now acquiring business data, really important business data in real time. Now they want to operationalize it, right? So, you know, extract based static reports and bi you know, business intelligence is getting replaced in all modern enterprises with what we call operational intelligence, right? Don't tell me what happened last quarter and how to plan this quarter better. Tell me what's happening today, what's happening right now. And it's, it's your business operations using data to make day to day decisions better that either grows your top line, compresses your bottom line, eliminates risk that are inherently creeping up in your business. >>Sure. You know, eliminate potential churn from a customer or fraud, you know, deduction and, and getting on top of, you know, that, you know, a minute into this, into, into an outage as opposed to an hour into the outage. Right? And so essentially I think businesses are now realizing that operational intelligence and operational analytics really, you know, allows them to leverage data and especially real time data to make their, you know, to grow their businesses faster and more efficiently. And especially in this kind of macro environment that is, you know, more important to have better unit economics in your business than ever before. Sure. And so that is really, I think that is the real market movement happening. And, and we are here to just serve that market. We are making it much, much easier for companies that have already adopted, you know, streaming technologies like Kafka and, and, and knows Canis MSK and all these technologies. Now businesses are acquiring these data in real time now. They can also get realtime analytics on the other end of it. Sure. >>You know, you just touched on this and, and I'd like to hear your thoughts about this, about, about the economic environment because it does drive decisions, right? And it does motivate people to look for efficiencies and maybe costs, you know, right. Cutting costs. What are you seeing right now in terms of that, that kind of looming influence, right? That the economy can have in terms of driving decisions about where investments are being made and what expectations are in terms of delivering value, more value for the buck? >>Exactly. I think we see across the board, all of our customers come back and tell us, we don't want to manage data infrastructure and we don't want to do kind of DIY open source clusters. We don't wanna manage and scale and build giant data ops and DevOps teams to manage that, because that is not really, you know, in their business. You know, we have car rental companies want to be better at car rentals, we want airlines to be a better airline, and they don't, don't want their, you know, a massive investment in DevOps and data ops, which is not really their core business. And they really want to leverage, you know, you know, fully managed and, you know, cloud offerings like Rock said, you know, built on aws, massively scalable in the cloud with zero operational overhead, very, very easy to get started and scale. >>And so that completely removes all the operational overhead. And so they can invest the resources they have, the manpower, they have, the calories that they have on actually growing their businesses because that is what really gonna allow them to have better unit economics, right? So everybody that is on my payroll is helping me grow my top line or shrink my bottom line, eliminate risk in my business and, and, and, and churn and, and fraud and other, and eliminate all those risks that are inherent in my business. So, so that is where I think a lot of the investments going. So gone are the days where, you know, you're gonna have these in like five to 10% team managing a very hard to operate, you know, open source data management clusters on EC two nodes in, in AWS and, and kind of DIYing it their way because those 10 people, you know, if all they do is just operational maintenance of infrastructure, which is a means to an end, you're way better off, you know, using a cloud, you know, a bond in the cloud built for the cloud solution like rock and eliminate all that cost and, and replace that with an operationally much, much simpler, you know, system to op, you know, to to work with such as, such as rock. >>So that is really the big trend that we are seeing why, you know, not only real time is going more and more mainstream cloud native solutions or the real future even when it comes to real time because the complexity barrier needs to be shattered and only cloud native solutions can actually, >>You get the two Cs cost and complexity, right. That you, you need to address. Exactly. Yeah, for sure. You know, what is it about building trust with your, with your clients, with your partners? Because you, you're talking about this cloud environment that, that everyone is talking about, right? Not everyone's made that commitment. There are still some foot draggers out there. How are you going about establishing confidence and establishing trust and, and, and providing them with really concrete examples of the values and the benefits that you can provide, you know, with, with these opportunities? >>So, you know, I grew up, so there's a few ways to to, to answer this question. I'll, I'll, I'll come, I'll cover all the angles. So in, in order to establish trust, you have to create value. They, you know, your customer has to see that with you. They were able to solve the problem faster, better, cheaper, and they're able to, you know, have a, the business impact they were looking for, which is why they started the project in the first place. And so establishing that and proving that, I think there's no equivalence to that. And, you know, I grew up at, at, you know, at Facebook back in the day, you know, I was managing online data infrastructure, okay. For Facebook from 2007 and 2015. And internally we always had this kind of culture of all the product teams building on top of the infrastructure that my team was responsible for. >>And so they were not ever, there was never a, a customer vendor relationship internally within Facebook that we're all like, we're all part of the same team. We're partnering here to have you, you know, to help you have a successful product launch. There's a very similar DNA that, that exists in Rock said, when our customers work with us and they come to us and we are there to make them successful, our consumption based pricing model also forces us to say they're not gonna really use Rock said and consume more. I mean, we don't make money until they consume, right? And so their success is very much integral part of our, our success. And so that I think is one really important angle on, you know, give us a shot, come and do an evaluation, and we will work with you to build the most efficient way to solve your problem. >>And then when you succeed, we succeed. So that I think is a very important aspect. The second one is AWS partnership. You know, we are an ISV partner, you know, AWS a lot of the time. That really helps us establish trust. And a lot of the time, one of the, the, the people that they look up to, when a customer comes in saying, Hey, what is, who is Rock? Said? You know, who are your friends? Yeah. Who are your friends? And then, you know, and then the AWS will go like, oh, you know, we'll tell you, you know, all these other successful case studies that R has, you know, you know, built up on, you know, the world's largest insurance provider, Europe's largest insurance provider. We have customers like, you know, JetBlue Airlines to Klarna, which is a big bator company. And so, so all these case studies help and, and, and, and platform and partners like AWS helps us, helps you amplify that, that, you know, and, and, and, and, and give more credibility. And last but not least, compliance matters. You know, being Soto type two compliant is, is a really important part of establishing trust. We are hip hop compliant now so that, you know, we can, you know, pi I phi data handling that. And so I think that will continue to be a part, a big part of our focus in improving the security, you know, functionality and, and capabilities that R set has in the cloud, and also compliance and, and the set of com, you know, you know, standards that we are gonna be compliant against. >>Well, I'm glad you hit on the AWS too, cause I did wanna bring that up. I, I appreciate that and I know they appreciate the relationship as well. Thanks for the time here. It's been a pleasure. Awesome. Learning about Rockette and what you're up to. Thank you. >>You bet. >>It's a pleasure. Thank you. Vi ka. All right. You are watching the cube coverage here at AWS Reinvent 22. And on the cube, of course, the leader, the leader in high tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Vegas. Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante here with theCUBE live on the Venetian Expo Hall Floor, talking all things AWS re:Invent 2022. This is the first full day of coverage. It is jam-packed here. People are back. They are ready to hear all the new innovations from AWS. Dave, how does it feel to be back yet again in Vegas? >> Yeah, Vegas. I think it's my 10th time in Vegas this year. So, whatever. >> This year alone. You must have a favorite steak restaurant then. >> There are several. The restaurants in Vegas are actually really good. >> You know? >> They are good. >> They used to be terrible. But I'll tell you. My favorite? The place that closed. >> Oh! >> Yeah, closed. In between where we are in the Wynn and the Venetian. Anyway. >> Was it CUT? >> No, I forget what the name was. >> Something else, okay. >> It was like a Greek sort of steak place. Anyway. >> Now, I'm hungry. >> We were at Pure Accelerate a couple years ago. >> Yes, we were. >> When they announced Cloud Block Store. >> That's right. >> Pure was the first- >> In Austin. >> To do that. >> Yup. >> And then they made the acquisition of Portworx which was pretty prescient given that containers have been going through the roof. >> Yeah. >> So I'm sort of excited to have these guys on and talk about that. >> We're going to unpack all of this. We've got one of our alumni back with us, Venkat Ramakrishna, VP of Product, Portworx by Pure Storage. And Dan Kogan joins us for the first time, VP of Product Management and Product Marketing, FlashArray at Pure Storage. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you. >> Hey, guys. >> Dan: Thanks for having us. >> Do you have a favorite steak restaurant in Vegas? Dave said there's a lot of good choices. >> There's a lot of good steak restaurants here. >> I like SDK. >> Yeah, that's a good one. >> That's the good one. >> That's a good one. >> Which one? >> SDK. >> SDK. >> Where's that? >> It's, I think, in Cosmopolitan. >> Ooh. >> Yeah. >> Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> It's pretty good, yeah. >> There's one of the Western too that's pretty. >> I'm an Herbs and Rye guy. Have you ever been there? >> No. >> No. >> Herbs and Rye is off strip, but it's fantastic. It's kind of like a locals joint. >> I have to dig through all of this great stuff today and then check that out. Talk to me. This is our first day, obviously. First main day. I want to get both of your perspectives. Dan, we'll start with you since you're closest to me. How are you finding this year's event so far? Obviously, tons of people. >> Busy. >> Busy, yeah. >> Yeah, it is. It is old times. Bigger, right? Last re:Invent I was at was 2019 right before everything shut down and it's probably half the size of this which is a different trend than I feel like most other tech conferences have gone where they've come back, but a little bit smaller. re:Invent seems to be the IT show. >> It really does. Venkat, are you finding the same? In terms of what you're experiencing so far on day one of the events? >> Yeah, I mean... There's tremendous excitement. Overall, I think it's good to be back. Very good crowd, great turnout, lot of excitement around some of the new offerings we've announced. The booth traffic has been pretty good. And just the quality of the conversations, the customer meetings, have been really good. There's very interesting use cases shaping up and customers really looking to solve real large scale problems. Yeah, it's been a phenomenal first day. >> Venkat, talk a little bit about, and then we'll get to you Dan as well, the relationship that Portworx by Pure Storage has with AWS. Maybe some joint customers. >> Yeah, so we... Definitely, we have been a partner of AWS for quite some time, right? Earlier this year, we signed what is called a strategic investment letter with AWS where we kind of put some joint effort together like to better integrate our products. Plus, kind of get in front of our customers more together and educate them on how going to how they can deploy and build vision critical apps on EKS and EKS anywhere and Outpost. So that partnership has grown a lot over the last year. We have a lot of significant mutual customer wins together both on the public cloud on EKS as well as on EKS anywhere, right? And there are some exciting use cases around Edge and Edge deployments and different levels of Edge as well with EKS anywhere. And there are pretty good wins on the Outpost as well. So that partnership I think is kind of like growing across not just... We started off with the one product line. Now our Portworx backup as a service is also available on EKS and along with the Portworx Data Services. So, it is also expanded across the product lanes as well. >> And then Dan, you want to elaborate a bit on AWS Plus Pure? >> Yeah, it's for kind of what we'll call the core Pure business or the traditional Pure business. As Dave mentioned, Cloud Block Store is kind of where things started and we're seeing that move and evolve from predominantly being a DR site and kind of story into now more and more production applications being lifted and shifted and running now natively in AWS honor storage software. And then we have a new product called Pure Fusion which is our storage as code automation product essentially. It takes you from moving and managing of individual arrays, now obfuscates a fleet level allows you to build a very cloud-like backend and consume storage as code. Very, very similar to how you do with AWS, with an EBS. That product is built in AWS. So it's a SaaS product built in AWS, really allowing you to turn your traditional Pure storage into an AWS-like experience. >> Lisa: Got it. >> What changed with Cloud Block Store? 'Cause if I recall, am I right that you basically did it on S3 originally? >> S3 is a big... It's a number of components. >> And you had a high performance EC2 instances. >> Dan: Yup, that's right. >> On top of lower cost object store. Is that still the case? >> That's still the architecture. Yeah, at least for AWS. It's a different architecture in Azure where we leverage their disc storage more. But in AWS were just based on essentially that backend. >> And then what's the experience when you go from, say, on-prem to AWS to sort of a cross cloud? >> Yeah, very, very simple. It's our replication technology built in. So our sync rep, our async rep, our active cluster technology is essentially allowing you to move the data really, really seamlessly there and then again back to Fusion, now being that kind of master control plan. You can have availability zones, running Cloud Block Store instances in AWS. You can be running your own availability zones in your data centers wherever those may happen to be, and that's kind of a unification layer across it all. >> It looks the same to the customer. >> To the customer, at the end of the day, it's... What the customer sees is the purity operating system. We have FlashArray proprietary hardware on premises. We have AWS's hardware that we run it on here. But to the customer, it's just the FlashArray. >> That's a data super cloud actually. Yeah, it's a data super cloud. >> I'd agree. >> It spans multiple clouds- >> Multiple clouds on premises. >> It extracts all the complexity of the underlying muck and the primitives and presents a common experience. >> Yeah, and it's the same APIs, same management console. >> Dave: Yeah, awesome. >> Everything's the same. >> See? It's real. It's a thing, On containers, I have a question. So we're in this environment, everybody wants to be more efficient, what's happening with containers? Is there... The intersection of containers and serverless, right? You think about all the things you have to do to run containers in VMs, configure everything, configure the memory, et cetera, and then serverless simplifies all that. I guess Knative in between or I guess Fargate. What are you seeing with customers between stateless apps, stateful apps, and how it all relates to containers? >> That's a great question, right? I think that one of the things that what we are seeing is that as people run more and more workloads in the cloud, right? There's this huge movement towards being the ability to bring these applications to run anywhere, right? Not just in one public cloud, but in the data centers and sometimes the Edge clouds. So there's a lot of portability requirements for the applications, right? I mean, yesterday morning I was having breakfast with a customer who is a big AWS customer but has to go into an on-prem air gap deployment for one of their large customers and is kind of re-platforming some other apps into containers in Kubernetes because it makes it so much easier for them to deploy. So there is no longer the debate of, is it stateless versus it stateful, it's pretty much all applications are moving to containers, right? And in that, you see people are building on Kubernetes and containers is because they wanted multicloud portability for their applications. Now the other big aspect is cost, right? You can significantly run... You know, like lower cost by running with Kubernetes and Portworx and by on the public cloud or on a private cloud, right? Because it lets you get more out of your infrastructure. You're not all provisioning your infrastructure. You are like just deploying the just-enough infrastructure for your application to run with Kubernetes and scale it dynamically as your application load scales. So, customers are better able to manage costs. >> Does serverless play in here though? Right? Because if I'm running serverless, I'm not paying for the compute the whole time. >> Yeah. >> Right? But then stateless and stateful come into play. >> Serverless has a place, but it is more for like quick event-driven decision. >> Dave: The stateless apps. >> You know, stuff that needs to happen. The serverless has a place, but majority of the applications have need compute and more compute to run because there's like a ton of processing you have to do, you're serving a whole bunch of users, you're serving up media, right? Those are not typically good serverless apps, right? The several less apps do definitely have a place. There's a whole bunch of minor code snippets or events you need to process every now and then to make some decisions. In that, yeah, you see serverless. But majority of the apps are still requiring a lot of compute and scaling the compute and scaling storage requirements at a time. >> So what Venkat was talking about is cost. That is probably our biggest tailwind from a cloud adoption standpoint. I think initially for on-premises vendors like Pure Storage or historically on-premises vendors, the move to the cloud was a concern, right? In that we're getting out the data center business, we're going all in on the cloud, what are you going to do? That's kind of why we got ahead of that with Cloud Block Store. But as customers have matured in their adoption of cloud and actually moved more applications, they're becoming much more aware of the costs. And so anywhere you can help them save money seems to drive adoption. So they see that on the Kubernetes side, on our side, just by adding in things that we do really well: Data reduction, thin provisioning, low cost snaps. Those kind of things, massive cost savings. And so it's actually brought a lot of customers who thought they weren't going to be using our storage moving forward back into the fold. >> Dave: Got it. >> So cost saving is great, huge business outcomes potentially for customers. But what are some of the barriers that you're helping customers to overcome on the storage side and also in terms of moving applications to Kubernetes? What are some of those barriers that you could help us? >> Yeah, I mean, I can answer it simply from a core FlashArray side, it's enabling migration of applications without having to refactor them entirely, right? That's Kubernetes side is when they think about changing their applications and building them, we'll call quote unquote more cloud native, but there are a lot of customers that can't or won't or just aren't doing that, but they want to run those applications in the cloud. So the movement is easier back to your data super cloud kind of comment, and then also eliminating this high cost associated with it. >> I'm kind of not a huge fan of the whole repatriation narrative. You know, you look at the numbers and it's like, "Yeah, there's something going on." But the one use case that looks like it's actually valid is, "I'm going to test in the cloud and I'm going to deploy on-prem." Now, I dunno if that's even called repatriation, but I'm looking to help the repatriation narrative because- >> Venkat: I think it's- >> But that's a real thing, right? >> Yeah, it's more than repatriation, right? It's more about the ability to run your app, right? It's not just even test, right? I mean, you're going to have different kinds of governance and compliance and regulatory requirements have to run your apps in different kinds of cloud environments, right? There are certain... Certain regions may not have all of the compliance and regulatory requirements implemented in that cloud provider, right? So when you run with Kubernetes and containers, I mean, you kind of do the transformation. So now you can take that app and run an infrastructure that allows you to deliver under those requirements as well, right? So that portability is the major driver than repatriation. >> And you would do that for latency reasons? >> For latency, yeah. >> Or data sovereign? >> Data sovereignty. >> Data sovereignty. >> Control. >> I mean, yeah. Availability of your application and data just in that region, right? >> Okay, so if the capability is not there in the cloud region, you come in and say, "Hey, we can do that on-prem or in a colo and get you what you need to comply to your EDX." >> Yeah, or potentially moves to a different cloud provider. It's just a lot more control that you're providing on customer at the end of the day. >> What's that move like? I mean, now you're moving data and everybody's going to complain about egress fees. >> Well, you shouldn't be... I think it's more of a one-time move. You're probably not going to be moving data between cloud providers regularly. But if for whatever reasons you decide that I'm going to stop running in X Cloud and I'm going to move to this cloud, what's the most seamless way to do? >> So a customer might say, "Okay, that's certification's not going to be available in this region or gov cloud or whatever for a year, I need this now." >> Yeah, or various commercial. Whatever it might be. >> "And I'm going to make the call now, one-way door, and I'm going to keep it on-prem." And then worry about it down the road. Okay, makes sense. >> Dan, I got to talk to you about the sustainability element there because it's increasingly becoming a priority for organizations in every industry where they need to work with companies that really have established sustainability programs. What are some of the factors that you talk with customers about as they have choice in all FlashArray between Pure and competitors where sustainability- >> Yeah, I mean we've leaned very heavily into that from a marketing standpoint recently because it has become so top of mind for so many customers. But at the end of the day, sustainability was built into the core of the Purity operating system in FlashArray back before it was FlashArray, right? In our early generation of products. The things that drive that sustainability of high density, high data reduction, small footprint, we needed to build that for Pure to exist as a company. And we are maybe kind of the last all-flash vendor standing that came ground up all-flash, not just the disc vendor that's refactored, right? And so that's sort of engineering from the ground up that's deeply, deeply into our software as a huge sustainability payout now. And we see that and that message is really, really resonating with customers. >> I haven't thought about that in a while. You actually are. I don't think there's any other... Nobody else made it through the knothole. And you guys hit escape velocity and then some. >> So we hit escape velocity and it hasn't slowed down, right? Earnings will be tomorrow, but the last many quarters have been pretty good. >> Yeah, we follow you pretty closely. I mean, there was one little thing in the pandemic and then boom! It's just kept cranking since, so. >> So at the end of the day though, right? We needed that level to be economically viable as a flash bender going against disc. And now that's really paying off in a sustainability equation as well because we consume so much less footprint, power cooling, all those factors. >> And there's been some headwinds with none pricing up until recently too that you've kind of blown right through. You know, you dealt with the supply issues and- >> Yeah, 'cause the overall... One, we've been, again, one of the few vendors that's been able to navigate supply really well. We've had no major delays in disruptions, but the TCO argument's real. Like at the end of the day, when you look at the cost of running on Pure, it's very, very compelling. >> Adam Selipsky made the statement, "If you're looking to tighten your belt, the cloud is the place to do it." Yeah, okay. It might be that, but... Maybe. >> Maybe, but you can... So again, we are seeing cloud customers that are traditional Pure data center customers that a few years ago said, "We're moving these applications into the cloud. You know, it's been great working with you. We love Pure. We'll have some on-prem footprint, but most of everything we're going to do is in the cloud." Those customers are coming back to us to keep running in the cloud. Because again, when you start to factor in things like thin provisioning, data reduction, those don't exist in the cloud. >> So, it's not repatriation. >> It's not repatriation. >> It's we want Pure in the cloud. >> Correct. We want your software. So that's why we built CBS, and we're seeing that come all the way through. >> There's another cost savings is on the... You know, with what we are doing with Kubernetes and containers and Portworx Data Services, right? So when we run Portworx Data Services, typically customers spend a lot of money in running the cloud managed services, right? Where there is obviously a sprawl of those, right? And then they end up spending a lot of item costs. So when we move that, like when they run their data, like when they move their databases to Portworx Data Services on Kubernetes, because of all of the other cost savings we deliver plus the licensing costs are a lot lower, we deliver 5X to 10X savings to our customers. >> Lisa: Significant. >> You know, significant savings on cloud as well. >> The operational things he's talking about, too. My Fusion engineering team is one of his largest customers from Portworx Data Services. Because we don't have DBAs on that team, it's just developers. But they need databases. They need to run those databases. We turn to PDS. >> This is why he pays my bills. >> And that's why you guys have to come back 'cause we're out of time, but I do have one final question for each of you. Same question. We'll start with you Dan, the Venkat we'll go to you. Billboard. Billboard or a bumper sticker. We'll say they're going to put a billboard on Castor Street in Mountain View near the headquarters about Pure, what does it say? >> The best container for containers. (Dave and Lisa laugh) >> Venkat, Portworx, what's your bumper sticker? >> Well, I would just have one big billboard that goes and says, "Got PX?" With the question mark, right? And let people start thinking about, "What is PX?" >> I love that. >> Dave: Got Portworx, beautiful. >> You've got a side career in marketing, I can tell. >> I think they moved him out of the engineering. >> Ah, I see. We really appreciate you joining us on the program this afternoon talking about Pure, Portworx, AWS. Really compelling stories about how you're helping customers just really make big decisions and save considerable costs. We appreciate your insights. >> Awesome. Great. Thanks for having us. >> Thanks, guys. >> Thank you. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase. This is Data as Code, The Future of Enterprise Data and Analytics. This is also season two, episode two of our ongoing series with exciting partners from the AWS ecosystem who are here to talk with us about data and analytics. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Two guests join me, one, a cube alumni. Venkat Venkataramani is here CEO & Co-Founder of Rockset. Good to see you again. And Doug Moore, VP of cloud platforms at Command Alkon. You're here to talk to me about how Command Alkon implemented real time analytics in just days with Rockset. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thanks for having us. >> Yeah, great to be here. >> Doug, give us a little bit of a overview of Command Alkon, what type of business you are? what your mission is? That good stuff. >> Yeah, great. I'll pref it by saying I've been in this industry for only three years. The 30 years prior I was in financial services. So this was really exciting and eye opening. It actually plays into the story of how we met Rockset. So that's why I wanted to preface that. But Command Alkon is in the business, is in the what's called The Heavy Building Materials Industry. And I had never heard of it until I got here. But if you think about large projects like building buildings, cities, roads anything that requires concrete asphalt or just really big trucks, full of bulky materials that's the heavy building materials industry. So for over 40 years Command Alkon has been the north American leader in providing software to quarries and production facilities to help mine and load these materials and to produce them and then get them to the job site. So that's what our supply chain is, is from the quarry through the development of these materials, then out to the to a heavy building material job site. >> Got it, and now how historically in the past has the movement of construction materials been coordinated? What was that like before you guys came on the scene? >> You'll love this answer. So 'cause, again, it's like a step back in time. When I got here the people told me that we're trying to come up with the platform that there are 27 industries studied globally. And our industry is second to last in terms of automation which meant that literally everything is still being done with paper and a lot of paper. So when one of those, let's say material is developed, concrete asphalt is produced and then needs to get to the job site. They start by creating a five part printed ticket or delivery description that then goes to multiple parties. It ends up getting touched physically over 50 times for every delivery. And to give you some idea what kind of scale it is there are over 330 million of these type deliveries in north America every year. So it's really a lot of favor and a lot of manual work. So that was the state of really where we were. And obviously there are compelling reasons certainly today but even 3, 4, 5 years ago to automate that and digitize it. >> Wow, tremendous potential to go nowhere but up with the amount of paper, the lack of, of automation. So, you guys Command Alkon built a platform, a cloud software construction software platform. Talk to me of about that. Why you built it, what was the compelling event? I mean, I think you've kind of already explained the compelling event of all the paper but give us a little bit more context. >> Yeah. That was the original. And then we'll get into what happened two years ago which has made it even more compelling but essentially with everything on premises there's really in a huge amount of inefficiency. So, people have heard the enormous numbers that it takes to build up a highway or a really large construction project. And a lot of that is tied up in these inefficiencies. So we felt like with our significant presence in this market, that if we could figure out how to automate getting this data into the cloud so that at least the partners in the supply chain could begin sharing information. That's not on paper a little bit closer to real time that we could make has an impact on everything from the timing it takes to do a project to even the amount of carbon dioxide that's admitted, for example from trucks running around and being delayed and not being coordinated well. >> So you built the connect platform you started on Amazon DynamoDB and ran into some performance challenges. Talk to us about the, some of those performance bottlenecks and how you found Venkat and Rockset. >> So from the beginning, we were fortunate, if you start building a cloud three years ago you're you have a lot of opportunity to use some of the what we call more fully managed or serverless offerings from Amazon and all the cloud vendors have them but Amazon is the one we're most familiar with throughout the past 10 years. So we went head first into saying, we're going to do everything we can to not manage infrastructure ourselves. So we can really focus on solving this problem efficiently. And it paid off great. And so we chose dynamo as our primary database and it still was a great decision. We have obviously hundreds of millions of billions of these data points in dynamo. And it's great from a transactional perspective, but at some point you need to get the data back out. And what plays into the story of the beginning when I came here with no background basically in this industry, is that, and as did most of the other people on my team, we weren't really sure what questions were going to be asked of the data. And that's super, super important with a NoSQL database like dynamo. You sort of have to know in advance what those usage patterns are going to be and what people are going to want to get back out of it. And that's what really began to strain us on both performance and just availability of information. >> Got it. Venkat, let's bring you into the conversation. Talk to me about some of the challenges that Doug articulated the, is industry with such little automation so much paper. Are you finding that still out there for in quite a few industries that really have nowhere to go but up? >> I think that's a very good point. We talk about digital transformation 2.0 as like this abstract thing. And then you meet like disruptors and innovators like Doug, and you realize how much impact, it has on the real world. But now it's not just about disrupting, and digitizing all of these records but doing it at a faster pace than ever before, right. I think this is really what digital transformation in the cloud really enable tools you do that, a small team in a, with a very very big mission and responsibility like what Doug team have been, shepherding here. They're able to move very, very, very fast, to be able to kind of accelerate this. And, they're not only on the forefront of digitizing and transforming a very big, paper-heavy kind of process, but real-time analytics and real time reporting is a requirement, right? Nobody's wondering where is my supply chain three days ago? Are my, one of the most important thing in heavy construction is to keep running on a schedule. If you fall behind, there's no way to catch up because there's so many things that falls apart. Now, how do you make sure you don't fall behind, realtime analytics and realtime reporting on how many trucks are supposed to be delivered today? Halfway through the day, are they on track? Are they getting behind? And all of those things is not just able to manage the data but also be able to get reporting and analytics on that is a extremely important aspect of this. So this is like a combination of digital transformation happening in the cloud in realtime and realtime analytics being in the forefront of it. And so we are very, very happy to partner with digital disruptors like Doug and his team to be part of this movement. >> Doug, as Venkat mentioned, access to real time data is a requirement that is just simple truth these days. I'm just curious, compelling event wise was COVID and accelerator? 'Cause we all know of the supply chain challenges that we're all facing in one way or the other, was that part of the compelling event that had you guys go and say, we want to do DynamoDB plus Rockset? >> Yeah, that is a fantastic question. In fact, more so than you can imagine. So anytime you come into an industry and you're going to try to completely change or revolutionize the way it operates it takes a long time to get the message out. Sometimes years, I remember in insurance it took almost 10 years really to get that message out and get great adoption and then COVID came along. And when COVID came along, we all of a sudden had a situation where drivers and the foreman on the job site didn't want to exchange the paperwork. I heard one story of a driver taping the ticket for signature to the foreman on a broomstick and putting it out his windows so that he didn't get too close. It really was that dramatic. And again, this is the early days and no one really has any idea what's happening and we're all working from home. So we launched, we saw that as an opportunity to really help people solve that problem and understand more what this transformation would mean in the long term. So we launched internally what we called Project Lemonade obviously from, make lemonade out of lemons, that's the situation that we were in and we immediately made some enhancements to a mobile app and then launched that to the field. So that basically there's now a digital acceptance capability where the driver can just stay in the vehicle and the foreman can be anywhere, look at the material say it's acceptable for delivery and go from there. So yeah, it made a, it actually immediately caused many of our customers hundreds to begin, to want to push their data to the cloud for that reason just to take advantage of that one capability >> Project lemonade, sounds like it's made a lot of lemonade out of a lot of lemons. Can you comment Doug on kind of the larger trend of real time analytics and logistics? >> Yeah, obviously, and this is something I didn't think about much either not knowing anything about concrete other than it was in my driveway before I got here. And that it's a perishable product and you've got that basically no more than about an hour and a half from the time you mix it, put it in the drum and get it to the job site and pour it. And then the next one has to come behind it. And I remember I, the trend is that we can't really do that on paper anymore and stay on top of what has to be done we'll get into the field. So a foreman, I recall saying that when you're in the field waiting on delivery, that you have people standing around and preparing the site ready to make a pour that two minutes is an eternity. And so, working a real time is all always a controversial word because it means something different to anyone, but that gave it real, a real clarity to mean, what it really meant to have real time analytics and how we are doing and where are my vehicles and how is this job performing today? And I think that a lot of people are still trying to figure out how to do that. And fortunately, we found a great tool set that's allowing us to do that at scale. Thankfully, for Rockset primarily. >> Venkat talk about it from your perspective the larger trend of real time analytics not just in logistics, but in other key industries. >> Yeah. I think we're seeing this across the board. I think, whether, even we see a huge trend even within an enterprise different teams from the marketing team to the support teams to more and more business operations team to the security team, really moving more and more of their use cases from real time. So we see this, the industries that are the innovators and the pioneers here are the ones for whom real times that requirement like Doug and his team here or where, if it is all news, it's no news, it's useless, right? But I think even within, across all industries, whether it is, gaming whether it is, FinTech, Bino related companies, e-learning platforms, so across, ed tech and so many different platforms, there is always this need for business operations. Some, certain aspects certain teams within large organizations to, have to tell me how to win the game and not like, play Monday morning quarterback after the game is over. >> Right, Doug, let's go back at you, I'm curious with connects, have you been able to scale the platform since you integrated with Rockset? Talk to us about some of the outcomes that you've achieved so far? >> Yeah, we have, and of course we knew and we made our database selection with dynamo that it really doesn't have a top end in terms of how much information that we can throw at it. But that's very, very challenging when it comes to using that information from reporting. But we've found the same thing as we've scaled the analytics side with Rockset indexing and searching of that database. So the scale in terms of the number of customers and the amount of data we've been able to take on has been, not been a problem. And honestly, for the first time in my career, I can say that we've always had to add people every time we add a certain number of customers. And that has absolutely not been the case with this platform. >> Well, and I imagine the team that you do have is far more, sorry Venkat, far more strategic and able to focus on bigger projects. >> It, is, and, you've amazed at, I mean Venkat hit on a couple of points that it's in terms of the adoption of analytics. What we found is that we are as big a customer of this analytic engine as our customers are because our marketing team and our sales team are always coming to us. Well how many customers are doing this? How many partners are connected in this way? Which feature flags are turned on the platform? And the way this works is all data that we push into the platform is automatically just indexed and ready for reporting analytics. So we really it's no additional ad of work, to answer these questions, which is really been phenomenal. >> I think the thing I want to add here is the speed at which they were able to build a scalable solution and also how little, operational and administrative overhead that it has cost of their teams, right. I think, this is again, realtime analytics. If you go and ask hundred people, do you want fast analytics on realtime data or slow analytics on scale data, people, no one would say give me slow and scale. So, I think it goes back to again our fundamental pieces that you have to remove all the cost and complexity barriers for realtime analytics to be the new default, right? Today companies try to get away with batch and the pioneers and the innovators are forced to solve, I know, kind of like address some of these realtime analytics challenges. I think with the platforms like the realtime analytics platform, like Rockset, we want to completely flip it on its head. You can do everything in real time. And there may be some extreme situations where you're dealing with like, hundreds of petabytes of data and you just need an analyst to generate like, quarterly reports out of that, go ahead and use some really, really good batch base system but you should be able to get anything, and everything you want without additional cost or complexity, in real time. That is really the vision. That is what we are really enabling here. >> Venkat, I want to also get your perspective and Doug I'd like your perspective on this as well but that is the role of cloud native and serverless technologies in digital disruption. And what do you see there? >> Yeah, I think it's huge. I think, again and again, every customer, and we meet, Command Alkon and Doug and his team is a great example of this where they really want to spend as much time and energies and calories that they have to, help their business, right? Like what, are we accomplishing trying to accomplish as a business? How do we enable, how do we build better products? How do we grow revenue? How do we eliminate risk that is inherent in the business? And that is really where they want to spend all of their energy not trying to like, install some backend software, administer build IDL pipelines and so on and so forth. And so, doing serverless on the compute side of that things like AWS lambda does and what have you. And, it's a very important innovation but that isn't, complete the story or your data stack also have to become serverless. And, that is really the vision with Rockset that your entire realtime analytics stack can be operating and managing. It could be as simple as managing a serverless stack for your compute environments like your APS servers and what have you. And so I think that is going to be a that is for here to stay. This is a path towards simplicity and simplicity scales really, really well, right? Complexity will always be the killer that'll limit, how far you can use this solution and how many problems can you solve with that solution? So, simplicity is a very, very important aspect here. And serverless helps you, deliver that. >> And Doug your thoughts on cloud native and serverless in terms of digital disruption >> Great point, and there are two parts to the scalability part. The second one is the one that's more subtle unless you're in charge of the budget. And that is, with enough effort and enough money that you can make almost any technology scale whether it's multiple copies of it, it may take a long time to get there but you can get there with most technologies but what is least scalable, at least that I as I see that this industry is the people, everybody knows we have a talent shortage and these other ways of getting the real time analytics and scaling infrastructure for compute and database storage, it really takes a highly skilled set of resources. And the more your company grows, the more of those you need. And that is what we really can't find. And that's actually what drove our team in our last industry to even go this way we reached a point where our growth was limited by the people we could find. And so we really wanted to break out of that. So now we had the best of both scalable people because we don't have to scale them and scalable technology. >> Excellent. The best of both worlds. Isn't it great when those two things come together? Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me on "theCUBE" today. Talking about what Rockset and Command Alkon are doing together better together what you're enabling from a supply chain digitization perspective. We appreciate your insights. >> Great. Thank you. >> Thanks, Lisa. Thanks for having us. >> My pleasure. For Doug Moore and Venkat Venkatramani, I'm Lisa Martin. Keep it right here for more coverage of "theCUBE", your leader in high tech event coverage. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to this CUBE Conversation featuring Rockset CEO and co-founder Venkat Venkataramani who selected season two of the AWS Startup Showcase featured company. Before co-founding Rockset Venkat was the engineering director at Facebook, infrastructure team responsible for all the data infrastructure, storing all there at Facebook and he's here to talk real-time analytics. Venkat welcome back to theCUBE for this CUBE Conversation. >> Thanks John. Thanks for having me again. It's a pleasure to be here. >> I'd love to read back and I know you don't like to take a look back but Facebook was huge hyperscale data at scale, really a leading indicator of where everyone is kind of in now so this is about real-time analytics moving from batch to theme here. You guys are at the center, we've talked about it before here on theCUBE, and so let's get in. We've a couple different good talk tracks to dig into but first I want to get your reaction to this soundbite I read on your blog post. Fast analytics on fresh data is better than slow analytics on stale data, fresh beats stale every time, fast beats slow in every space. Where does that come from obviously it makes a lot of sense nobody wants slow data, no one wants to bail data.(giggles) >> Look, we live in the information era. Businesses do want to track, ask much information as possible about their business and want to use data driven decisions. This is now like motherhood and apple pie, no business would say that is not useful because there's more information than what can fit in one person's head that the businesses want to know. You can either do Monday morning quarterback or in the middle of the third quarter before the game is over, you're maybe six points down, you look at what plays are working today, you look at who's injured in your team and who's injured in your opponent and you try to come up with plays that can change the outcome of the game. You still need Monday morning quarterbacking that's not going anywhere, that's batch analytics, that's BI, classic BI, and what the world is demanding more and more is operational intelligence like help me run my business better, don't just gimme a great report at the end of the quarter. >> Yeah, this is the whole trend. Looking back is key to post more like all that good stuff but being present to make future decisions is a lot more mainstream now than ever was you guys are the center of it, and I want to get your take on this data driven culture because the showcase this year for this next episode of the showcase for Startup says, cloud stuff says, data as code something I'm psyched for because I've been saying in theCUBE for many years, data as code is almost as important as infrastructure as code. Because when you think about the application of data in real-time, it's not easy, it's a hard problem and two, you want to make it easy so this is the whole point of this data driven culture that you're on right now. Can you talk about how you see that because this is really one of the most important stories we've seen since the last inflection point. >> Exactly right. What is data driven culture which basically means you stop guessing. You look at the data, you look at what the data says and you try to come up with hypothesis it's still guardrail, it's a guiding light it's not going to tell you what to do, but you need to be able to interrogate your data. If every time you ask a question and it takes 20 minutes for you to get an answer from your favorite Alexa CD or what have you you are probably not going to ever use that device you will not try to be data driven and you can't really build that culture, so it's not just about visibility it's not just about looking back and getting analytics on how the business is doing, you need to be able to interrogate your data in real-time in an interactive fashion, and that I think is what real-time analytics gives you. This is what we say when we say fast analytics on real-time data that's what we mean, which is, as you make changes to your business on the course of your day-to-day work, week-to-week work, what changes are working? How much impact is it having? If something isn't working you have more questions to figure out why and being able to answer all of that is how you really build the data driven culture and it isn't really going to come from just looking at static reports at the end of the week and at the end of the quarter. >> To talk about the latency aspect of the term and how it relates to where it could be a false flag in the sense of you could say, well, we have low latency but you're not getting all the data. You got to get the data, you got to ingest it, make it addressable, query it, represent it, these are huge things when you factor in every single data where you're not guessing latency is a factor. Can you unpack what this new definition is all about and how do people understand whether they got it right or not. >> A great question. A lot of people say, is five minutes real-time? Because I used to run my thing every six hours. Now for us, if it's more than two seconds behind in terms of your data latency, data freshness, it's too old. When does the present become the past and the future hasn't arrived yet and we think it's about one to two seconds. And so everything we do at Rockset we only call it real-time if it can be within one to two seconds 'cause that's the present, that's what's happening now, if it's five minutes ago, it's already five minutes ago it's already past tense. So if you kind of break it down, you're absolutely right that you have to be able to bring data into a system in real-time without sacrificing freshness, and you store it in a way where you can get fast analytics out of that so Rockset is the only real-time data platform real-time analytics platform with built-in connectors so this is why we have built-in connectors where without writing a single line of code, you can bring in data in real-time from wherever you happen to be managing it today. And when data comes into Rockset now the latency is about query processing. What is the point of bringing in data in real-time if every question you're going to ask is going to still take 20 minutes to come back. Well, then you might as well batch data in order to load it, so there I think we have a conversion indexing, we have a real-time indexing technology that allows data as it comes in real-time to be organized in a way and how a distributor SQL engine on top of that so as long as you can frame your question using a SQL query you can ask any question on your real-time data and expect subsequent response time. So that I think is the the combination of the latency having two parts to it, one is how fresh is your data and how fast is your analytics, and you need both, with the simplicity of the cloud for you to really unlock and make real-time analytics to default, as opposed to let me try to do it and batch and see if I can get away with it, but if you really need real-time you have to be able to do both cut down and control your data latency on how fresh your data is, and also make it fast. >> You talk about culture, can you talk about the people you're working with and how that translates into your next topic which is business observability, the next play on words obviously observability if you can measure everything, there shouldn't be any questions that you can't ask. But it's important this culture is shifting from hardcore data engineering to business value kind of coming together at scale. This is kind of where you see the hardcore data folks really bringing that into the business can you talk about this? The people you're working with, and how that's translating to this business observability. >> Absolutely. We work with the world's probably largest Buy Now Pay Later company maybe they're in the top three, they have hundreds of millions of users 300,000+ merchants, working in so many different countries so many different payment methods and there's a very simple problem they have. Some part of their product, some part of their payment system is always down at any given point in time or it has a very high chance of not working. It's not the whole thing is down but, for this one merchant in Switzerland, Apple Pay could be not working and so all of those kinds of transactions might not be processing, and so they had a very classic cloud data warehouse based solution, accumulate all these payments, every six hours they would kind of process and look for anomalies and say, hey, these things needs to be investigated and a response team needs to be tackling these. The business was growing so fast. Those analytical jobs that would run every six hours in batch mode was taking longer than six hours to run and so that was a dead end. They came to Rockset, simply using SQL they're able to define all the metrics they care about across all of their dimensions and they're all accurate up to the second, and now they're able to run their models every minute. And in sort of six hours, every minute they're able find anomalies and run their statistical models, so that now they can protect their business better and more than that, the real side effect of that is they can offer much better quality of a product, much better quality of service to their customer so that the customers are very sticky because now they're getting into the state where they know something is wrong with one of their more merchants, even before the merchants realize that, and that allows them to build a much better product to their end users. So business observability is all about that. It's about do you know really what's happening in your business and can you keep tabs on it, in real-time, as you go about your business and this is what we call operational intelligence, businesses are really demanding operational intelligence a lot more than just traditional BI. >> And we're seeing it in every aspect of a company the digital transformation affects every single department. Sales use data to get big sales better, make the product better people use data to make product usage whether it's A/B testing whatnot, risk management, OPS, you name it data is there to drill down so this is a huge part of real-time. Are you finding that the business observability is maturing faster now or where do you put the progress of companies with respect to getting on board with the idea that this wave is here. >> I think it's a very good question. I would say it has gone mainstream primarily because if you look at technologies like Apache Kafka, and you see Confluent doing really really well, those technologies have really enabled now customers and business units, business functions across the spectrum, to be able to now acquire really really important business data in real-time. If you didn't have those mechanisms to acquire the data in real-time, well, you can't really do analytics and get operational intelligence on that. And so the majority is getting there and things are growing very fast as those kinds of technologies get better and better. SaaSification also is a very big component to it which is like more and more business apps are basically becoming SaaS apps. Now that allows everything to be in the cloud and being interconnected and now when all of those data systems are all interconnected, you can now have APIs that make data flow from one system to another all in happening in real-time, and that also unlocks a lot more potential for again, getting better operational intelligence for your enterprise, and there's a subcategory to this which is like B2B SaaS companies also having to build real-time interactive analytics embedded as part of their offering otherwise people wouldn't even want to buy it and so that it's all interconnected. I think the market is emerging, market is growing but it is gone mainstream I would say predominantly because, Kafka, Confluent, and these kinds of real-time data collection and aggregation kind of systems have gone mainstream and now you actually get to dream about operational intelligence which you couldn't even think about maybe five or 10 years ago. >> They're getting all their data together. So to close it out, take us through the bottom line real-time business observability, great for companies collecting their data, but now you got B2B, you got B2C, people are integrating partnerships where APIs are connecting, it could be third party business relationships, so the data collection is not just inside the company it's also outside. This is more value. This is the more of what's going on. >> Exactly. So more and more, instead of going to your data team and demanding real-time analytics what a lot of business units are doing is, they're going to the product analytics platform, the SaaS app they're using for covering various parts of their business, they go to them and demand, either this is my recruiting software, sales software, customer support, gimme more real-time insights otherwise it's not really that useful. And so there is really a huge uptake on all these SaaS companies now building real-time infrastructure powered by Rockset in many cases that actually ends up giving a lot of value to their end customers and that I think is kind of the proof of value for a SaaS product, all the workflows are all very, very important absolutely but almost every amazing SaaS product has an analytics tab and it needs to be fast, interactive and it needs to be real-time. It needs you talking about fresh insights that are happening and that is often in a B2B SaaS, application developers always comes and tell us that's the proof of value that we can show how much value that that particular SaaS application is creating for their customer. So I think it's all two sides of the same coin, large enterprises want to build it themselves because now they get more control about how exactly the problem needs to be solved and then there are also other solutions where you rely on a SaaS application, where you demand that particular application gives you. But at the end of the day, I think the world is going real-time and we are very, very happy to be part of this moment, operational intelligence. For every classic BI use case I think there are 10 times more operational intelligence use cases. As Rockset we are on a mission to eliminate all cost and complexity barriers and really really provide fast analytics on real-time data with the simplicity of the cloud and really be part of this moment. >> You guys having some fun right now these days through in the middle of all the action. >> Absolutely. I think we're growing very fast, we're hiring, we are onboarding as many customers as possible and really looking forward to being part of this moment and really accelerate this moment from business intelligence to operational intelligence. >> Well, Venkat great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE as part of this CUBE Conversation, you're in the class of AWS Startup Showcase season two, episode two. Thanks for coming on. Keep it right there everyone watch more action from theCUBE. Your leader in tech coverage, I'm John Furrier your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Welcome back to Los Angeles. TheCUBE is live. I can't say that enough. The cube is live. We're at KubeCon Cloud Native Con 21. We've been here all day yesterday, and today and tomorrow I'm talking with lots of guests, really uncovering what's going on in the world of Kubernetes. Lisa Martin, here with Dave Nicholson. We've got some folks. Next we're going to be talking about a customer use case, which is always one of my favorite things to talk about. Please welcome Micah Coletti, the principal platform engineer at CHG healthcare, and Venkat Ramakrishnan VP of products from Portworx by Pure Storage, guys welcome to the program. >> Thank you. >> Happy to be here. >> Yeah. So Micah, first of all, let's go ahead and start with you. Give the audience an overview of CHG healthcare. >> Yeah. So CHG healthcare, we're a staffing company. So we try like a little companion. So our clients are doctors and hospitals, so we help staff hospitals with temporary doctors or even permanent placing. So we deal with a lot of doctors, a lot of nursing and we're a combination of multiple companies. So CHG is the parent. So, and yeah, we're known in the industry as one of the leaders in this field and providing hospitals with high quality doctors and nurses. And, you know, our customer service is like number one, and one of the things our CEO is really focused on is now how do we make that more digital? How do we provide that same level of quality of service, but a digital experience as rich for her. >> I can imagine it was a massive need for that in the last 18 months alone. >> COVID definitely really raised that awareness up for us and the importance of that digital experience and that we need to be out there in the digital market. >> Absolutely. So you're a customer port works by pure storage, we're going to get into that, but then Venkat talk to us about what's going on, the acquisition of port works by pure storage was about a year ago. Talk to us about your VP of products what's going on. >> Yeah, I mean, you know, first of all, I think I could not say how much of a great fit for a Portworx will be part of pure storage, it's, pure itself is a very fast moving, large startup that's a dominant leader in the flash and data center space, and, you know, pure recognizes the fact that Kubernetes is the new operating system of the cloud is not how, you know, it's kind of virtualizing the cloud itself, and there's a, you know, a big burgeoning need for data management and Kubernetes and how you can kind of orchestrate workloads between your on-prem data centers and the cloud and back. So Portworx fits right into the story as complete vision of data management for our customers, and it's been phenomenal. Our business has grown as part of being part of a pure, and you know, we're looking at launching some new products as well, and it's all exciting times. >> So you must've been pretty delighted to be acquired as a startup by essentially a startup because, because although pure has reached significant milestones in the storage business and is a leader in flash storage still that that startup mindset is absolutely unique. That's not, that's not the same as being acquired by a company that's been around for a hundred years seeking to revitalize itself. >> Absolutely. >> Can you talk a little bit about that aspect? >> Yeah, So I think, you know, purist culture is a highly innovation-driven and it's a very open, flat culture, right? I mean, it's, everybody in pure is accessible. It can easily have a composition with folks and everybody has his learning mindset and Portworx is and has always been the same way. Right? So when you put these teams together, if we can create wonders, I mean, we right after the acquisition, just within a few months, we announced an integrated solution that portworx orchestrates volumes and file shares in pure splash products and then delivers as an integrated solution for our customers, and pure has a phenomenal cloud-based monitoring and management system called pure one that we integrated well into. Now, we're bringing the power of all of the observability that pure's customers are used to for all of the corporate customers, and I've been super happy, you know, delegating that capability to our customers and our customers are delighted. Now they can have a complete view all the way from Kubernetes app to the flash. and I don't think any one company in the planet can even plan they can do that. >> I think it's fair to acknowledge that pure one was observability before observability was a word that everyone used regularly. >> Yep. >> Sounds very interesting. >> Micah Talk to us about, obviously you are a customer. CHG is a customer of Portworx now Portworx by Pure Storage. Talk to us about the use case. What, what was the compellent? Was there a compelling event and from a storage perspective that led you to Portworx in the first place. >> So we beat, they began this, our CEO base came to the vision, we need to have a digital presence we need enhances. and this was even before COVID. So they brought me on board and my, my manager read glossary. We basically had this task to, how are we going to get out into the cloud? How are we going to make that happen? And we chose to follow a very much a cloud native strategy and the platform of choice, I mean, it just made sense with Kubernetes. And so when we were looking at Kubernetes, we were starting to figure out how we're doing. We knew that data is going to be a big factor. You know, being a, provide data. We're very much focused on an event driven. We're really pushing to event driven architecture. So we leverage Kafka on top of Kubernetes, but at the time we were actually leveraging Kafka with a MSK down, out in AWS, and that was just a huge cost to us. So I came on board, I had experienced with Portworx, a prior company before that, and I basically said, we need to figure out a great storage relay overlay. and the only way to do is we got to have high performance storage, we've got to have secure. We got to be able to backup and recover that storage. And the Portworx was the right match. And that allowed us to have a very smooth transition off of MSK onto Kubernetes saving us a significant amount of money per month, and just leverage that already existing hardware that our existing compute memory and just, and the, and move right to Portworx. >> Leveraging your existing investments. >> Exactly. >> Which is key, >> Very key, very key so. >> So how common are the challenges that when you guys came together with CHG, how common are the challenges? >> It's actually a, that's a great question. You know, this is, you know, I'll tell you the challenges that Micah and his team are running into is what we see a lot in the industry where people pay a ton of money, you know to other vendors are, you know, especially in some cases use some cloud native services, but they want to have control over the data. They want to control the cost and they want higher performance and they want to have, you know, there's also governance and regulatory things that they need to control better. So they want to kind of bring these services and have more control over them. Right? So now we will work very well with all of our partners, including the cloud providers, as well as, you know, on-prem and server vendors and everybody, but different customers have different kinds of needs. And Portworx gives them that flexibility. If you are a customer who want, you know, have a lot of control over your applications, the performance, the latency, and want to control costs very well and leverage your existing investments Portworx can deliver that for you in your data center. Right now, you can integrate that with pure slash and you get a complete solution, or you want to run it in cloud, and you still want to have leverage the agility of the cloud and scale Portworx delivers a solution for you as well. So it kind of not only protects their investment its future proves their architecture, you get future proving your architecture completely. So if you want to tear the cloud or burst the cloud, you have a great solution that you can continue to leverage >> Micah, when you hear future-proof and I'm a marketer. So I always go, I love to know what it means to different people. What does that mean to you in your environment? >> My environment. So a future-proof means like one of the things we've been addressing lately, that's just a real big challenge. And I'm sure it's a challenge in the industry, especially the Q and A's is upgrading our clusters. The ability to actually maintain a consistent flow with how fast Kubernetes is growing, you know, they're, they they're out. I think he cast, we leverage the cast. So it's like 121 or 122 now, and that effort to upgrade a cluster, it can be a daunting one. With Portworx, we actually were able to make that to where we could actually spin up a brand new cluster. And with Portworx shift, all our applications, services, data migrated completely over, Portworx handles all of that for us and stand up that new cluster in, in less than a day. And that effort, I mean, it would take us a week, two weeks to do so, not even man hours and time spent there, but just the reliability of being able to do that in the cost, you know, instead of standing up a new cluster and configuring it and doing all that and spending all that time, we can just really, we move to what we call blue green cut-over strategy. And Portworx is an essential piece of that. >> So Venkat, is it fair to say that there are a variety of ways that people approach Portworx from a value perspective in terms of, I know that one area that you are particularly good in is the area of backups in this environment, but then you get data management and there's a third kind of vector there. What is the third vector? >> As all of the data services, >> Data services, >> Yeah Like for example, deep database as a service on any Kubernetes cluster feed on your cloud or your on-prem data centers. >> Which data, what kind of databases are you talking about? >> I mean we're talking about anything from Reddit Kafka, Post-stress my sequel console, we are supporting. We just announced something called a Portworx Data Services Offering that essentially delivers all these databases as a service on any Kubernetes cluster that a customer can point to and lets them kind of get the automated management of the database from day one to day three, the entire life cycle, you know, through regular Kubernetes, scoop cuddle experience through APIs and SDKs and a nice slick UI that they can, you know, that's, role-based access control and all of that, that they can completely control their data and their applications through it. And you know, that's the third vector of Portworx office. >> Micah a question for you. So Portworx has been a part of pure storage? You've known it since obviously for several years before you were at CHG, you brought it to CHG. You now know it a year into being acquired by a fast paced startup. Talk to me about the relationship and some of the benefits that you're getting with Portworx as a part of pure storage? >> Well, I mean, one of the things I, you know, when I heard about the acquisition, my first thing was, I was a little bit concerned is that relationship going to change? And when we were acquiring, when we were looking at adopting Portworx, one thing I would tell my management is Portworx is not just a vendor that wants to throw a solution on you and provide some capability. They're a partner. They want to partner with you and your success in your journey and this whole cloud native journey to provide this rich digital experience in the, for not only our platform engineering team, but our Dev teams, but also be able to really accelerate the development of our services. So we can provide that digital portal for our end users. And that didn't change. If anything, that it accelerated that relationship did not change. You know, I came to Venkat with an issue. We just we're, we're dealing with, he immediately got someone on a phone call with me. And so that has not changed. So it's really exciting to see that now that they've been acquired, that they still are very much invested in the success of their customers and making sure we're successful. You know, it's not all of a sudden. I was worried I was going to have to do a whole different support PA process, and it was going to go into a black hole. Didn't happen. They still are very much involved with their customers. >> It's sounds kind of Venkat similar to what you talked about with the cultural alignment. I've known here for a long time and they're very customer centric sounds like one of the areas in which there was a very strong alignment with Portworx >> Absolutely. and Portworx has always taken pride in being customer first company. Our founders are heavily customer focused. You know, they are aligned. They want, they have always aligned. our portraits business to our customers' needs. Now Pure is a company that's maniacally focused on customers, right? I mean, that's all in a pure pounder cars and everybody cared about. And so, you know, bringing these companies together and being part of the Pure team, I kind of see how, how synergistic it is. And, you know, we have, you know, that has enabled us to serve our customer's customers even better than before. >> So I'm curious about the two of you personally, in terms of your, your histories, I'm going to assume that you didn't both just bounce out of high school into the world of Kubernetes, right? So like Lisa and I you're spanning the generations between the world of say virtualization based on x86 architecture, virtualization, where you're not, you don't have microservices, you have a full blown operating system that you're working with. Kind of talk about, you know, Micah with you first talk about what that's been like navigating that change. We were in the midst of that. Do you have advice for others that are navigating that change? >> Don't be afraid of it. You know, a lot of people want to, you know, I call it we're moving from where we're name me. We still have cats and dogs. They have a name that the VMs either whether or not they're physical boxes or their VMs to where it's more like, he'd say cattle, you know, it's like we don't own the OOS and not to be afraid of afraid of that, because change is really good. You know, the ability for me to not have to worry about patching and operating system, it's huge, you know, where I can rely on someone like EKS and, and the version and allow them to, if a CV comes out, they let me know. I go and I use their tools to be able to upgrade. So I don't have to literally worry about owning that OOS and containers as the same thing. You know, you, you know, it's all about being fault-tolerant right. And being able to be changed or where, you know, you can actually roll out a new version of a container, a base image with a lot of ease without having to go and patch a bunch of servers. I mean, patch night was hell and sorry if I could say that, but it was a nightmare, you know, but this whole world has just been a game changer with that. >> So Venkat from your perspective, you were coming at it, going into a startup, looking at the landscape in the future and seeing opportunity. What what's that been like for you? I guess the question for you is more something, Lisa and I talk about this concept of peak Kubernetes, where are we in the wave? Is this just, is this just the beginning? Are we in the thick of it? >> I think I would say we're kind of transitioning from early adopters, early majority phase in the whole, you know, crossing the chasm analogy, right? So I would say we're still early stages of this big wave. That's going to transform how infrastructure is built. Apps are apps are built and managed and run in production. I think some of the pieces, the key pieces are falling in place and maturing. There are some other pieces like observability and security, you know, kind of edge use cases need to be, you know, they're kind of going to get a lot more mature and you'll see that the cloud, as we know today, and the apps, as we know today, they're going to be radically different. And you know, if you're not building your apps and your business on this modern platform, on this modern infrastructure, you're going to be left behind. You know, I, my wife's birthday was a couple of days ago. I was telling the story to my couple of friends is that I, I used another flowers delivery website. They miss delivering the flowers on the same day, right. So they told me all kinds of excuses. Then I just went and looked up a, you know, like door dash, which is delivers, you know, and then, you know, like your food, but there's also flower delivery and door dash and I don't do I door dash flowers to her, and I can track the flower delivery all the way she did not need them, but my kids love the chocolates though. Right. So, and you know, the case in point is that you cannot be in a building, a modern business without leveraging the model tool chain and modern tool chain and how the business is going to be delivered at that thing is going to be changing dramatically. And those kinds of customer experience, if you don't deliver, you're not going to be successful in business. And Kubernetes is the fundamental technology that enables this containers is a fundamental piece of technology that enables building new businesses, you know, modernizing existing businesses. And the 5G is going to be, there's going to be new innovations. It's going to get unleashed. And again, Kubernetes and containers enable us to leverage those. And so we're still scratching the surface on this. It's big. Now, it's going to be much, much bigger, you know, as, as we go into the next couple of years. >> Speaking, scratching the surface, Micah, take us out in the last 30 seconds or so with where CHG healthcare is on institutional transformation, how is Portworx facilitating that? >> So we're, we're right in the thick of it. I mean, we are, we still have what we call the legacy. We're working on getting those, but I mean, we're really moving forward to provide that rich experience, especially with event driven platforms like Kafka and Kubernetes and partnering with Portworx is one of the key things for us with that. And AWS along with that. But we're a, and I remember I heard a talk and I can't, I can't remember her name, but he talked about how, how Pure Kubernetes is sort of like the 56K modem, right. You're hearing it and see, but it's got to get to the point where it's just there. It's just the high-speed internet and Kelsey Hightower. That's great. But yeah, and I really liked that because that's true, you know, and that's where we are. We're all in that transition where we're still early, it's still at 50. So you still want to hear note, you still want to do cube CTL. You want to learn it the hard way and do all that fun stuff. But eventually it's going to be where it's just, it's just there. And it's running everything like 5G. I mean, stripped down doing micro, you know, Kate's things like that. You know, we're going to see it in a lot of other areas and just periphery and really accelerate the industry in compute and memory and storage, and. >> Yeah, a lot of acceleration. Guys thank you. This has been a really interesting session. I always love digging into customer use cases. How CHG is really driving its evolution with Portworx. Venkat, thanks for sharing with us, What's going on with Portworx a year after the acquisition. It sounds like all good stuff. >> Thank you. Thanks for having us. >> Pleasure. All right. For Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Los Angeles. This is our coverage of KubeCon Cloud Native Con 21.

>>Mhm Welcome back to Los Angeles. The Cubans live, I can't say that enough. The Cubans live. We're at cu con cloud Native Con 21. We've been here all day yesterday and today and tomorrow talking with lots of gas. Really uncovering what's going on in the world of kubernetes, lisa martin here with Dave Nicholson. We've got some folks. Next we're gonna be talking about a customer use case, which is always one of my favorite things to talk about. Please welcome Michael Coletti, the principal platform engineer at CHG Healthcare and then cat from a christian VP of products from port works by pure storage. Guys, welcome to the program, Thank you. Happy to be here. Yeah. So Michael, first of all, let's go ahead and start with you, give the audience an overview of CHG healthcare. >>Yeah, so CHG Healthcare were a staffing company so we sure like a locum pen and so our clients are doctors and hospitals, so we help staff hospitals with temporary doctors or even permanent placing. So we deal with a lot of doctors, a lot of nursing and we're were a combination of multiple companies to see if she is the parents. So and uh yeah, we're known in the industry is one of the leaders in this, this field and providing uh hospitals with high quality uh doctors and nurses and uh you know, our customer services like number one and one of these are Ceos really focused on is now how do we make that more digital, how we provide that same level of quality of service, but a digital experience as rich for >>I can imagine there was a massive need for that in the last 18 months alone. >>Covid definitely really raised that awareness out for us and the importance of that digital experience and that we need to be out there in the digital market. >>Absolutely. So your customer report works by pure storage, we're gonna get into that. But then can talk to us about what's going on. The acquisition of port works by peer storage was about a year ago I talked to us about your VP of product, what's going on? >>Yeah, I mean, you know, first of all, I think I could not say how much of a great fit for a port works to be part of your storage. It's uh uh Pure itself is a very fast moving large start up that's a dominant leader in a flash and data center space. And you know, pure recognizes the fact that Cuban it is is the new operating system of the cloud is now how you know, it's kind of virtualizing the cloud itself and there is a, you know, a big burgeoning need for data management in communities and how you can kind of orchestrate work lords between your on prem data centers in the cloud and back. So port books fits right into the story as complete vision of data management for our customers and uh spend phenomenal or business has grown as part of being part of Pure and uh you know, we're looking at uh launching some new products as well and it's all exciting times. >>So you must have been pretty delighted to be acquired as a startup by essentially a startup because because although pure has reached significant milestones in the storage business and is a leader in flash storage still, that, that startup mindset is there, that's unique, that's not, that's not the same as being acquired by a company that's been around for 100 years seeking to revitalize >>itself. Can >>you talk a little bit about that >>aspect? So I think it will uh, Purest culture is highly innovation driven and it's a very open flat culture. Right? I mean everybody impure is accessible, it can easily have a conversation with folks and everybody has his learning mindset and Port works is and has always been in the same way. Right? So when you put these teams together, if we can create wonders, I mean we, right after that position, just within a few months we announced an integrated solution that Port works orchestrates volumes and she file shares in Pure flash products and then delivers as an integrated solution for our customers. And Pure has a phenomenal uh, cloud based monitoring and management system called Pure one that we integrated well into. Now we're bringing the power of all of the observe ability that Purest customers are used to for all of the partners customers and having super happy, you know, delivering that capability to our customers and our customers are delighted now they can have a complete view all the way from community is an >>app to the >>flash and I don't think any one company on the planet can even climb, they can do that. >>I think, I think it's fair to acknowledge that pure one was observe ability before observe ability was a word. Exactly one used regularly. So that's very interesting. >>I could talk to us about obviously you are a customer CHD as a customer of court works now Port works by peer storage. Talk to us about the use case, what what was the compelling? It was their compelling event and from a storage perspective that that led you to Port works in the >>first so we be, they began this our Ceo basically in the vision, we we need to have a digital presence, we need and hazards and this was even before Covid, so they brought me on board and my my manager read uh glass or he we basically had this task to how are we going to get out into the cloud, how we're going to make that happen And we we chose to follow very much cloud native strategy and the platform of choice. I mean it just made sense with kubernetes and so when we were looking at kubernetes, we're starting to figure out how we're doing, we knew that data is going to be a big factor, you know, um being to provide data, we're very much focused on an event driven, were really pushing to event driven architecture. So we leverage Kafka on top of kubernetes, but at the time we were actually leveraging Kafka with M S K down out in a W S and that was just a huge cost to us. So I came on board, I had experienced with poor works prior company before that and I basically said we need to figure out a great storage away overlay. And the only way to do is we gotta have high performance storage, we've got to have secure, we gotta be able to back up and recover that storage and the poor works was the right match and that allowed us to have a very smooth transition off of M S K onto kubernetes, saving us, it's a significant amount of money per month and just leverage that already existing hardware that are existing, compute memory and just in the and move right to port works, >>leveraging your existing investments. >>Exactly which is key. Very, very key. So, >>so been kept, how common are the challenges that when you guys came together with the HD, how common are the challenges? It's actually, >>that's a great question, you know, this is, I'll tell you the challenges that Michael and his team are running into is what we see a lot in the, in the industry where people pay a ton of money, you know, to, you know, to to other vendors or especially in some cases use some cloud native services, but they want to have control over the data. They want to control the cost and they want higher performance and they want to have, you know, there's also governance and regulatory things that they need to control better. So they want to kind of bring these services and have more control over them. Right? So now we will work very well with all of our partners including the cloud providers as well as uh, you know, an from several vendors and everybody but different customers are different kinds of needs and port works gives them the flexibility if you are a customer who want, you know, have a lot of control over your applications, the performance of the agency and want to control cars very well in leveraging existing investments board works can deliver that for you in your data center right now you can integrate it with pure slash and you get a complete solution or you won't run it in cloud and you still want to have leverage the agility of the cloud and scale for books delivers a solution for you as well. So it kind of not only protects their investment in future proves their architecture, you get future proving your architecture completely. So if you want to tear the cloud or burst the cloud, you have a great solution that you can continue to leverage >>when you hear a future proof and I'm a marketer. So I always go, I love to know what it means to different people, what does that mean to you in your environment? >>My environment. So a future proof means like one of the things we've been addressing lately, that's just a real big challenge and I'm sure it's a challenge in the industry, especially Q and A's is upgrading our clusters ability to actually maintain a consistent flow with how fast kubernetes is growing, you know, they they're out I think yes, we leverage eks so it's like 1 21 or 1 22 now, uh that effort to upgrade a cluster, it can be a daunting one with port works. We actually were able to make that to where we could actually spin up a brand new cluster and with port work shift, all our application services, data migrated completely over poor works, handles all that for us and stand up that new cluster in less than a day. And that effort, it would take us a week, two weeks to do so not even man hours the time spent there, but just the reliability of being able to do that and the cost, you know, instead of standing up a new cluster and configuring it and doing all that and spending all that time, we can just really, we move to what we call blue green cut over strategy and port works is an essential piece of that. >>So is it fair to say that there are a variety of ways that people approach port works from a, from a value perspective in terms of, I I know that one area that you are particularly good in is the area of backups in this environment, but then you get data management and there's a third kind of vector there. What is the third vector? >>Yeah, it's all of the data services. Data services, like for example, database as a service on any kubernetes cluster paid on your cloud or you're on from data centers, which >>data, what kind of databases >>you were talking about? Anything from Red is Kafka Postgres, my sequel, you know, council were supporting, we just announced something called port books, data services offering that essentially delivers all these databases as a service on any kubernetes cluster uh that that a customer can point to unless than kind of get the automated management of the database on day one to day three, the entire life cycle. Um you know, through regular communities, could curdle experience through Api and SDK s and a nice slick ui that they can, you know, just role based access control and all of that, that they can completely control their data and their applications through it. And, you know, that's the third vector of potatoes Africans >>like a question for you. So what works has been a part of peer storage? You've known it since obviously for several years before you were a c h G, you brought up to see H G, you now know it a year into being acquired by a fast paced startup. Talk to me about the relationship and some of the benefits that you're getting with port works as a part of pure storage. >>Well, I mean one of the things, you know, when, when I heard about the accusation, my first thing was I was a little bit concerned is that relationship going to change and when we were acquiring, when we're looking at a doctor and Poor works, One thing I would tell my management is poor works is not just a vendor that wants to throw a solution on you and provide some capability there, partner, they want to partner with you and your success in your journey and this whole cloud native journey to provide this rich digital experience for not only our platform engineering team, but our dev teams, but also be able to really accelerate the development of our services so we can provide that digital portal for our end users and that didn't change. If anything that accelerated that that relationship did not change. You know, I came to the cat with an issue we just, we're dealing with, he immediately got someone on the phone call with me and so that has not changed. So it's really exciting to see that now that they've been acquired that they still are very much invested in the success of their customers and making sure we're successful. You know, it's not all of a sudden I was worried I was gonna have to do a whole different support process and it's gonna go into a black hole didn't happen. They still are very much involved with their customers. And >>that sounds kind of similar to what you talked about with the cultural alignment I've known here for a long time and they're very customer centric. Sounds like one of the areas in which there was a very strong alignment with port works. >>Absolutely important works has always taken pride in being customer. First company. Our founders are heavily customer focused. Uh, you know, they are aligned. They want, they have always aligned uh, the portraits business to our customers needs. Uh Pure is a company that's men. I actually focused on customers, right? I mean, that's all, you know, purist founder cause and everybody care about and so, you know, bringing these companies together and being part of the pure team. I kind of see how synergistic it is. And you know, we have, you know, that has enabled us to serve our customers customers even better than before. >>So, I'm curious about the two of you personally, in terms of your histories, I'm going to assume that you didn't both just bounce out of high school into the world of kubernetes, right? So like lisa and I your spanning the generations between the world of, say, virtualization based on X 86 architecture and virtualization where you can have microservices, you have a full blown operating system that you're working with, that kind of talk about, you know, Michael with you first talk about what that's been like navigating that change. We were in the midst of that, Do you have advice for others that are navigating that change? >>Don't be afraid of it, you know, a lot of people want to, you know, I call it, we're moving from where we're uh naming, we still have cats and dogs, they have a name, the VMS either whether or not their physical boxes or their VMS to where it's more like it's a cattle, you know, it's like we don't own the Os and not to be afraid afraid of that because change is really good. You know, the ability for me to not have to worry about patching and operating system is huge, you know, where I can rely on someone like the chaos and and the version and allow them to, if CV comes out, they let me know I go and I use their tools to be able to upgrade. So I don't have to literally worry about owning that Os and continues the same thing. You know, you, you, you know, it's all about being fault tolerant, right? And being able to be changed where you can actually brought a new version of a container, a base image with a lot of these without having to go and catch a bunch of servers, I mean patch night was held, I'm sorry if I could say that, but it was a nightmare, you know, but this whole world has just been a game changer >>with that. So Van cut from your perspective, you were coming at it, going into a startup, looking at the landscape in the future and seeing opportunity, um what what what's that been like for you? I guess the question for you is more something lisa and I talk about this concept of peak kubernetes, where are we in the wave, is this just is this just the beginning, are we in the thick of it? >>Yeah, I think I would say we're kind of transitioning from earlier doctors too early majority face in the whole, you know, um crossing the chasm analogy. Right, so uh I would say we're still the early stages of this big wave that's going to transform how infrastructure is built, apps are, apps are built and managed and run in production. Um I think some of the uh pieces, the key pieces are falling in place and maturing, uh there are some other pieces like observe ability and security, uh you know, kind of edge use cases need to be, you know, they're kind of going to get a lot more mature and you'll see that the cloud as we know today and the apps as we know today, they're going to be radically different and you know, if you're not building your apps and your business on this modern platform, on this modern infrastructure, you're gonna be left behind. Um, you know, I, my wife's birthday was a couple of days ago. I was telling this story a couple of friends is that I r I used another flowers delivery website. Uh they missed delivering the flowers on the same day, right? So when they told me all kinds of excuses, then I just went and looked up, you know, like door dash, which delivers uh, you know, and then, you know, like your food, but there's also flower delivery, indoor dash and I don't do it, I door dash flowers to her and I can track the flower does all the way she did not eat them, okay, You need them. But my kids love the chocolates though. So, you know, the case in point is that you cannot be, you know, building a modern business without leveraging the moral toolchain and modern toolchain and how the business is going to be delivered. That that thing is going to be changing dramatically. And those kind of customer experience, if you don't deliver, uh, you're not gonna be successful in business and communities is the fundamental technology that enables these containers. It's a fundamental piece of technology that enables building new businesses, you know, modernizing existing businesses and the five G is gonna be, there's gonna be new innovations that's going to get unleashed. And uh, again, communities and containers enable us to leverage those. And so we're still scratching the surface on this, it's big now, it's going to be much, much bigger as we go to the next couple of years. >>Speaking of scratching the surface, Michael, take us out in the last 30 seconds or so with where CHG healthcare is on its digital transformation. How is port works facilitating that? >>So we're right in the thick of it. I mean we are we still have what we call the legacy, we're working on getting those. But I mean we're really moving forward um to provide that rich experience, especially with inventing driven platforms like Kafka and Kubernetes and partnering with port works is one of the key things for us with that and a W s along with that. But we're, and I remember I heard a talk and I can't, I can't remember me but he he talked about how, how kubernetes just sort of like 56 K. Modem, You're hearing it, see, but it's got to get to the point where it's just there, it's just the high speed internet and Kelsey Hightower, That's who Great. Yeah, and I really like that because that's true, you know, and that's where we're on that transition, where we're still early, it's still that 50. So you still want to hear a note, you still want to do cube Cto, you want to learn it the hard way and do all that fun stuff, but eventually it's gonna be where it's just, it's just there and it's running everything like five G. I mean stripped down doing Micro K. It's things like that, you know, we're gonna see it in a lot of other areas and just proliferate and really accelerate uh the industry and compute and memory and, and storage and >>yeah, a lot of acceleration guys, thank you. This has been a really interesting session. I always love digging into customer use cases how C H. G is really driving its evolution with port works Venkat. Thanks for sharing with us. What's going on with port works a year after the acquisition. It sounds like all good stuff. >>Thank you. Thanks for having us. It's been fun, our >>pleasure. Alright for Dave Nicholson. I'm lisa martin. You're watching the cube live from Los Angeles. This is our coverage of Yukon cloud native Con 21 mhm

(mid tempo digital music) >> Welcome to today's session of theCUBE' presentation of the AWS startup showcase. This is New Breakthroughs and DevOps, Data Analytics, and Cloud Management Tools. The segment is featuring Rockset and we're going to be talking about data analytics. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and today I'm joined by one of our alumni, Venkat Venkataramani, the co-founder and CEO of Rockset, and Carl Sjogreen, the co-founder and CPO of Seesaw Learning. We're going to be talking about the fast path to real-time analytics at Seesaw. Guys, Thanks so much for joining me today. >> Thanks for having us >> Thank you for having us. >> Carl, let's go ahead and start with you. Give us an overview of Seesaw. >> Yeah, so Seesaw is a platform that brings educators, students, and families together to create engaging and learning experiences. We're really focused on elementary aged students, and have a suite of creative tools and engaging learning activities that helps get their learning and ideas out into the world and share that with family members. >> And this is used by over 10 million teachers and students and family members across 75% of the schools in the US and 150 countries. So you've got a great big global presence. >> Yeah, it's really an honor to serve so many teachers and students and families. >> I can imagine even more so now with the remote learning being such a huge focus for millions and millions across the country. Carl, let's go ahead and get the backstory. Let's talk about data. You've a ton of data on how your product is being used across millions of data points. Talk to me about the data goals that you set prior to using Rockset. >> Yeah, so, as you can imagine with that many users interacting with Seesaw, we have all sorts of information about how the product is being used, which schools, which districts, what those usage patterns look like. And before we started working with Rockset, a lot of data infrastructure was really custom built and cobbled together a bit over the years. We had a bunch of batch jobs processing data, we were using some tools, like Athena, to make that data visible to our internal customers. But we had a very sort disorganized data infrastructure that really as we've grown, we realized was getting in the way of helping our sales and marketing and support and customer success teams, really service our customers in the way that we wanted to past. >> So operationalizing that data to better serve internal users like sales and marketing, as well as your customers. Give me a picture, Carl, of those key technology challenges that you knew you needed to solve. >> Yeah, well, at the simplest level, just understanding, how an individual school or district is using Seesaw, where they're seeing success, where they need help, is a critical question for our customer support teams and frankly for our school and district partners. a lot of what they're asking us for is data about how Seesaw is being used in their school, so that they can help target interventions, They can understand where there is an opportunity to double down on where they are seeing success. >> Now, before you found Rockset, you did consider a more traditional data warehouse approach, but decided against it. Talk to me about the decision why was a traditional data warehouse not the right approach? >> Well, one of the key drivers is that, we are heavy users of DynamoDB. That's our main data store and has been tremendous aid in our scaling. Last year we scaled with the transition to remote learning, most of our metrics by, 10X and Dynamo didn't skip a beat, it was fantastic in that environment. But when we started really thinking about how to build a data infrastructure on top of it, using a sort of traditional data warehouse, a traditional ETL pipeline, it wasn't going to require a fair amount of work for us to really build that out on our own on top of Dynamo. And one of the key advantages of Rockset was that it was basically plug and play for our Dynamo instance. We turned Rockset on, connected it to our DynamoDB and were able within hours to start querying that data in ways that we hadn't before. >> Venkat let's bring you into the conversation. Let's talk about the problems that you're solving for Seesaw and also the complimentary relationship that you have with DynamoDB. >> Definitely, I think, Seesaw, big fan of the product. We have two kids in elementary school that are active users, so it's a pleasure to partner with Seesaw here. If you really think about what they're asking for, what Carl's vision was for their data stack. The way we look at is business observability. They have many customers and they want to make sure that they're doing the right thing and servicing them better. And all of their data is in a very scalable, large scale, no SEQUEL store like DynamoDB. So it makes it very easy for you to build applications, but it's very, very hard to do analytics on it. Rockset had comes with all batteries included, including real-time data connectors, with Amazon DynamoDB. And so literally you can just point Rockset at any of your Dynamo tables, even though it's a no SEQUEL store, Rockset will in real time replicate the data and automatically convert them into fast SEQUEL tables for you to do analytics on. And so within one to two seconds of data getting modified or new data arriving in DynamoDB from your application, within one to two seconds, it's available for query processing in Rockset with full feature SEQUEL. And not just that, I think another very important aspect that was very important for Seesaw is not just that they wanted me to do batch analytics. They wanted their analytics to be interactive because a lot of the time we just say something is wrong. It's good to know that, but oftentimes you have a lot more followup questions. Why is it wrong? When did it go wrong? Is it a particular release that we did? Is it something specific to the school district? Are they trying to use some part of the product more than other parts of the product and struggling with it? Or anything like that. It's really, I think it comes down to Seesaw's and Carl's vision of what that data stack should serve and how we can use that to better serve the customers. And Rockset's indexing technology, and whatnot allows you to not only get real-time in terms of data freshness, but also the interactivity that comes in ad-hoc drilling down and slicing and dicing kind of analytics that is just our bread and butter . And so that is really how I see not only us partnering with Seesaw and allowing them to get the business observerbility they care about, but also compliment Dynamo transactional databases that are massively scalable, born in the cloud, like DynamoDB. >> Carl talked to me about that complimentary relationship that Venkat just walked us through and how that is really critical to what you're trying to deliver at Seesaw. >> Yeah, well, just to reiterate what Venkat said, I think we have so much data that any question you ask about it, immediately leads to five other questions about it. We have a very seasonal business as one example. Obviously in the summertime when kids aren't in school, we have very different usage patterns, then during this time right now is our critical back to school season versus a steady state, maybe in the middle of the school year. And so really understanding how data is trending over time, how it compares year over year, what might be driving those things, is something that frankly we just haven't had the tools to really dig into. There's a lot about that, that we are still beginning to understand and dig into more. And so this iterative exploration of data is incredibly powerful to expose to our product team, our sales and marketing teams to really understand where Seesaw's working and where we still have work do with our customers. And that's so critical to us doing a good job for schools in districts. >> And how long have you been using Rockset, Carl? >> It's about six months now, maybe a little bit longer. >> Okay, so during the pandemic. So talk to me a little bit about in the last 18 months, where we saw the massive overnight transition to remote learning and there's still a lot of places that are in that or a hybrid environment. How critical was it to have Rockset to fuel real-time analytics interactivity, particularly in a very challenging last 18 month time period? >> The last 18 months have been hard for everyone, but I think have hit teachers and schools maybe harder than anyone, they have been struggling with. And then, overnight transition to remote learning challenges of returning to the classroom hybrid learning, teachers and schools are being asked to stretch in ways they have never been stretched before. And so, our real focus last year was in doing whatever we could to help them manage those transitions. And data around student attendance in a remote learning situation, data around which kids were completing lessons and which kids weren't, was really critical data to provide to our customers. And a lot of our data infrastructure had to be built out to support answering those questions in this really crazy time for schools. >> I want to talk about the data set, but I'd like to go back to Venkat 'cause what's interesting about this story is Seesaw is a customer of Rockset, Venkat, is a customer of Seesaw. Talk to me Venkat about how this has been helpful in the remote learning that your kids have been going through the last year and a half. >> Absolutely. I have two sons, nine and ten year olds, and they are in fourth and fifth grade now. And I still remember when I told them that Seesaw is considering using Rockset for the analytics, they were thrilled, they were overjoyed because finally they understood what I do for a living. (chuckling) And so that was really amazing. I think, it was a fantastic dual because for the first time I actually understood what kids do at school. I think every week at the end of the week, we would use Seesaw to just go look at, "Hey, well, let's see what you did last week." And we would see not only what the prompts and what the children were doing in the classroom, but also the comments from the educators, and then they comment back. And then we were like, "Hey, this is not how you speak to an educators." So it was really amazing to actually go through that, and so we are very, very big fans of the product, we really look forward to using it, whether it is remote learning or not, we try to use it as a family, me, my wife and the kids, as much as possible. And it's a very constant topic of conversation, every week when we are working with the kids and seeing how we can help them. >> So from an observability perspective, it sounds like it's giving parents and teachers that visibility that really without it, you don't get. >> That's absolutely correct . I think the product itself is about making connections, giving people more visibility into things that are constantly happening, but you're not in the know. Like, before Seesaw, I used to ask the kids, "How was school today? "what happened in the class?" And they'll say, "It was okay." It would be a very short answer, it wouldn't really have the depth that we are able to get from Seesaw. So, absolutely. And so it's only right that, that level of observability and that level of... Is also available for their business teams, the support teams so that they can also service all the organizations that Seesaw's working with, not only the parents and the educators and the students that are actually using the product. >> Carl, let's talk about that data stack And then I'm going to open the can on some of those impacts that it's making to your internal folks. We talked about DynamoDB, but give me an visual audio, visual picture of the data stack. >> Yeah. So, we use DynamoDB as our database of record. We're now in the process of centralizing all of our analytics into Rockset. So that rather than having different BaaS jobs in different systems, querying that data in different ways, trying to really set Rockset up as the source of truth for analytics on top of Dynamo. And then on top of Rockset, exposing that data, both to internal customers for that interactive iterative SEQUEL style queries, but also bridging that data into the other systems our business users use. So Salesforce, for example, is a big internal tool and have that data now piped into Salesforce so that a sales rep can run a report on a prospect to reach out to, or a customer that needs help getting started with Seesaw. And it's all plumbed through the Rockset infrastructure. >> From an outcome standpoint, So I mentioned sales and marketing getting that visibility, being able to act on real time data, how has it impacted sales in the last year and a half? six months rather since , it's now since months using it. >> Well, I don't know if I can draw a direct line between those things, but it's been a very busy year for Seesaw, as schools have transitioned to remote learning. And our business is really largely driven by teachers discovering our free product, finding it valuable in their classroom, and then asking their school or district leadership to purchase a school wide subscription. It's a very bottoms up sales motion. And so data on where teachers are starting to use Seesaw is the key input into our sales and marketing discussions with schools and districts. And so understanding that data quickly in real time is a key part of our sales strategy and a key part of how we grow at Seesaw over time. >> And it sounds like Rockset is empowering those users, the sales and marketing folks to really fine tune their interactions with existing customers, prospective customers. And I imagine you on the product side in terms of tuning the product. What are some of the things Carl that you've learned in the last six months that have helped you make better decisions on what you want Seesaw to deliver in the future? >> Well, one of the things that I think has been really interesting is how usage patterns have changed between the classroom and remote learning. We saw per student usage of Seesaw increased dramatically over the past year, and really understanding what that means for how the product needs to evolve to better meet teacher needs, to help organize that information, since it's now a lot more of it, really helped motivate our product roadmap over the last year. We launched a new progress dashboard that helps teachers get an added glance view of what's happening in their classroom. That was really in direct response to the changing usage patterns, that we were able to understand with better insights into data. >> And those insights allow you to pivot and iterate on the product. Venkat I want to just go back to the AWS relationship for a second. You both talked about the complimentary nature of Rockset and DynamoDB. Here we are at the AWS Startup Showcase. Venkat just give the audience a little overview of the partnership that you guys have with AWS. >> Rockset fully runs on AWS, so we are customer of AWS. We are also a partner. There are lots of amazing cloud data products that AWS has, including DynamoDB or AWS Kinesis. And so one with which we have built in integrations. So if you're managing data in AWS, we compliment and we can provide, very, very fast interactive real-time analytics on all of your datasets. So the partnership has been wonderful, we're very excited to be in the Startup Showcase. And so I hope this continuous for years to come. >> Let's talk about the synergies between a Rockset and Seesaw for a second. I know we talked about the huge value of real time analytics, especially in today's world, where we've learned many things in the last year and a half, including that real-time analytics is no longer a nice to have for a lot of industries, 'cause I think Carl as you said, if you can't get access to the data, then there's questions we can't ask. Or we can't iterate on operations, if we wait seconds for every query to load, then there's questions we can't ask. Talk to me Venkat, about how Rockset is benefiting from what you're learning from Seesaw's usage of the technology? >> Absolutely. I mean, if you go to the first part of the question on why do businesses really go after real time. What is the drive here? You might have heard the phrase, the world is going from batch to real-time. What does it really mean? What's the driving factor there? Our take on it is, I think it's about accelerating growth. Seesaw's product being amazing and it'll continue to grow, it'll continue to be a very, very important product in the world. With or without Rockset, that will be true. The way we look at once they have real-time business observability, is that inherent growth that they have, they can reach more people, they can put their product in the hands of more and more people, they can iterate faster. And at the end of the day, it is really about having this very interesting platform, very interesting architecture to really make a lot more data driven decisions and iterate much more quickly. And so in batch analytics, if you were able to make, let's say five decisions a quarter, in real time analytics you can make five decisions a day. So that's how we look at it. So that is really, I think, what is the underpinnings of why the world is going from batch to real time. And what have we learned from having a Seesaw as a customer? I think Seesaw has probably one of the largest DynamoDB installations that we have looked at. I think, we're talking about billions and billions of records, even though they have tens of millions of active users. And so I think it has been an incredible partnership working with them closely, and they have had a tremendous amount of input on our product roadmap and some of that like role-based access control and other things have already being a part of the product, thanks to the continuous feedback we get from their team. So we're delighted about this partnership and I am sure there's more input that they have, that we cannot wait to incorporate in our roadmap. >> I imagine Venkat as well, you as the parent user and your kids, you probably have some input that goes to the Seesaw side. So this seems like a very synergistic relationship. Carl, a couple more questions for you. I'd love to know how in this... Here we are kind of back to school timeframe, We've got a lot of students coming back, they're still remote learning. What are some of the things that you're excited about for this next school year that do you think Rockset is really going to fuel or power for Seesaw? >> Yeah, well, I think schools are navigating yet another transition now, from a world of remote learning to a world of back to the classroom. But back to the classroom feels very different than it does at any other back to school timeframe. Many of our users are in first or second grade. We serve early elementary age ranges and some of those students have never been in a classroom before. They are entering second grade and never having been at school. And that's hard. That's a hard transition for teachers in schools to make. And so as a partner to those schools, we want to do everything we can to help them manage that transition, in general and with Seesaw in particular. And the more we can understand how they're using Seesaw, where they're struggling with Seesaw, as part of that transition, the more we can be a good partner to them and help them really get the most value out of Seesaw, in this new world that we're living in, which is sort of like normal, and in many ways not. We are still not back to normal as far as schools are concerned. >> I'm sure though, the partnership that you provide to the teachers and the students can be a game changer in these, and still navigating some very uncertain times. Carl, last question for you. I want you to point folks to where they can go to learn more about Seesaw, and how for all those parents watching, they might be able to use this with their families. >> Yeah, well, seesaw.me is our website, and you can go to seesaw.me and learn more about Seesaw, and if any of this sounds interesting, ask your teacher, if they're not using Seesaw, to give it a look. >> Seesaw.me, excellent. Venkat, same question for you. Where do you want folks to go to learn more about Rockset and its capabilities? >> Rockset.com is our website. There is a free trial for... $300 worth of free trial credits. It's a self service platform, you don't need to talk to anybody, all the pricing and everything is out there. So, if real-time analytics and modernizing your data stack is on your roadmap, go give it a spin. >> Excellent guys. Thanks so much for joining me today, talking about real-time analytics, how it's really empowering both the data companies and the users to be able to navigate in challenging waters. Venkat, thank you, Carl, thank you for joining us. >> Thanks everyone. >> Thanks Lisa. >> For my guests, this has been our coverage of the AWS Startup Showcase, New Breakthroughs in DevOps, Data Analytics and Cloud Management Tools. I am Lisa Martin. Thanks for watching. (mid tempo music)

(gentle music) >> Hello and welcome today's session theCUBE presentation of AWS Startup Showcase powered by theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, for your host of theCUBE. This is a session on breaking through with DevOps data analytics tools, cloud management tools with MontyCloud and cloud management migration, I'm your host. Thanks for joining me, I've got two great guests. Venkat Krishnamachari who's the co-founder and CEO of MontyCloud and Shruthi Sreenivasa Murthy, solution architect research computing group St. Louis University. Thanks for coming on to talk about transforming IT, day one day two operations. Venkat, great to see you. >> Great to see you again, John. So in this session, I really want to get into this cloud powerhouse theme you guys were talking about before on our previous Cube Conversations and what it means for customers, because there is a real market shift happening here. And I want to get your thoughts on what solution to the problem is basically, that you guys are targeting. >> Yeah, John, cloud migration is happening rapidly. Not an option. It is the current and the immediate future of many IT departments and any type of computing workloads. And applications and services these days are better served by cloud adoption. This rapid acceleration is where we are seeing a lot of challenges and we've been helping customers with our platform so they can go focus on their business. So happy to talk more about this. >> Yeah and Shruthi if you can just explain your relationship with these guys, because you're a cloud architect, you can try to put this together. MontyCloud is your customer, talk about your solution. >> Yeah I work at the St. Louis University as the solutions architect for the office of Vice President of Research. We can address St. Louis University as SLU, just to keep it easy. SLU is a 200-year-old university with more focus on research. And our goal at the Research Computing Group is to help researchers by providing the right infrastructure and computing capabilities that help them to advance their research. So here in SLU research portfolio, it's quite diverse, right? So we do research on vaccines, economics, geospatial intelligence, and many other really interesting areas, and you know, it involves really large data sets. So one of the research computing groups' ambitious plan is to move as many high-end computation applications from on-prem to the AWS. And I lead all the cloud initiatives for the St. Louis university. >> Yeah Venkat and I, we've been talking, many times on theCUBE, previous interviews about, you know, the rapid agility that's happening with serverless and functions, and, you know, microservices start to see massive acceleration of how fast cloud apps are being built. It's put a lot of pressure on companies to hang on and manage all this. And whether you're a security group was trying to lock down something, or it's just, it's so fast, the cloud development scene is really fun and you're implementing it at a large scale. What's it like these days from a development standpoint? You've got all this greatness in the cloud. What's the DevOps mindset right now? >> SLU is slowly evolving itself as the AWS Center of Excellence here in St. Louis. And most of the workflows that we are trying to implement on AWS and DevOps and, you know, CICD Pipelines. And basically we want it ready and updated for the researchers where they can use it and not have to wait on any of the resources. So it has a lot of importance. >> Research as code, it's like the internet, infrastructure as code is DevOps' ethos. Venkat, let's get into where this all leads to because you're seeing a culture shift in companies as they start to realize if they don't move fast, and the blockers that get in the way of the innovation, you really can't get your arms around this growth as an opportunity to operationalize all the new technology, could you talk about the transformation goals that are going on with your customer base. What's going on in the market? Can you explain and unpack the high level market around what you guys are doing? >> Sure thing, John. Let's bring up the slide one. So they have some content that Act-On tabs. John, every legal application, commercial application, even internal IT departments, they're all transforming fast. Speed has never been more important in the era we are today. For example, COVID research, you know, analyzing massive data sets to come up with some recommendations. They don't demand a lot from the IT departments so that researchers and developers can move fast. And I need departments that are not only moving current workloads to the cloud they're also ensuring the cloud is being consumed the right way. So researchers can focus on what they do best, what we win, learning and working closely with customers and gathering is that there are three steps or three major, you know, milestone that we like to achieve. I would start the outcome, right? That the important milestone IT departments are trying to get to is transforming such that they're directly tied to the key business objectives. Everything they do has to be connected to the business objective, which means the time and you know, budget and everything's aligned towards what they want to deliver. IT departments we talk with have one common goal. They want to be experts in cloud operations. They want to deliver cloud operations excellence so that researchers and developers can move fast. But they're almost always under the, you know, they're time poor, right? And there is budget gaps and that is talent and tooling gap. A lot of that is what's causing the, you know, challenges on their path to journey. And we have taken a methodical and deliberate position in helping them get there. >> Shruthi hows your reaction to that? Because, I mean, you want it faster, cheaper, better than before. You don't want to have all the operational management hassles. You mentioned that you guys want to do this turnkey. Is that the use case that you're going after? Just research kind of being researchers having the access at their fingertips, all these resources? What's the mindset there, what's your expectation? >> Well, one of the main expectations is to be able to deliver it to the researchers as demand and need and, you know, moving from a traditional on-prem HBC to cloud would definitely help because, you know, we are able to give the right resources to the researchers and able to deliver projects in a timely manner, and, you know, with some additional help from MontyCloud data platform, we are able to do it even better. >> Yeah I like the onboarding thing and to get an easy and you get value quickly, that's the cloud business model. Let's unpack the platform, let's go into the hood. Venkat let's, if you can take us through the, some of the moving parts under the platform, then as you guys have it's up at the high level, the market's obvious for everyone out there watching Cloud ops, speed, stablism. But let's go look at the platform. Let's unpack that, do you mind pick up on slide two and let's go look at the what's going on in the platform. >> Sure. Let's talk about what comes out of the platform, right? They are directly tied to what the customers would like to have, right? Customers would like to fast track their day one activities. Solution architects, such as Shruthi, their role is to try and help get out of the way of the researchers, but we ubiquitous around delegating cloud solutions, right? Our platform acts like a seasoned cloud architect. It's as if you've instantly turned on a cloud solution architect that should, they can bring online and say, Hey, I want help here to go faster. Our lab then has capabilities that help customers provision a set of governance contracts, drive consumption in the right way. One of the key things about driving consumption the right way is to ensure that we prevent a security cost or compliance issues from happening in the first place, which means you're shifting a lot of the operational burden to left and make sure that when provisioning happens, you have a guard rails in place, we help with that, the platform solves a problem without writing code. And an important takeaway here, John is that a was built for architects and administrators who want to move fast without having to write a ton of code. And it is also a platform that they can bring online, autonomous bots that can solve problems. For example, when it comes to post provisioning, everybody is in the business of ensuring security because it's a shared model. Everybody has to keep an eye on compliance, that is also a shared responsibility, so is cost optimization. So we thought wouldn't it be awesome to have architects such as Shruthi turn on a compliance bot on the platform that gives them the peace of mind that somebody else and an autonomous bot is watching our 24 by 7 and make sure that these day two operations don't throw curve balls at them, right? That's important for agility. So platform solves that problem with an automation approach. Going forward on an ongoing basis, right, the operation burden is what gets IT departments. We've seen that happen repeatedly. Like IT department, you know, you know this, John, maybe you have some thoughts on this. You know, you know, if you have some comments on how IT can face this, then maybe that's better to hear from you. >> No, well first I want to unpack that platform because I think one of the advantages I see here and that people are talking about in the industry is not only is the technology's collision colliding between the security postures and rapid cloud development, because DevOps and cloud, folks, are moving super fast. They want things done at the point of coding and CICB pipeline, as well as any kind of changes, they want it fast, not weeks. They don't want to have someone blocking it like a security team, so automation with the compliance is beautiful because now the security teams can provide policies. Those policies can then go right into your platform. And then everyone's got the rules of the road and then anything that comes up gets managed through the policy. So I think this is a big trend that nobody's talking about because this allows the cloud to go faster. What's your reaction to that? Do you agree? >> No, precisely right. I'll let Shurthi jump on that, yeah. >> Yeah, you know, I just wanted to bring up one of the case studies that we read on cloud and use their compliance bot. So REDCap, the Research Electronic Data Capture also known as REDCap is a web application. It's a HIPAA web application. And while the flagship projects for the research group at SLU. REDCap was running on traditional on-prem infrastructure, so maintaining the servers and updating the application to its latest version was definitely a challenge. And also granting access to the researchers had long lead times because of the rules and security protocols in place. So we wanted to be able to build a secure and reliable enrollment on the cloud where we could just provision on demand and in turn ease the job of updating the application to its latest version without disturbing the production environment. Because this is a really important application, most of the doctors and researchers at St. Louis University and the School of Medicine and St. Louis University Hospital users. So given this challenge, we wanted to bring in MontyCloud's cloud ops and, you know, security expertise to simplify the provisioning. And that's when we implemented this compliance bot. Once it is implemented, it's pretty easy to understand, you know, what is compliant, what is noncompliant with the HIPAA standards and where it needs an remediation efforts and what we need to do. And again, that can also be automated. It's nice and simple, and you don't need a lot of cloud expertise to go through the compliance bot and come up with your remediation plan. >> What's the change in the outcome in terms of the speed turnaround time, the before and after? So before you're dealing with obviously provisioning stuff and lead time, but just a compliance closed loop, just to ask a question, do we have, you know, just, I mean, there's a lot of manual and also some, maybe some workflows in there, but not as not as cool as an instant bot that solve yes or no decision. And after MontyCloud, what are some of the times, can you share any data there just doing an order of magnitude. >> Yeah, definitely. So the provisioning was never simpler, I mean, we are able to provision with just one or two clicks, and then we have a better governance guardrail, like Venkat says, and I think, you know, to give you a specific data, it, the compliance bot does about more than 160 checks and it's all automated, so when it comes to security, definitely we have been able to save a lot of effort on that. And I can tell you that our researchers are able to be 40% more productive with the infrastructure. And our research computing group is able to kind of save the time and, you know, the security measures and the remediation efforts, because we get customized alerts and notifications and you just need to go in and, you know. >> So people are happier, right? People are getting along at the office or virtually, you know, no one is yelling at each other on Slack, hey, where's? Cause that's really the harmony here then, okay. This is like a, I'm joking aside. This is a real cultural issue between speed of innovation and the, what could be viewed as a block, or just the time that say security teams or other teams might want to get back to you, make sure things are compliant. So that could slow things down, that tension is real and there's some disconnects within companies. >> Yeah John, that's spot on, and that means we have to do a better job, not only solving the traditional problems and make them simple, but for the modern work culture of integrations. You know, it's not uncommon like you cut out for researchers and architects to talk in a Slack channel often. You say, Hey, I need this resource, or I want to reconfigure this. How do we make that collaboration better? How do you make the platform intelligent so that the platform can take off some of the burden off of people so that the platform can monitor, react, notify in a Slack channel, or if you should, the administrator say, Hey, next time, this happens automatically go create a ticket for me. If it happens next time in this environment automatically go run a playbook, that remediates it. That gives a lot of time back that puts a peace of mind and the process that an operating model that you have inherited and you're trying to deliver excellence and has more help, particularly because it is very dynamic footprint. >> Yeah, I think this whole guard rail thing is a really big deal, I think it's like a feature, but it's a super important outcome because if you can have policies that map into these bots that can check rules really fast, then developers will have the freedom to drive as fast as they want, and literally go hard and then shift left and do the coding and do all their stuff on the hygiene side from the day, one on security is really a big deal. Can we go back to this slide again for the other project? There's another project on that slide. You talked about RED, was it REDCap, was that one? >> Yeah. Yeah, so REDCap, what's the other project. >> So SCAER, the Sinfield Center for Applied Economic Research at SLU is also known as SCAER. They're pretty data intensive, and they're into some really sophisticated research. The Center gets daily dumps of sensitive geo data sensitive de-identified geo data from various sources, and it's a terabyte so every day, becomes petabytes. So you know, we don't get the data in workable formats for the researchers to analyze. So the first process is to convert this data into a workable format and keep an analysis ready and doing this at a large scale has many challenges. So we had to make this data available to a group of users too, and some external collaborators with ads, you know, more challenges again, because we also have to do this without compromising on the security. So to handle these large size data, we had to deploy compute heavy instances, such as, you know, R5, 12xLarge, multiple 12xLarge instances, and optimizing the cost and the resources deployed on the cloud again was a huge challenge. So that's when we had to take MontyCloud help in automating the whole process of ingesting the data into the infrastructure and then converting them into a workable format. And this was all automated. And after automating most of the efforts, we were able to bring down the data processing time from two weeks or more to three days, which really helped the researchers. So MontyCloud's data platform also helped us with automating the risk, you know, the resource optimization process and that in turn helped bring the costs down, so it's been pretty helpful then. >> That's impressive weeks to days, I mean, this is the theme Venkat speed, speed, speed, hybrid, hybrid. A lot of stuff happening. I mean, this is the new normal, this is going to make companies more productive if they can get the apps built faster. What do you see as the CEO and founder of the company you're out there, you know, you're forging new ground with this great product. What do you see as the blockers from customers? Is it cultural, is it lack of awareness? Why aren't people jumping all over this? >> Only people aren't, right. They go at it in so many different ways that, you know, ultimately be the one person IT team or massively well-funded IT team. Everybody wants to Excel at what they're delivering in cloud operations, the path to that as what, the challenging part, right? What are you seeing as customers are trying to build their own operating model and they're writing custom code, then that's a lot of need for provisioning, governance, security, compliance, and monitoring. So they start integrating point tools, then suddenly IT department is now having a, what they call a tax, right? They have to maintain the technical debt while cloud service moving fast. It's not uncommon for one of the developers or one of the projects to suddenly consume a brand new resource. And as you know, AWS throws up a lot more services every month, right? So suddenly you're not keeping up with that service. So what we've been able to look at this from a point of view of how do we get customers to focus on what they want to do and automate things that we can help them with? >> Let me, let me rephrase the question if you don't mind. Cause I I didn't want to give the impression that you guys aren't, you guys have a great solution, but I think when I see enterprises, you know, they're transforming, right? So it's not so much the cloud innovators, like you guys, it's really that it's like the mainstream enterprise, so I have to ask you from a customer standpoint, what's some of the cultural things are technical reasons why they're not going faster? Cause everyone's, maybe it's the pandemic's forcing projects to be double down on, or some are going to be cut, this common theme of making things available faster, cheaper, stronger, more secure is what cloud does. What are some of the enterprise challenges that they have? >> Yeah, you know, it might be money for right, there's some cultural challenges like Andy Jassy or sometimes it's leadership, right? You want top down leadership that takes a deterministic step towards transformation, then adequately funding the team with the right skills and the tools, a lot of that plays into it. And there's inertia typically in an existing process. And when you go to cloud, you can do 10X better, people see that it doesn't always percolate down to how you get there. So those challenges are compounded and digital transformation leaders have to, you know, make that deliberate back there, be more KPI-driven. One of the things we are seeing in companies that do well is that the leadership decides that here are our top business objectives and KPIs. Now if we want the software and the services and the cloud division to support those objectives when they take that approach, transformation happens. But that is a lot more easier said than done. >> Well you're making it really easy with your solution. And we've done multiple interviews. I've got to say you're really onto something really with this provisioning and the compliance bots. That's really strong, that the only goes stronger from there, with the trends with security being built in. Shruthi, got to ask you since you're the customer, what's it like working with MontyCloud? It sounds so awesome, you're customer, you're using it. What's your review, what's your- What's your, what's your take on them? >> Yeah they are doing a pretty good job in helping us automate most of our workflows. And when it comes to keeping a tab on the resources, the utilization of the resources, so we can keep a tab on the cost in turn, you know, their compliance bots, their cost optimization tab. It's pretty helpful. >> Yeah well you're knocking projects down from three weeks to days, looking good, I mean, looking real strong. Venkat this is the track record you want to see with successful projects. Take a minute to explain what else is going on with MontyCloud. Other use cases that you see that are really primed for MontyCloud's platform. >> Yeah, John, quick minute there. Autonomous cloud operations is the goal. It's never done, right? It there's always some work that you hands-on do. But if you set a goal such that customers need to have a solution that automates most of the routine operations, then they can focus on the business. So we are going to relentlessly focused on the fact that autonomous operations will have the digital transformation happen faster, and we can create a lot more value for customers if they deliver to their KPIs and objectives. So our investments in the platform are going more towards that. Today we already have a fully automated compliance bot, a security bot, a cost optimization recommendation engine, a provisioning and governance engine, where we're going is we are enhancing all of this and providing customers lot more fluidity in how they can use our platform Click to perform your routine operations, Click to set up rules based automatic escalation or remediation. Cut down the number of hops a particular process will take and foster collaboration. All of this is what our platform is going and enhancing more and more. We intend to learn more from our customers and deliver better for them as we move forward. >> That's a good business model, make things easier, reduce the steps it takes to do something, and save money. And you're doing all those things with the cloud and awesome stuff. It's really great to hear your success stories and the work you're doing over there. Great to see resources getting and doing their job faster. And it's good and tons of data. You've got petabytes of that's coming in. It's it's pretty impressive, thanks for sharing your story. >> Sounds good, and you know, one quick call out is customers can go to MontyCloud.com today. Within 10 minutes, they can get an account. They get a very actionable and valuable recommendations on where they can save costs, what is the security compliance issues they can fix. There's a ton of out-of-the-box reports. One click to find out whether you are having some data that is not encrypted, or if any of your servers are open to the world. A lot of value that customers can get in under 10 minutes. And we believe in that model, give the value to customers. They know what to do with that, right? So customers can go sign up for a free trial at MontyCloud.com today and get the value. >> Congratulations on your success and great innovation. A startup showcase here with theCUBE coverage of AWS Startup Showcase breakthrough in DevOps, Data Analytics and Cloud Management with MontyCloud. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to this special CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of the CUBE. We are not in the Palo Alto studio, We are in Napa Valley for a special CUBE event. And we have a great CUBE alumni guest remoting in from Seattle, Napa, Seattle. Venkat Krishnamachari, CEO and Co-founder of MontyCloud, CUBE alumni. Venkat, welcome back to the CUBE. Great to see you. >> It is great to see you again, John. Thank you for taking time. >> So we've had previous conversations on the CUBE. You guys were advanced technology partner with AWS. And startup showcase is going on again, we're back for a revisit there for special session. We're going to go into deep dive on MontyCloud. You've had tremendous success with very large enterprises with your product. Congratulations, and you're just emerging really into rapid growth. Take a minute to explain for the viewers who is MontyCloud and what's going on. >> Sure thing, John. So we are an autonomous cloud operations company. Like you call it, we are also an advanced technology partner, a public sector partner, and an Amazon certified cloud management partner. What we do is we help IT teams simplify their cloud operations. With our platform, our customers, without adding any specialized cloud skills or adding any multiple point tools, they can still enable their teams to provision, manage, operate the Cloud and reduce the ongoing cloud operations cost by 70%. That's what we do for our customers. >> You guys are solving a real problem that's emerging very quickly. It's actually a more of an opportunity, less of a problem, but it means a problem if you don't address it. And that is the cloud migration is going next level. Meaning, people are re platforming to the cloud with cloud operations. But now they're starting to leverage the cloud services and there's more and more coming on every day. Look at what server less is doing and the impact of microservices, just everything is changing fast and people are refactoring their businesses with cloud services. This is where it starts to get into what they call day two operations, where you got to be day one every day and create innovation. But now you've got this day two, where reliability, security, new things have to be nailed down and secured and stabilized. And so this is a big trend. You guys have a solution here. Could you take a minute and talk about the specific problem that you see customers and how you guys solve it? >> Sure thing. So customers like you rightly say, John, they're rapidly adopting the cloud. And what we are seeing here is there is a challenge of not just onboarding and consistent provisioning, which they perform on the metaphorical day one. They are also burdened with multiple operations. Like you called out, right? Keeping the security of your application, high compliance, maintaining visibility into who's using what, why some things are costing more or sometimes, sometimes they're not costing appropriately, right? Having a position on all of that is now an increasing burden and the responsibility on the IT team and the IT teams are increasingly being held accountable to the business objectives because business objectives are getting closely tied with cloud and digital transformation. That's the area we help and solve. >> So I want to ask you one of the questions that's come up a lot. And this is, and I don't mean to put you on the spot here at Venkat, but I think it's important to address a lot of people say, Hey, I'm buying into this misdirection. I just don't have the staff. My IT guys can't be trained fast enough. I got them on a re-skilling track. I got to find some talent. This is becoming not just how to provision stand up applications, put them in the cloud and grow them talent, the talent equation. Can you talk about how you see that problem being solved and how, what are you guys doing to help them? >> Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. I might skip some things to go directly to some of the value we'll be at, right? With our platform, imagine adding a highly skilled cloud solutions architect in under 10 minutes to your teams. That's one of the value of our platform. Customers are trying to hire more and more cloud solution architects. They're trying to upscale their own team members so that they can enable the rest of the company to consume the cloud safely, which means a cloud solutions architect role is not only the safe building blocks that others can reuse, but also put governance guardrails, and drive for accountability so that developers can move fast. That's one of the areas customers are struggling to hire and up-skill with our platform within 10 minutes, you can turn on autonomous cloud solution architect, which comes in, helps you fast track provisioning. Customers can deploy any kind of application pattern from networking to data services, to Silva based or container based applications. We have pre-built well architected solutions in the platform that acts like your own cloud solution architect. We address that skill gap immediately, their platform on the day one aspect of things. >> Yeah, I love it. It's like, you know, the old joke AI bots are bots are automating things. You're essentially automating like key specialized roles that traditionally were expensive. I mean, it's hard to find talent at that level. So I think that's a major wave coming and I think you guys are on top of it. So definitely want to hear more about that. I do want to get your thoughts while I have you here about cloud operations day one operations, day two operations, Venkat, define for me what you consider day one operations. >> Yeah. Day one operations involve helping your teams consume the cloud and fast track your digital transformation would an ability to have developers move fast, right? That's kind of day one, right? The top-down leadership decides let's go to the cloud. They have the enabled teams to consume it, and safely. That is an area we help. One, a typical thing we've learned in our conversations with customers, John, is this. Right, It's very expensive to let teams provision like the wild wild west, right? And then later pull back control. Later, drive for accountability. Oftentimes we see that customers end up in a spot where they wonder why this is costing them so much more than they originally taught. A lot of that is because consuming the cloud from day one itself has to be thought through, has to have well-architected principles in mind. So we help in that area. We call this shifting left, right? Customers, if they... the best way, right? The best way to consume the cloud and the right way to do it is to ensure that when you provision itself, there is a notion of well-architected principles in place security compliance costs are being addressed in the provisioning aspects. So we help there, for example, a fortune hundred customers for us, right? They were looking to fast track the application modernization and they were under pressure to do that. They use MontyCloud's pre-built templates, which are well-architected. That teams were able to fast track provisioning of the resources, enable the developers with the CICB pipeline that they needed and they could move their application fast. The key thing here is post moving the application. They found that the approach we took to solve in the day, one problem automatically reduces the amount of time they need to spend to drive for who owns the resources. Why is it costing so much? All those problems go away to a certain degree. If you think about day one, the right way. That's one area we helped with. And that's how we think about day one, reduce the ongoing burden from day one itself. >> Day one's great. You give them a blank, check the provisioning, all the services. And next thing you know, you're racking up a big bill. The engineers are building and they're waiting, but what do we build? Great stuff. First of all, engineers want to get access that's critical. And we know that that's where the innovation comes from Right, now, I want you to talk about day two operations because this, this where it starts to get really interesting when you start to reign it in, you know, the old expression, let chaos reign and then rein in the chaos. So define day two operations for us, what is day two operations mean for you? >> Okay. So this is our deep, you know, hypothesis that was driven by a really rich conversation with customers, right? Ongoing operations in the cloud is the responsibility of multiple teams. And the cloud providers are expecting consumers and the customers in this case to have a shared portion of their responsibility, right? Security is a shared responsibility. Compliance is a shared responsibility. Cost management is a shared responsibility. And then the ongoing uptime and MTTR, like the meantime to resolution, they are all responsibilities are wholly sitting on the customer side. All of this put together impact the bottom line of the business because more and more businesses are now cloud businesses powered by cloud applications, managing this entire set of problems, and challenges, is what we call us day two operations. >> One of the things you guys have been known for in the industry, in your customer base and within some of the geek community is you guys turn it teams into cloud powerhouses that's been said, what does that mean? What can you take me through that? Because I mean, we know what IT teams do. They could provision gear, they'd be mostly on premises. And they move to the cloud. They still got to do all the things that it stands to do, but then they got cloud and they got automation. So, but explain to me how you guys have transformed IT teams into cloud powerhouses. >> Sure. So maybe the customer example will help. Right? One of her fortune funded launch, you know, global customer before they're at the cloud, they had a five member team watching over a farm of servers, right? More 10,000 servers for compliance needs. Their physician wants to move those servers to the cloud. And, and in essence, move applications to the cloud and continue to provide compliance to their entire organization. In that they started up-skilling the five member team. When they met MontyCloud, we offered them a solution that not only help them govern those servers in the cloud with a very simple no-code approach, we also gave them four of their headcount back. They were able to repurpose four members on the team to other projects because we attached them that we attached with them compliance bot. We asked this question right to customers. Wouldn't it be? Wouldn't it be awesome, if you're able to quickly add a cloud operations engineer, a cloud security engineer, a cloud compliance engineer, to every application in a dedicated manner? Customers go, how do we do that, right? Well, we have anonymous bots that have been built for this purpose and the comprehensive real-time bots that customers can fine- tune to their environments, and it's as if you added a dedicated cloud compliance engineer. In this particular case, there's a large customer is now operating a 10,000 plus server farm with MontyCloud compliance bot with another individual on the team. And the other four individuals were given back to other projects. This is what we mean by empowering our customers and making that cloud team, the traditional IT teams into cloud powerhouses. They can do more with less and they can keep track of the cloud consumption in the right way. And they can do that without having to write a single line of code. That's what our platform promises. >> Awesome. Well, great stuff. As enterprise buyers are out there looking at solutions, you know, they always try to, you know, separate the winners from the not so good winners, if you will, that'd be, be polite. Jerry Chen regionally has been talking about this paper castles in the cloud where you can build moats within the cloud and build on other people's clouds. So that brings up the question that I wanted to ask you about MontyCloud. Your competitive advantage and how you compare vis-a-vis the competition and how should customers would potentially evaluating your platform and your services look at you long-term are you going to, what kind of value proposition are you offering them? Cause that's always top of mind in enterprise, you know, these guys got to be around, what, are they like me? They're going to solve my problem and help me transform. Will they deliver the value? So the question is, how are you guys competing? Can you address that please? >> Yeah. Like we, like, we have been sharing, you know, more than competition. It's the customer, right? That is so much more customer challenge to solve and solve it in a way that's most meaningful to customers. The competition is good to have because they sometimes show us the way, but customers really tell us both their stated needs and the implied needs that we find out, right? John, we are the only comprehensive cloud management platform that enables our customers in every step of the cloud transformation, right? You will find a, you will find in the market, point tools that help with security, point tools that help with compliance, provisioning infrastructure as code solutions that you have to learn and write code and do. There's a lot going on. We are the only comprehensive platform that thinks about customers from the day one. From onboarding to provisioning and consumption to governance, to security, compliance, and ongoing operations with costs and context in mind, we are the only platform that offers that to our customers. And all of that, without the customers having to write a single line of code, they can fast track as if they onboarded a cloud center of excellence in their team with the MontyCloud platform. That's our biggest differentiation. And this comes from deep understanding of the customers, interconnected problems, because you don't only solve provisioning and then forget context, you don't solve only context and cost and forget security. All of these are interconnected challenges. So you need an interconnected solution. That's what we're building. >> I think that interconnected systems, mindset really is about the bridge to the future. And if you can be with the customer together and build that bridge and cross over together, that's to me is a relationship oriented value proposition. I think that's really needed in this transformative market. So congratulations. I love the mindset there. I've got to ask you. I know you've got a lot of customers and you can't say their names on camera. A lot of large enterprises give us a taste of some of the things they say to you like, "Hey, Venkat, I love your service because blank. What do they, what are some of the anecdotal sayings that customers say about MontyCloud? >> Oh, we have some customers we can talk about. Some of the customers are going to come back on the stage actually St. Louis university is going to be coming on the QV event that's coming up soon, right? So a bunch of customers, we can talk about some customers. We are, you know, deeply working with them and we've solved some problems for them. So what we typically hear from customers is this, right? A lot of vendors come in and ask our teams to up-skill and they teach our teams how to manage cloud. Your solution helps us focus on our KPIs. That's what we repeatedly hear from customers, right? Being able to help the customer. Look, it's not the customers, you know, primary focus to build and maintain a cloud center of excellence that also involves dealing with multiple point tools that involves constantly keeping up with the growing footprint, that involves up-skilling the team constantly. You know, it's great that you have a cloud focus, but every customer that we've engaged with, even the large customers tell us that the fact that they can go back to focusing on their KPIs, whether the application is providing services to their customers, how much uptime is, is, is directly impacting their business. What are the costs of per transaction? Those are the important things they really want to focus on. So consistently our customers are able to come back and validate that when MontyCloud gets involved with them, they're able to shift that focus back to their business, as opposed to trying to focus on things that is basically becoming an essential problem. They need to solve. That's the common theme. We get us feedback and we continuously learn from that and continue to improve that. >> Awesome, great stuff. Venkat, great to have you on again, the CUBE Conversation at The Update, while I got you, take a minute to put a plug in for the company where you guys at on status, state of the company, are you guys looking to hire... sound bites? Anything you want to share? Give a quick minute plug for MontyCloud. >> Yeah, sure thing, John. Hey, we are a startup. We are always hiring. We're always trying to find the smartest people that we want to work with. We want people to come in and kind of show us what to do, right? So give us a shout out. From a growth perspective, John, the market is, you know, booming, right? We are, we are with the small team, which I will give a shout out to my team, right? We have like 23, 23 member team, right? Being able to go deliver to a world-class cloud management platform, expectations and deliver to fortune hundred companies means they are thinking about the problem space deeply. So those who are interested in that kind of, you know, accelerated delivery to customers, you know, do more with less attitude are welcome to engage with us from a self look to the company perspective. Here's what we offer. We offered a free trial today. Our platform can be turned on and start delivering value to customers. In under 10 minutes, we can go to MontyCloud.com, sign up for a free trial, connect their cloud accounts. Within few minutes, they're going to get free recommendations on where they can optimize costs. Where they can improve security. What are the compliance issues they can solve? And they'll get full visibility into the environment, all in just about a few clicks. And that is a value prop our platform offers on an ongoing basis. They can further customize the platform to their needs. So I invite everybody to go try MontyCloud.com. >> All right, Venkat, thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it. Great example of how the cloud can enable startups to be a supplier for the biggest companies in the world. MontyCloud again, start-up successful in the cloud. This is what it's all about. The new model, new, new manufacturing. It's the cloud. I'm John Furrier with The CUBE. Thanks for watching this CUBE Conversation.

(bright intro music) >> Welcome to this "Cube Conversation". I'm your host, Lisa Martin. This is part of our third AWS Start-up Showcase. And I'm pleased to welcome two gentlemen from Rockset, Venkat Venkataramani is here, the CEO and co-founder and Dhruba Borthakur, CTO and co-founder. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> Excited to learn more about Rockset, Venkat, talk to me about Rockset and how it's putting real-time analytics within the reach of every company. >> If you see the confluent IPO, if you see where the world is going in terms of analytics, I know, we look at this, real-time analytics is like the lost frontier. Everybody wants fast queries on fresh data. Nobody wants to say, "I don't need that. You know, give me slow queries on stale data," right? I think if you see what data warehouses and data lakes have done, especially in the cloud, they've really, really made batch analytics extremely accessible, but real-time analytics still seems too clumsy, too complex, and too expensive for most people. And we are on a mission to make, you know, real-time analytics, make it very, very easy and affordable for everybody to be able to take advantage of that. So that's our, that's what we do. >> But you're right, nobody wants a stale data or slower queries. And it seems like one of the things that we learned, Venkat, sticking with you in the last 18 months of a very strange world that we're living in, is that real-time is no longer a nice to have. It's really a differentiator and table stakes for businesses in every industry. How do you make it more affordable and accessible to businesses in so many different industries? >> I think that's a great question. I think there are, at a very high level, there are two categories of use cases we see. I think there is one full category of use cases where business teams and business units are demanding almost like business observability. You know, if you think about one domain that actually understood real-time and made everything work in real-time is the DevOps world, you know, metrics and monitoring coming out of like, you know, all these machines and because they really want to know as soon as something goes wrong, immediately, I want to, you know, be able to dive in and click and see what happens. But now businesses are demanding the same thing, right? Like a CEO wants to know, "Are we on track to hit our quarterly estimates or not? And tell me now what's happening," because you know, the larger the company, the more complex that have any operations dashboards are. And, you know, if you don't give them real-time visibility, the window of opportunity to do something about it disappears. And so they are really, businesses is really demanding that. And so that is one big use case we have. And the other strange thing we're also seeing is that customers are demanding real-time even from the products they are using. So you could be using a SaaS product for sales automation, support automation, marketing automation. Now I don't want to use a product if it doesn't have real-time analytics baked into the product itself. And so all these software companies, you know, providing a SaaS service to their cloud customers and clients, they are also looking to actually, you know, their proof of value really comes from the analytics that they can show within the product. And if that is not interactive and real-time, then they are also going to be left behind. So it's really a huge differentiator whether you're building a software product or your running a business, the real-time observability gives you a window of opportunity to actually do something about, you know, when something goes wrong, you can actually act on it very, very quickly. >> Right, which is absolutely critical. Dhruba, I want to get your take on this. As the CTO and co-founder as I introduced you, what were some of the gaps in the market back in 2016 that you saw that really necessitated the development of this technology? >> Yeah, for real-time analytics, the difference compared to what it was earlier is that all your things used to be a lot of batch processes. Again, the reason being because there was something called MapReduce, and that was a scanning system that was kind of a invention from Google, which talked about processing big data sets. And it was about scanning, scanning large data sets to give answers. Whereas for real-time analytics, the new trend is that how can you index these big datasets so that you can answer queries really fast? So this is what Rockset does as well, is that we have capabilities to index humongous amounts of data cheaply, efficiently, and economically feasible for our customers. And that's why query is the leverage the index to give fast (indistinct). This is one of the big changes. The other change obviously is that it has moved to the cloud, right? A lot of analytics have moved to the cloud. So Rockset is built natively for the cloud, which is why we can scale up, scale down resources when queries come and we can provide a great (indistinct) for people as data latency, and as far as query latencies comes on, both of these things. So these two trends, I think, are kind of the power behind moving, making people use more real-time analytics. >> Right, and as Venkat was talking about how it's an absolute differentiator for businesses, you know, last year we saw this really, this quick, all these quick pivots to survive and ultimately thrive. And we're seeing the businesses now coming out of this, that we're able to do that, and we're able to pivot to digital, to be successful and to out-compete those who maybe were not as fast. I saw that recently, Venkat, you guys had a new product release a few weeks ago, major product release, that is making real-time analytics on streaming data sources like Apache Kafka, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon DynamoDB, and data lakes a lot more accessible and affordable. Breakdown that launch for me, and how is it doing the accessibility and affordability that you talked about before? >> Extremely good question. So we're really excited about what we call SQL-based roll-ups, is what we call that release. So what does that do? So if you think about real-time analytics and even teeing off the previous question you asked on what is the gap in the market? The gap in the market is really, all that houses and lakes are built for batch. You know, they're really good at letting people accumulate huge volumes of data, and once a week, analyst asking a question, generating a report, and everybody's looking at it. And with real-time, the data never stops coming. The queries never stop coming. So how do you, if I want real-time metrics on all this huge volumes of data coming in, now if I drain it into a huge data lake and then I'm doing analytics on that, it gets very expensive and very complex very quickly. And so the new release that we had is called SQL-based roll-ups, where simply using SQL, you can define any real-time metric that you want to track across any dimensions you care about. It could be geo demographic and other dimensions you care about that and Rockset will automatically maintain all those real-time metrics for you in real-time in a highly accurate fashion. So you never have to doubt whether the metrics are valid and it will be accurate up to the second. And the best part is you don't have to learn a new language. You can actually use SQL to define those metrics and Rockset will automatically maintain that and scale that for you in the cloud. And that, I think, reduces the barrier. So like if somebody wants to build a real-time, you know, track something for their business in real-time, you know, you have to duct tape together multiple, disparate components and systems that were never meant to work with each other. Now you have a real-time database built for the cloud that is fully, you know, supports full feature SQL. So you can do this in a matter of minutes, which would probably take you days or weeks with alternate technologies. >> That's a dramatic X reduction in time there. I want to mention the Snowflake IPO since you guys mentioned the Confluent IPO. You say that Rockset does for real-time, what Snowflake did for batch. Dhruba, I want to get your perspective on that. Tell me about that. What do you mean by that? >> Yeah, so like we see this trend in the market where lot of analytics, which are very batch, they get a lot of value if they've moved more real-time, right? Like Venkat mentioned, when analytics powers, actual products, which need to use analytics into their, to make the product better. So Rockset very much plays in this area. So Rockset is the only solution. I shouldn't say solution. It's a database, it's a real-time database, which powers these kind of analytic systems. If you don't use Rockset, then you might be using maybe a warehouse or something, but you cannot get real-time because there is always a latency of putting data into the warehouse. It could be minutes, it could be hours. And then also you don't get too many people making concurrent queries on the warehouse. So this is another difference for real-time analytics because it powers applications, the query volume could be large. So that's why you need a real-time database and not a real-time warehouse or any other technologies for this. And this trend has really caught up because most people have either, are pretty much into this journey. You asked me this previous question about what has changed since 2016 as well. And this is a journey that most enterprises we see are already embarking upon. >> One thing too, that we're seeing is that more and more applications are becoming data intensive applications, right? We think of whether it's Instagram or DoorDash or whatnot, or even our banking app, we expect to have the information updated immediately. How do you help, Dhruba, sticking with you, how do you help businesses build and power those data intensive applications that the consumers are demanding? >> That's a great question. And we have booked, me and Venkat, we have seen these data applications at large scale when we were at Facebook earlier. We were both parts of the Facebook team. So we saw how real-time was really important for building that kind of a business, that was social media. But now we are taking the same kind of back ends, which can scale to like huge volumes of data to the enterprises as well. Venkat, do you have anything to add? >> Yeah, I think when you're trying to go from batch to real-time, you're 100% spot on that, a static report, a static dashboard actually becomes an application, becomes a data application, and it has to be interactive. So you're not just showing a newspaper where you just get to read. You want to click and deep dive, do slice and dice the data to not only understand what happened, but why it happened and come up with hypotheses to figure out what I want to do with it. So the interactivity is important and the real-timeliness now it becomes important. So the way we think about it is like, once you go into real-time analytics, you know, the data never stops coming. That's obvious. Data freshness is important. But the queries never stop coming also because one, when your dashboards and metrics are getting up to date real-time, you really want alerts and anomaly detection to be automatically built in. And so you don't even have to look at the graphs once a week. When something is off, the system will come and tap on your shoulder and say, "Hey, something is going on." And so that really is a real-time application at that point, because it's constantly looking at the data and querying on your behalf and only alerting you when something, actually, is interesting happening that you might need to look at. So yeah, the whole movement towards data applications and data intensive apps is a huge use case for us. I think most of our customers, I would say, are building a data application in one shape or form or another. >> And if I think of use cases like cutthroat customer 360, you know, as customers and consumers of whatever product or solution we're talking about, we expect that these brands know who we are, know what we've done with them, what we've bought, what to show me next is what I expect whether again, it's my bank or it's Instagram or something else. So that personalization approach is absolutely critical, and I imagine another big game changer, differentiator for the customers that use Rockset. What do you guys think about that? >> Absolutely, personalized recommendation is a huge use case. We see this all where we have, you know, Ritual is one of the customers. We have a case study on that, I think. They want to personalize. They generate offline recommendations for anything that the user is buying, but they want to use behavioral data from the product to personalize that experience and combine the two before they serve anything on the checkout lane, right? We also see in B2B companies, real-time analytics and data applications becoming a very important thing. And we have another customer, Command Alkon, who, you know, they have a supply chain platform for heavy construction and 80% of concrete in North America flows through their platform, for example. And what they want to know in real-time is reporting on how many concrete trucks are arriving at a big construction site, which ones are late and whatnot. And the real-time, you know, analytics needs to be accurate and needs to be, you know, up to the second, you know, don't tell me what trucks were, you know, coming like an hour ago. No, I need this right now. And so even in a B2B platform, we see that very similar trend trend where real-time reporting, real-time search, real-time indexing is actually a very, very important piece to the puzzle. And not just for B to C examples that you said, and the Instagram comment is also very appropriate because a hedge fund customer came to us and said, "I have kind of a dashboards built on top of like Snowflake. They're taking two to five seconds and I have certain parts of my dashboards, but I am actually having 50/60 visualizations. You do the math, it takes many minutes to load. And so they said, "Hey, you have some indexing deck. Can you make this faster?" Three weeks later, the queries that would take two to five seconds on a traditional warehouse or a cloud data warehouse came back in 18 milliseconds with Rockset. And so it is so fast that they said, you know, "If my internal dashboards are not as fast as Instagram, no one in my company uses it." These are their words. And so they are really, you know, the speed is really, really important. The scale is really, really important. Data freshness is important. If you combine all of these things and also make it simple for people to access with SQL-based, that's really the real unique value prop that we have a Rockset, which is what our customers love. >> You brought up something interesting, Venkat, that kind of made me think of the employee experience. You know, we always think of the customer 360. The customer experience with the employee experience, in my opinion, is inextricably linked. The employees have to have access to what they need to deliver and help these great customer relationships. And as you were saying, you know, the employees are expecting databases to be as fast as they see on Instagram, when they're, you know, surfing on their free time. Then adoption, I imagine, gets better, obviously, than the benefit from the end user and customers' perspective is that speed. Talk to me a little bit about how Rockset, and I would like to get both of your opinions here, is a facilitator of that employee productivity for your customers. >> This is a great question. In fact, the same hedge fund, you know, customer, I pushed them to go and measure how many times do people even look at all the data that you produce? (laughs) How many analysts and investors actually use your dashboards and ask them to go investigate at that. And one of the things that they eventually showed me was there was a huge uptake and their dashboards went from two to three second kind of like, you know, lags to 18 milliseconds. They almost got the daily active user for their own internal dashboards to be almost going from five people to the entire company, you know, so I think you're absolutely spot on. So it really goes back to, you know, really leveraging the data and actually doing something about it. Like, you know, if I ask a question and it's going to, you know, system is going to take 20 minutes to answer that, you know, I will probably not ask as many questions as I want to. When it becomes interactive and very, very fast, and all of a sudden, I not only start with a question and, you know, I can ask a follow-up question and then another follow-up question and make it really drive that to, you know, a conclusion and I can actually act upon it. And this really accelerates. So even if you kind of like, look at the macro, you hear these phrases, the world is going from batch to real-time, and in my opinion, when I look at this, people want to, you know, accelerate their growth. People want to make faster decisions. People want to get to, what can I do about this and get actionable insights. And that is not really going to come from systems that take 20 minutes to give a response. It's going to really come from systems that are interactive and real-time, and that's really the need for acceleration is what's really driving this movement from batch to real-time. And we're very happy to facilitate that and accelerate that moment. >> And it really drives the opportunity for your customers to monetize more and more data so that they can actually act on it, as you said, in real-time and do something about it, whether it's a positive experience or it is, you know, remediating a challenge. Last question guys, since we're almost out of time here, but I want to understand, talk to me about the Rockset-AWS partnership and what the value is for your customers. >> Okay, yeah. I'll get to that in a second, but I wanted to add something to your previous question. I think my opinion for all the customers that we see is that real-time analytics is addictive. Once they get used to it, they can go back to the old stuff. So this is what we have found with all our customers. So, yeah, for the AWS question, I think maybe Venkat can answer that better than me. >> Yeah, I mean, we love partnering with AWS. I think, they are the world's leader when it comes to public clouds. We have a lot of joint happy customers that are all AWS customers. Rockset is entirely built on top of AWS, and we love that. And there is a lot of integrations that Rockset natively comes with. So if you're already managing your data in AWS, you know, there are no data transfer costs or anything like that involved for you to also, you know, index that data in Rockset and actually build real-time applications and stream the data to Rockset. So I think the partnership goes in very, very deep in terms of like, we are an AWS customer, we are a partner and we, you know, our go-to market teams work with them. And so, yeah, we're very, very happy, you know, like, AWS fanboys here, yeah. >> Excellent, it sounds like a very great synergistic collaborative relationship, and I love, Dhruba, what you said. This is like, this is a great quote. "Real-time analytics is addictive." That sounds to me like a good addiction (all subtly laugh) for businesses and every industry to take out. Guys, it's been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for joining me, talking to the audience about Rockset, what differentiates you, and how you're helping customers really improve their customer productivity, their employee productivity, and beyond. We appreciate your time. >> Thanks, Lisa. >> Thank you, thanks a lot. >> For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this "Cube Conversation". (bright ending music)

>>Hold on. Welcome to this special cube conversation. I'm John ferry, host of the queue here in Palo Alto, California. Got a great deep dive conversation with multicloud, who we were featuring on our AWS showcase of cloud startups. Uh, Venkat Krista who's the CEO. And co-founder great to see you again and Candace Hendrix delivery architect at green pages, a partner customer. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on as always cube conversations are fun to get the deep dive. Good to see you. >>Oh, great to have, uh, have this opportunity, John. Thank you so much. Uh, Candace, thank you for joining us. It's been a pleasure work in pages, John, we're looking forward to this conversation today. >>Yeah. One of the things I'm really excited about that came out of our coupon cloud startups showcase was you guys talking about day two operations, which has been kicked around, but you guys drilled into it and put some quantification around the value proposition, but this is every company has a day to problem an opportunity and then usually our problems and most people see, but they're really opportunities to create this value proposition around something that's now going to be an operational, um, standard table-stakes. So let's get into it, take us through, uh, what you guys have with day two offers that, do a deep dive on this. Take, take it away. >>Thanks, John. Uh, John, we'll do a little bit of an involved conversation today. We'll switch between a little bit of a slide and, um, we are actually happy to show a quick demo as well. So our customers can, uh, what they see is what they get kind of demo. Um, so, uh, to give a quick background on context a day, two operations in the cloud are important for customers who are trying to get, uh, self-service provisioning, going standardization going, uh, have a way to help their developers move fast on the innovation. What we are experiencing now is developers are increasingly having a seat at the table and they would like their infrastructure architects and infrastructure solution providers to enable them to do things that they want to do with fewer friction points. What day two platform that we built does is it upskills our it teams so that they can deli work, uh, what the developers need so that the sandbox environments that they want comes to life quickly. >>And on top of that, developers can move fast with the innovation with guard rails that are in place, the guard rails that are it, administrators, it leaders are able to set for developers, include cost guard, rails, governance, guard, rails, security, and compliance guard rails, a, you know, bot based approach to getting out of the way of the developers so they can move fast while the, uh, technology provides them the Alcoa to go innovate without running into the common cloud problems, such as cost overruns or security or compliance challenges today, I'll go show and tell a little bit of all of this, and then we'll bring in partners or partner, canvas as well, so that she can talk about how we help the fortune 200, uh, innovate, uh, faster with our platform. >>Awesome. Well, let's get into it. I, you know, as you know, I, I think that day two operations is really a cloud, uh, lingua. Frank was going to be part of everyone's, uh, operational standard. And it's not just for making sure you've got cost-effectiveness, but innovation strategies that rely on cloud, they need to have new things in place. So take us through the show and tell. >>Great, well, let's switch to the slide deck here. So I'm going to give a quick background and then go from there. Great. So, um, uh, you know, Montclair is an intelligent cloud man and platform company. We help customers of all sizes. Uh, we are an AWS partner that is a cloud management tool, competency partner, super happy to be in a wedding on the AWS platform for AWS customers. Our platform is an autonomous cloud operations platform. What our mission is, we empower ID teams to go deliver to their developers and become cloud powerhouses. Uh, I'm going to go through a quick three sections of the Manticore platform that delivers value to our customers first with our platform without needing additional skillsets or hiring, uh, needing to hire, uh, you know, hard to find talent or having to use third party tools. Our customers can use AWS native solutions to achieve full visibility into their cloud environments. >>They can enable consistent self-service deployments and simplify them. They can also reduce the total cost of cloud operations, all in just a few clicks. Uh, I'm going to show and tell, uh, what customers get quickly moving into the slide where customers can get visibility into the footprint, a comprehensive security posture management and compliance posture management, click away and solve these problems. They can enable their innovation teams with operations ready environments that can provision anything from server-based workloads to serverless workloads, to containerized environments. All of that are available readily in the platform. And of course, uh, all of this can be done with a few clicks and no code. That's our platform. And a nutshell I'm happy to switch to a demo from here on John. How does that sound >>Great. Sounds awesome. Let's get the demo. Thanks for the overview. By the way, we cover that in a great video too, and a high level, um, in our new show startup showcase, people can check that out online, um, check it out, but let's get into the demo. >>Sounds good. So I'm going to switch to my laptop again here to show the browser window and go into the demo environment. Great. So this is Monte cloud.com. Uh, customers can go to app.monica.com. I'm going to move fast in a demo environment show and tell here, uh, customers split login, assuming they have signed up for the platform. It's free to sign up. Uh, the platform activates immediately. This is their full first run experience. Uh, customers can get started in about a couple of clicks. There's a welcome screen here. They can walk through this. What this provides is a way a guard had experience for customers to be able to gain visibility, security, compliance, and set up the cloud operations, uh, environment in just a couple of clicks. So in this case, customers can get continuous resource visibility. They click next from a security point of view, we'll assess about 2,220 plus security best practices and customers can select saying they would like to remediate the issues. >>We'll help do that. That's a bot based approach that does it click next compliance, a similar situation. We do compliance assessments in the platform. Customers can remediate it. Uh, click next. We have provisioning templates, John. We had a really good conversation yesterday about this, a whole set of, uh, well-architected, uh, templates that customers can click and provision anything from, uh, basic core networking, all the way up to high performance computing and minds that all is available in the platform. Again, click next to go select that customers can manage servers, windows, or Linux servers running on any cloud could be hybrid cloud, uh, Azure, AWS GCP. Again, we can manage them in a single interface and last but not the least application management, our ID operators and leaders want to have a position on how their cloud applications are performing. They want to react quickly to it best possible platform. Uh, that's it they've selected all the features. All the, which is free in the platform. Some features are available in the free trial. Customers can click and say they would like to try for 14 days. That's all. So click next platform sets itself up. This is how quick we can get to helping customers understanding what they need to do. I'm going to try and show you if I can go to the next screen here and say, this is my company name. >>So I'm going to enter some details here that, uh, helps, um, capture some basic information about, uh, our customers, uh, departments. Uh, let's say this is a demo account, or I'm going to say, um, HR, um, uh, account, let's say there's a human resources department that I'm trying to connect and manage their cloud environment, but click next >>And that's it. They connect to the AWS account. We now take our customers back to an AWS console where they're familiar interface. They're going to click next on this cloud formation stack here, which automatically starts creating what we need on the customer's account. And click, click a button here. It's going to run in the background, what my platform in this case, my view, the other view does is, uh, it instantly receives notification back from the customer's account. As you can see now, day two has recognized that, Hey, the customer is trying to connect the cloud account. It's a question. Do you want to manage these regions? We can manage 15 plus regions click next. Uh, that is pretty much it. Uh, I'm going to skip this one so that we can get to the dashboard. I'm going to skip this as well, because you can invite your team members. Uh, you can get weekly reports, uh, long story short, that's it about 10 clicks. We are already in, in a cloud environment where customers can begin to manage, operate and start taking control of the cloud footprint. >>Got it. And physical you, you skipped over the collaboration feature that's for what team members do. Kind of see the same dashboard. >>The great question. Uh, our customers can invite additional team members could be an educator who wants to look at the total cost of cloud operations. Uh, they could invite another team member who wants to be enabled only for certain parts of the platform. Very simple. We have SSO integration as well in the platform. So, uh, invite additional users start using day two in less than 10 minutes, no additional, uh, you know, configuration required. >>You know, Amazon's got that slogan always day one. You guys are always day to always go to >>About all about ensuring data was taken care of. >>Awesome. Great stuff. Candace, what's your take on this? How do you fit in here? Talk about what it's like to work with these guys. What's the, what's your perspective on this? A new multicloud day two operations dashboard. >>Hi, thank you, John. Hi, Ben Kat. Thank you very much for the introduction. Um, basically our interaction is collaborative and we're great team partners, and we work well with, with multicloud often and, and have been partners working together for quite some time and solutioning products for our clients. >>Great. Vinca you want to chime in as well and share some color commentary on, um, your partners value? >>Sure. Thanks Justin. So, uh, so green pages, uh, they offer cloud services and a whole suite of solutions to their customers. Some of the customers are ranging from fortune a hundred enterprises, uh, to a wide variety of customers. Perhaps we can actually switch over to a slide deck here, but Candace, if you're up for it, maybe we can walk through a liberal green pages and solutions that you've implemented. We can talk from the customer point of view, which we think would be more beneficial to our audience as well. >>Yes. Thank you. That's very helpful. Um, again, my name is Candice Hendrix and I'm a delivery architect here at green pages technology solutions. And what I'd like to do is share a few examples of collaboration that we have achieved through our partnership with Moni cloud first to give a better history of green pages we've been in business since 1992, we maintain a wide range of customer base, um, approximately 500 different, uh, customers and all different workflows from insurance to government to, um, um, manufacturing and the such. We've also made the CRN tech elite two 50 less for, uh, sense its inception in 2011. And basically what that is, is it's all of the companies and, or the top 250 companies in the U S and Canada, having the highest level of experience top of their game, maintaining the highest levels of training and certifications. We also offer managed services, support, professional services, cloud readiness assessments, and migrations, as well as growing a CSP or cloud service provider today, I would like to highlight a few innovative projects that we've executed with multicloud is our partner for AWS compliance needs as well as, um, AWS Dr. >>So this slide first outlines a business scenario that we dealt with with one of our clients to address cost security compliance standardization across a global AWS environment. And the challenge with this was that we experienced was the complexity of the cloud environment and the size of the environment and how can they stay compliant, optimize costs and scale the outcome with the teamwork of Mani cloud and green pages, we were able to achieve all the facets of the challenge, also enabling and, and creating what we coined it, the compliance bot and what that provided was a platform to easily parameterize some of the, um, options such as configurable schedules, configurable target servers, departments, um, options to choose between automated and manual remediation processes in compliance ability to choose whether that remediation process also, uh, auto reboots versus approval based reboots on, um, infrastructure or resources integrations into a Slack channel for manual remediation approval process, as well as daily noncompliance reporting the compliance bot also can ensure proper patching necessary agents required software versions and resources, um, that they maintain compliance through the use of tagging Lambda functions, AWS fleet manager, AWS config, and AWS CloudWatch. >>Uh, another, um, opportunity we've had to work with, um, Moni cloud in this use case, the scenario that the green pages customer needed to solve was the automation of Dr to address the requirement of an entire AWS regional failure within requirements was a RTO of four hours and an RPO of less than one minute uncertain ESE, two instances. So the challenge that we had was to develop this solution with only the use of AWS native services meeting the required RTO and RPO with no custom tooling integration. So with mighty clouds assistance and teamwork, what we were able to achieve is what we now refer to as the Dr. Bot, we solution the automation to replicate everything from their production, uh, environment in AWS to the Dr. Region in AWS, such as subnets, um, IP cider ranges, LAN IP addresses, security groups, load balancers, and all associated configuration settings. >>So with the pilot light scripting that runs daily through a Lambda function, we can manage those Delta copies into the Dr production or the Dr. Region from production and address any changes that may occur in the production environment to meet the RPO. What we used is cloud door, which is also a native AWS service. And we used AWS backup for the more static instances, we then created an integration to send any health alerts in the event of an AWS outage to their Slack channel. Then upon approval, um, they could kick off through a manual approval process. They could kick off and execute an end to end fail over from production to an AWS region and to their Dr. Region in AWS, both the compliance spot and the Dr. Bot automations can be ported and variabilize for any AWS environment. We welcome the opportunity to discuss this further and assist you in your cloud journey. I hope this explain some of the great innovation that we've been able to work with money cloud on. Thanks, Ben Capra, allowing me to speak and back to you. >>Thank you, Candace. This is fantastic. John Lassie Seesaw, right? The challenge with cloud operations is there's a lot of moving parts and, uh, visibility, compliance, security, uh, you know, all of that. Typically customers have to write custom code or integrate ten-plus tools, suddenly what, you know, customers we're seeing they're spinning up their own cloud operating teams. They're spinning up their own homegrown cloud operations model, which in invariably results in more attacks, symptoms of maintenance tasks, our platform can do all of this abstract, the complexity, and put this kind of automation within the reach of customers who are trying to transform their it departments by clicking away. That's the attack that we built on top. >>Yeah, I think that's a great example. I think Candace highlights some of the things we were talking about last time around intelligent applications, meeting, intelligent infrastructure, and to your point about operations, this comes up huge all the time in every conversation we're in and we're seeing it in the marketplace where there's a new operational model developing in real time. You're seeing people, um, homegrown ops, transforming ops. I mean, there's new roles and responsibilities are emerging and that's just the nature of the beast right now. This is kind of the new normal that it's not your traditional ops model. It's transitioning to a new, new way. This is a great example. Um, you see that the same way? >>Well, that's a, that's a great description, John you're right. That is the model that is evolving that, uh, once, um, that demands more from it teams and on the runway that is shrinking to transform and the cloud surface, it has grown how that's exactly where the becoming to help. And, uh, uh, we did do a little bit of a deep dive into what the platform does today to talk to our audience so that they can get this value. Thank you for that. Uh, you know, uh, depth in diving, happy to chat a little bit more if you'd like about, uh, where customers could go and that they can get started. >>Yeah. Looking forward to it. Vanco. Thanks for coming on, Candace. Thank you very much for sharing. Um, green pages. Congratulations. Love the Dr. Bot. That's phenomenal. I mean, I w I want a cube bottom. You're just doing these interviews is boss, but I'm looking forward to having a follow on conversation vanco. We're going to certainly see you out on the internet on Twitter. Um, maybe get you on our clubhouse, uh, chats, a lot of action out there. A lot of people talking about this, and you're seeing things from observability to new kinds of monitoring, to modern application development techniques that are just evolving in real time. So day two is here. Thanks for sharing. >>Looking forward, John, and, uh, where customers could go to is they could go to montclair.com today. They could get started in just a few place. We have a free version on the platform. They can activate this account in 10 months. They now have the power of the automation that we've built, and they can start taking control of the cloud operations in about 10 minutes. So we encourage persons to go find some free monitor.com and thank you candidates for taking the time, uh, uh, does it's fantastic that we'll be able to go solve some problems together. >>Mazi cloud turning teams into cloud powerhouses. That's their slogan. Check them out. I'm John Farrar with the cube. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to this Cube special presentation of Cube On CloudStartups with AWS Showcase. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. This session is the accelerate digital transformation and simplify AWS with autonomous cloud operations with Venkat Krishnamachari, who's the CEO and co-founder here with me on remote. Venkat, good to see you. >> Great to see you, John. >> So this is a session on, essentially DAY2 operations. Something that we've been covering on theCUBE as you know, for a long time. But the big trend is as DevOps becomes much more mainstream, intelligent applications or agile applications, have to connect with intelligent infrastructure and your company MontyCloud has the solution that literally turns IT pros into cloud powerhouses as you guys say, it's your tagline. This is a super important area. I want to get your thoughts and showcase what you guys are doing as one of the hot 10 startups. Thanks for coming on. So take a minute to explain real quick. What is MontyCloud all about? >> Great, thank you again for the opportunity. Hey everybody, I'm Venkat Krishnamachari. I represent mandate team at MontyCloud. We are an intelligent cloud management platform company. What we help customers do, is we help them simplify their cloud operations so they can go innovate and develop intelligent applications. Our platform is called DAY2, because everything after the day one of going to Cloud, needs a lot of expertise and we decided that's a fun area to go solve for our customers. We solve everything on starting DAY2 from simplifying provisioning, to management, to operations, to autonomous cloud operations. Our platform does this for our customers so they can innovate faster and they can close the cloud skills gap that is required to empower the developers. >> Venkat, I want to get your thoughts on DAY2 operations. There's been a trend that people talk about for a long time. As people move to the cloud and see the economic advantage of certainly with COVID-19, the market has said, "Hey, if you're on cloud native, you win." Andy Jassy at re:Invent last Keynote really laid out how companies can be proficient in becoming cloud-scale advantages. One of them was have expertise in cloud. So everyone is kind of doing that. You're starting to see enterprises all build the muscle for cloud operations. That's day one, they get started. Then that's kind of the challenges and the opportunities kick in when you have to continue in production. You have things that go on in the software. The underlying scaling infrastructure needs to be scaled out or all these kinds of things happen. This is what DAY2 is all about, keeping track of and maintaining high availability, uptime and keep the cost structure in line. This is what people discover. If they don't think properly about the architecture, they have huge problems. You guys solve this problem. Could you explain why this is important. >> Sure thing, John. So cloud operations, as you described, it's a continuous operations and continuous improvement in cloud environments. What efficient cloud operations does for customers is it accelerates innovation, reduces the risk, and more importantly, all the period of time that they are using their applications in the cloud, which is future, reduces the total cost of cloud operations. This is important because there is a huge gap in cloud skills. The surface area of cloud that customers need to manage is growing by the day. And most importantly, developers are increasingly and rightfully so, getting a seat at the table in defining and accelerating company's cloud journey. Which means, now they're proposing, microservices based application, container based application. Traditional applications are still in the mix. Now the surface area becomes a challenge for the IT operators to manage. That's why it's very important to start right. See, we ask this question to our customers. Having listened to our customers as hundreds of them, one thing is clear, when we ask this question to our customers, ever wonder why and how large scale companies like AWS are able to deliver massively scalable services and operate massive data centers with fewer people? Because it's automation. And it's important to think about, as you scale, automate a way things that must be automated, eliminate undifferentiated heavy lifting and help your developers move fast. All of this is vital in the day and age we live in, John. >> Yeah, I want to double down on that because I think this idea of integrating into operations is a critical key point for where success and failure kind of happen. We've seen with cloud, certainly IT departments and enterprise is going okay, cost optimization, check. Get cloud native, getting the cloud, lift and shift, I thought it through, I put some stuff in the cloud and then they go great, now I need resilience. I need resiliency, and I want to make sure things are now working okay, water flowing through the pipes, cloud's working. Then they say, "Well this is good, I got to need to integrate in with my own premises or edge or other things that are happening." Then they try to integrate into their core operations. McKinsey calls this the value driver three, integrating into core operators. We heard from them earlier in the program here at this event. This is key, it's not trivial to integrate cloud into your operations. This is what DAY2 and beyond is all about. Talk more about that. >> Yeah, that's a great point. And that's something that we've been working with customers to hands-on help learn and build it for them, right? So the acceleration of cloud adoption during the pandemic and ongoing adoption, it's going to shift the software security compliance and operational landscape dramatically. There's no escaping it. Cloud operations will no longer be an afterthought. DevOps will integrate with CloudOps. It'll provide a seamless feedback loop so that a box can be found sooner, fixed sooner, and uptime can be guaranteed. I'll give an example. One of our customers is a university. During the pandemic, their core examination application went down and they couldn't fix it on time because of lack of resources. For them, it's vital to have adopted cloud operations sooner but the runway they had was very little. Fortunately, we had the solution for them there. Within a week, they were able to take their entire on-prem application online, not just take the application but provide an autonomous cloud operations layer to their existing IT team with our platform, upscale them, and then about 14,000 students took their exams without any disruption. Now this customer and customers such as themselves have come to expect that level of integrated cloud operations into their application portfolio. It's important to address that with a platform that simplifies it. >> Venkat, real quick. Define, what is autonomous CloudOps platform? What does that mean? >> So let's take an example here, right? Customers who are trying to move an existing workload to cloud bring a traditional set of application. Then customers who are born in the cloud build microservices or server less based applications. Then there is containers. Now, all three the person surface areas that customers, particularly the IT teams have to manage. With the growing surface area, with the adoption of infrastructure as core, it becomes more nuanced to think about, how do we simplify? And in simplification comes automation. When a developer provision certain resource, previously, they used to be filing a ticket. Central IT team has to respond. Developers don't want that anymore. They want to innovate faster but at the same time Central IT team wants to have some governance in play. The best way to get out of the way of developers is automating it. And providing autonomous cloud operations means developers can deploy newer workloads faster, but with a level of guaranteed guardrail on security compliance and costs that sets them free. This is what we mean by autonomous cloud operations, closing the gap in skills, closing the gap in tooling, empowering your developers without thinking about the traditional model but enabling them to do things that's more in a rapid pace. That's what we mean by autonomous cloud operations. >> You had a great market opportunity. I think this is obviously a no brainer. As people say in the industry "cloud is scale is proven". Even post COVID if people don't have a cloud growth strategy they're pretty much going to be toast. McKinsey calls this a trillion dollar at a minimum not including potential new use cases, new pioneering applications coming. So pretty much, well the verdict is there, this is cloud. I got to ask you about MontyCloud as you guys have a business. Give or take a quick minute to explain the business of MontyCloud, some vitals or how people buy the product, the business model. Take a quick minute to explain MontyCloud business. >> Sure thing. John, see, our entire goal is to simplify cloud operations. Because what we learned is what seems to be complex about cloud adoption is that everybody is expected to be an expert on everything in the new era, but most teams are not ready to run efficient cloud operations at scale, as the cloud footprint is growing. This means we have to redefine certain conversations here. We talk directly to infrastructure architects, cloud architects, application owners. And in general, we talk to people who are leading their IT digital transformation for their companies. What we are enabling our customers is, they must demand that the traditional operation model must change to enable newer application patterns. For this, we are expecting customers want to standardize things, right? IT leaders are beginning to say, "All right, I got to standardize my provisioning, standardize my operations, reduce the heavy lifting that comes with infrastructure's code, and enable the business team and the application team to work closely together." The best way to do that is to go solve this problem with automation. So our platform is able to go help such customers, particularly leaders who demand digital transformation. With clear KPIs, our platform can help them ask the why question easily. And then our platform can also go perform, the how part of automation. That's what we solve. Those are the kinds of customers we really have been working with, John. >> So if I'm a customer, how do I know when I need to call MontyCloud? Is it because my cloud footprint is growing which is a natural sign of growth, or is it because I have more events happening, more things to manage? When do I know I have the need to call you guys? What's the signal? What's the sign? >> So we call it the day one mindset, and also the DAY2 mindset. Customers deciding to go to cloud on day one, should think about DAY2. Because without thinking about DAY2, it can become very expensive, right? When a customer's thinking about digital transformation, could be a lift and shift or it could be starting a new application pattern in the cloud, we can certainly help starting right that day because there are a couple of things they have to do, right? They have to standardize the cloud operations which means setting up the cloud accounts, setting up guardrails, enabling teams to go provision with self service. You want to start the right way. So we are happy to help on the day one journey itself and we can automate DAY2 along with it. So standardizing infrastructure operations, standardizing provisioning, security, visibility, compliance, cost. If any of this is an important milestone that customers have to achieve in their cloud journey, we can help. >> By the way, I would just point out that we were just talking on another session around lift and shift is not a no-brainer either if not thought through and remediated correctly that cost could go through the roof. I mean, we've seen evidence of lift and shift fails just because they didn't think it through. Just to your point. I mean, that's not a no brainer. Quickly explain why lift and shift is not as easy as it looks. >> Sure thing. So lift and shift is great to get started, but why sometimes it fails is that the connotations about wanting to keep your Opex down while giving up CapEx is at odds with each other, right? Cloud is great for reducing your Capex. But ongoing operations, of the DAY2 operations, can add a lot of burden to the operational expenses. What customers find out is after moving to the cloud, the cost overruns are happening because of resources that are not provisioned correctly, resources that should not be running. Wild Wild West kind of scenarios, where everybody has access to everything and they over provision. All of this together end up impacting customers' ability to go control the Opex. Then digital transformation projects are looked at from three different angles at least, right? Cost is definitely one, security is another, and then the ongoing operational tax with respect to monitoring, governance, remediation. All three when it simultaneously hits our customers, they look at lift and shift and saying, "Hey, this was cheaper on prem." But actually in the long run, this will be not just cheaper on the cloud, it can also be more efficient if they do it right. We can talk about some examples on how we help some customers with that helpful, John. >> Well, I want to get into the cloud operations, the whole dashboard in cloud operation administration. Is there anything that you could share because people are wanting more and more analytics. I mean, they're buying everything in sight. I mean, cyber security, you name it. There's more and more dashboards. No one wants another dashboard. So this is something that you guys have a strong opinion on how to think this through. Because again, at the end of the day, if you're instrumenting your network properly and your applications, your intelligence, things are changing, where's the data? Take us through your thinking around that. >> Sure thing. You are spot on. Nobody wants another dashboard that is just spewing data at them because data, without context is irrelevant in our mind, right? We want to be able to provide context, we want to be able to provide data within the context. And the dashboard to us means a customer that's looking at it, an IT leader looking at it should be able to ask the why question without working too hard at it, right? Let's bring up our dashboard. I would love to show and tell, although it's a dashboard, it is a tool that can enable IT leaders do things differently. >> John: Right, here it is. This is it right here. Okay, so this is the dashboard. Take me through it, what does it mean? >> Venkat: Yeah, let's (indistinct) right? The chart in the middle is the most important piece there. What we help our leaders, IT leaders do is, all the fullness of time of cloud adoption, we know the cloud's footprint is going to grow. The gray chart in the back, the stock chart represents the cloud footprint. As the cloud footprint continues to grow, we would like our leaders to demand that their security issues go down, their compliance issues go down and their costs to become more and more optimum. When leaders demand this, they can make things happen and our platform can help reduce all three and leaders can have this kind of dashboard to ask the why question. For example, they can compare one department with another department, ask that why question. They can compare an application that is similar in one department in another department and ask the why question, why is it more expensive? Why is it having more compliance issues? This is the kind of why questions our dashboard helps our customers perform and ask those questions, and they don't have to lift a finger, right? This entire dashboard comes to life within few minutes of them connecting their cloud accounts, where we provide visibility into operational issues, trend lines of data on how much consumption happens. And over a couple of months, they can see for themselves, make overall operation cost going down. Is my IT infrastructure now in cloud more resilient? And doesn't take more people to do it or am I able to turn on MontyClouds DAY2 bonds to go start reducing that burden or the period of time. This is what we mean by putting the power of autonomous CloudOps in our hands for customers. >> And this is what you mean by the IT powerhouse for the cloud. Is this on Amazon? So if I want to consume the product, what do I need to do to engage with you guys? What does it mean to me? Am I buying a service? Is it native? Is there agents involved? Take me through, what do I need to do? >> It's a great question. We are born in the cloud startup, which means we are super thankful for amazing technologies like Amazon infrastructure as core and the venting platform that's out there. So our platform is fully hosted, managed SaaS platform. A customer does not need to do anything but log onto montycloud.com, click a bunch of buttons, and connect their database account. They get started in under five minutes, self-service. And as they go through the platform, the guided experience where they can get to that dashboard I showed you in just a few clicks. They can get visibility, security posture assessment, compliance posture assessment, all in those few clicks. And when they decide to start using the platform more to automate and leverage the bots, they can always buy into additional services in the platform. So it's a easy to use get started in 10 minutes tops, if you will, that kind of platform >> Okay, great stuff. I want you to take me through the intelligent application flywheel that's going on here. So I can imagine that as the flywheel of success happens. Okay, got some intelligent apps, I see the dashboard, I'm getting some more visibility on the value creation, unlocking more value, new use case, all the things that happen in cloud, all good. And then I start growing, but I got builders trying to build more applications, more demand for more applications, more pressure on the infrastructure. The next question's, how do you guys simplify the cloud operation equation? Because I got to add more VPCs, I got to do more infrastructure, is it more EC Two? It can get complicated. How do you guys solve that problem? Because if the cloud footprint starts to grow because of more intelligent applications, how do you guys make it easier and simpler to scale up the intelligent infrastructure? >> Oh, that's a great question again, John. I'm going to go into a little bit of a detailed slide here. But before I do that, let's talk about two customers that we helped, right? This slide on the left, talks to those, both the customers. So what we have learned working with customers is, they have to build cloud accounts, manage cloud regions, user onboarding. Then they have to build networking infrastructure. Then they have to enable application infrastructure on top of the networking infrastructure. Application infrastructure could mean they want high-performance computing workloads or elastic services, such as queuing services, storage, or traditional VMS databases. That's a lot to build in the application infrastructure with infrastructure scope. On top of that, our customers have to deal with visibility, security, compliance costs. You get it, right? The path to intelligent applications is not easy because cloud is powerful, but it's broad, and the talent required is deep. We are able to say, how can we help our customers automate everything below the intelligent application layer. If we can do that, which we do, we can now propel our developers to go build intelligent applications without having the of also managing the underlying infrastructure. And we can help the IT operations team become cloud powerhouses because they get out of the way and enabled. Give you two examples here, right? One of our customers is a fortune 200 large ISP. They have about 10,000 servers in a particular department. And previously, when the servers were on premises, they had about a four member team managing compliance for it. When they lifted and shifted these servers into the cloud, the same model they wanted to... There are leaders that asked "Why should we continue with the same model?" They wanted MontyCloud. Now there is a DAY2 compliance board that's running, managing the 10,000 servers automatically watching on for compliance drifts, notifying them in a Slack channel, gets approval, remediates and fixes it. They were able to take those four folks and put them on the intelligent application side, I suppose to continuous infrastructure management site. Another example, a fortune 200 global networking company. It's an interesting situation, John. So on cyber Monday, they wanted to go big of obviously the cyber Monday was very important for them. The Thursday before cyber Monday, their on-premises data center and application went down and their teams wanted to move the application to cloud. And the partner that we work with, that brought this challenge to us saying hey, this fortune customer wants to go to cloud and we have this weekend. Well, we were able to go guide the partner and with our platform they were able to not only take their application from on-prem to cloud, they set up the cloud infrastructure, the networking, the application layer, the monitoring layer, the operations layer, all of that within a day. And on Monday that application delivered three X sales for this customer, without that partner or the customer being a cloud expert. That's what we mean by putting that kind of power in the hands of customers. >> Yeah, and I want to go back to that slide 'cause I think there's a second section I want to look at because what you just referred to is, I think this builds into the next comment on the right-hand side, this DAY2 kind of console vision here. The idea of getting in the weeds and getting into the troubleshooting of say, that cyber Monday example is exactly the non agility scenario, right? Because, if anyone's ever worked in tech knows when you have to get to root cause on something, it can take a while, right? So you need to have the system architecture built out. So here, classic cloud architecture on the left moves to a simple kind of console model. That's kind of what you guys are offering. Am I getting that right, Venkat? Is that kind of how this works? >> Yeah, that's kind of how it works, but the path to that maybe, a quick explanation though. We look at what's on the right--- >> Put that slide back up, let's get that slide back. Okay, there it is. >> Venkat: So what's on the right side here is, every layer on the left requires specialized talent and specialized tooling. That's all customers are currently experienced in the cloud. They either have to buy into a expensive monitoring tool or buy into an expensive security posture management tool. They have to hire, you know... It's hard to find cloud talent, right? And then they have to use infrastructure as code solutions. Sometimes that is, that can get more complex to maintain. What we have in MontyCloud is that, every layer there, they can provision by clicking away. For example, when they provision their cloud accounts setting up AWS best practices, budget guardrails, security, logging and monitoring, they can click away and do it. Setting up network infrastructure like VPC is setting up AWS transit gateway, VPNs, there's templates they can click and do it. The application infrastructure, which is a growing set of application infrastructure. Imagine this John, if a developer can come in and request the IT team they would like to set up an RDS database, right? The IT team can now with DAY2, can provide the developer options of, do you want it in dev stage prod? And do you want snapshots, backup, high availability? These are all check boxes and the developer can pick and choose and they can provision what they want without additional help from the IT team. And the IT team does not have to automate any one of those because it's pre automated in our platform. >> Yeah, this is the promise of infrastructure as code. You don't got to get in to the architecture and start throwing switches and all kinds of weird stuff can happen. Someone doesn't turn off, they don't enable auto-scale and they tested for this they forgot to revert back. I mean, there's a zillion things that could go wrong, human error, as well as automation. So once you set it up, then you provide a consumable developer friendly approach. That seems to be what's happening. Okay, cool. All right, well Venkat, this is fantastic. Final minutes we have left. I want to get your thoughts on the momentum and the vision. Talk about the momentum that you guys have now in the marketplace and what's the vision for the next five years. >> Great, it's a great question. From a momentum perspective John, we take an approach of, let's work with customers and understand that we can solve some problems for them. We've been working backups with customers. We have customers that are startups, that are born in the cloud, we have customers that are enterprise customers who are having a large footprint on-prem. Then we have everybody in between like university customers who are transitioning off. So what we did is from a momentum perspective, we worried more about, do we understand the talent gap and the tooling gap that exists across the board of all customers? Because every customer, once they go to cloud, they look to achieving the same level of efficiency and simplicity like modern cloud companies. A traditional company that moves to cloud wants to act and behave like the one in the cloud customer. For us it was very important to understand a variety of customers, a variety of use cases, and then automated away. So momentum is that we are able to go help a customer that is a Greenfield customer to go to cloud easily. And we're also able to go help brownfield customers, ensure they can reduce the total cost of cloud operations on an ongoing basis. So we've been seeing customers of all sizes, even helping customers of all sizes move fast. And there's a bunch of case studies out there in our website. We are a startup, so we've been able to help those customers and earn their trust by delivering results for them. So the momentum is that, we are able to go scale up now, and scale up fast for our customers without us being in the way, technically. Or customers can go to our platform help themselves and accelerate the platform. That's the momentum we have. From a future perspective, you asked, where things are headed, right? There are a couple of things. First things first, it's important to not just predict the future, we got to create it, right? About two years back when we founded MontyCloud, the question my team asked me, my CTO asked me is, what really matters in cloud ranking, right? So we said, all right, this is provisioning automation management. Yeah, they all matter. But what seemed to really matter is there are three things that matter. That's how we came to... One is events. The cloud itself is an eventing machine, right? More than ever, the cloud infrastructure emits events at every turn, every resource, every activity is expressed as an event. So we made an early bet on building an event driven platform from the ground up. We are the only platform that is even driven. Every other platform is seen to try and solve problems which is awesome to have, but they take an approach of an API based model or an inference into log based model. So the future, we believe, belongs to eventing model because it's lightweight on the customer's infrastructure, it goes easy on the cloud providers. More importantly, it gets the customer as close as possible to when the event happens, right? That's very important, to be able to be even event-driven. If you noticed Cloud Native Foundation came up and announced recently cloud events is the right way to deal with modern SaaS platforms. We've been in cloud events from day one for us, right? So the future is in eventing model. >> And that's where the data angle, I think, connects here for this event and why you guys are a hot startup is, observability, all these things. It's all about a event driven infrastructure. It's all events. It's monitoring, it's management, it's data. At the end of the day, the data is the instrumentation, is what it is. Developers are coding. Media's data. Everything's data. Everything has to do with data. You guys have a unique approach. Venkat Krishnamachari, thank you for coming on. Appreciate it, and thanks for sharing your story here at the AWS Showcase. First inaugural Cube On CloudStartups, part of the 10 hot startups categories. Thanks for sharing. >> Thanks for the opportunity. And we hope to help a lot more customers, simply for the cloud operations and innovate with some intelligent applications that's going to change the world. >> Check out Venkat and his company all on Twitter, on Facebook, they're on every channel, all the channels are open, of course. theCUBE we're bringing you all the hot startups, extracting the signal from the noise. I'm John furrier. Thanks for watching. (Upbeat music)

(bright instrumental music) >> Well, thank you for joining us here as we continue our series of CUBE Conversations on the AWS Startup Showcase. John Walls here on theCUBE again, glad to have you with us. We're joined by a couple of guests today. I'd like to introduce them to you. I'm joined by Venkat Krishnamachari who's the Co-Founder and CEO of MontyCloud, and, Venkat, good to see you today, sir. Thanks for being with us. >> Good to see you, John. >> And also with us is Kandice Hendricks. Who's the delivery architect at GreenPages and, Kandice, thank you for your time as well today. >> Thank you. >> But, Venkat, I'd like you to lead off a little bit just for our viewers who aren't too familiar with MontyCloud. Share with us a little bit about the origins of your company and the services that you're providing. >> Sure thing John, thank you for taking the time. MontyCloud is an autonomous cloud operations company. our origins rest in thinking about our customers from a cloud perspective on what can cloud do for customers. We've been in the enterprise background workspace for a long time. Me and my team members, we have been part of larger companies like Microsoft, AWS, Commvault. So in our journey, what we understood is anytime there is a technology shift that's happening, customers that are able to leverage that technology in a simpler way, are able to innovate better. We realize cloud is so powerful, but sort of complex. We figure it's a, with great power comes great responsibility. And with cloud there's a lot of shared responsibilities that come to customers. We asked this question, how can we help our customers deliver on their part of the shared responsibility in a much easier way than the current situation is, so they can innovate faster and move their business forward. So MontyCloud was born out of understanding larger platform shifts that happen around us all the time, and how we can help customers thrive on that environment. >> We're talking about customers and it's kind of these conundrums that they find themselves in as they're trying to make these big shifts and they have a lot of concerns. GreenPages, one of your clients, and Kandice, I'd like you to come in and maybe tell us a little bit about GreenPages and then I'm going to shift over to how you got to MontyCloud and about that relationship. But first off just give me the 30,000 foot level on GreenPages. >> GreenPages being also a consulting firm working with our clients to solve complex issues as well for security compliance and any of the cloud adoption migration needs. We've been in business since 1992 and I've had the pleasure to work with MontyCloud for quite some time now. I know I've been here just a few years at GreenPages and have been with MontyCloud from the start. And it's just such an awesome team work that we have together solving some of those issues for our clients. >> Venkat touched on a few of those, and they're concerns that I'm sure you share with many other companies, you know, about compliance studies of operation, about TCCO, right? You've got a lot of things on your plate. What were your concerns and what were your goals that you took to MontyCloud and you said, we want to get here, help us. >> So Green Page just started out like as more of VMware player, really strong in the VMware marketplace and it slowly adopted into a CSP and offering more cloud native solutions and problems. But one of the things that really drove us to MontyCloud was their skill levels was far beyond what we could provide as consultants. Like we had the administrative skills but not as strong on the development side and MontyCloud just shines when it comes to the development side and really assisting us and being a great partner with what we need to achieve those goals with our clients. >> So, Venkat, the autonomous CloudOps, this transformation toward this service that you're providing, take that in pieces, if you would, about just how that has evolved and how you define autonomous, in this case, and what are those components? >> Sure thing, thank you, Kandice. It's been fantastic working with GreenPages as well. So, John, I'll take a small example of how GreenPages as a partner, you know, we look at them as a partner in a way to help customers. What Kandice is alluding to is the cloud development aspects. What we figured is MSPs, IT departments across large scale enterprises, all of them are trying to get their internal teams to consume the cloud better and modernize their infrastructure, and build intelligent applications. In all three aspects, we learned that there's undifferentiated amount of heavy development that every team has to do. We started thinking about how can we automate that, and when we say, hey, we can develop for our customers, we truly develop an autonomous approach. Our platform automates those development aspects for customers such that when a customer wants to go to cloud, wants to set up the guardrails, want to set up their self-service provisioning and get to intelligent applications, for every layer, we have developed a repeatable, reusable platform that fills the gap, like the gap that Kandice was pointing out, is the gap in cloud skills and cloud knowledge and cloud development skills. We augment our platform, which fills the gap, and also the tooling gap that comes along with cloud, both of that we've been able to work with partners like GreenPages, and several customers and give them the power of cloud automation with a platform approach back to them. That's what we've been specializing on. >> Venkat, when you talk to a customer and not just GreenPages but customers in general, are there common concerns? Are there challenges that everybody seems to have or think, you know, big buckets security would be one compliance is a cost, obviously, but what is it that you hear from customers, and then in turn, how do you then transform your company, or to meet their needs? How have you kind of reconfigured your approach to address those concerns? >> Sure thing, John. See, our platform is called MontyCloud DAY2. Here's why, or maybe that background might help. We know, day one mindset matters when it comes to digital transformation and technology adoption. But what we also know from experience is day two comes after day one, and most customers are under prepared for the cloud operations that they need to deliver. Ever wonder why large companies, such as Amazon AWS is able to operate a massive data center with just few people? Is able to deliver global scale services with fewer engineers behind it? The power of automation that large companies use is not readily available to customers who are also consuming the cloud. So we looked at that problem space and said, how do we help? And what we learned from hundreds of customers conversations is that there are three things that seem to matter and three things that digital transformation leaders are doing better. We understood those three important things and started automating them. So every customer that's taking the cloud journey can benefit from it. The three things we gathered are, first, most customers are trying to do undifferentiated heavy lifting when it comes to consuming the cloud. For that, they are looking to simplify deployments. Leaders in the space are simplifying deployments, enabling their builders, developers, to move fast without them worrying about the underlying infrastructure. So simplifying deployment is a number one thing that we have understood that's important to solve. The second thing is visibility. Having a visibility into what the cloud footprint is automatically puts leaders in a spot where they can ask questions about, now that I got visibility, what's my compliance posture? What's my security posture? Where do I spend money? Where do I save money? All of that rests on top of a continuous visibility framework. So leaders do that really well. The third thing we understood from customers that they do well is keep an eye on day two, keep an eye towards reducing the total cost of cloud operations, not just the cloud bill. You see, when you go to the cloud, initially is you test the water with couple of applications, things work and businesses grow. Now, the consumption grows higher. You really want to have more and more cloud powered workloads which means the footprint is going to go larger. What we don't want is as the cloud footprint grows, you don't want the cloud bill to be inconsistently growing. You don't want to security compliance and operational overheads to grow along with the cloud footprint. You want those lines trends to drop while the footprint grows, which means the approach that leadership position that customers take is how do I think about my total cost of cloud operations, and who can help? So these are the three areas we spent time understanding and automating. That's the approach we take, John. >> So, Kandice, back when Venkat was talking about Day2 I saw you smile a little bit, right? 'Cause I think you do have this kind of like now what moment, right? You've given me all these great capabilities. We have a whole new tech, our life is great, now what? You know, what happens tomorrow? Day two, which I think is genius. So let's look at GreenPages. What was your day two experience or your now what experience in terms of now that you've been handed this bright, new, shiny well-oiled machine, if you will, concerns that you had about maintaining, sustainability, about adding new apps, adding new services, microservices, all these things, that might be, you know, with different technologies that weren't there before? >> Right, so I'm very familiar with MontyCloud DAY2 platform and it's incredible, especially for the small businesses, it's really trying to adopt that enterprise level automation and simplicity. So that's what DAY2 provides. What our relationship with GreenPages has enhanced is their ability to improve and innovate on their DAY2 platform, because a lot of the projects that we've worked together as a team have built the ground, you know, some of the refactoring and the enhancements of their DAY2 platform which they've had for quite some time So our partnership in that development has helped drive some of the underlying functionality of the DAY2 platform, if that makes sense. >> Sure, and, Venkat, as we know, cost is key, and that is the bottom line, right? You know, help me be more efficient, help me be more compact, but help me save money, right? So at the end of the day, how have you addressed that? How are you providing these additional values at lowered costs in terms of what the client can see at the end of the day? >> That's a great question, John There's a little bit of fogginess in cost, right? What we repeatedly see is cost of cloud bills but cloud bills are usually shockers. People are not getting used to that yet. The consumption economics has changed the capex model to opex model. While that is great, if you don't understand where you're spending the cost, that's a challenge. There's a whole slew of startups and companies helping understand the cloud bill. We took an approach of not just the cloud bill being the problem, right? That is a challenge of a skill gap. Customers wanting to go to cloud need to go hire a lot of specialized talent. That's hard to combine, to get their cloud operations started the right way. We've seen customers go into cloud and only realize this is not working. It's the Wild Wild West in terms of growth. So they do a V2 version of their own cloud again. So we see challenges, whether it's a skill gap that's adding to cost. Then there is cloud bill, obviously. Then there's a tooling gap. Traditional solutions that are not built for the cloud and built in the cloud, don't lend themselves very well for cloud operations. Security is a good example. Compliance is a good example. Ongoing routine automations is a good example. In all three cases what we find customers repeatedly do is they have a chance of either building it themselves, which is expensive and hard to maintain, or they go after specialized tooling, which again brings you the host of integration problems. We looked at it and said, how do we help customers use cloud native tooling? For example, there are no third party agents in MontyCloud DAY2. There is no need to go buy a third party security or compliance or governance tool. We looked at cloud native offerings from Amazon, for example, and we automated them at a higher order and put that power back in the customer's hands. Which means what our customers were able to do is from connecting to MontyCloud, to setting up a cloud operations that is continuously going to reduce the total cost of operations. They can go from zero to that state in couple of days by themselves, within hours, they'll be productive, and they don't have to go close the skill gap. They don't have to buy a third party tooling, and then ongoing basis, they're going to get all the benefits of what AWS provides, in terms of cost optimization, which our platform can contextualize and give it in the customer's hands. So there are many layers you have to cut cost and understanding that's very important to us. And it's been very helpful to talk to our customers and innovate on all the layers on their behalf. >> Well, you certainly, I think you've hit all the big pieces, right? If you've lowered the costs, full visibility, simple deployment, it's a winning combination, and congratulations on that, and thank you both. It sounds like you've got a pretty good thing going, GreenPages and MontyCloud, and we wish you continue to success down the road. Thank you both for joining us here on theCUBE. >> Thank you, John. >> Thank you, Kandice, thank you, John. >> You've been watching theCUBE conversation here on AWS Startup Showcase. I'm John Walls, your host, and thank you for joining us. We'll see you next time around. (gentle instrumental music)

live from Las Vegas it's the cube covering AWS reinvent 2018 brought to you by Amazon Web Services Intel and their ecosystem partners welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of AWS reinvent here at the Venetian in Las Vegas I'm your host Rebecca night along with my co-host Dave Volante Rebecca we work together this week and I'm excited for our next guest he is an esteemed cube alum Harish Venkat vice president global sales enablement and marketing at Veritas technologies welcome back to the Q thank you very much thank you see you Gary good to see you David so you've been to this is not your first rodeo you know many AWS reinvents what are you hearing what what are you hearing on the ground from your customers what trends are you seeing what most excites you yeah first of all that's great to be part of reinvent you know love the buzz here it's very electrifying and we're very happy about our partnership with AWS and we're very happy about the sponsorship for reinvent as well if there are any skeptics out there who's still thinking cloud is still a fashion statement they really need to reassess their statement because proud is in full effect for both computer and storage the other trend that I'm seeing is globalization is in full effect ideas are flowing swiftly and freely through the borders and then when you think about technology technology is very exciting the global GDP is what about 79 trillion IT spend about four trillion but it's interesting to see the four trillion sort of fueling the growth for the 79 trillion I also think AI machine learning deep learning all of this is going to reshape not only the software industry but I think it's going to reshape the way we live our lives and the last thing I'll say is data hands down as the new currency for enterprise right exactly we keep hearing this data is the new oil data is the it is the currency it's even more valuable I got our take on this okay so I can take a quarter oil and/or a gallon oil I can put it in my house or I can put it in my car I can't do both with that same resource data it doesn't follow the laws of scarcity I can use that same data from multiple use cases so by premises it's more valuable than oil what do you think I think the versatility of data is not the same as oil oil has very limited purpose and I think it's important and we are all dependent on it but data is so meaningful the amount of insights you can get it provides you a competitive edge in the industry it is unbeatable so yeah oil not say mono reefs I've had the pleasure of doing a couple of Veritas solution days yes I did Veritas vision last year you guys have broken that up into multiple cities this year I did New York and Chicago just at ease with the last 30 to 45 days yeah had some great conversations with customers some Veritas execs the conversation was obviously heavy kool-aid injection of Veritas technology your roadmap your vision really really detailed stuff obviously a cloud was a piece of that the conversations here I'm sure a much more cloud oriented now can you talk about the discussions that you're having the focus that you have on cloud generally in AWS specifically yeah sure look I mean data is growing year over year and and customers are still trying to figure out how to manage the data how am I going to work out the economics of this by leveraging cloud and this is not an easy equation to solve by no means and this is where Veritas and cloud service providers like AWS are really taking the market leadership role and then figuring out how do we leverage the entire data landscape if you will so before you even think of cloud the first thing you want to know is where does my data reside and what type of data do I have so Veritas is able to provide that visibility of data classification of data we provide immense amount of deduplication ratio which helps with the economics of this ratio this equation so I think we provide an end to solution from visibility classification deduplication even helping new application and data to the cloud and the partnership with AWS is really enabling customers to solve that conundrum that you're talking so I want to double click on this you know so as a as a as a person who understands backup and recovery deeply as a working for a company that's that's their business and of course you're extending beyond backup and I understand that but you know snapshots replication that's not backup in recovery so when I see something like outpost outpost is this on Prem infrastructure appliance that AWS is bringing as part of its hybrid strategy I want to know how is that gonna be protected now of course they'll talk about the way in which they protect it but a company like yours has a different philosophy your recovery is everything the whole data management approach how do you guys think about data management and data protection you know beyond snapshots or beyond just replication can you explain that yeah so I think the best way to explain that would be to talk about a customer use case great and while several customers come to mind I want to talk about see IMC I think it's a perfect embodiment of all the business use cases that we've been discussing so far ok see IMC is China International Marine container and they've been in business since 1980 you know employ about 51,000 based out of Shenzhen in in in China and they started their digital transformation in 2017 and what they're trying to do is really achieve three things one move all of their business application to the cloud starting with their strategic ERP in this case it was s AP and s AP Hana and the other thing is because they've been around since 1980s a lot of their processes are outdated it's very manual and they had a lot of dependency on tape as part of their backup and recovery so they want to modernize but they want to modernize that piece of it and then the last thing is they wanted a state-of-the-art disaster recovery which is also required by the local compliance laws in China where it doesn't matter where your business application is running they needed a copy of data on Prem so they evaluated all the different vendors market and clearly they chose Veritas as well as AWS to solve that business problem why why did they choose you guys yeah so you know obviously Veritas is number one in data protection 15 years in a row we got more than 50 thousand customers 96 percent of Fortune 100 trust their data with us but more importantly I think it's the partnership with AWS that really helped solve this problem and let me tell you how they did it I think that's important so the first thing they did is they launched an instance of net backup in AWS you know gone are the days where you're completely dependent on purpose-built appliance people are switching over to virtual appliance and they were able to do that by the partnership with Veritas and AWS so an instance in AWS leveraging s3 for the immediate server two days after the data they moved on s3 data over to s3 ia and eventually to glacier you know obviously Andy Jessee has been talking quite a bit in terms of increased throughput from s3 to glacier which is going to help this cause and then when you when you think about how customers are dealing with the transition to the cloud not everyone's ever going to move there all of their application to the cloud it's going to be a journey with time but what that creates in a customer environment is you got critical data in the cloud critical data on prem and they're looking at one data protection solution for both on prem and cloud and this is where Veritas net back really comes and that backup really comes in well I want to ask a little bit about that journey because as you said they don't have everything in the cloud so how has Veritas and any available AWS this sort of three-way partnership how are you how does that work I mean our user hand-holding them are you is it a co-creative process can you can you riff on that a little bit yeah sure so you know just like any of their lines we start off with the technical alliance we want to make sure that whatever use case that we're going to the market and all of those use cases are really coming from customers we understand customer challenges we work with different companies and cloud service providers in this case AWS to make sure that the solution that we take to the market is complete there's absolutely no hiccups we got professional services to help them to mitigate the risk factors and to considerations that most customers are thinking about one is costs another one is performance and thanks to net backup a IR or auto image replicator you know we are able to take a 2/3 of the network bandwidth out so you can achieve all of that performance with one third the network we got incredible deduplication ratio the storage cost as a result as 50 times less than what you would get and so back to the to consideration factor performance and cost we're able to do that in collaboration with AWS so I wonder we could talk about multi cloud or poly cloud as we sometimes call it so you can infer from listening to AWS that it really is better off having a one cloud strategy but as we know oh you say you talk to customers there's no one customer cloud strategy the customers are made up of there's like the government there's multiple constituencies in the company and shadow IT and so there's multi clouds you don't care whether it's one cloud a moment about you're there to protect it but I'm interested in what years you're seeing so what are you seeing and how are you because we we know it's not more than it's more than just one it's not just on Prem in one cloud how are you approaching that problem talk about customers and what their kind of roadmap looks like in their strategic plans and where you fit yeah so back to your point I don't think we'll ever see just one cloud the dependency on just one cloud is not happening we're seeing multiple clouds we're seeing hybrid clouds obviously you know Azure stack is coming up with their own version and so is AWS and in a customer's environment you are seeing that now there's also talks about are we going to see cloud to cloud movement cloud to cloud disaster recovery I am not seeing that at all I think the economics of cloud to cloud move over our failover is just too expensive so I think we're still seeing physical to cloud cloud back to physical and then one physical to another cloud I don't see a whole lot of cloud movement so where Veritas really comes in as our ability to provide that disaster recovery both from physical to physical protect your data in the same assured way on Prem as well as the cloud allowing you to leverage the cloud as a disaster recovery mechanism in fact I was having breakfast with Bell media this morning and they have two sides in Canada that they're using disaster recovery and they're wanting to leverage cloud and he's super excited about net backup eight one two cloud catalyst you know ability to leverage cloud as the disaster recovery and with our VRP was just Veritas resiliency platform to achieve that so a culmination of all of that hopefully answers their question absolutely and I think that's right on you had referenced earlier in your commentary Harish that you see some major changes coming for the software industry and we were we were talking to Jerry Chen the other day from Greylock in a really sharp former VMware now he's you know VC so he sees a lot of stuff and he put forth the premise that everything's changing in software development as a software company I wonder if you could you could comment that Amazon is essentially giving all these this tooling to create new software apps but as a software player how do you guys look at that how are you modernizing you know your platform and what do you see is the outcome yeah so you know it's interesting you talked about VSD in New York obviously and I spoke about it and when I talked about two things over there which was really ease of use and simplicity and and that's really where the customers are gravitating we have to make sure that any platform in the software industry has the 3.click to value mantra built in you can't be having the green screens anymore so Veritas has taken the same approach we're really looking at ease of use and simplicity and three clicks to value so that's a big trend you know I talked about AI and machine learning and deep learning you know gone are the days where everyone is reacting to something now it's all predictive analytics how do I garner more information so we're building AI and machine learning into our platform where if there's an outage we're going to tell you beforehand some of the reasons before or beforehand into some of the reasons behind it and that way you can address it and not be a subject to a reactive catastrophe so I think those are two big things that I'm seeing in the software-defined storage and the second thing is just an overall ecosystem right so it's not just about standalone value but how do you collaborate with the rest of the software providers to build a bigger and better solutions as an example our relationship with AWS is speaking very highly of that we're solving bigger and better problems as a result of this we just announced our alliance with pure storage with their data hub architecture we're able to do you know data protection with IOT s which is again another trend in the marketplace where we can share protect and collaborate with pure data as well well let's talk with the edge in terms of data protection for the edge how'd how does the edge IOT how does that affect customers data protection strategies and what's Veritas is angle there yeah so you know I mentioned this in in Microsoft ignite because Satya had mentioned this in his keynote saying that the edge computing there's a lot of proliferation around that and it's not just a compute fact because a lot of data has been generated in that too so how do you make sense of all of that data how do you which ones do you protect which ones do discard so Veritas has that solution which allows you to sift through all of that data figure out which one's important classify that and then help you provide data protection for the edge computing I'm thinking about yesterday's keynote with Andy Jesse a dizzying number of announcements of new products and services new innovations and it's and this is really de rigueur at an AWS reinvent is this is this pace sustainable I mean this this constant innovation I mean is that sustainable what are you you know it's interesting you asked me that question because it's the same concept of is Moore's lot going to be sustainable right so far we're seeing that it is and as a result you're seeing all these madness around innovation you know driverless cars and you know journey to the another planet in a I and and ml and full effect and all of this is going to reshape our future so far I'm not seeing any signs of slowing down as long as Moore's law is going to keep up with its multiplier effect I think we'll see better better lifestyle and more and more innovation just the amount of patents that we're seeing with new startups it's just off the charts so I'm a big proponent of innovation and I think this will this will continue going on well I think if I could comment I think Moore's Law in many ways was was one-dimensional I mean you had the doubling of you know performance every 18 months whatever it is now you have this multi-dimensional innovation combination Moore's Law fine but you've got data you've got machine intelligence applied to that data and you've got the cloud at scale so this you have this combinatorial effect that has multiplicative effects on innovation so that our argument is the curve is actually bending you know into a nonlinear and it's mind-boggling there's big pace of innovation you certainly see that here from from Amazon it seems to be accelerating and it's it's underscored by the number of announcements that this company is making others trying to keep pace them forcing their customers to keep pace it's him it actually feels like it's it's speeding up not decelerating without a doubt and I think it depends on the type of company you're talking about if you're a startup company you know and have any of the legacy things that you're talking about you're spending all of your IT spent on innovation you look at a classy IT spend equation 85% of it just to keep the lights on and less than 10% on innovation I think that is mind-boggling to me and that's why some of these new startups are constantly challenging you know fortune 500 companies whose lifespan used to be 65 years but now at 16 years and it's constantly getting down because of this effect as well and I think that's a great point if if you're stuck in that 85% technical debt world and you don't allocate enough for innovation yeah it's it's going to be problematic and so what we see is customers looking at it as a portfolio we got run the business we have grow the business we have transformed the business we're going to deliberately allocate cash to each of those and hopefully bet on the right things yeah not a doubt I mean look at the at the end of it as a result of all these different phenomenons that we're talking about it is good for consumers because they're looking at more and more options better technology and those sort of fierce competition is always good for everyone as consumers as well as enterprise great well Harish thank you so much for coming on the cables my pleasure I'm Rebekah night for DES Volante we will have more of the cubes the live coverage of AWS re-invent coming up in just a little bit [Music]

[Music] we're on welcome to the special cube conversation we're here with some breaking news we got some startup investment news here in the Q studios palo alto I'm John for your host here at Jerry Chen partnered Greylock and the CEO of rock said Venkat Venkat Rahmani welcome to the cube you guys announcing hot news today series a and seed and Series A funding 21 million dollars for your company congratulations thank you Roxette is a data company jerry great this is one of your nest you kept this secret forever it was John was really hard you know over the past two years every time I sat in this seat I'd say and one more thing you know I knew that part of the advantage was rocks I was a special company and we were waiting to announce it and that's right time so it's been about two and half years in the making I gotta give you credit Jerry I just want to say to everyone I try to get the secrets out of you so hard you are so strong and keeping a secret I said you got this hot startup this was two years ago yeah I think the probe from every different angle you can keep it secrets all the entrepreneurs out there Jerry Chen's your guide alright so congratulations let's talk about the startup so you guys got 21 million dollars how much was the seed round this is the series a the seed was three million dollars both Greylock and Sequoia participating and the series a was eighteen point five all right so other investors Jerry who else was in on this I just the two firms former beginning so we teamed up with their French from Sequoia and the seed round and then we over the course of a year and half like this is great we're super excited about the team bank had Andrew bhai belt we love the opportunity and so Mike for an office coin I said let's do this around together and we leaned in and we did it around alright so let's just get into the other side I'm gonna read your your about section of the press release roxette's visions to Korea to build the data-driven future provide a service search and analytics engine make it easy to go from data to applications essentially building a sequel layer on top of the cloud for massive data ingestion I want to jump into it but this is a hot area not a lot of people are doing this at the level you guys are now and what your vision is did this come from what's your background how did you get here did you wake up one Wednesday I'm gonna build this awesome contraction layer and build an operating system around data make this thing scalable how did it all start I think it all started from like just a realization that you know turning useful data to useful apps just requires lots of like hurdles right you have to first figure out what format the data is in you got to prepare the data you gotta find the right specialized you know data database or data management system to load it in and it often requires like weeks to months before useful data becomes useful apps right and finally you know after I you know my tenure at Facebook when I left the first thing I did was I was just talking you know talking to a lot of people with real-world companies and reload problems and I started walking away from moremore of them thinking that this is way too complex I think the the format in which a lot of the data is coming in is not the format in which traditional sequel based databases are optimized for and they were built for like transaction processing and analytical processing not for like real-time streams of data but there's JSON or you know you know parque or or any of these other formats that are very very popular and more and more data is getting produced by one set of applications and getting consumed by other applications but what we saw it was what is this how can we make it simpler why do we need all this complexity right what is a simple what is the most simple and most powerful system we can build and pulled in the hands of as many people as possible and so we very sort of naturally relate to developers and data scientists people who use code on data that's just like you know kind of like our past lives and when we thought about it well why don't we just index the data you know traditional databases were built when every byte mattered every byte of memory every byte on disk now in the cloud the economics are completely different right so when you rethink those things with fresh perspective what we said was like what if we just get all of this data index it in a format where we can directly run very very fast sequel on it how simple would the world be how much faster can people go from ideas to do experiments and experiments to production applications and how do we make it all faster also in the cloud right so that's really the genesis of it well the real inspiration came from actually talking to a lot of people with real-world problems and then figuring out what is the simplest most powerful thing we can build well I want to get to the whole complexity conversation cuz we were talking before we came on camera here about how complexity can kill and why and more complexity on top of more complexity I think there's a simplicity angle here that's interesting but I want to get back to your background of Facebook and I want to tell a story you've been there eight years but you were there during a very interesting time during that time in history Facebook was I think the first generation we've taught us on the cube all the time about how they had to build their own infrastructure at scale while they're scaling so they were literally blitzscaling as reid hoffman and would say and you guys do it the Greylock coverage unlike other companies at scale eBay Microsoft they had old-school one dotto Technology databases Facebook had to kind of you know break glass you know and build the DevOps out from generation one from scratch correct it was a fantastic experience I think when I started in 2007 Facebook had about 40 million monthly actives and I had the privilege of working with some of the best people and a lot of the problems we were very quickly around 2008 when I went and said hey I want to do some infrastructure stuff the mandate that was given to me and my team was we've been very good at taking open source software and customizing it to our needs what would infrastructure built by Facebook for Facebook look like and we then went into this journey that ended up being building the online data infrastructure at Facebook by the time I left the collectively these systems were surveying 5 plus billion requests per second across 25 plus geographical clusters and half a dozen data centers I think at that time and now there's more and the system continues to chug along so it was just a fantastic experience I think all the traditional ways of problem solving just would not work at that scale and when the user base was doubling early in the early days every four months every five months yeah and what's interesting you know you're young and here at the front lines but you're kind of the frog in boiling water and that's because you are you were at that time building the power DevOps equation automating scale growth everything's happening at once you guys were right there building it now fast forward today everyone who's got an enterprise it's it wants to get there they don't they're not Facebook they don't have this engineering staff they want to get scale they see the cloud clearly the value property has got clear visibility but the economics behind who they hire so they have all this data and they get more increasing amount of data they want to be like Facebook but can't be like Facebook so they have to build their own solutions and I think this is where a lot of the other vendors have to rebuild this cherry I want to ask you because you've been looking at a lot of investments you've seen that old guard kind of like recycled database solutions coming to the market you've seen some stuff in open source but nothing unique what was it about Roxette that when you first talk to them that but you saw that this is going to be vectoring into a trend that was going to be a perfect storm yeah I think you nailed it John historic when we have this new problems like how to use data the first thing trying to do you saw with the old technology Oh existing data warehouses akin databases okay that doesn't work and then the next thing you do is like okay you know through my investments in docker and B and the boards or a cloud aerosol firsthand you need kind of this rise of stateless apps but not stateless databases right and then I through the cloud area and a bunch of companies that I saw has an investor every pitch I saw for two or three years trying to solve this data and state problem the cloud dudes add more boxes right here's here's a box database or s3 let me solve it with like Oh another database elastic or Kafka or Mongo or you know Apache arrow and it just got like a mess because if almond Enterprise IT shop there's no way can I have the skill the developers to manage this like as Beckett like to call it Rube Goldberg machination of data pipelines and you know I first met Venkat three years ago and one of the conversations was you know complexity you can't solve complex with more complexity you can only solve complexity with simplicity and Roxette and the vision they had was the first company said you know what let's remove boxes and their design principle was not adding another boxes all a problem but how to remove boxes to solve this problem and you know he and I got along with that vision and excited from the beginning stood to leave the scene ah sure let's go back with you guys now I got the funding so use a couple stealth years to with three million which is good a small team and that goes a long way it certainly 2021 total 18 fresh money it's gonna help you guys build out the team and crank whatnot get that later but what did you guys do in the in those two years where are you now sequel obviously is lingua franca cool of sequel but all this data is doesn't need to be scheming up and built out so were you guys that now so since raising the seed I think we've done a lot of R&D I think we fundamentally believe traditional data management systems that have been ported over to run on cloud Williams does not make them cloud databases I think the cloud economics is fundamentally different I think we're bringing this just scratching the surface of what is possible the cloud economics is you know it's like a simple realization that whether you rent 100 CPUs for one minute or or one CPU 400 minutes it's cost you exactly the same so then if you really ask why is any of my query is slow right I think because your software sucks right so basically what I'm trying to say is if you can actually paralyze that and if you can really exploit the fluidity of the hardware it's not easy it's very very difficult very very challenging but it's possible I think it's not impossible and if you can actually build software ground-up natively in the cloud that simplifies a lot of this stuff and and understands the economics are different now and it's system software at the end of the day is how do I get the best you know performance and efficiency for the price being paid right and the you know really building you know that is really what I think took a lot of time for us we have built not only a ground-up indexing technique that can take raw data without knowing the shape of the data we can turn that and index it in ways and store them maybe in more than one way since for certain types of data and then also have built a distributed sequel engine that is cloud native built by ground up in the cloud and C++ and like really high performance you know technologies and we can actually run distributor sequel on this raw data very very fast my god and this is why I brought up your background on Facebook I think there's a parallel there from the ground this ground up kind of philosophy if you think of sequel as like a Google search results search you know keyword it's the keyword for machines in most database worlds that is the standard so you can just use that as your interface Christ and then you using the cloud goodness to optimize for more of the results crafty index is that right correct yes you can ask your question if your app if you know how to see you sequel you know how to use Roxette if you can frame your the question that you're asking in order to answer an API request it could be a micro service that you're building it could be a recommendation engine that you're that you're building or you could you could have recommendations you know trying to personalize it on top of real time data any of those kinds of applications where it's a it's a service that you're building an application you're building if you can represent ask a question in sequel we will make sure it's fast all right let's get into the how you guys see the application development market because the developers will other winners here end of the day so when we were covering the Hadoop ecosystem you know from the cloud era days and now the important work at the Claire merger that kind of consolidates that kind of open source pool the big complaint that we used to hear from practitioners was its time consuming Talent but we used to kind of get down and dirty the questions and ask people how they're using Hadoop and we had two answers we stood up Hadoop we were running Hadoop in our company and then that was one answer the other answer was we're using Hadoop for blank there was not a lot of those responses in other words there has to be a reason why you're using it not just standing it up and then the Hadoop had the problem of the world grew really fast who's gonna run it yeah management of it Nukem noose new things came in so became complex overnight it kind of had took on cat hair on it basically as we would say so how do you guys see your solution being used so how do you solve that what we're running Roxette oh okay that's great for what what did developers use Roxette for so there are two big personas that that we currently have as users right there are developers and data scientists people who program on data right - you know on one hand developers want to build applications that are making either an existing application better it could be a micro service that you know I want to personalize the recommendations they generated online I mean offline but it's served online but whether it is somebody you know asking shopping for cars on San Francisco was the shopping you know was the shopping for cars in Colorado we can't show the same recommendations based on how do we basically personalize it so personalization IOT these kinds of applications developers love that because often what what you need to do is you need to combine real-time streams coming in semi structured format with structured data and you have no no sequel type of systems that are very good at semi structured data but they don't give you joins they don't give you a full sequel and then traditional sequel systems are a little bit cumbersome if you think about it I new elasticsearch but you can do joins and much more complex correct exactly built for the cloud and with full feature sequel and joins that's how that's the best way to think about it and that's how developers you said on the other side because its sequel now all of a sudden did you know data scientist also loved it they had they want to run a lot of experiments they are the sitting on a lot of data they want to play with it run experiments test hypotheses before they say all right I got something here I found a pattern that I don't know I know I had before which is why when you go and try to stand up traditional database infrastructure they don't know how what indexes to build how do i optimize it so that I can ask you know interrogatory and all that complexity away from those people right from basically provisioning a sandbox if you will almost like a perpetual sandbox of data correct except it's server less so like you don't you never think about you know how many SSDs do I need how many RAM do I need how many hosts do I need what configure your programmable data yes exactly so you start so DevOps for data is finally the interview I've been waiting for I've been saying it for years when's is gonna be a data DevOps so this is kind of what you're thinking right exactly so you know you give us literally you you log in to rocks at you give us read permissions to battle your data sitting in any cloud and more and more data sources we're adding support every day and we will automatically cloudburst will automatically interested we will schematize the data and we will give you very very fast sequel over rest so if you know how to use REST API and if you know how to use sequel you'd literally need don't need to think about anything about Hardware anything about standing up any servers shards you know reindex and restarting none of that you just go from here is a bunch of data here are my questions here is the app I want to build you know like you should be bottleneck by your career and imagination not by what can my data employers give me through a use case real quick island anyway the Jarius more the structural and architectural questions around the marketplace take me through a use case I'm a developer what's the low-hanging fruit use case how would I engage with you guys yeah do I just you just ingest I just point data at you how do you see your market developing from the customer standpoint cool I'll take one concrete example from a from a developer right from somebody we're working with right now so they have right now offline recommendations right or every night they generate like if you're looking for this car or or this particular item in e-commerce these are the other things are related well they show the same thing if you're looking at let's say a car this is the five cars that are closely related this car and they show that no matter who's browsing well you might have clicked on blue cars the 17 out of 18 clicks you should be showing blue cars to them right you may be logging in from San Francisco I may be logging in from like Colorado we may be looking for different kinds of cars with different you know four-wheel drives and other options and whatnot there's so much information that's available that you can you're actually by personalizing it you're adding creating more value to your customer we make it very easy you know live stream all the click stream beta to rock set and you can join that with all the assets that you have whether it's product data user data past transaction history and now if you can represent the joins or whatever personalization that you want to find in real time as a sequel statement you can build that personalization engine on top of Roxanne this is one one category you're putting sequel code into the kind of the workflow of the code saying okay when someone gets down to these kinds of interactions this is the sequel query because it's a blue car kind of go down right so like tell me all the recent cars that this person liked what color is this and I want to like okay here's a set of candidate recommendations I have how do I start it what are the four five what are the top five I want to show and then on the data science use case there's a you know somebody building a market intelligence application they get a lot of third-party data sets it's periodic dumps of huge blocks of JSON they want to combine that with you know data that they have internally within the enterprise to see you know which customers are engaging with them who are the persons churning out what are they doing and they in the in the market and trying to bring they bring it all together how do you do that when you how do you join a sequel table with a with a JSON third party dumb and especially for coming and like in the real-time or periodic in a week or week month or one month literally you can you know what took this particular firm that we're working with this is an investment firm trying to do market intelligence it used age to run ad hoc scripts to turn all of this data into a useful Excel report and that used to take them three to four weeks and you know two people working on one person working part time they did the same thing in two days and Rock said I want to get to back to microservices in a minute and hold that thought I won't go to Jerry if you want to get to the business model question that landscape because micro services were all the world's going to Inc so competition business model I'll see you gets are funded so they said love the thing about monetization to my stay on the core value proposition in light of the red hat being bought by by IBM had a tweet out there kind of critical of the transactions just in terms of you know people talk about IBM's betting the company on RedHat Mike my tweet was don't get your reaction will and tie it to the visible here is that it seems like they're going to macro services not micro services and that the world is the stack is changing so when IBM sell out their stack you have old-school stack thinkers and then you have new-school stack thinkers where cloud completely changes the nature of the stack in this case this venture kind of is an indication that if you think differently the stack is not just a full stack this way it's this way in this way yeah as we've been saying on the queue for a couple of years so you get the old guard trying to get a position and open source all these things but the stacks changing these guys have the cloud out there as a tailwind which is a good thing how do you see the business model evolving do you guys talk about that in terms of you can hey just try to find your groove swing get customers don't worry about the monetization how many charging so how's that how do you guys talk about the business model is it specific and you guys have clear visibility on that what's the story on that I mean I think yeah I always tell Bank had this kind of three hurdles you know you have something worthwhile one well someone listen to your pitch right people are busy you like hey John you get pitched a hundred times a day by startups right will you take 30 seconds listen to it that's hurdle one her will to is we spend time hands on keyboards playing around with the code and step threes will they write you a check and I as a as a enter price offered investor in a former operator we don't overly folks in the revenue model now I think writing a check the biz model just means you're creating value and I think people write you checking screening value but you know the feedback I always give Venkat and the founders work but don't overthink pricing if the first 10 customers just create value like solve their problems make them love the product get them using it and then the monetization the actual specifics the business model you know we'll figure out down the line I mean it's a cloud service it's you know service tactically to many servers in that sentence but it's um it's to your point spore on the cloud the one that economists are good so if it works it's gonna be profitable yeah it's born the cloud multi-cloud right across whatever cloud I wanna be in it's it's the way application architects going right you don't you don't care about VMs you don't care about containers you just care about hey here's my data I just want to query it and in the past you us developer he had to make compromises if I wanted joins in sequel queries I had to use like postgrads if I won like document database and he's like Mongo if I wanted index how to use like elastic and so either one I had to pick one or two I had to use all three you know and and neither world was great and then all three of those products have different business models and with rocks head you actually don't need to make choices right yes this is classic Greylock investment you got sequoia same way go out get a position in the market don't overthink the revenue model you'll funded for grow the company let's scale a little bit and figure out that blitzscale moment I believe there's probably the ethos that you guys have here one thing I would add in the business model discussion is that we're not optimized to sell latte machines who are selling coffee by the cup right so like that's really what I mean we want to put it in the hands of as many people as possible and make sure we are useful to them right and I think that is what we're obsessed about where's the search is a good proxy I mean that's they did well that way and rocks it's free to get started right so right now they go to rocks calm get started for free and just start and play around with it yeah yeah I mean I think you guys hit the nail on the head on this whole kind of data addressability I've been talking about it for years making it part of the development process programming data whatever buzzword comes out of it I think the trend is it looks a lot like that depo DevOps ethos of automation scale you get to value quickly not over thinking it the value proposition and let it organically become part of the operation yeah I think we we the internal KPIs we track are like how many users and applications are using us on a daily and weekly basis this is what we obsess about I think we say like this is what excellence looks like and we pursue that the logos in the revenue would would you know would be a second-order effect yeah and it's could you build that core kernels this classic classic build up so I asked about the multi cloud you mention that earlier I want to get your thoughts on kubernetes obviously there's a lot of great projects going on and CN CF around is do and this new state problem that you're solving in rest you know stateless has been an easy solution VP is but API 2.0 is about state right so that's kind of happening now what's your view on kubernetes why is it going to be impactful if someone asked you you know at a party hey thank you why is what's all this kubernetes what party going yeah I mean all we do is talk about kubernetes and no operating systems yeah hand out candy last night know we're huge fans of communities and docker in fact in the entire rock set you know back-end is built on top of that so we run an AWS but with the inside that like we run or you know their entire infrastructure in one kubernetes cluster and you know that is something that I think is here to stay I think this is the the the programmability of it I think the DevOps automation that comes with kubernetes I think all of that is just like this is what people are going to start taking why is it why is it important in your mind the orchestration because of the statement what's the let's see why is it so important it's a lot of people are jazzed about it I've been you know what's what's the key thing I think I think it makes your entire infrastructure program all right I think it turns you know every aspect of you know for example yeah I'll take it I'll take a concrete example we wanted to build this infrastructure so that when somebody points that like it's a 10 terabytes of data we want to very quickly Auto scale that out and be able to grow this this cluster as quickly as possible and it's like this fluidity of the hardware that I'm talking about and it needs to happen or two levels it's one you know micro service that is ingesting all the data that needs to sort of burst out and also at the second level we need to be able to grow more more nodes that we we add to this cluster and so the programmability nature of this like just imagine without an abstraction like kubernetes and docker and containers and pods imagine doing this right you are building a you know a lots and lots of metrics and monitoring and you're trying to build the state machine of like what is my desired state in terms of server utilization and what is the observed state and everything is so ad hoc and very complicated and kubernetes makes this whole thing programmable so I think it's now a lot of the automation that we do in terms of called bursting and whatnot when I say clock you know it's something we do take advantage of that with respect to stateful services I think it's still early days so our our position on my partner it's a lot harder so our position on that is continue to use communities and continue to make things as stateless as possible and send your real-time streams to a service like Roxette not necessarily that pick something like that very separate state and keep it in a backhand that is very much suited to your micro service and the business logic that needs to live there continue should continue to live there but if you can take a very hard to scale stateful service split it into two and have some kind of an indexing system Roxette is one that you know we are proud of building and have your stateless communal application logic and continue to have that you know maybe use kubernetes scale it in lambdas you know for all we care but you can take something that is very hard to you know manage and scale today break it into the stateful part in the stateless part and the serval is back in like like Roxette will will sort of hopefully give you a huge boost in being able to go from you know an experiment to okay I'm gonna roll it out to a smaller you know set of audience to like I want to do a worldwide you know you can do all of that without having to worry about and think about the alternative if you did it the old way yeah yeah and that's like talent you'd need it would be a wired that's spaghetti everywhere so Jerry this is a kubernetes is really kind of a benefit off your your investment in docker you must be proud and that the industry has gone to a whole nother level because containers really enable all this correct yeah so that this is where this is an example where I think clouds gonna go to a whole nother level that no one's seen before these kinds of opportunities that you're investing in so I got to ask you directly as you're looking at them as a as a knowledgeable cloud guy as well as an investor cloud changes things how does that change how is cloud native and these kinds of new opportunities that have built from the ground up change a company's network network security application era formants because certainly this is a game changer so those are the three areas I see a lot of impact compute check storage check networking early days you know it's it's it's funny it gosh seems so long ago yet so briefly when you know I first talked five years ago when I first met mayor of Essen or docker and it was from beginning people like okay yes stateless applications but stateful container stateless apps and then for the next three or four years we saw a bunch of companies like how do I handle state in a docker based application and lots of stars have tried and is the wrong approach the right approach is what these guys have cracked just suffered the state from the application those are app stateless containers store your state on an indexing layer like rock set that's hopefully one of the better ways saw the problem but as you kind of under one problem and solve it with something like rock set to your point awesome like networking issue because all of a sudden like I think service mesh and like it's do and costs or kind of the technologies people talk about because as these micro services come up and down they're pretty dynamic and partially as a developer I don't want to care about that yeah right that's the value like a Roxanna service but still as they operate of the cloud or the IT person other side of the proverbial curtain I probably care security I matters because also India's flowing from multiple locations multiple destinations using all these API and then you have kind of compliance like you know GDP are making security and privacy super important right now so that's an area that we think a lot about as investors so can I program that into Roxette what about to build that in my nap app natively leveraging the Roxette abstraction checking what's the key learning feature it's just a I'd say I'm a prime agent Ariane gdpr hey you know what I got a website and social network out in London and Europe and I got this gdpr nightmare I don't we don't have a great answer for GDP are we are we're not a controller of the data right we're just a processor so I think for GDP are I think there is still the controller still has to do a lot of work to be compliant with GDP are I think the way we look at it is like we never forget that this ultimately is going to be adding value to enterprises so from day one we you can't store data and Roxette without encrypting it like it's just the on you know on by default the only way and all transit is all or HTTPS and SSL and so we never freaked out that we're building for enterprises and so we've baked in for enterprise customers if they can bring in their own custom encryption key and so everything will be encrypted the key never leaves their AWS account if it's a you know kms key support private VP ceilings like we have a plethora of you know security features so that the the control of the data is still with the data controller with this which is our customer but we will be the the processor and a lot of the time we can process it using their encryption keys if I'm gonna build a GDP our sleeves no security solution I would probably build on Roxette and some of the early developers take around rocks at our security companies that are trying to track we're all ideas coming and going so there the processor and then one of the companies we hope to enable with Roxette is another generation security and privacy companies that in the past had a hard time tracking all this data so I can build on top of rocks crack okay so you can built you can build security a gbbr solution on top rock set because rock set gives you the power to process all the data index all the data and then so one of the early developers you know stolen stealth is they looking at the data flows coming and go he's using them and they'll apply the context right they'll say oh this is your credit card the Social Security is your birthday excetera your favorite colors and they'll apply that but I think to your point it's game-changing like not just Roxette but all the stuff in cloud and as an investor we see a whole generation of new companies either a to make things better or B to solve this new category problems like pricing the cloud and I think the future is pretty bright for both great founders and investors because there's just a bunch of great new companies and it's building up from the ground up this is the thing I brought my mother's red hat IBM thing is that's not the answer at the root level I feel like right now I'd be on I I think's fastenings but it's almost like you're almost doubling down to your your comment on the old stack right it's almost a double down the old stack versus an aggressive bet on kind of what a cloud native stack will look like you know I wish both companies are great people I was doing the best and stuff do well with I think I'd like to do great with OpenStack but again their product company as the people that happen to contribute to open source I think was a great move for both companies but it doesn't mean that that's not we can't do well without a new stack doing well and I think you're gonna see this world where we have to your point oh these old stacks but then a category of new stack companies that are being born in the cloud they're just fun to watch it all it's all big all big investments that would be blitzscaling criteria all start out organically on a wave in a market that has problems yeah and that's growing so I think cloud native ground-up kind of clean sheet of paper that's the new you know I say you're just got a pic pick up you got to pick the right way if I'm oh it's gotta pick a big wave big wave is not a bad wave to be on right now and it's at the data way that's part of the cloud cracked and it's it's been growing bigger it's it's arguably bigger than IBM is bigger than Red Hat is bigger than most of the companies out there and I think that's the right way to bet on it so you're gonna pick the next way that's kind of cloud native-born the cloud infrastructure that is still early days and companies are writing that way we're gonna do well and so I'm pretty excited there's a lot of opportunities certainly this whole idea that you know this change is coming societal change you know what's going on mission based companies from whether it's the NGO to full scale or all the applications that the clouds can enable from data privacy your wearables or cars or health thing we're seeing it every single day I'm pretty sad if you took amazon's revenue and then edit edit and it's not revenue the whole ready you look at there a dybbuk loud revenue so there's like 20 billion run which you know Microsoft had bundles in a lot of their office stuff as well if you took amazon's customers to dinner in the marketplace and took their revenue there clearly would be never for sure if item binds by a long shot so they don't count that revenue and that's a big factor if you look at whoever can build these enabling markets right now there's gonna be a few few big ones I think coming on they're gonna do well so I think this is a good opportunity of gradual ations thank you thank you at 21 million dollars final question before we go what are you gonna spend it on we're gonna spend it on our go-to-market strategy and hiding amazing people as many as we can get good good answer didn't say launch party that I'm saying right yeah okay we're here Rex at SIA and Joe's Jerry Chen cube cube royalty number two all-time on our Keeble um nine list partner and Greylock guy states were coming in I'm Jeffrey thanks for watching this special cube conversation [Music]