>> Live from Anaheim, California It's the queue covering nutanix dot next twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Nutanix >> Welcome back, everyone to the Cubes Live coverage of Nutanix Next here in Anaheim, California I'm your host, Rebecca Night, along with my co host, John Furrier. We're joined by Pharma's Mahdavi. He is the senior group director Cadence Design Systems. Thank you so much for coming on the Cube. So tell our viewers a little bit about Kate, based in San Jose. Can't tell our viewers a little bit about your company Cadence Design Systems. >> So Cajuns has been a A company in the very essence about thirty years ago. So we make software to enable semiconductor companies to design test than billed chips. So most technique, you know, technology that you bought, you see, and the fries Electronics has some cadence solution. >> So you guys had a lot of legacy and you're talking about the nutanix relationship. >> So our journey with Nutanix started about three years ago. I'd actually explored Nutanix at a previous company. I've been with Cadence three and a half years. Eso liked it, but there was really no opportunity Teo do much At that time, the company was very new at the time. But I cadence, we identified some opportunities Teo to explore nutanix. And it's been a great experience so far Way actually are running a lot of our critical of business applications on nutanix. So we're all in. >> What was the door opener for? What was the door opener for you? You guys there? That cadence. What? Goddammit! >> The overall architecture look good in a presentation level s so it was worth exploring. But, you know, it's a new company. New architecture. Er you have to kind of going to it carefully. So it was a matter of identifying opportunities that were maybe not production, not super business critical to start. But as time goes on, you build confidence and you do more and more. So today we're using Nutanix. As I said for business applications were using your for VD I AA lot of ours End that stop. You know, instances are running on nutanix today. We use that as well because here zero so a lot of art shared services. You know, the n s active directory. Those sorts of services are running on his hands. So, you know, we're looking for more and more opportunities to expand it. >> So I always like to know how this actually helps you and your company. Do people do their jobs better, more quickly, more efficiently, more productively? Can you sort of walk us through what life was like before nutanix and what life is like now in terms of the staffing and the overhead and the >> star? So I would say there's a couple of different, you know, big benefits. One is we're in a cloud, uh, era, right? So a lot of companies are looking for work close to move to the public cloud, and we're no different. We're constantly looking for what? What makes sense and the public cloud. What makes sense on Prem? So from this support and skill sets, fan point is very important to be consistent. I basically have the same support model for both on Prima's well as public public cloud. So that's one big benefit that Nutanix offers because the same skill sets to support. Let's say eight lbs environment is the same as, you know, the nutanix support environment. Thie. Other critical thing is just like any ICTSI organization were challenged with limited resource is you know, doing more with less. So the ease of administration, ease of support, just inherent reliability of the technology allows our staff to, you know, sleep more at nights and, you know, work less often during the weekend. So the overalls support overhead has reduced significantly. So that's the those are the biggest things. I would say. >> Those are two very important things. >> Those are the two biggest things that way went into this, um, this engagement with But, you know, we're pleasantly surprised that performance is exceeded our expectations, you know? You know, I did expect reliability. I didn't quite expect this level of performance improvement, so that's been excellent. So again, we're looking for more and more opportunities to expand it. Just given that experience, he >> said, the staff sleeps well at night. How have they reacted? What if some other anecdotes from the staff freed more free time management playing? What's the most of what was some of the feedback from the from your team? >> Well, I mean, I don't want to give the wrong impression. It's not like they're not >> working. Yeah, I write >> the scenario, but, you know, I would say it's gone from, uh, crazy environments is something a little more humane, S O, I think not only with the staff just across the company. You have those who are who kind of buy in and go into it positively and others who are more reluctant. And that's no different the support staff. So I think just their own confidence level. And, you know, there, >> uh, a >> desire to do more with nutanix as increase as they had more experience with >> it. It's interesting. I did a panel yesterday with some customers from NUTANIX and was a mixed in a big bank, midsized company and and a good, big corporate kind of it. And it's very interesting. The legacy with was where there was more legacy. There was a lot of dependencies, and they were looking at time frames for pushing stuff out, like eight weeks to two months in two hours. So they went for eight weeks. Teo pushing any kind of rule propagation or any kind of new stuff. It weeks the two hours and that was a huge number. Are you Are you guys seeing anything around in terms of performance and group on the time side with Nutanix? What are some of the things that you're getting benefits wise operationally. >> Well, the more we do, the more cookie cutter it becomes. So you know, each migration is easier and faster and so on. And that also acid with confidence, right? The very first critical business application that we moved to Nutanix the level of testing we did was insane. Now it's less Oh, so for multiple reasons that migration experience is much more efficient much, much quicker today than it was early on. >> One of the things we hear to Rebecca was, you know, new channels. The new vendor you mentioned new company. They're ten years old, so still new relative to the bigger guys getting it pushed, getting it through, getting it approved by executive confidence from executive management around. Wait, was this new new company what's the benefits? All kinds of gyrations, of approvals and sometimes politics and, you know, legacy kind of factors in How does that work on your N? How did that go? Getting nutanix through was a struggle. That was The challenge was to take us through that. >> So as you mentioned the fact that it's new technology new company that has its own set of challenges from first, some application owners and executives. You know, why take the risk? Why not do the same thing we've done? You know, always, um so? So that that's one big big challenge. The other was There is a tendency, especially early on when NUTANIX was selling it as an appliance, as opposed to license on Lee. Um, there is a tendency to view it as a hardware solution, and it's exactly not that it's the exact opposite of that is purely a software solution. That's where the value is. So it's very easy to get chopped into that hardware discussion where people will kind of compare with servers and storage versus nutanix s. So you have to kind of change that mindset and show the real value that hyper convergence provides thes of administration, that high performance reliability and so on on DH. Then, as you make that argument and convince more people again, you have to, you know, start small and expand. But that that was some of the main challenges. I would say >> when you're talking about the migration experience and you said when we formed the first business critical application with it was a long time we tested it. We really worked at it. Now we have a bit more faith that it's that it's going to work out. But can you talk about some best practices that emerged in terms of how to migrate and my great well, that maybe other companies could learn from from Cadence Design System? >> Yeah, well, I would say the best practices aren't unique to unit nutanix. Any migration process has, you know, various phases in terms of planning, testing and so on. And I think just having that discipline well documented, consistent process so that you're not starting fresh every time there's a new migration initiative going on. But I think nutanix makes it easier just given the especially the prison management tool. But I would say it's not particularly unique to your tent. NUTANIX Torto organization just need to be well disciplined in immigration process. >> One of the things that you mentioned software, which is great point that cultural shifts, not a hardware box, and it's probably all the best practices around. Evaluating hardware software is becoming more and more central to it. How do you see it evolving because you got cloud right on the horizon. You got public cloud benefits. They are clear if you're greenfield yet legacy Stop. We have containers containing ization happening as a trend lift and shift versus, you know, evolved life cycle management of APS and workloads, or are now under a new kind of view with software that was changing and, you know, as a as a practitioner in the field. Now, do you look at the evolution of how it is going to change? >> So my side of the house is the infrastructure and operations side, and they tend to be historically kind of manual, you know, different network administrator, storage administrator, system administrations, the administrators that is all changing and all becoming more developer skill sets, scripting automation, things without sort. So I think that's the biggest changes going on in today is kind of changing the skill sets and kind of viewing it as a full stack as opposed to just stories. You're just network. So having that holistic view point having ability, too, develop automation that works across the stack. I think that those those are the changes that traditional infrastructure groups need. Thio adapted. >> While I was talking to a customer yesterday And he was a young young guy, was I think, in this late twenties I'm seeing myself. You know, ten years ago he was in high school or college. So you see a new generation coming up where they gravitate towards Dev ops, right? And so they get that so they don't have that dogma. What? We went with this vendor. So they kind of this new thinking, Any observations that you can share on this younger generation coming inside your new talent that's coming in. That's developer or what they like. What? What's the work style? What they gravitate to what some of the tools they like. That's the mindset. >> So I think they can teach us to be honest way have you know, the older folks like myself have a tendency to look at the way things have always been done. Right? So having the fresh viewpoint is great to kind of come into it with a dead body develops mentality, you know, off jump. But I think I which we should kind of welcome that and take advantage of that. Um you know, for cadence in General Wei are pretty mature company in terms of our personnel we don't have that rapid turnover person of, you know, our team members. So we're trying to actually, you know, we welcome that new talent, eh? So that we can kind of get that, uh, Dev officer mentality in house and kind of mature it ourselves. So we're in the beginning of that journey. >> How do you work together? Because, I mean, you're not that old first of all, but But this This is the time where we have multiple generations together working in the workforce, thes digital natives that we were talking about that and the people who get technology so innate Li grew up with it versus the Gen Xers. The boomers are still there. The gen y's that are emerging and graduating. Now, how is it a challenge at at Cadence to to get all these people working collaboratively productively together? >> Well, Katie, this is an extremely technical company. Uh, referred to our customers, you know, they're all double e, you know, Master's and doctorate engineers. So it's a very technical environment. We try not to really focus on the technology, actually, but to look at, you know, the business objectives, you know? What are we trying to achieve what problems that we're trying to solve. That supposed, Tio. Oh, here's a cool technology. How can we use it? You know, the mindset is a little bit different. We're looking at the business side first and then using technology to solve for those problems. So once you have that focus, regardless of your experience, your age, your background, you work together, you know, to to achieve that end goal. >> What you think about the show. We're here at NUTANIX next Anaheim. What's what's your verdict on so far? The content. Positioning your customer. What's next for you guys? Yeah, very loyal customer. Based on what we found. People love the product. What's next, Joe? >> I'm very impressed. I wasn't expecting it to be this large. You know, I went Teo Local smaller version that was in the area last year. That was pretty impressive, too. But this is amazing. I like it because, you know, I t leaders get sales calls all the time, and we kind of get bombarded. So Tennessee so ignore those. This kind of gives us a chance to at our own pace kind of see who the key partners are. Two new tenants look for opportunities and meet some of these other vendors s. So it's been both educational as well as kind of entertaining. >> Excellent. Well, thank you so much. Farmers for coming on the Q b really appreciated >> my pleasure to meet you. Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have much more of nutanix next here in Anaheim, coming up in just a little bit.

(upbeat music) >> Oracle is in the midst of an acceleration of its product cycles. It really has pushed new capabilities across its database, the database platforms, and of course the cloud in an effort to really maintain its position as the gold standard for cloud database. We've reported pretty extensively on Exadata, most recently the X9M that increased database IOPS and throughput. Organizations running mission critical OLTP, analytics and mix workloads tell us that they've seen meaningfully improved performance and lower costs, which you expect in a technology cycle. I often say if Oracle calls you out by name it's a compliment and it means you've succeeded. So just a couple of weeks ago, Oracle turned up the heat on MongoDB with a Mongo compatible API, in an effort to persuade developers to run applications in a autonomous database and on OCI, Oracle cloud infrastructure. There was a big emphasis by Oracle on acid compliance transactions and automatic scaling as well as access to multiple data types. This caught my attention because in the early days of no SQL, there was a lot of chatter from folks about not needing acid capability in the database anymore. Funny how that comes around. And anyway, you see Oracle investing, they spend money in R&D We've always said that`, they're protecting their moat. Now in social I've seen some criticisms like Oracle still is not adding enough new logos, and Oracle of course will dispute that and give you some examples. But to me what's most impressive is the big name customers that Oracle gets to talk in public. Deutsche Bank, Telephonic, Experian, FedEx, I mean dozens and dozens and dozens. I work with a lot of companies and the quality of the customers Oracle puts in front of analysts like myself is very very high. At the top of the list I would say. And they're big spending customers. And as we said many times when it comes to mission critical workloads, Oracle is the king. And one of the executives behind the success is a longtime Cube alum, Juan Loaiza who's executive vice president of mission critical technologies at Oracle. And we've invited him back on today to talk about some news and Oracle's latest developments and database, Juan welcome back to the show and thanks for coming on today and talking about today's announcement. >> I'm very happy to be here today with you. >> Okay, so what are you announcing and how does this help organizations particularly with those existing Exadata cloud at customer installations? >> Yeah, the big thing we're announcing is our very successful cloud at customer platform. We're extending the capabilities of our autonomous database running on it. And specifically we're allowing much smaller configurations so customers can start small and grow with our autonomous database on our cloud customer platform. >> So let's get into granularity a little bit and double click on this. Can you go over how customers, carve up VM clusters for different workloads? What's the tangible benefit to them? >> Yeah, so it's pretty straightforward. We deploy our Cloud@Customer system anywhere the customer wants it, let's say in their data center. And then through our cloud APIs and GUIs they can carve up into pieces into basically VMs. They can say, Hey, I want a VM with eight CPUs to do this, I want a VM with 20 CPUs to that, I want a 500 CPUVM to do something else. And that's what we call a VM cluster because in Cloud@Customer, it is a highly available environment. So you don't just get one VM, you get a cluster of highly available VMs. So you carve it up. You hand it out to different aspects of a company. You might have development on one, testing on another one, some production sales on one VM, marketing on a different VM. And then you run your databases in there and that's kind of how it works and it's all done completely through our GUI and it's very, very simple 'cause they use it the same cloud APIs and GUIs that we use in the public cloud. It is the same APIs and GUIs that we use in the public cloud. >> Yeah, I was going to say sounds like cloud. So what about prerequisites? What do customers have to do to take advantage of the new capabilities? Can they run it on an Exadata cloud a customer that they installed a couple years ago? Do they have to upgrade the hardware? What migration pain is involved? >> Yeah, there's no pain, so it's just, (coughs) excuse me. I can take their existing system, they get our free software update and they can just deploy autonomous database as a VM in their existing Exadata cloud system. >> Oh nice okay what's the bottom line dollars? Our audience are always interested in cutting costs. It's one of the reasons they're moving to the cloud for example. So how does autonomous database on VM clusters, on Exadata Cloud at Customer? How does it help cut their cost? >> Well, it's pretty straightforward. So previous to this a customer would have to have dedicated a system to either autonomous database or to non autonomous data. So you have to choose one together. So on a system by system basis, you chose I want this thing autonomous, or I don't want it autonomous. Now you carve in the VMs and say for this VM I want that autonomous for that VM I want to run a regular database managed database on there. So lets customers now start small with any size they want. They could start with two CPUs and run an autonomous database and that's all they pay for is the two CPUs that they use. >> Let's talk a little about traction. I mean, I remember we covered the original Exadata announcement quite a long time ago and it's obviously evolved and taken many forms. Look, it's hard to argue that it hasn't been a big success. It has for Oracle and your target customers. Does this announcement make Exadata cloud a customer more attractive for smaller companies. In other words, does it expand the team for ADB? And if so, how? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean our Exadata cloud platform is extremely successful. We have thousands of deployments, we have on our data platform we have about almost 90% of the global fortune 100 and thousands of smaller customers. In the cloud we have now up to 40% of the global 100 a hundred biggest companies in the world running on that. So it's been extremely successful platform and cloud a customer is super key. A lot of customers can't move their data to the public cloud. So we bring the public cloud to them with our cloud customer offering. And so that's the big customer is the fortune hundred but we have thousands of smaller customers also. And the nice thing about this offering is we can start with literally two CPUs. So we can be a very small customer and still run our autonomous data based on our cloud customer platform. >> Well, everybody cares about security and governance. I mean, especially the big guys, but the little guys that in many ways as well they want the capabilities of the large companies but they can't necessarily afford it. So I want to talk about security in particular governance and it's especially important for mission-critical apps. So how does this all change the security in governance paradigm? What do customers need to know there? >> Yeah, so the beauty of autonomous database which is the thing that we're talking about today is Oracle deals with all the security. So the OS, the hardware, firmware, VMs, the database itself all the interfaces to the VM, to the database all that is it's all done by Oracle. So, which is incredibly important because there's a constant stream of security alerts that are coming out and it's very difficult for customers to keep up with this stuff. I mean, it's hard for us and we have thousands of engineers. And so we take that whole burden away from customers. And you just don't have to think about it, we deal with it. So once you deploy an autonomous database it is always secure because anytime a security alert comes out, we will apply that and we do it in an online fashion also. So it's really, particularly for smaller customers it's even harder because to keep up with all the security that you you need a giant team of security experts and even the biggest customers struggle with that and a small customer's going to really struggle. There's just two, you have to look at the entire stack, all the different components switches, firmware, OS, VMs, database, everything. It's just very difficult to keep up. So we do it all and for small cut, they just can't do it. So really they really need to partner with a company like Oracle that has thousands of engineers that can keep up with this stuff. >> It's true what you say, even large customers this CSOs will tell you that lack of talent, lack of skill sets. They just don't have enough people and so even the big guys can't keep up. Okay, I want you to pitch me as though I'm a developer, which I'm not, but we got a lot of developers in our community. We'll be Cube con next month in Valencia, sell me on why a developer should lean into ADB on Exadata cloud as a customer? >> Yeah, it's very straightforward. So Oracle has the most advanced database in the industry and that's widely recognized by database analysts and experts in the field. Traditionally, it's been hard for a developer to use it because it's been hard to manage. It's been hard to set up, install, configure, patch, back up all that kind of stuff. Autonomous database does it all for you. So as a developer, you can just go into our console, click on creating a database. We ask you four questions, how big, how many CPUs how much storage and say, give your password. And within minutes you have a database. And at that point you can go crazy and just develop. And you don't have to worry about managing the database, patching the database, maintaining the security and the database backing up to all that stuff. You can instantly scale it. You can say, Hey, I want to grow it, you just click a button, take, grow it to much any size you want and you get all the mission critical capabilities. So it works for tiny databases but it is a stock exchange quality in terms of performance, availability, security it's a rock solid database that's super trivial. So what used to be a very complex thing is now completely trivial for a developer. So they get the best of both worlds, they get everything on the database side and it it's trivial for them to use. >> Wow, if you're doing all that stuff for 'em are they going to do on their weekends? Code? (chuckles) >> They should be developing their application and add value to their company that's kind of what they should focus on. And they can be looking at all sorts of new technologies like JSON and the database machine learning in the database graph in the database. So you can build very sophisticated applications because you don't have to worry about the database anymore. >> All right, let's talk about the competition. So it's always a topic I like to bring up with you. From a competitive perspective how is this latest and instantiation of Exadata cloud a customer X9M how's this different from running an AWS database service for instance on outpost, or let's say I want to run SQL server on Azure Stack or whatever Microsoft's calling it these days. Give us the competitive angle here. >> Yeah, there kind of is no real competition. So both Amazon and Microsoft have an at customer solution but they're very primitive. I mean, just to give you an example like Amazon doesn't run any of their premier database offerings at customers. So whether it's Aurora Redshift, doesn't run just plane does not run. It's not that it runs badly or it's got limited, just does not run. They can't run Oracle RDS on premise and same thing with Microsoft. They can't run Azure SQL, which is their premier database on their act customer platform. So that kind of tells you how limited that platform is when even their own premier offerings doesn't run on it. In contrast, we're running Exadata with our premier autonomous database. So it's our premier platform that's in use today by most of the biggest, banks, telecom to retailers et cetera in the world, thousands of smaller customers. So it's super mission critical, super proven with our premier cloud database, which is autonomous theory. So it couldn't be more black and white, this is a case where it's there really is no competition in the cloud of customer space on the database side. >> Okay, but let me follow up on that, Juan, if I may, so, okay. So it took you guys a while to get to the cloud, it's taken them a while to figure it on-prem. I mean, aren't they going to eventually sort of get there? What gives you confidence that you'll be able to to keep ahead? >> Well, there's two things, right? One is we've been doing this for a long time. I mean, that's what Oracle initially started as an on-prem and our Exadata platform has been available for over a decade. And we have a ton of experience on this. We run the biggest banks in the world already, it's not some hope for the future. This is what runs today. And our focus has always been a combination of cloud and on-prem their heart's not really in the on-prem stuff they really like. Amazon's really a public cloud only vendor and you can see from the result, it's not you can say, they can say whatever they want but you can see the results. Their outpost platform has been available for several years now and it still doesn't even run their own products. So you can kind of see how hard they're trying and how much they really care about this market. >> All right, boil it down if you just had a few things that you'd tell someone about why they should run ADB on Exadata cloud at customer, what would you say? >> It's pretty simple, which is it's the world's most sophisticated database made completely simple, that's it? So you get a stock exchange level database, you can start really small and grow and it's completely trivial to run because Oracle is automated everything within our autonomous data we use machine learning and a lot of automation to automate everything around the database. So it's kind of the best of both worlds. The best possible database starts as small as you want and is the simplest database in the world. >> So I probably should have asked you this while I was pushing the competitive question but this may be my last question, I promise. It's the age old debate It rages on, you got specialized databases kind of a right tool for the right job approach. That's clearly where Amazon is headed or what Oracle refers to is converge database. Oracle says its approach is more complete and "simpler." Take us through your thinking on this and the latest positioning so the audience can understand it a bit better. >> Yeah, so apps aren't what they used to business apps, data driven apps aren't what they used to be. They used to be kind of green screens where you just entered data. Now everyone's a very sophisticated app, they want to be have location, they want to have maps, they want to have graph in there. They want to have machine learning, they want machine learning built into the app. So they want JSON they want text, they want text search. So all these capabilities are what a modern app has to support. And so what Oracle's done is we provided a single solution that provides everything you need to build a modern app and it's all integrated together. It's all transactional. You have analytics built into the same thing. You have reporting built into the same thing. So it has everything you need to build a modern app. In contrast, what most of our competitors do is they give you these little solutions, say, okay here you do machine learning over here, you do analytics over there, you do JSON over here, you do spatial over here you do graph over there. And then it's left a developer to put an app together from all these pieces. So it's like getting the pieces of a card and having to assemble it yourself and then maintain it for the rest of your life, which is the even harder part. So one part upgrades, you got to test that. So of other piece upgrade or changes, you got to test that, you got to deal with all the security problems of all these different systems. You have to convert the data, you have to move the data back and forth it's extraordinarily complicated. Our converge database, the data sits in one place and all the algorithms come to the data. It's very simple, it is dramatically simpler. And then autonomous database is what makes managing it trivial. You don't really have to manage anything more because Oracle's automated the whole thing. >> So, Juan, we got a pretty good Cadence going here. I mean I really appreciate you coming on and giving us these little video exclusives. You can tell by again, that Cadence how frequently you guys are making new announcements. So that's great, congrats on yet another announcement. Thanks for coming back in the program appreciate it. >> Yeah, of course we invest heavily in data management. That's our core and we will continue to do that. I mean, we're investing billions of dollars a year and we intend to stay the leaders in this market. >> Great stuff and thank you for watching the Cube, your leader in enterprise tech coverage, this is Dave Vellante we'll see you next time.

>>Welcome everyone. I'm Dave Nicholson with the cube. This is a special Q conversation. That is part of the AWS startup showcase. Season two. Got a very interesting conversation on deck with Steve Francis who joins us from Instaclustr. Steve is the chief revenue officer and executive vice president for go-to-market operations for Insta cluster. Steve, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you, Dave. Good to be here. >>It looks like you're on a, uh, you're you're you're coming to us from an exotic locale. Or do you just like to have a nautical theme in your office? >>No, I'm actually on my boat. I have lots of kids at home and, uh, it can be very noisy. So, uh, we call this our apartment in the city and sometimes when we need a quiet place, this, this does nicely >>Well, fantastic. Well, let's, let's talk about Instaclustr. Um, first give us, give us a primmer on Instaclustr and, uh, and what you guys do. And then let's double click on that and go into some of the details. >>Sure. So in sip cluster, we offer a SAS platform for data layer, open source technologies. And what those technologies have in common is they scale massively. We re curate technologies that are capable of massive scale. So people use them to solve big problems typically. And so in addition to SAS offerings for those open source projects where people can provision themselves clusters in minutes, um, we also offer support for all of the technologies that we offer on our SAS platform. We offer our customer support contracts as well. And then we have a consulting team, a global consulting team who are expert in all of those open source projects that can help with implementations that can help with design health checks, uh, you name it. So most of what they do is kind of short term expert engagements, but we've also done longer-term projects with them as well. >>So your business model is to be a SAS provider as opposed to an alternative, which would be to, uh, provide what's referred to as, uh, open core software. Is that, is that right? >>Yeah, that's exactly right. So you, so when, when our customers have an interest in using community open source, we're the right partner for them. And so, you know, really what that means is if they, whether it's our SAS platform, if, if they want the flexibility to say, we want to take that workload off of your SAS platform, maybe at some point operated ourselves because we're not throwing a bunch of PROPRICER proprietary stuff in there. They have the flexibility to do that. So they always have an exit ramp without being locked in and with our support customers, of course, it's very easy. What we support is both the open source project. And if there's a gap in that open source project, what we'll do is rather than create a proprietary piece of software to close the gap, we'll source something from the community and we'll support that. Or if it, or if something does not exist in the community, in many cases, we'll write it ourselves and open source it and then, and then support it. >>Yeah, it's interesting. Uh, supposedly Henry Ford made a comment once that if you ask customers what they want, they'll tell you they want a faster horse, uh, but he was inventing the automobile and some people have, have likened open core to sort of the faster mechanical horse version of open source where you're essentially substituting an old school legacy vendor for a new school vendor. That's wrapping their own proprietary stuff around a delicious core of open source, but it sort of diminishes the value proposition of open source. It sounds like that's, that's the philosophy that you have adopted at this point. That's >>I love that story. I haven't heard that before. One that I like, uh, you know, matching metaphor for metaphor, uh, is, uh, the, um, is the Luddites, right? You know, the Luddites didn't want to lose their weaving jobs. And so they would smash weeding looms and, um, you know, to, to protect their reading jobs. And I think it's the same thing with the open core model they're protecting, uh, you know, they're creating fear, uncertainty and doubt about open, open sourcing. Oh, it isn't secure. And, you know, the, those, those arguments have been used for 15 years or 20 years. And, you know, maybe 15 years ago there were some truth to it. But when you look at who is using open source community open source now for huge projects, you know, if you just do a search for Apache coffee users and go to the Apache Apache website, you know, it's kind of the who's who in big business, and these are people using community open source. And so, um, a lot of the fear and uncertainty and doubt is still used, and it's just, you know, it's just kind of hanging on to a business model that isn't really it's for the benefit of the, of the vendor and not the benefit of the customer. >>Well, so I can imagine being a customer and realizing several years into an open core journey that I basically painted myself into a similar corner that I was in before. Um, and so I can see where that, you know, that can be something that is a realization that, that creeps up over time from a customer perspective, but from your business model perspective, um, if I'm understanding correctly, your, when you scale, you're scaling the ability to, um, take over operations for our customer, uh, that, that some level, I'm sure you've got automation involved in this. Uh, but at some level you've got to scale in terms of really smart people, um, has that limited your ability to scale. So first talk about what have the results been. You guys we've been covering you since 2018. What have your results been over time and has that sort of limited that that limit to your scalability, uh, been an issue at all. >>It's hard to find people, uh, it's hard, it's hard for our customers to find people and it's hard for us to find people. So we have an advantage for two reasons. Number one, we have a really good process for hiring people, hiring graduates, recent computer science graduates typically, and then getting them trained up and productive on our platform and within a pretty short timeframe of three or four months. And, um, you know, so we we've, we've, uh, we have a really well-proven process to do that. And then the other thing that you've already alluded to is automation, right? There's a ton of automation built into our platform. So we have a big cost advantage over our customers. So, you know, our, our customers, you know, if they want to go hire a seasoned, you know, Kafka person or PostGrest personal work, a person, these people are incredibly expensive in the market, but for us, we can get those people for relatively less expensive. And then with the automation that we have built into our platform to do all the operational tasks and handle all the operational burdens on those different open source projects, it's a lot of it's automated. And so, uh, you know, where one of our experts can use, you know, the number of workloads that they can operate is usually, you know, many times more than what someone could do without all of the operational capability or all the automated capabilities that we have. >>So what has your, what is your plan for scaling the business look like into the future? Is it a additional investment in those core operators? Uh, are you looking at, uh, uh, expansion, geographically acquisition? What, what can you share with us? >>We've done some acquisition. We added a Postgres capability. We recently added a last, further Alaska search capability and really buttressed our capabilities there. I think we'll do more of that. And, um, we, we will continue to add technologies that we find interesting and, and federal model, usually what we look for technologies that are pretty popular. They're used to solve big problems and they're complicated to manage, right? If something's easy to manage, people are less likely to perceive our value to be that great. So we look for things that, um, you know, are we kind of take the biggest areas, gnarliest, um, open-source projects for people to manage, and we handle the heavy lifting. >>Well, can you give me an example of something like that? You don't have to, you don't have to share a customer name if you don't, if it's not appropriate, but give us a, give us an example of, of Instaclustr inaction pretend I'm the customer. And, uh, and, uh, you know, you mentioned elastic search. Let's say that, let's say that that is absolutely something that's involved. And I have a choice between some open, open core solution and throwing my people at it to manage it, uh, and, and, and operate at the data layer, uh, versus what you would do. What does that interaction look like? How do, how does the process, >>Um, so one thing that we hear from elastic search customers a lot is, uh, their customers, some of them are unhappy. And what they'll tell us is look, when we get an operational problem with Alaska search, we go to Alaska search. And the answer we get from them is we gotta buy, you know, you gotta buy more stuff, you got to add more nodes, and they're in the business of, uh, you know, that's, that's our business. And, uh, you know, they do have a SAS offering, but, um, you know, they're, they're also in the business of selling software. And so when those customers, those same customers come to us, our answer is often, well, Hey, we can help you optimize your environment. And, you know, a lot of times when we onboard people into our platform, they'll achieve cost savings because maybe they weren't on the cloud. Maybe they weren't completely optimized there. And, um, you know, we want to make sure that they get a good operational experience and that's how we felt lock customers in, right. We don't lock them in with code. We make sure that they have a positive experience that we take a lot of that operational stuff off their hands. And so there's just a good natural alignment between what we want to provide that customer and what they ultimately want to consume. Uh, you know, that, that alignment I think is, is uniquely high within our business. >>Well, so how, how have things changed just in the last several years? Obviously, I mean, you know, the, the pandemic has, has affected everything in, in one way or another, but, but in terms of things that live at the data layer being important, um, I mean, just in the last three or four years, the talk of various messaging interfaces and databases has shifted to a degree. Um, what do you see on the horizon? What's, what's, what's, what's getting buzz that maybe didn't get buzz a year ago. What, what, what are you looking for as well? If you're out looking for people with skill sets right now, what are those skill sets you're hiring to? >>I don't hire engineers, right. I run the go to market organization. I hire marketers, salespeople, consultants, but, uh, so it's probably different. I'm maybe not the best person to ask from an engineering standpoint, but, uh, your question about the data layer, um, and how, you know, that's evolving trends that we see it's becoming increasingly strategic. You know, every, there's a couple of buzzwords out there that, you know, for years now, people have been talking about, um, modernization, digital transformation, stuff like that, but, you know, there's, there's a lot to it like digital, you know, every business kind of needs to become a digital business. And as that happens, the amount of data that's produced is, is just as mushrooming, right. You know, the amount of data on the planet doubles about every two years. And so for a lot of applications for a lot of enterprise mission-critical applications, data is the most expensive layer of the application. >>You know, much more expensive than delivering a front end, much more expensive than delivering a military when you just, when you factor in storage, um, uh, just the kind of moving data in and out, you know, data transfer fees, the cost of engineering resources that it's, it's incredibly expensive. So data layers are becoming strategic because organizations are looking at it and realizing, you know, the amount that they're spending on this is eye-popping. And so that's why it's becoming strategic. It's on the radar, just due to the, uh, the size of bills that organizations are looking at. Um, and we could drive those bills down. You know, our value proposition is really simpler. It's a better, faster, cheaper, and we eliminate the license fees. We can, you know, we are operational experts, so we can get people architected in the cloud more efficiently, and probably about a third of the time we save our customers cloud fees. Um, so it's, you know, it's a pretty simple model that some of those things that are strategically more, or are there, sorry, traditionally more tactical or becoming strategic, just because of the scope and scale of them. >>We, uh, we're having this conversation as part of the AWS startup showcase, which basically means that AWS said, Hey, Silicon angle, have your cube guys go talk to these people because we think they're cool. So, um, so why, why, why do they think you're cool? Are you a wholly owned subsidiary of AWS? Did you, did you and your family, uh, uh, exceed the 300 order, uh, Amazon threshold last year? Y what's your relationship with Amazon? >>I bought an elf on the shelf from, I don't know, I don't know why. Um, you know, we're, we're growing fast and we're, we're growing north of 50% last year in 21 and closer to 60%. Um, you know, we certainly, I think, uh, when our customers sign up for our services, you know, Amazon gets more workloads. That's, that's probably a positive thing for Amazon. Um, we're certainly not, you know, there's much, much, much bigger vendors and partners than us that they have, but, uh, but you know, they're, I think they're aware that there's, there's some, some of the smaller vendors like us will grow up to be, you know, the, you know, the bigger vendors of tomorrow. Um, but they've kind of, they've been a great partner. You know, we, we support multiple, we do support multiple clouds, and Amazon's cool with that. You know, we support GCP, we support Azure and kind of give our customers the choice of what clouds they want to run on. Uh, most of our customers do run an Amazon that seems to be sort of a defacto standard, but, um, they haven't been a great partner, >>But, but AWS, it's not a dependency. Uh, if you're, if you're working within the cluster, it doesn't mean that you must be in AWS. >>Nope. We can support customers. Uh, that's a great question. So we can support customers and multiple clouds, and we even support them on prem, right? If they, if organizations that have their own data center, we actually have an on-premise managed service offering. And if that's not a fit, we even have, um, we can offer support contracts, like if they want to do it themselves and do a lot of the heavy lifting and just need sort of a red phone for emergency situations. Uh, we offer 24 by 7, 365 support with 20 minutes service levels for urgent issues. >>So your chief revenue officer, that means that you write the code that runs operations in your system. I'm not smiling, but I'm at, but I'm, but I am actually joking. So that's what the dry sense of humor. Uh, but, but, but seriously, let's talk about the business end of this, right? We have, uh, we have a lot of folks who, uh, who tuned into the queue because of the technology aspect of it, but let's talk about your, your growth trajectory over time. Um, uh, this isn't a drill down. I'm not asking for your, your pipeline, Steve, but, uh, but, but, you know, give us an idea of what that trajectory has looked like. Um, what's going on. >>Yeah. I mean the most recent year, you know, we're, we're getting, uh, to be, um, I, I don't know what I'm permitted to share expect, but I, you know, we've, we've had a lot of growth, you know, if we've won a couple, a couple of hundred percent, our revenue has in the amount of time that I've been here, which is three years, and we're the point now, or pretty good size. Uh, and that gives us, uh, it's cool. It's exciting. You know, we're, we're noticing in the market is people who traded two years ago. People, no one knew who we were. And now we're beginning to talk to some partners, some resellers, some customers, and they will say things like, oh yeah, we've heard of you. We didn't know what you did, but we've heard of you. And, you know, that's, that's fun. That's a great place to be. Uh, you know, it becomes a little bit self-sustaining at that point. And, um, we, you know, we are about to launch, I, it's not a secret because this isn't public preview. So I think >>Was there, I noticed the pause where you're like, can I say this or not? Go ahead and say, go ahead and say, >>Really we, uh, I was trying to think, wait, am I revealing anything here? I shouldn't. But, uh, we did just go public preview, uh, probably a month ago with a project called Aiden's, uh, cadence workflow. Uh, you can actually, um, go to the Instaclustr website and look up cadence. Um, it's run their homepage, or you can, if you want to go to the open source project itself, you can go to cadence, workflow.io. Uh, this is a project that's trending pretty highly on Google. It's got a lot of important movers in the technology business that are using it and having a lot of success with it. Uh, and we're going to be first to market globally with a SAS offering for cadence, port flop. And, um, it's an incredibly exciting project. And it's exciting for us to specifically, because it's a little different, right? It's not, it's a middle tier project that is targeted at developers to increase developer productivity and developer velocity. >>Um, you joked about my being a CRO writing code, but I actually used to be a coder long time ago. I was not very good at it, but what I did enough of it to remember that a lot of what I did as a coder was right. Plumbing code, you know, rather than writing that code that makes the business application function a huge amount of my time as a developer was spent writing, you know, just the plumbing code to make things work and to make it secure and to make a transactional and just all that, you know, kind of nitty gritty code that you gotta do in a nutshell, cadence makes writing that code way easier. So especially for distributed applications that have workflow like capabilities requirements, uh, it's a massive productivity and PR increaser. So it's cool. Exciting for us is now we can, rather than just target data operators, we can actually target developers and engage, not just at the data layer, but kind of at that middle tier as well, and begin to, uh, identify and, um, uh, synergies between the different services that we have and, and our customers will obviously benefit from that. >>So that's a big part of our growth strategy. >>Yeah. So more, more on from a business perspective and a go to market perspective. Um, what is your, what is your go to market strategy or, uh, do you have, do you have a channel strategy? Are you working with partners? >>He is pretty nascent. You know, our go to market strategy for the most part has been, you know, we, uh, pay the Google gods and, and lots of people come to our website and say, they want to talk to us. You know, we talked to them and we get them signed up with, uh, uh, on our, our, our SAS platform or with a support contract or with our consulting team. Um, we also do outbound, you know, we do, we have an inside sales team that does outbound prospecting and we have, um, and we also have some self-service. We have some, some self service customers as well that just, you know, anyone can go to our website, swipe a credit card, sign up for one of our SAS offering and begin, literally get fired up in minutes and PR and using the platform. Uh, so, you know, it's a bit of a mix of high touch, low touch, I think are, you know, we have tons of big logos. >>We know lots and lots of our customers are household name, really big organizations solving big problems. And, um, that's kind of where the bulk of our businesses. And so I think we've been a little more focused there and go to market than we have sort of a know startup selling to startups and the people that just from super developer focused, wanting low touch. So, but I think we need to do better at that part of the market. And we are investing some resources there so that, you know, we're not so lopsided at the high end of the market. We want kind of a, more of a balanced approach because, you know, some of those, some of those, um, younger companies are going to grow up to be big massively successful companies. We've had that, you know, door dash is a tough class, has been a customer of ours for years, and they were not nearly, you know, we, there were a prepayment, there were custom bars, pre pandemic, and we all know what happened to them, uh, during the pandemic. And so, you know, we know there's other door dashes out there. >>Yeah. Yeah. Uh, uh, final question, geography, uh, you guys global. I, uh, I know you're in north America, but, um, what, what, what does that look like for you? Where are you at? >>We're super global. So, you know, in my go-to-market organization, we have sellers in, um, uh, AsiaPac and Europe, you know, multiple in Asia, multiple in Europe, uh, you know, lots of lots in the, in the states, uh, same with marketing, uh, same with engineering, same with our tech ops delivery team. We have most of them, uh, in Australia, which is where we were founded. Uh, but we also have a pretty good sized team, uh, out of Boston and, um, kind of a nascent team, uh, in India as well, to help to tell it, to help them out. So yeah, very much global and, um, you know, getting close to 300 employees, um, you know, when I started, I think we're about 85 to 90, >>That's it, that's an exciting growth trajectory. And, uh, I'm just going to assume, because it just feels awesome to assume it that since you're on a boat and since you were founded in Australia, that that's how you go back and forth to, uh, to visit the most. >>Yeah. Yeah. It takes a while. It takes a while. >>So with that, Steve, I want to say a smooth sailing and, uh, and, uh, thanks for joining us here on the cube. I'm Dave Nicholson. Uh, this has been part of the AWS startup showcase my conversation with Steve Francis of Instaclustr again. Thanks Steve. Stay tuned. >>Thanks very much to you, >>Your source for hybrid tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to this "CUBE" conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE", Here in Palo Alto, California, beginning in 2022, kicking off the new year with a great conversation. We're with folks from down under, two co-founders of Instaclustr. Peter Lilley, CEO, Ben Bromhead, the CTO, Intaclustr success. 'Cause he's been on "theCUBE" before, 2018 at Amazon re:Invent. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on "theCUBE". Thanks for piping in from Down Under into Palo Alto. >> Thanks, John, it's really good to be here, I'm looking forward to the conversation. >> So, I love the name, Instaclustr. It conjures up cloud, cloud scale, modern application, server list. It just gives me a feel of things coming together. Spin me up a cluster of these kinds of feelings. The cloud is here, open sources is growing, that's what you guys are in the middle of. Take a minute to explain what you guys do real quick and this open source cloud intersection that's just going supernova right now. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Instaclustr is on a mission to really enable the world's ambitions to use open source technology. And we do that specifically at the data layer. And we primarily do that through what we call our platform offering. And think of it as the way to make it super easy, super scalable, super reliable way to adopt open source technologies at the data layer, to build cutting edge applications in the cloud. Today used by customers all over the world. We started the business in Australia but we've very quickly become a global business. But we are the business that sits behind some of the most successful brands that are building massively scalable cloud based applications. And you did right. We sit at a real intersection of kind of four things. One is open source adoption which is an incredibly powerful journey and wave that's driving the future direction of IT. You've got managed services or managed operations and moving those onto a platform like Instaclustr. You've got the adoption of cloud and cloud as a wave, like open source is a wave. And then you've got the growth of data, everything is data-driven these days. And data is just excellent for businesses and our customers. And in a lot of cases when we work with our customers on Instaclustr today, the application and the data, the data is the business. >> Ben, I want to get your thoughts as a CTO because open source, and technology, and cloud, has been a real game changer. If you go back prior to cloud, open source is very awesome, still great, freedom, we've got code, it's just the scale of open source. And then cloud came along, changed the game, so, open source. And then new business models became, so commercial open source software is now an industry. It's not just open source, "Hey, free software." And then maybe a red hat's out there, or someone like a red hat, have some premium support. There's been innovation on the business model side. So, matching technology innovation with the business model has been a big change in the past, many, many years. And this past year in particular that's been key. And open source, open core, these are the things that people are talking about. License changes, this is a big discussion. Because you could be on the wrong side of history if you make the wrong decision here. >> Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think it's also worth, I guess, taking a step back and understanding a little bit about why have people gravitated towards open source and the cloud? Beyond kind of the hippie freedoms of, I can see the code and I have ownership, and everything's free and great. And I think the reason why it's really taken off in a commercial setting, in an enterprise setting is velocity. How much easier is it to go reach and grab a open-source tool? That you can download, you can grab, you can compile yourself, you can make it work the way you want it to do to solve a problem here and now. Versus the old school way of doing it which is with I have to go download a trial version. Oh no, some of the features are locked. I've got to go talk to a procurement or a salesperson to kind of go and solve the problem that I have. And then I've got to get that approved by my own purchasing department. And do we have budget? And all of a sudden it's way, way, way harder to solve the problem in front of you as an engineer. Whereas with open source I just go grab it and I move on. I've achieved something for the day. >> Basically all that friction that comes, you got a problem to solve, oh, open-source, I'm going to just get a hammer and hammer that nail. Wait, whoa, whoa. I got to stand in line, I got to jump over hoops, I got to do all these things. This is the hassle and friction. >> Exactly, and this is why it's often called one of the most impressive things about that. And I think on the cloud side it's the same thing, but for hardware, and capability, and compute, and memory. Previously, if you wanted to compute, oh, you're going to lodge a ticket. You've got to ask someone to rack a server in a data center. You've got to deal with three different departments. Oh my goodness. How painful is that just to get a server up to go run and do something? That's just pulling your hair out. Whereas with the cloud, that's an API call or clicking a few buttons on a console and off you go. You'd have to combine those two things. And I would say that software engineers are probably the most productive they've ever been in the last 20 years. I know sometimes it doesn't look like that but their ability to solve problems in front of them, especially using external stuff is way way, way better. >> Peter: I think when you put those two things together you get an- >> The fact of the matter is they are productive. They're putting security into the code right in the CICD pipeline. So, this is highly agile right now. So, coders are highly productive and efficient in changing the way people are rolling out applications. So, the game is over, open source has won, open core is winning. And this is where the people are confused. This is why I got you guys here? What's the difference between open source and open core? What's the big deal? Why is it so important? >> Yeah, no, great question. So, really the difference between open source and open core, it comes down to, really it's a business model. So, open core contains open-source software, that's a hundred percent true. So, usually what will happen is a company will take a project that is open source, that has an existing community around it, or they've built it, or they've contributed it, or however that genesis has happened. And then what they'll do is they'll look at all the edges around that open-source project. And I think what are some enterprise features that don't exist in the open-source project that we can build ourselves? And then sprinkle those around the edges and sell that as a proprietary offering. So, what you get is you get the core functionality is powered by an open-source project. And quite often the code is identical. But there's all these kinds of little features around the outside that might make it a little bit easier to use in an enterprise environment. Or might make it a bit easier to do some operations side of things. And they'll charge you a license for that. So, you end up in a situation where you might have adopted the open source project, but then now if you want a feature X, Y, or Z, you then need to go and fork over some money and go into that whole licensing kind of contract. So, that's the core difference between open core and open-source, right? Open core, it's got all these little proprietary bits kind of sprinkled around the outside. >> So, how would you describe your platform for your customers? Obviously, you guys are succeeding, your growth is great, we're going to get that second. But as you guys have been steadily expanding the platform of open source data technologies, what is the main solution that you guys are offering customers? Managing open source technologies? What's the main value that you guys bring to the customer? >> Yeah, definitely. So, really the main value that we bring to the customer is we allow them to, I guess, successfully adopt open source databases or database technologies without having to go down that open core path. Open core can be quite attractive, but what it does is you end up with all these many Oracles drivers. Still having to pay the toll in terms of license fees. What we do, however, is we take those open-source projects and we deliver that as a database, as a service on our managed platform. So, we take care of all the operations, the pain, the care, the feeding, patch management, backups. Everything that you need to do, whether you're running it yourself or getting someone else to run it, we'll take care of that for you. But we do it with the pure upstream open source version. So, that means you get full flexibility, full portability. And more importantly you're not paying those expensive license fees. Plus it's easy and it just works. You get that full cloud native experience and you get your database right now when you need it. >> And basically you guys solve the problem of one, I got this legacy or existing licensed technology I've got to pay for. And it may not be enabling modern applications, and they don't have a team to go do all the work (laughing). Or some companies have like a whole army of people just embedded in open-source, that's very rare. So, it sounds like you guys do both. Did I get that right, is that right? >> Yeah, definitely. So, we definitely enable it if you don't have that capability yourself. We are the outsourced option to that. It's obviously a lot more than that but it's one of those pressures that companies nowadays face. And if we take it back to that concept of developer velocity, you really want them working on your core business problems. You don't want them having to fight database infrastructure. So, you've also got the opportunity cost of having your existing engineers working on running this stuff themselves. Or running a proprietary or an open call solution themselves, when really you should be outsourcing preferably to Instaclustr. But hey, let's be honest, you should be outsourcing it to anyone so that your engineers can be focusing on your core business problems. And really letting them work on the things that make you money. >> That's very smart. You guys have a great business model. Because one of the things we've been reporting on "theCUBE" on SiliconANGLE as well, is that the database market is becoming so diverse for the right reasons. Databases are everywhere now and code is becoming horizontally scalable for the cloud but vertically specialized with machine learning. So, you're seeing applications and new databases, no one database rules the world anymore. It's not about Oracle anymore, or anything else. So, open source fits nicely into this kind of platform view. How do you guys decide which technologies go in to the platform that you support? >> Yeah, great question. So, we certainly live in a world of, I call it polyglot persistence. But a simple way of referring to that is the right tool for the right job. And so, we really live in this world where engineers will reach for a database that solves a specific problem and solves it well. As you mentioned, companies, they're no longer Oracle shops, or they're no longer MySQL shops. You'll quite often see services or applications of teams using two or three different databases to solve different challenges. And so, what we do at Instaclustr is we really look at what are the technologies that our existing customers are using, and using side-by-side with, say, some of the existing Instaclustr offerings. We take great lead from that. We also look at what are the different projects out there that are solving use cases that we don't address at the moment. So, it's very use case driven. Whether it's, "Hey, we need something that's better at," say, "Time series." Or we need something that's a little bit better at translatable workloads. Or something a bit of a better fit for a case, right? And we work with those. And I think importantly, we also have this view that in a world of polyglot persistence, you've also got data integration challenges. So, how do you keep data safe between these two different database types? So, we're also looking at how do we integrate those better and support our users on that particular journey. So, it really comes down to one, listening to your customers, seeing what's out there and what's the right use case for a given technology and then we look to adopt that. >> That's great, Ben, machine learning is completely on fire right now. People love it, they want more of it. AI everything, everyone's putting AI on every label. If it does any automation, it's magic, it's AI. So, really, we know what that's happening, it's just really database work and machine learning under the covers. Pete, the business model here has completely changed too, because now with open source as a platform you have more scale, you have differentiation opportunities. I'm sure business is doing great. Give us an update on the business side of Instaclustr. What's clicking for you guys, what's working? What's the success trajectory look like? >> Yeah, it's been an amazing journey for us. When you think about it we were founded it in 2013, so, we're eight years into our journey. When we started the business we were focused entirely on Cassandra. But as Ben talked about, we've gone in diversified those technologies onto the platform, that common experience that we offer customers. So, you can adopt any one to a number of open source technologies in a highly integrated way and really, really grow off the back of that. It's driving some phenomenal growth in our business and we've really enjoyed growth rates that have been 70, 80, 100 year on year since we've started the business. And that's led to an enormous scale and opportunities for us to invest further in the platform, invest further in additional technologies in a really highly opinionated way. I think Ben talked about that integrations, then that becomes incredibly complex as you have many, many kinds of offerings on the platform. So, Instaclustr is much more targeted in terms of how we want to take our business forward and the growth opportunity before us. We think about being deeply expert and deeply capable in a smaller subset of technologies. But those which actually integrate and inter operate for customers so they can build solutions for their applications. But do that on Instaclustr using its platform with a common experience. And, so we've grown to 270 people now around the world. We started in Australia, we've got a strong presence in the US. We recently acquired a business called credativ in Europe, which was a PostgreSQL specialist organization. And that was because, as Ben said before, talking about those technologies we bring onto our platform. PostgreSQL, huge market, disrupting Oracle, exactly the right place that we want to be as Instaclustr with pure open source offerings. We brought them into the Instaclustr family in March this year and we did that to accelerate it on our platform. And so, we think about that. We think about future technologies on their platform, what we can do, and introduced to even provide an even greater and richer experience. Cadence is new to our platform. Super exciting for us because not only is it something that provides workflow as code, as an open source experience, but as a glue technology to build a complex business technology for applications. It actually drives workloads across Cassandra, PostgreSQL and Kafka, which are kind of core technologies on our platform. Super exciting for us, a big market. Interesting kind of group of adopters. You've got Uber kind of leading the charge there with that and us partnering with them now. We see that as a massive growth opportunity for our business. And as we introduce analytics capabilities, exploration, visibility features into the platform all built on open source. So, you can build a complete top to bottom data services layer using open source technology for your platform. We think that's an incredibly exciting part of the business and a great opportunity for us. >> Opportunities to raise money, more acquisitions on the horizon? >> Well, I think acquisitions where it makes sense. I talked about credativ, where we looked at credativ, we knew that PostgreSQL was new to our market, and we were coming into that market reasonably late. So, the way we thought about that from a strategy perspective was we wanted to accelerate the richness of the capability on our platform that we introduced and became GA late last year. So, we think about when we're selecting that kind of technology, that's the perfect opportunity to consider an acquisition for us. So, as we look at what we're going to introduce in the platform over the next sort of two, three, four years, that sort of decision that will, or that sort of thinking, or frames our thinking on what we would do from an acquisition perspective. I think the other way we think about acquisitions is new markets. So, thinking about globally entering, say into the Japanese market. does that make sense because of any language requirements to be able to support customers? 'Cause one of the things that's really, really important to us is the platform is fantastic for scaling, growing, deploying, running, operating this very powerful open source technology. But so too is the importance of having deep operational open source expertise backing and being there to call on if a customer's having an application issue. And that kind of drives the need for us to have in country kind of market support. And so, when we think about those sort of opportunities, I think we think about acquisition there, isn't it like another string to the bow in terms of getting presence in a particular or an emerging market that we're interested in. >> Awesome, Ben, final question to you is, on the technology front what do you see this year emerging? A lot of changes in 2021. We've got another year of pandemic situation going on. Hopefully it goes by fast. Hopefully it won't be three years, but again, who knows? But you're seeing the cloud open source actually taking as a tailwind from the pandemic. New opportunities, companies are refreshing, they have to, they're forced. There's going to be a lot more changes. What do you see from a tech perspective in open-source, open core, and in general for large companies as opensource continues to power the innovation? >> So, definitely the pandemic has a tailwind, particularly for those companies adopting the cloud. I think it's forced a lot of their hands as well. Their five-year plans have certainly become two or three year plans around moving to the cloud. And certainly, that contest for talent means that you really want to be keeping your engineers focused on core things. So, definitely I think we're going to see a continuation of that. We're going to say the continuation of open source dominating when it comes to a database and the database market, the same with cloud. I think we're going to see the gradual march towards different adoption models within the cloud. So, server lists, right? I think we're going to see that kind of slowly mature. I think it's still a little bit early in the hype cycle there, but we're going to start to see that mature. On the ML, AI side of things as well, people have been talking about it for the last three or four years. And I'm sure to people in the industry, they're like, "Oh, we're over that." But I think on the broader industry we're still quite early in that particular cycle as people figure out, how do they use the data that they've got? How do they use that? How do they train models on that? How do they serve inference on that? And how do they unlock other things with lower down on their data stack as well when it comes to ML and AI, right? We're seeing great research papers come out from AI powered indexes, right? So, the AI is actually speeding up queries, let alone actually solving business problems. So, I think we're going to say more and more of that kind of come out. I think we're going to see more and more process capabilities and organizational responses to this explosion of data. I'm super excited to say people talking about concepts and organizational concepts like data mesh. I think that's going to be fundamental as we move forward and have to manage the complexities of dealing with this. So, it's an old industry, data, when you think about it. As soon as you had computers you had data, and it's an old industry from that perspective. But I feel like we're only just getting started and it's just heating up. So, we're super excited to see what 2022 holds for us. >> Every company will be an source AI company. It has to be no matter what. (Ben laughing) Well, thanks for sharing the data Pete and Ben, the co-founders of Instaclustr. We'll get our "CUBE" AI working on this data we got today from you guys. Thanks for sharing, great stuff. Thanks for sharing the open core perspective. We really appreciate it and congratulations on your success. Companies do need more Instaclustrs out there, and you guys are doing a great job. Thanks for coming on, I appreciate it. >> Thanks John, cheers mate. >> Thanks John. >> It's "theCUBE" Conversation here at Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (bright music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting innovation for good, brought to you by on shape. >>Hello, everyone, and welcome to Innovation for Good Program, hosted by the Cuban. Brought to You by on Shape, which is a PTC company. My name is Dave Valentin. I'm coming to you from our studios outside of Boston. I'll be directing the conversations today. It's a very exciting, all live program. We're gonna look at how product innovation has evolved and where it's going and how engineers, entrepreneurs and educators are applying cutting edge, cutting edge product development techniques and technology to change our world. You know, the pandemic is, of course, profoundly impacted society and altered how individuals and organizations they're gonna be thinking about an approaching the coming decade. Leading technologists, engineers, product developers and educators have responded to the new challenges that we're facing from creating lifesaving products to helping students learn from home toe how to apply the latest product development techniques and solve the world's hardest problems. And in this program, you'll hear from some of the world's leading experts and practitioners on how product development and continuous innovation has evolved, how it's being applied toe positive positively affect society and importantly where it's going in the coming decades. So let's get started with our first session fueling Tech for good. And with me is John Hirschbeck, who is the president of the Suffers, a service division of PTC, which acquired on shape just over a year ago, where John was the CEO and co founder, and Dana Grayson is here. She is the co founder and general partner at Construct Capital, a new venture capital firm. Folks, welcome to the program. Thanks so much for coming on. >>Great to be here, Dave. >>All right, John. >>You're very welcome. Dana. Look, John, let's get into it for first Belated congratulations on the acquisition of Von Shape. That was an awesome seven year journey for your company. Tell our audience a little bit about the story of on shape, but take us back to Day zero. Why did you and your co founders start on shape? Well, >>actually, start before on shaping the You know, David, I've been in this business for almost 40 years. The business of building software tools for product developers and I had been part of some previous products in the industry and companies that had been in their era. Big changes in this market and about, you know, a little Before founding on shape, we started to see the problems product development teams were having with the traditional tools of that era years ago, and we saw the opportunity presented by Cloud Web and Mobile Technology. And we said, Hey, we could use Cloud Web and Mobile to solve the problems of product developers make their Their business is run better. But we have to build an entirely new system, an entirely new company, to do it. And that's what on shapes about. >>Well, so notwithstanding the challenges of co vid and difficulties this year, how is the first year been as, Ah, division of PTC for you guys? How's business? Anything you can share with us? >>Yeah, our first year of PTC has been awesome. It's been, you know, when you get acquired, Dave, you never You know, you have great optimism, but you never know what life will really be like. It's sort of like getting married or something, you know, until you're really doing it, you don't know. And so I'm happy to say that one year into our acquisition, um, PTC on shape is thriving. It's worked out better than I could have imagined a year ago. Along always, I mean sales are up. In Q four, our new sales rate grew 80% vs Excuse me, our fiscal Q four Q three. In the calendar year, it grew 80% compared to the year before. Our educational uses skyrocketing with around 400% growth, most recently year to year of students and teachers and co vid. And we've launched a major cloud platform using the core of on shape technology called Atlas. So, um, just tons of exciting things going on a TTC. >>That's awesome. But thank you for sharing some of those metrics. And of course, you're very humble individual. You know, people should know a little bit more about you mentioned, you know, we founded Solid Works, co founded Solid where I actually found it solid works. You had a great exit in the in the late nineties. But what I really appreciate is, you know, you're an entrepreneur. You've got a passion for the babies that you you helped birth. You stayed with the salt systems for a number of years. The company that quiet, solid works well over a decade. And and, of course, you and I have talked about how you participated in the the M I T. Blackjack team. You know, back in the day, a zai say you're very understated, for somebody was so accomplished. Well, >>that's kind of you, but I tend to I tend Thio always keep my eye more on what's ahead. You know what's next, then? And you know, I look back Sure to enjoy it and learn from it about what I can put to work making new memories, making new successes. >>Love it. Okay, let's bring Dana into the conversation. Hello, Dana. You look you're a fairly early investor in in on shape when you were with any A And and I think it was like it was a serious B, but it was very right close after the A raise. And and you were and still are a big believer in industrial transformation. So take us back. What did you see about on shape back then? That excited you. >>Thanks. Thanks for that. Yeah. I was lucky to be a early investment in shape. You know, the things that actually attracted me. Don shape were largely around John and, uh, the team. They're really setting out to do something, as John says humbly, something totally new, but really building off of their background was a large part of it. Um, but, you know, I was really intrigued by the design collaboration side of the product. Um, I would say that's frankly what originally attracted me to it. What kept me in the room, you know, in terms of the industrial world was seeing just if you start with collaboration around design what that does to the overall industrial product lifecycle accelerating manufacturing just, you know, modernizing all the manufacturing, just starting with design. So I'm really thankful to the on shape guys, because it was one of the first investments I've made that turned me on to the whole sector. And while just such a great pleasure to work with with John and the whole team there. Now see what they're doing inside PTC. >>And you just launched construct capital this year, right in the middle of a pandemic and which is awesome. I love it. And you're focused on early stage investing. Maybe tell us a little bit about construct capital. What your investment thesis is and you know, one of the big waves that you're hoping to ride. >>Sure, it construct it is literally lifting out of any what I was doing there. Um uh, for on shape, I went on to invest in companies such as desktop metal and Tulip, to name a couple of them form labs, another one in and around the manufacturing space. But our thesis that construct is broader than just, you know, manufacturing and industrial. It really incorporates all of what we'd call foundational industries that have let yet to be fully tech enabled or digitized. Manufacturing is a big piece of it. Supply chain, logistics, transportation of mobility or not, or other big pieces of it. And together they really drive, you know, half of the GDP in the US and have been very under invested. And frankly, they haven't attracted really great founders like they're on in droves. And I think that's going to change. We're seeing, um, entrepreneurs coming out of the tech world orthe Agnelli into these industries and then bringing them back into the tech world, which is which is something that needs to happen. So John and team were certainly early pioneers, and I think, you know, frankly, obviously, that voting with my feet that the next set, a really strong companies are going to come out of the space over the next decade. >>I think it's a huge opportunity to digitize the sort of traditionally non digital organizations. But Dana, you focused. I think it's it's accurate to say you're focused on even Mawr early stage investing now. And I want to understand why you feel it's important to be early. I mean, it's obviously riskier and reward e er, but what do you look for in companies and and founders like John >>Mhm, Um, you know, I think they're different styles of investing all the way up to public market investing. I've always been early stage investors, so I like to work with founders and teams when they're, you know, just starting out. Um, I happened to also think that we were just really early in the whole digital transformation of this world. You know, John and team have been, you know, back from solid works, etcetera around the space for a long time. But again, the downstream impact of what they're doing really changes the whole industry. And and so we're pretty early and in digitally transforming that market. Um, so that's another reason why I wanna invest early now, because I do really firmly believe that the next set of strong companies and strong returns for my own investors will be in the spaces. Um, you know, what I look for in Founders are people that really see the world in a different way. And, you know, sometimes some people think of founders or entrepreneurs is being very risk seeking. You know, if you asked John probably and another successful entrepreneurs, they would call themselves sort of risk averse, because by the time they start the company, they really have isolated all the risk out of it and think that they have given their expertise or what they're seeing their just so compelled to go change something, eh? So I look for that type of attitude experience a Z. You can also tell from John. He's fairly humble. So humility and just focus is also really important. Um, that there's a That's a lot of it. Frankly, >>Excellent. Thank you, John. You got such a rich history in the space. Uh, and one of you could sort of connect the dots over time. I mean, when you look back, what were the major forces that you saw in the market in in the early days? Particularly days of on shape on? And how is that evolved? And what are you seeing today? Well, >>I think I touched on it earlier. Actually, could I just reflect on what Dana said about risk taking for just a quick one and say, throughout my life, from blackjack to starting solid works on shape, it's about taking calculated risks. Yes, you try to eliminate the risk Sa's much as you can, but I always say, I don't mind taking a risk that I'm aware of, and I've calculated through as best I can. I don't like taking risks that I don't know I'm taking. That's right. You >>like to bet on >>sure things as much as you sure things, or at least where you feel you. You've done the research and you see them and you know they're there and you know, you, you you keep that in mind in the room, and I think that's great. And Dana did so much for us. Dana, I want to thank you again. For all that, you did it every step of the way, from where we started to to, you know, your journey with us ended formally but continues informally. Now back to you, Dave, I think, question about the opportunity and how it's shaped up. Well, I think I touched on it earlier when I said It's about helping product developers. You know, our customers of the people build the future off manufactured goods. Anything you think of that would be manufacturing factory. You know, the chair you're sitting in machine that made your coffee. You know, the computer you're using, the trucks that drive by on the street, all the covert product research, the equipment being used to make vaccines. All that stuff is designed by someone, and our job is given the tools to do it better. And I could see the problems that those product developers had that we're slowing them down with using the computing systems of the time. When we built solid works, that was almost 30 years ago. If people don't realize that it was in the early >>nineties and you know, we did the >>best we could for the early nineties, but what we did. We didn't anticipate the world of today. And so people were having problems with just installing the systems. Dave, you wouldn't believe how hard it is to install these systems. You need toe speck up a special windows computer, you know, and make sure you've got all the memory and graphics you need and getting to get that set up. You need to make sure the device drivers air, right, install a big piece of software. Ah, license key. I'm not making this up. They're still around. You may not even know what those are. You know, Dennis laughing because, you know, zero cool people do things like this anymore. Um, and it only runs some windows. You want a second user to use it? They need a copy. They need a code. Are they on the same version? It's a nightmare. The teams change, you know? You just say, Well, get everyone on the software. Well, who's everyone? You know, you got a new vendor today? A new customer tomorrow, a new employee. People come on and off the team. The other problem is the data stored in files, thousands of files. This isn't like a spreadsheet or word processor, where there's one file to pass around these air thousands of files to make one, even a simple product. People were tearing their hair out. John, what do we do? I've got copies everywhere. I don't know where the latest version is. We tried like, you know, locking people out so that only one person can change it At the time that works against speed, it works against innovation. We saw what was happening with Cloud Web and mobile. So what's happened in the years since is every one of the forces that product developers experience the need for speed, the need for innovation, the need to be more efficient with their people in their capital. Resource is every one of those trends have been amplified since we started on shape by a lot of forces in the world. And covert is amplified all those the need for agility and remote work cove it is amplified all that the same time, The acceptance of cloud. You know, a few years ago, people were like cloud, you know, how is that gonna work now They're saying to me, You know, increasingly, how would you ever even have done this without the cloud. How do you make solid works work without the cloud? How would that even happen? You know, once people understand what on shapes about >>and we're the >>Onley full SAS solution software >>as a service, >>full SAS solution in our industry. So what's happened in those years? Same problems we saw earlier, but turn up the gain, their bigger problems. And with cloud, we've seen skepticism of years ago turn into acceptance. And now even embracement in the cova driven new normal. >>Yeah. So a lot of friction in the previous environments cloud obviously a huge factor on, I guess. I guess Dana John could see it coming, you know, in the early days of solid works with, you know, had Salesforce, which is kind of the first major independent SAS player. Well, I guess that was late nineties. So his post solid works, but pre in shape and their work day was, you know, pre on shape in the mid two thousands. And and but But, you know, the bet was on the SAS model was right for Crick had and and product development, you know, which maybe the time wasn't a no brainer. Or maybe it was, I don't know, but Dana is there. Is there anything that you would invest in today? That's not Cloud based? >>Um, that's a great question. I mean, I think we still see things all the time in the manufacturing world that are not cloud based. I think you know, the closer you get to the shop floor in the production environment. Um e think John and the PTC folks would agree with this, too, but that it's, you know, there's reliability requirements, performance requirements. There's still this attitude of, you know, don't touch the printing press. So the cloud is still a little bit scary sometimes. And I think hybrid cloud is a real thing for those or on premise. Solutions, in some cases is still a real thing. What what we're more focused on. And, um, despite whether it's on premise or hybrid or or SAS and Cloud is a frictionless go to market model, um, in the companies we invest in so sass and cloud, or really make that easy to adopt for new users, you know, you sign up, started using a product, um, but whether it's hosted in the cloud, whether it's as you can still distribute buying power. And, um, I would I'm just encouraging customers in the customer world and the more industrial environment to entrust some of their lower level engineers with more budget discretionary spending so they can try more products and unlock innovation. >>Right? The unit economics are so compelling. So let's bring it, you know, toe today's you know, situation. John, you decided to exit about a year ago. You know? What did you see in PTC? Other than the obvious money? What was the strategic fit? >>Yeah, Well, David, I wanna be clear. I didn't exit anything. Really? You >>know, I love you and I don't like that term exit. I >>mean, Dana had exit is a shareholder on and so it's not It's not exit for me. It's just a step in the journey. What we saw in PTC was a partner. First of all, that shared our vision from the top down at PTC. Jim Hempleman, the CEO. He had a great vision for for the impact that SAS can make based on cloud technology and really is Dana of highlighted so much. It's not just the technology is how you go to market and the whole business being run and how you support and make the customers successful. So Jim shared a vision for the potential. And really, really, um said Hey, come join us and we can do this bigger, Better, faster. We expanded the vision really to include this Atlas platform for hosting other SAS applications. That P D. C. I mean, David Day arrived at PTC. I met the head of the academic program. He came over to me and I said, You know, and and how many people on your team? I thought he'd say 5 40 people on the PTC academic team. It was amazing to me because, you know, we were we were just near about 100 people were required are total company. We didn't even have a dedicated academic team and we had ah, lot of students signing up, you know, thousands and thousands. Well, now we have hundreds of thousands of students were approaching a million users and that shows you the power of this team that PTC had combined with our product and technology whom you get a big success for us and for the teachers and students to the world. We're giving them great tools. So so many good things were also putting some PTC technology from other parts of PTC back into on shape. One area, a little spoiler, little sneak peek. Working on taking generative design. Dana knows all about generative design. We couldn't acquire that technology were start up, you know, just to too much to do. But PTC owns one of the best in the business. This frustrated technology we're working on putting that into on shaping our customers. Um, will be happy to see it, hopefully in the coming year sometime. >>It's great to see that two way exchange. Now, you both know very well when you start a company, of course, a very exciting time. You know, a lot of baggage, you know, our customers pulling you in a lot of different directions and asking you for specials. You have this kind of clean slate, so to speak in it. I would think in many ways, John, despite you know, your install base, you have a bit of that dynamic occurring today especially, you know, driven by the forced march to digital transformation that cove it caused. So when you sit down with the team PTC and talk strategy. You now have more global resource is you got cohorts selling opportunities. What's the conversation like in terms of where you want to take the division? >>Well, Dave, you actually you sounds like we should have you coming in and talking about strategy because you've got the strategy down. I mean, we're doing everything said global expansion were able to reach across selling. We got some excellent PTC customers that we can reach reach now and they're finding uses for on shape. I think the plan is to, you know, just go, go, go and grow, grow, grow where we're looking for this year, priorities are expand the product. I mentioned the breath of the product with new things PTC did recently. Another technology that they acquired for on shape. We did an acquisition. It was it was small, wasn't widely announced. It, um, in an area related to interfacing with electrical cad systems. So So we're doing We're expanding the breath of on shape. We're going Maura, depth in the areas were already in. We have enormous opportunity to add more features and functions that's in the product. Go to market. You mentioned it global global presence. That's something we were a little light on a year ago. Now we have a team. Dana may not even know what we have. A non shape, dedicated team in Barcelona, based in Barcelona but throughout Europe were doing multiple languages. Um, the academic program just introduced a new product into that space that z even fueling more success and growth there. Um, and of course, continuing to to invest in customer success and this Atlas platform story I keep mentioning, we're going to soon have We're gonna soon have four other major PTC brands shipping products on our Atlas Saas platform. And so we're really excited about that. That's good for the other PTC products. It's also good for on shape because now there's there's. There's other interesting products that are on shape customers can use take advantage of very easily using, say, a common log in conventions about user experience there, used to invest of all they're SAS based, so they that makes it easier to begin with. So that's some of the exciting things going on. I think you'll see PTC, um, expanding our lead in SAS based applications for this sector for our our target, uh, sectors not just in, um, in cat and data management, but another area. PTC's Big and his augmented reality with of euphoria, product line leader and industrial uses of a R. That's a whole other story we should do. A whole nother show augmented reality. But these products are amazing. You can you can help factory workers people on, uh, people who are left out of the digital transformation. Sometimes we're standing from machine >>all day. >>They can't be sitting like we are doing Zoom. They can wear a R headset in our tools, let them create great content. This is an area Dana is invested in other companies. But what I wanted to note is the new releases of our authoring software. For this, our content getting released this month, used through the Atlas platform, the SAS components of on shape for things like revision management and collaboration on duh workflow activity. All that those are tools that we're able to share leverage. We get a lot of synergy. It's just really good. It's really fun to have a good time. That's >>awesome. And then we're gonna be talking to John MacLean later about that. Let's do a little deeper Dive on that. And, Dana, what is your involvement today with with on shape? But you're looking for you know, which of their customers air actually adopting. And they're gonna disrupt their industries. And you get good pipeline from that. How do you collaborate today? >>That sounds like a great idea. Um, Aziz, John will tell you I'm constantly just asking him for advice and impressions of other entrepreneurs and picking his brain on ideas. No formal relationship clearly, but continue to count John and and John and other people in on shaping in the circle of experts that I rely on for their opinions. >>All right, so we have some questions from the crowd here. Uh, one of the questions is for the dream team. You know, John and Dana. What's your next next collective venture? I don't think we're there yet, are we? No. >>I just say, as Dana said, we love talking to her about. You know, Dana, you just returned the compliment. We would try and give you advice and the deals you're looking at, and I'm sort of casually mentoring at least one of your portfolio entrepreneurs, and that's been a lot of fun for May on, hopefully a value to them. But also Dana. We uran important pipeline to us in the world of some new things that are happening that we wouldn't see if you know you've shown us some things that you've said. What do you think of this business? And for us, it's like, Wow, it's cool to see that's going on And that's what's supposed to work in an ecosystem like this. So we we deeply value the ongoing relationship. And no, we're not starting something new. I got a lot of work left to do with what I'm doing and really happy. But we can We can collaborate in this way on other ventures. >>I like this question to somebody asking With the cloud options like on shape, Wilmore students have stem opportunities s Oh, that's a great question. Are you because of sass and cloud? Are you able to reach? You know, more students? Much more cost effectively. >>Yeah, Dave, I'm so glad that that that I was asked about this because Yes, and it's extremely gratified us. Yes, we are because of cloud, because on shape is the only full cloud full SAS system or industry were able to reach. Stem education brings able to be part of bringing step education to students who couldn't get it otherwise. And one of most gratifying gratifying things to me is the emails were getting from teachers, um, that that really, um, on the phone calls that were they really pour their heart out and say We're able to get to students in areas that have very limited compute resource is that don't have an I T staff where they don't know what computer that the students can have at home, and they probably don't even have a computer. We're talking about being able to teach them on a phone to have an android phone a low end android phone. You can do three D modeling on there with on shape. Now you can't do it any other system, but with on shape, you could do it. And so the teacher can say to the students, They have to have Internet access, and I know there's a huge community that doesn't even have Internet access, and we're not able, unfortunately to help that. But if you have Internet and you have even an android phone, we can enable the educator to teach them. And so we have case after case of saving a stem program or expanding it into the students that need it most is the ones we're helping here. So really excited about that. And we're also able to let in addition to the run on run on whatever computing devices they have, we also offer them the tools they need for remote teaching with a much richer experience. Could you teach solid works remotely? Well, maybe if the student ran it had a windows workstation. You know, big, big, high end workstation. Maybe it could, but it would be like the difference between collaborating with on shape and collaborate with solid works. Like the difference between a zoom video call and talking on the landline phone. You know, it's a much richer experience, and that's what you need. And stem teaching stem is hard, So yeah, we're super super. Um, I'm excited about bringing stem to more students because of cloud yond >>we're talking about innovation for good, and then the discussion, John, you just had it. Really? There could be a whole another vector here. We could discuss on diversity, and I wanna end with just pointing out. So, Dana, your new firm, it's a woman led firm, too. Two women leaders, you know, going forward. So that's awesome to see, so really? Yeah, thumbs up on that. Congratulations on getting that off the ground. >>Thank you. Thank you. >>Okay, so thank you guys. Really appreciate It was a great discussion. I learned a lot and I'm sure the audience did a swell in a moment. We're gonna talk with on shaped customers to see how they're applying tech for good and some of the products that they're building. So keep it right there. I'm Dave Volonte. You're watching innovation for good on the Cube, the global leader in digital tech event coverage. Stay right there. >>Oh, yeah, it's >>yeah, yeah, around >>the globe. It's the Cube presenting innovation for good. Brought to you by on shape. >>Okay, we're back. This is Dave Volonte and you're watching innovation for good. A program on Cuba 3 65 made possible by on shape of PTC company. We're live today really live tv, which is the heritage of the Cube. And now we're gonna go to the sources and talkto on shape customers to find out how they're applying technology to create real world innovations that are changing the world. So let me introduce our panel members. Rafael Gomez Furberg is with the Chan Zuckerberg bio hub. A very big idea. And collaborative nonprofit was initiative that was funded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, and really around diagnosing and curing and better managing infectious diseases. So really timely topic. Philip Tabor is also joining us. He's with silver side detectors, which develops neutron detective detection systems. Yet you want to know if early, if neutrons and radiation or in places where you don't want them, So this should be really interesting. And last but not least, Matthew Shields is with the Charlottesville schools and is gonna educate us on how he and his team are educating students in the use of modern engineering tools and techniques. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cuban to the program. This should be really interesting. Thanks for coming on. >>Hi. Or pleasure >>for having us. >>You're very welcome. Okay, let me ask each of you because you're all doing such interesting and compelling work. Let's start with Rafael. Tell us more about the bio hub and your role there, please. >>Okay. Yeah. So you said that I hope is a nonprofit research institution, um, funded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. Um, and our main mission is to develop new technologies to help advance medicine and help, hopefully cure and manage diseases. Um, we also have very close collaborations with Universe California, San Francisco, Stanford University and the University California Berkeley on. We tried to bring those universities together, so they collaborate more of biomedical topics. And I manage a team of engineers. They by joining platform. Um, and we're tasked with creating instruments for the laboratory to help the scientist boats inside the organization and also in the partner universities Do their experiments in better ways in ways that they couldn't do before >>in this edition was launched Well, five years ago, >>it was announced at the end of 2016, and we actually started operation with at the beginning of 2017, which is when I joined, um, So this is our third year. >>And how's how's it going? How does it work? I mean, these things take time. >>It's been a fantastic experience. Uh, the organization works beautifully. Um, it was amazing to see it grow From the beginning, I was employee number 12, I think eso When I came in, it was just a nem P office building and empty labs. And very quickly we had something running about. It's amazing eso I'm very proud of the work that we have done to make that possible. Um And then, of course, that's you mentioned now with co vid, um, we've been able to do a lot of very cool work attire being of the pandemic in March, when there was a deficit of testing, uh, capacity in California, we spun up a testing laboratory in record time in about a week. It was crazy. It was a crazy project, Um, but but incredibly satisfying. And we ended up running all the way until the beginning of November, when the lab was finally shut down. We could process about 3000 samples a day. I think at the end of it all, we were able to test about 100 on the order of 100 and 50,000 samples from all over the state. We were providing free testing toe all of the Department of Public Health Department of Public Health in California, which at the media pandemic, had no way to do testing affordably and fast. So I think that was a great service to the state. Now the state has created that testing system that would serve those departments. So then we decided that it was unnecessary to keep going with testing in the other biopsy that would shut down. >>All right. Thank you for that. Now, Now, Philip, you What you do is mind melting. You basically helped keep the world safe. Maybe describe a little bit more about silver sod detectors and what your role is there and how it all works. >>Tour. So we make a nuclear bomb detectors and we also make water detectors. So we try and do our part thio keep the world from blowing up and make it a better place at the same time. Both of these applications use neutron radiation detectors. That's what we make. Put them out by import border crossing places like that. They can help make sure that people aren't smuggling. Shall we say very bad things. Um, there's also a burgeoning field of research and application where you can use neutrons with some pretty cool physics to find water so you could do things. Like what? A detector up in the mountains and measure snowpack. Put it out in the middle of the field and measure soil moisture content. And as you might imagine, there's some really cool applications in, uh, research and agronomy and public policy for this. >>All right, so it's OK, so it's a It's much more than, you know, whatever fighting terrorism, it's there's a riel edge or I kind of i o t application for what you guys >>do. We do both its's to plowshares. You might >>say a mat. I I look at your role is kind of scaling the brain power for for the future. Maybe tell us more about Charlottesville schools and in the mission that you're pursuing and what you do. >>Thank you. Um, I've been in Charlottesville City schools for about 11 or 12 years. I started their teaching, um, a handful of classes, math and science and things like that. But Thescore board and my administration had the crazy idea of starting an engineering program about seven years ago. My background is an engineering is an engineering. My masters is in mechanical and aerospace engineering and um, I basically spent a summer kind of coming up with what might be a fun engineering curriculum for our students. And it started with just me and 30 students about seven years ago, Um, kind of a home spun from scratch curriculum. One of my goals from the outset was to be a completely project based curriculum, and it's now grown. We probably have about six or 700 students, five or six full time teachers. We now have pre engineering going on at the 5th and 6th grade level. I now have students graduating. Uh, you know, graduating after senior year with, like, seven years of engineering under their belt and heading off to doing some pretty cool stuff. So it's It's been a lot of fun building a program and, um, and learning a lot in the process. >>That's awesome. I mean, you know, Cuba's. We've been passionate about things like women in tech, uh, diversity stem. You know, not only do we need more, more students and stem, we need mawr underrepresented women, minorities, etcetera. We were just talking to John Herstek and integrate gration about this is Do you do you feel is though you're I mean, first of all, the work that you do is awesome, but but I'll go one step further. Do you feel as though it's reaching, um, or diverse base? And how is that going? >>That's a great question. I think research shows that a lot of people get funneled into one kind of track or career path or set of interests really early on in their educational career, and sometimes that that funnel is kind of artificial. And so that's one of the reasons we keep pushing back. Um, so our school systems introducing kindergartners to programming on DSO We're trying to push back how we expose students to engineering and to stem fields as early as possible. And we've definitely seen the first of that in my program. In fact, my engineering program, uh, sprung out of an after school in Extracurricular Science Club that actually three girls started at our school. So I think that actually has helped that three girls started the club that eventually is what led to our engineering programs that sort of baked into the DNA and also our eyes a big public school. And we have about 50% of the students are under the poverty line and we e in Charlottesville, which is a big refugee town. And so I've been adamant from Day one that there are no barriers to entry into the program. There's no test you have to take. You don't have to have be taking a certain level of math or anything like that. That's been a lot of fun. To have a really diverse set of kids enter the program and be successful, >>that's final. That's great to hear. So, Philip, I wanna come back to you. You know, I think about maybe some day we'll be able to go back to a sporting events, and I know when I when I'm in there, there's somebody up on the roof looking out for me, you know, watching the crowd, and they have my back. And I think in many ways, the products that you build, you know, our similar. I may not know they're there, but they're keeping us safe or they're measuring things that that that I don't necessarily see. But I wonder if you could talk about a little bit more detail about the products you build and how they're impacting society. >>Sure, so There are certainly a lot of people who are who are watching, trying to make sure things were going well in keeping you safe that you may or may not be aware of. And we try and support ah lot of them. So we have detectors that are that are deployed in a variety of variety of uses, with a number of agencies and governments that dio like I was saying, ports and border crossing some other interesting applications that are looking for looking for signals that should not be there and working closely to fit into the operations these folks do. Onda. We also have a lot of outreach to researchers and scientists trying to help them support the work they're doing. Um, using neutron detection for soil moisture monitoring is a some really cool opportunities for doing it at large scale and with much less, um, expense or complication than would have been done. Previous technologies. Um, you know, they were talking about collaboration in the previous segment. We've been able to join a number of conferences for that, virtually including one that was supposed to be held in Boston, but another one that was held out of the University of Heidelberg in Germany. And, uh, this is sort of things that in some ways, the pandemic is pushing people towards greater collaboration than they would have been able to do. Had it all but in person. >>Yeah, we did. Uh, the cube did live works a couple years ago in Boston. It was awesome show. And I think, you know, with this whole trend toward digit, I call it the Force march to digital. Thanks to cove it I think that's just gonna continue. Thio grow. Rafael. What if you could describe the process that you use to better understand diseases? And what's your organization's involvement? Been in more detail, addressing the cove in pandemic. >>Um, so so we have the bio be structured in, Um um in a way that foster so the combination of technology and science. So we have to scientific tracks, one about infectious diseases and the other one about understanding just basic human biology, how the human body functions, and especially how the cells in the human body function on how they're organized to create tissues in the body. On Ben, it has this set of platforms. Um, mind is one of them by engineering that are all technology rated. So we have data science platform, all about data analysis, machine learning, things like that. Um, we have a mass spectrometry platform is all about mass spectrometry technologies to, um, exploit those ones in service for the scientist on. We have a genomics platform that it's all about sequencing DNA and are gonna, um and then an advanced microscopy. It's all about developing technologies, uh, to look at things with advanced microscopes and developed technologies to marry computation on microscopy. So, um, the scientists set the agenda and the platforms, we just serve their needs, support their needs, and hopefully develop technologies that help them do their experiments better, faster, or allow them to the experiment that they couldn't do in any other way before. Um And so with cove, it because we have that very strong group of scientists that work on have been working on infectious disease before, and especially in viruses, we've been able to very quickly pivot to working on that s O. For example, my team was able to build pretty quickly a machine to automatically purified proteins on is being used to purify all these different important proteins in the cove. It virus the SARS cov to virus Onda. We're sending some of those purified proteins all over the world. Two scientists that are researching the virus and trying to figure out how to develop vaccines, understand how the virus affects the body and all that. Um, so some of the machines we built are having a very direct impact on this. Um, Also for the copy testing lab, we were able to very quickly develop some very simple machines that allowed the lab to function sort of faster and more efficiently. Sort of had a little bit of automation in places where we couldn't find commercial machines that would do it. >>Um, eso Matt. I mean, you gotta be listening to this and thinking about Okay, So someday your students are gonna be working at organizations like like, like Bio Hub and Silver Side. And you know, a lot of young people they're just don't know about you guys, but like my kids, they're really passionate about changing the world. You know, there's way more important than you know, the financial angles and it z e. I gotta believe you're seeing that you're right in the front lines there. >>Really? Um, in fact, when I started the curriculum six or seven years ago, one of the first bits of feedback I got from my students is they said Okay, this is a lot of fun. So I had my students designing projects and programming microcontrollers raspberry, PiS and order we nose and things like that. The first bit of feedback I got from students was they said Okay, when do we get to impact the world? I've heard engineering >>is about >>making the world a better place, and robots are fun and all, but, you know, where is the real impact? And so um, dude, yeah, thanks to the guidance of my students, I'm baking that Maurin. Now I'm like day one of engineering one. We talk about how the things that the tools they're learning and the skills they're gaining, uh, eventually, you know, very soon could be could be used to make the world a better place. >>You know, we all probably heard that famous line by Jeff Hammer Barker. The greatest minds of my generation are trying to figure out how to get people to click on ads. I think we're really generally generationally, finally, at the point where young students and engineering a really, you know, a passionate about affecting society. I wanna get into the product, you know, side and understand how each of you are using on shape and and the value that that it brings. Maybe Raphael, you could start how long you've been using it. You know, what's your experience with it? Let's let's start there. >>I begin for about two years, and I switched to it with some trepidation. You know, I was used to always using the traditional product that you have to install on your computer, that everybody uses that. So I was kind of locked into that. But I started being very frustrated with the way it worked, um, and decided to give on ship chance. Which reputation? Because any change always, you know, causes anxiety. Um, but very quickly my engineers started loving it, Uh, just because it's it's first of all, the learning curve wasn't very difficult at all. You can transfer from one from the traditional product to entree very quickly and easily. You can learn all the concepts very, very fast. It has all the functionality that we needed and and what's best is that it allows to do things that we couldn't do before or we couldn't do easily. Now we can access the our cat documents from anywhere in the world. Um, so when we're in the lab fabricating something or testing a machine, any computer we have next to us or a tablet or on iPhone, we can pull it up and look at the cad and check things or make changes. That's something that couldn't do before because before you had to pay for every installation off the software for the computer, and I couldn't afford to have 20 installations to have some computers with the cat ready to use them like once every six months would have been very inefficient. So we love that part. And the collaboration features are fantastic, especially now with Kobe, that we have to have all the remote meetings eyes fantastic, that you can have another person drive the cad while the whole team is watching that person change the model and do things and point to things that is absolutely revolutionary. We love it. The fact that you have very, very sophisticated version control before it was always a challenge asking people, please, if you create anniversary and apart, how do we name it so that people find it? And then you end up with all these collection of files with names that nobody ever remembers, what they are, the person left. And now nobody knows which version is the right one. A mess with on shape on the version ING system it has, and the fact that you can go back in history off the document and go back to previous version so easily and then go back to the press and version and explore the history of the part that is truly, um, just world changing for us, that we can do that so easily on for me as a manager to manage this collection of information that is critical for our operations. It makes it so much easier because everything is in one place. I don't have to worry about file servers that go down that I have to administer that have to have I t taken care off that have to figure how to keep access to people to those servers when they're at home, and they need a virtual private network and all of that mess disappears. I just simply give give a person in accounting on shape and then magically, they have access to everything in the way I want. And we can manage the lower documents and everything in a way that is absolutely fantastic. >>Feel what was your what? What were some of the concerns you had mentioned? You had some trepidation. Was it a performance? Was it security? You know some of the traditional cloud stuff, and I'm curious as to how, How, whether any of those act manifested really that you had to manage. What were your concerns? >>Look, the main concern is how long is it going to take for everybody in the team to learn to use the system like it and buy into it? Because I don't want to have my engineers using tools against their will write. I want everybody to be happy because that's how they're productive. They're happy, and they enjoyed the tools they have. That was my main concern. I was a little bit worried about the whole concept of not having the files in a place where I couldn't quote unquote seat in some server and on site, but that That's kind of an outdated concept, right? So that took a little bit of a mind shift, but very quickly. Then I started thinking, Look, I have a lot of documents on Google Drive. Like, I don't worry about that. Why would I worry about my cat on on shape, right? Is the same thing. So I just needed to sort of put things in perspective that way. Um, the other, um, you know, the concern was the learning curve, right? Is like, how is he Will be for everybody to and for me to learn it on whether it had all of the features that we needed. And there were a few features that I actually discussed with, um uh, Cody at on shape on, they were actually awesome about using their scripting language in on shape to sort of mimic some of the features of the old cat, uh, in on, shaped in a way that actually works even better than the old system. So it was It was amazing. Yeah, >>Great. Thank you for that, Philip. What's your experience been? Maybe you could take us through your journey within shape. >>Sure. So we've been we've been using on shaped silver side for coming up on about four years now, and we love it. We're very happy with it. We have a very modular product line, so we make anything from detectors that would go into backpacks. Two vehicles, two very large things that a shipping container would go through and saw. Excuse me. Shape helps us to track and collaborate faster on the design. Have multiple people working a same time on a project. And it also helps us to figure out if somebody else comes to us and say, Hey, I want something new how we congrats modules from things that we already have put them together and then keep track of the design development and the different branches and ideas that we have, how they all fit together. A za design comes together, and it's just been fantastic from a mechanical engineering background. I will also say that having used a number of different systems and solid works was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Before I got using on shape, I went, Wow, this is amazing and I really don't want to design in any other platform. After after getting on Lee, a little bit familiar with it. >>You know, it's funny, right? I'll have the speed of technology progression. I was explaining to some young guns the other day how I used to have a daytime er and that was my life. And if I lost that daytime, er I was dead. And I don't know how we weigh existed without, you know, Google maps eso we get anywhere, I don't know, but, uh but so So, Matt, you know, it's interesting to think about, you know, some of the concerns that Raphael brought up, you hear? For instance, you know, all the time. Wow. You know, I get my Amazon bill at the end of the month that zip through the roof in, But the reality is that Yeah, well, maybe you are doing more, but you're doing things that you couldn't have done before. And I think about your experience in teaching and educating. I mean, you so much more limited in terms of the resource is that you would have had to be able to educate people. So what's your experience been with With on shape and what is it enabled? >>Um, yeah, it was actually talking before we went with on shape. We had a previous CAD program, and I was talking to my vendor about it, and he let me know that we were actually one of the biggest CAD shops in the state. Because if you think about it a really big program, you know, really big company might employ. 5, 10, 15, 20 cad guys, right? I mean, when I worked for a large defense contractor, I think there were probably 20 of us as the cad guys. I now have about 300 students doing cat. So there's probably more students with more hours of cat under their belt in my building than there were when I worked for the big defense contractor. Um, but like you mentioned, uh, probably our biggest hurdle is just re sources. And so we want We want one of things I've always prided myself and trying to do in this. Programs provide students with access two tools and skills that they're going to see either in college or in the real world. So it's one of the reason we went with a big professional cad program. There are, you know, sort of K 12 oriented software and programs and things. But, you know, I want my kids coding and python and using slack and using professional type of tools on DSO when it comes to cat. That's just that That was a really hurt. I mean, you know, you could spend $30,000 on one seat of, you know, professional level cad program, and then you need a $30,000 computer to run it on if you're doing a heavy assemblies, Um and so one of my dreams And it was always just a crazy dream. And I was the way I would always pitcher in my school system and say, someday I'm gonna have a kid on a school issued chromebook in subsidized housing, on public WiFi doing professional level bad and that that was a crazy statement until a couple of years ago. So we're really excited that I literally and you know, March and you said the forced march, the forced march into, you know, modernity, March 13th kids sitting in my engineering lab that we spent a lot of money on doing cad March 14th. Those kids were at home on their school issued chromebooks on public WiFi, uh, keeping their designs going and collaborating. And then, yeah, I could go on and on about some of the things you know, the features that we've learned since then they're even better. So it's not like this is some inferior, diminished version of Academy. There's so much about it. Well, I >>wanna I wanna ask you that I may be over my skis on this, but we're seeing we're starting to see the early days of the democratization of CAD and product design. It is the the citizen engineer, I mean, maybe insulting to the engineers in the room, But but is that we're beginning to see that >>I have to believe that everything moves into the cloud. Part of that is democratization that I don't need. I can whether you know, I think artists, you know, I could have a music studio in my basement with a nice enough software package. And Aiken, I could be a professional for now. My wife's a photographer. I'm not allowed to say that I could be a professional photographer with, you know, some cloud based software, and so, yeah, I do think that's part of what we're seeing is more and more technology is moving to the cloud. >>Philip. Rafael Anything you Dad, >>I think I mean, yeah, that that that combination of cloud based cat and then three d printing that is becoming more and more affordable on ubiquitous It's truly transformative, and I think for education is fantastic. I wish when I was a kid I had the opportunity to play with those kinds of things because I was always the late things. But, you know, the in a very primitive way. So, um, I think this is a dream for kids. Teoh be able to do this. And, um, yeah, there's so many other technologies coming on, like Arduino on all of these electronic things that live kids play at home very cheaply with things that back in my day would have been unthinkable. >>So we know there's a go ahead. Philip, please. >>We had a pandemic and silver site moved to a new manufacturing facility this year. I was just on the shop floor, talking with contractors, standing 6 ft apart, pointing at things. But through it all, our CAD system was completely unruffled. Nothing stopped in our development work. Nothing stopped in our support for existing systems in the field. We didn't have to think about it. We had other server issues, but none with our, you know, engineering cad, platform and product development in support world right ahead, which was cool, but also a in that's point. I think it's just really cool what you're doing with the kids. The most interesting secondary and college level engineering work that I did was project based, taken important problem to the world. Go solve it and that is what we do here. That is what my entire career has been. And I'm super excited to see. See what your students are going to be doing, uh, in there home classrooms on their chromebooks now and what they do building on that. >>Yeah, I'm super excited to see your kids coming out of college with engineering degrees because, yeah, I think that Project based experience is so much better than just sitting in a classroom, taking notes and doing math problems on day. I think it will give the kids a much better flavor. What engineering is really about Think a lot of kids get turned off by engineering because they think it's kind of dry because it's just about the math for some very abstract abstract concept on they are there. But I think the most important thing is just that hands on a building and the creativity off, making things that you can touch that you can see that you can see functioning. >>Great. So, you know, we all know the relentless pace of technology progression. So when you think about when you're sitting down with the folks that on shape and there the customer advisor for one of the things that that you want on shape to do that it doesn't do today >>I could start by saying, I just love some of the things that does do because it's such a modern platform. And I think some of these, uh, some some platforms that have a lot of legacy and a lot of history behind them. I think we're dragging some of that behind them. So it's cool to see a platform that seemed to be developed in the modern era, and so that Z it is the Google docks. And so the fact that collaboration and version ing and link sharing is and like platform agnostic abilities, the fact that that seems to be just built into the nature of the thing so far, That's super exciting. As far as things that, uh, to go from there, Um, I don't know, >>Other than price. >>You can't say >>I >>can't say lower price. >>Yeah, so far on P. D. C. S that work with us. Really? Well, so I'm not complaining. There you there, >>right? Yeah. Yeah. No gaps, guys. Whitespace, Come on. >>We've been really enjoying the three week update. Cadence. You know, there's a new version every three weeks and we don't have to install it. We just get all the latest and greatest goodies. One of the trends that we've been following and enjoying is the the help with a revision management and release work flows. Um, and I know that there's more than on shape is working on that we're very excited for, because that's a big important part about making real hardware and supporting it in the field. Something that was cool. They just integrated Cem markup capability. In the last release that took, we were doing that anyway, but we were doing it outside of on shapes. And now we get to streamline our workflow and put it in the CAD system where We're making those changes anyway when we're reviewing drawings and doing this kind of collaboration. And so I think from our perspective, we continue to look forward. Toa further progress on that. There's a lot of capability in the cloud that I think they're just kind of scratching the surface on you, >>right? I would. I mean, you're you're asking to knit. Pick. I would say one of the things that I would like to see is is faster regeneration speed. There are a few times with convicts, necessities that regenerating the document takes a little longer than I would like. It's not a serious issue, but anyway, I I'm being spoiled, >>you know? That's good. I've been doing this a long time, and I like toe ask that question of practitioners and to me, it It's a signal like when you're nit picking and that's what you're struggling to knit. Pick that to me is a sign of a successful product, and and I wonder, I don't know, uh, have the deep dive into the architecture. But are things like alternative processors. You're seeing them hit the market in a big way. Uh, you know, maybe helping address the challenge, But I'm gonna ask you the big, chewy question now. Then we maybe go to some audience questions when you think about the world's biggest problems. I mean, we're global pandemics, obviously top of mind. You think about nutrition, you know, feeding the global community. We've actually done a pretty good job of that. But it's not necessarily with the greatest nutrition, climate change, alternative energy, the economic divides. You've got geopolitical threats and social unrest. Health care is a continuing problem. What's your vision for changing the world and how product innovation for good and be applied to some of the the problems that that you all are passionate about? Big question. Who wants toe start? >>Not biased. But for years I've been saying that if you want to solve the economy, the environment, uh, global unrest, pandemics, education is the case. If you wanna. If you want to, um, make progress in those in those realms, I think funding funding education is probably gonna pay off pretty well. >>Absolutely. And I think Stam is key to that. I mean, all of the ah lot of the well being that we have today and then industrialized countries. Thanks to science and technology, right improvements in health care, improvements in communication, transportation, air conditioning. Um, every aspect of life is touched by science and technology. So I think having more kids studying and understanding that is absolutely key. Yeah, I agree, >>Philip, you got anything to add? >>I think there's some big technical problems in the world today, Raphael and ourselves there certainly working on a couple of them. Think they're also collaboration problems and getting everybody to be able to pull together instead of pulling separately and to be able to spur the ideas on words. So that's where I think the education side is really exciting. What Matt is doing and it just kind of collaboration in general when we could do provide tools to help people do good work. Uh, that is, I think, valuable. >>Yeah, I think that's a very good point. And along those lines, we have some projects that are about creating very low cost instruments for low research settings, places in Africa, Southeast Asia, South America, so that they can do, um, um, biomedical research that it's difficult to do in those place because they don't have the money to buy the fancy lab machines that cost $30,000 an hour. Um, so we're trying to sort of democratize some of those instruments. And I think thanks to tools like Kahn shape then is easier, for example, to have a conversation with somebody in Africa and show them the design that we have and discuss the details of it with them on. But it's amazing, right to have somebody, you know, 10 time zones away, Um, looking really life in real time with you about your design and discussing the details or teaching them how to build a machine, right? Because, um, you know, they have a three D printer. You can you can just give them the design and say like, you build it yourself, uh, even cheaper than and, you know, also billing and shipping it there. Um, so all that that that aspect of it is also super important. I think for any of these efforts to improve some of the hardest part was in the world for climate change. Do you say, as you say, poverty, nutrition issues? Um, you know, availability of water. You have that project at about finding water. Um, if we can also help deploy technologies that teach people remotely how to create their own technologies or how to build their own systems that will help them solve those forms locally. I think that's very powerful. >>Yeah, the point about education is right on. I think some people in the audience may be familiar with the work of Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, the second machine age where they sort of put forth the premise that, uh, is it laid it out. Look, for the first time in history, machines air replacing humans from a cognitive perspective. Machines have always replaced humans, but that's gonna have an impact on jobs. But the answer is not toe protect the past from the future. The answer is education and public policy that really supports that. So I couldn't agree more. I think it's a really great point. Um, we have We do have some questions from the audience. If if we could If I can ask you guys, um, you know, this one kind of stands out. How do you see artificial intelligence? I was just talking about machine intelligence. Um, how do you see that? Impacting the design space guys trying to infuse a I into your product development. Can you tell me? >>Um, absolutely, like, we're using AI for some things, including some of these very low cost instruments that will hopefully help us diagnose certain diseases, especially this is that are very prevalent in the Third World. Um, and some of those diagnostics are these days done by thes armies of technicians that are trained to look under the microscope. But, um, that's a very slow process. Is very error prone and having machine learning systems that can to the same diagnosis faster, cheaper and also little machines that can be taken to very remote places to these villages that have no access to a fancy microscope. To look at a sample from a patient that's very powerful. And I we don't do this, but I have read quite a bit about how certain places air using a Tribune attorneys to actually help them optimize designs for parts. So you get these very interesting looking parts that you would have never thought off a person would have never thought off, but that are incredibly light ink. Earlier, strong and I have all sort of properties that are interesting thanks to artificial intelligence machine learning in particular >>yet another. The advantage you get when when your work is in the cloud I've seen. I mean, there's just so many applications that so if the radiology scan is in the cloud and the radiologist is goes to bed at night, Radiologist could come in in the morning and and say, Oh, the machine while you were sleeping was using artificial intelligence to scan these 40,000 images. And here's the five that we picked out that we think you should take a closer look at. Or like Raphael said, I can design my part. My, my, my, my, my you know, mount or bracket or whatever and go to sleep. And then I wake up in the morning. The machine has improved. It for me has made it strider strider stronger and lighter. Um And so just when your when your work is in the cloud, that's just that's a really cool advantage that you get that you can have machines doing some of your design work for you. >>Yeah, we've been watching, uh, you know, this week is this month, I guess is AWS re invent and it's just amazing to see how much effort is coming around machine learning machine intelligence. You know Amazon has sage maker Google's got, you know, embedded you no ML and big query. Uh, certainly Microsoft with Azure is doing tons of stuff and machine learning. I think the point there is that that these things will be infused in tow R and D and in tow software product by the vendor community. And you all will apply that to your business and and build value through the unique data that your collecting, you know, in your ecosystems. And and that's how you add value. You don't have to be necessarily, you know, developers of artificial intelligence, but you have to be practitioners to apply that. Does that make sense to you, Philip? >>Yeah, absolutely. And I think your point about value is really well chosen. We see AI involved from the physics simulations all the way up to interpreting radiation data, and that's where the value question, I think, is really important because it's is the output of the AI giving helpful information that the people that need to be looking at it. So if it's curating a serious of radiation alert, saying, Hey, like these air the anomalies. You need to look at eyes it, doing that in a way that's going to help a good response on. In some cases, the II is only as good as the people. That sort of gave it a direction and turn it loose. And you want to make sure that you don't have biases or things like that underlying your AI that they're going to result in less than helpful outcomes coming from it. So we spend quite a lot of time thinking about how do we provide the right outcomes to people who are who are relying on our systems? >>That's a great point, right? Humans air biased and humans build models, so models are inherently biased. But then the software is hitting the market. That's gonna help us identify those biases and help us, you know? Of course. Correct. So we're entering Cem some very exciting times, guys. Great conversation. I can't thank you enough for spending the time with us and sharing with our audience the innovations that you're bringing to help the world. So thanks again. >>Thank you so much. >>Thank you. >>Okay. Welcome. Okay. When we come back, John McElheny is gonna join me. He's on shape. Co founder. And he's currently the VP of strategy at PTC. He's gonna join the program. We're gonna take a look at what's next and product innovation. I'm Dave Volonte and you're watching innovation for good on the Cube, the global leader. Digital technology event coverage. We'll be right back. >>Okay? Okay. Yeah. Okay. >>From around >>the globe, it's the Cube. Presenting innovation for good. Brought to you by on shape. >>Okay, welcome back to innovation. For good. With me is John McElheny, who is one of the co founders of On Shape and is now the VP of strategy at PTC. John, it's good to see you. Thanks for making the time to come on the program. Thanks, Dave. So we heard earlier some of the accomplishments that you've made since the acquisition. How has the acquisition affected your strategy? Maybe you could talk about what resource is PTC brought to the table that allowed you toe sort of rethink or evolve your strategy? What can you share with us? >>Sure. You know, a year ago, when when John and myself met with Jim Pepperman early on is we're we're pondering. Started joining PTC one of things became very clear is that we had a very clear shared vision about how we could take the on shape platform and really extended for, for all of the PTC products, particular sort of their augmented reality as well as their their thing works or the i o. T business and their product. And so from the very beginning there was a clear strategy about taking on shape, extending the platform and really investing, um, pretty significantly in the product development as well as go to market side of things, uh, toe to bring on shape out to not only the PTC based but sort of the broader community at large. So So So PTC has been a terrific, terrific, um, sort of partner as we've we've gonna go on after this market together. Eso We've added a lot of resource and product development side of things. Ah, lot of resource and they go to market and customer success and support. So, really, on many fronts, that's been both. Resource is as well a sort of support at the corporate level from from a strategic standpoint and then in the field, we've had wonderful interactions with many large enterprise customers as well as the PTC channels. So it's been really a great a great year. >>Well, and you think about the challenges of in your business going to SAS, which you guys, you know, took on that journey. You know, 78 years ago. Uh, it's not trivial for a lot of companies to make that transition, especially a company that's been around as long as PTC. So So I'm wondering how much you know, I was just asking you How about what PCP TC brought to the table? E gotta believe you're bringing a lot to the table to in terms of the mindset, uh, even things is, is mundane is not the right word, but things like how you compensate salespeople, how you interact with customers, the notion of a service versus a product. I wonder if you could address >>that. Yeah, it's a it's a really great point. In fact, after we had met Jim last year, John and I one of the things we walked out in the seaport area in Boston, one of things we sort of said is, you know, Jim really gets what we're trying to do here and and part of let me bring you into the thinking early on. Part of what Jim talked about is there's lots of, you know, installed base sort of software that's inside of PTC base. That's helped literally thousands of customers around the world. But the idea of moving to sass and all that it entails both from a technology standpoint but also a cultural standpoint. Like How do you not not just compensate the sales people as an example? But how do you think about customer success? In the past, it might have been that you had professional services that you bring out to a customer, help them deploy your solutions. Well, when you're thinking about a SAS based offering, it's really critical that you get customers successful with it. Otherwise, you may have turned, and you know it will be very expensive in terms of your business long term. So you've got to get customers success with software in the very beginning. So you know, Jim really looked at on shape and he said that John and I, from a cultural standpoint, you know, a lot of times companies get acquired and they've acquired technology in the past that they integrate directly into into PTC and then sort of roll it out through their products, are there just reached channel, he said. In some respects, John John, think about it as we're gonna take PTC and we want to integrate it into on shape because we want you to share with us both on the sales side and customer success on marketing on operations. You know all the things because long term, we believe the world is a SAS world, that the whole industry is gonna move too. So really, it was sort of an inverse in terms of the thought process related to normal transactions >>on That makes a lot of sense to me. You mentioned Sharon turns the silent killer of a SAS company, and you know, there's a lot of discussion, you know, in the entrepreneurial community because you live this, you know what's the best path? I mean today, You see, you know, if you watch Silicon Valley double, double, triple triple, but but there's a lot of people who believe, and I wonder, if you come in there is the best path to, you know, in the X Y axis. If if it's if it's uh, growth on one and retention on the other axis. What's the best way to get to the upper right on? Really? The the best path is probably make sure you've nailed obviously the product market fit, But make sure that you can retain customers and then throw gas on the fire. You see a lot of companies they burn out trying to grow too fast, but they haven't figured out, you know that. But there's too much churn. They haven't figured out those metrics. I mean, obviously on shape. You know, you were sort of a pioneer in here. I gotta believe you've figured out that customer retention before you really, You know, put the pedal to the >>metal. Yeah, and you know, growth growth can mask a lot of things, but getting getting customers, especially the engineering space. Nobody goes and sits there and says, Tomorrow we're gonna go and and, you know, put 100 users on this and and immediately swap out all of our existing tools. These tools are very rich and deep in terms of capability, and they become part of the operational process of how a company designs and builds products. So any time anybody is actually going through the purchasing process. Typically, they will run a try along or they'll run a project where they look at. Kind of What? What is this new solution gonna help them dio. How are we gonna orient ourselves for success? Longer term. So for us, you know, getting new customers and customer acquisition is really critical. But getting those customers to actually deploy the solution to be successful with it. You know, we like to sort of, say, the marketing or the lead generation and even some of the initial sales. That's sort of like the Kindle ing. But the fire really starts when customers deploy it and get successful. The solution because they bring other customers into the fold. And then, of course, if they're successful with it, you know, then in fact, you have negative turn which, ironically, means growth in terms of your inside of your install. Bates. >>Right? And you've seen that with some of the emerging, you know, SAS companies, where you're you're actually you know, when you calculate whatever its net retention or renew ALS, it's actually from a dollar standpoint. It's up in the high nineties or even over 100%. >>So >>and that's a trend we're gonna continue. See, I >>wonder >>if we could sort of go back. Uh, and when you guys were starting on shape, some of the things that you saw that you were trying to strategically leverage and what's changed, you know, today we were talking. I was talking to John earlier about in a way, you kinda you kinda got a blank slate is like doing another startup. >>You're >>not. Obviously you've got installed base and customers to service, but But it's a new beginning for you guys. So one of the things that you saw then you know, cloud and and sas and okay, but that's we've been there, done that. What are you seeing? You know today? >>Well, you know, So So this is a journey, of course, that that on shape on its own has gone through it had I'll sort of say, you know, several iterations, both in terms of of of, you know, how do you How do you get customers? How do you How do you get them successful? How do you grow those customers? And now that we've been part of PTC, the question becomes okay. One, There is certainly a higher level of credibility that helps us in terms of our our megaphone is much bigger than it was when we're standalone company. But on top of that now, figuring out how to work with their channel with their direct sales force, you know, they have, um, for example, you know, very large enterprises. Well, many of those customers are not gonna go in forklift out their existing solution to replace it with with on shape. However, many of them do have challenges in their supply chain and communications with contractors and vendors across the globe. And so, you know, finding our fit inside of those large enterprises as they extend out with their their customers is a very interesting area that we've really been sort of incremental to to PTC. And then, you know, they they have access to lots of other technology, like the i o. T business. And now, of course, the augmented reality business that that we can bring things to bear. For example, in the augmented reality world, they've they've got something called expert capture. And this is essentially imagine, you know, in a are ah, headset that allows you to be ableto to speak to it, but also capture images still images in video. And you could take somebody who's doing their task and capture literally the steps that they're taking its geo location and from their builds steps for new employees to be, we'll learn and understand how todo use that technology to help them do their job better. Well, when they do that, if there is replacement products or variation of of some of the tools that that they built the original design instruction set for they now have another version. Well, they have to manage multiple versions. Well, that's what on shape is really great at doing and so taking our technology and helping their solutions as well. So it's not only expanding our customer footprint, it's expanding the application footprint in terms of how we can help them and help customers. >>So that leads me to the tam discussion and again, as part of your strategist role. How do you think about that? Was just talking to some of your customers earlier about the democratization of cat and engineering? You know, I kind of joked, sort of like citizen engineering, but but so that you know, the demographics are changing the number of users potentially that can access the products because the it's so much more of a facile experience. How are you thinking about the total available market? >>It really is a great question, You know, it used to be when you when you sold boxes of software, it was how many engineers were out there. And that's the size of the market. The fact that matter is now when, When you think about access to that information, that data is simply a pane of glass. Whether it's a computer, whether it's a laptop, UH, a a cell phone or whether it's a tablet, the ability to to use different vehicles, access information and data expands the capabilities and power of a system to allow feedback and iteration. I mean, one of the one of the very interesting things is in technology is when you can take something and really unleash it to a larger audience and builds, you know, purpose built applications. You can start to iterate, get better feedback. You know there's a classic case in the clothing industry where Zara, you know, is a fast sort of turnaround. Agile manufacturer. And there was a great New York Times article written a couple years ago. My wife's a fan of Zara, and I think she justifies any purchases by saying, You know, Zara, you gotta purchase it now. Otherwise it may not be there the next time. Yet you go back to the store. They had some people in a store in New York that had this woman's throw kind of covering Shaw. And they said, Well, it would be great if we could have this little clip here so we can hook it through or something. And they sent a note back toe to the factory in Spain, and literally two weeks later they had, you know, 4000 of these things in store, and they sold out because they had a closed loop and iterative process. And so if we could take information and allow people access in multiple ways through different devices and different screens, that could be very specific information that, you know, we remove a lot of the engineering data book, bring the end user products conceptually to somebody that would have had to wait months to get the actual physical prototype, and we could get feedback well, Weaken have a better chance of making sure whatever product we're building is the right product when it ultimately gets delivered to a customer. So it's really it's a much larger market that has to be thought of rather than just the kind of selling A boxes software to an engineer. >>That's a great story. And again, it's gonna be exciting for you guys to see that with. The added resource is that you have a PTC, Um, so let's talk. I promise people we wanna talk about Atlas. Let's talk about the platform. A little bit of Atlas was announced last year. Atlas. For those who don't know it's a SAS space platform, it purports to go beyond product lifecycle management and you You're talking cloud like agility and scale to CAD and product design. But John, you could do a better job than I. What do >>we need to know about Atlas? Well, I think Atlas is a great description because it really is metaphorically sort of holding up all of the PTC applications themselves. But from the very beginning, when John and I met with Jim, part of what we were intrigued about was that he shared a vision that on shape was more than just going to be a cad authoring tool that, in fact, you know, in the past these engineering tools were very powerful, but they were very narrow in their purpose and focus. And we had specialty applications to manage the versions, etcetera. What we did in on shape is we kind of inverted that thinking. We built this collaboration and sharing engine at the core and then kind of wrap the CAD system around it. But that collaboration sharing and version ING engine is really powerful. And it was that vision that Jim had that he shared that we had from the beginning, which was, how do we take this thing to make a platform that could be used for many other applications inside of inside of any company? And so not only do we have a partner application area that is is much like the APP store or Google play store. Uh, that was sort of our first Stan Shih ation of this. This this platform. But now we're extending out to broader applications and much meatier applications. And internally, that's the thing works in the in the augmented reality. But there'll be other applications that ultimately find its way on top of this platform. And so they'll get all the benefits of of the collaboration, sharing the version ing the multi platform, multi device. And that's an extremely extremely, um, strategic leverage point for the company. >>You know, it's interesting, John, you mentioned the seaport before. So PTC, for those who don't know, built a beautiful facility down at the Seaport in Boston. And, of course, when PTC started, you know, back in the mid 19 eighties, there was nothing at the seaport s. >>So it's >>kind of kind of ironic, you know, we were way seeing the transformation of the seaport. We're seeing the transformation of industry and of course, PTC. And I'm sure someday you'll get back into that beautiful office, you know? Wait. Yeah, I'll bet. And, uh and but I wanna bring this up because I want I want you to talk about the future. How you how you see that our industry and you've observed this has moved from very product centric, uh, plat platform centric with sass and cloud. And now we're seeing ecosystems form around those products and platforms and data flowing through the ecosystem powering, you know, new innovation. I wonder if you could paint a picture for us of what the future looks like to you from your vantage point. >>Yeah, I think one of the key words you said there is data because up until now, data for companies really was sort of trapped in different applications. And it wasn't because people were nefarious and they want to keep it limited. It was just the way in which things were built. And, you know, when people use an application like on shape, what ends up happening is there their day to day interaction and everything that they do is actually captured by the platform. And, you know, we don't have access to that data. Of course it's it's the customer's data. But as as an artifact of them using the system than doing their day to day job, what's happening is they're creating huge amounts of information that can then be accessed and analyzed to help them both improve their design process, improve their efficiencies, improve their actual schedules in terms of making sure they can hit delivery times and be able to understand where there might be roadblocks in the future. So the way I see it is companies now are deploying SAS based tools like on shape and an artifact of them. Using that platform is that they have now analytics and tools to better understand and an instrument and manage their business. And then from there, I think you're going to see, because these systems are all you know extremely well. Architected allow through, you know, very structured AP. I calls to connect other SAS based applications. You're gonna start seeing closed loop sort of system. So, for example, people design using on shape, they end up going and deploying their system or installing it, or people use the end using products. People then may call back into the customers support line and report issues, problems, challenges. They'll be able to do traceability back to the underlying design. They'll be able to do trend analysis and defect analysis from the support lines and tie it back and closed loop the product design, manufacture, deployment in the field sort of cycles. In addition, you can imagine there's many things that air sort of as designed. But then when people go on site and they have to install it. There's some alterations modifications. Think about think about like a large air conditioning units for buildings. You go and you go to train and you get a large air conditioning unit that put up on top of building with a crane. They have to build all kinds of adaptors to make sure that that will fit inside of the particulars of that building. You know, with on shape and tools like this, you'll be able to not only take the design of what the air conditioning system might be, but also the all the adapter plates, but also how they installed it. So it sort of as designed as manufactured as stalled. And all these things can be traced, just like if you think about the transformation of customer service or customer contacts. In the early days, you used to have tools that were PC based tools called contact management solution, you know, kind of act or gold mine. And these were basically glorified Elektronik role in Texas. It had a customer names and they had phone numbers and whatever else. And Salesforce and Siebel, you know, these types of systems really broadened out the perspective of what a customer relationship? Waas. So it wasn't just the contact information it was, you know, How did they come to find out about you as a company? So all of the pre sort of marketing and then kind of what happens after they become a customer and it really was a 3 60 view. I think that 3 60 view gets extended to not just to the customers, but also tools and the products they use. And then, of course, the performance information that could come back to the manufacturer. So, you know, as an engineer, one of the things you learn about with systems is the following. And if you remember, when the CD first came out CDs that used to talk about four times over sampling or eight times over sampling and it was really kind of, you know, the fidelity the system. And we know from systems theory that the best way to improve the performance of a system is to actually have more feedback. The more feedback you have, the better system could be. And so that's why you get 16 60 for example, etcetera. Same thing here. The more feedback we have of different parts of a company that a better performance, The company will be better customer relationships. Better, uh, overall financial performance as well. So that's that's the view I have of how these systems all tied together. >>It's a great vision in your point about the data is I think right on. It used to be so fragmented in silos, and in order to take a system view, you've gotta have a system view of the data. Now, for years, we've optimized maybe on one little component of the system and that sometimes we lose sight of the overall outcome. And so what you just described, I think is, I think sets up. You know very well as we exit. Hopefully soon we exit this this covert era on John. I hope that you and I can sit down face to face at a PTC on shape event in the near term >>in the seaport in the >>seaport would tell you that great facility toe have have an event for sure. It >>z wonderful >>there. So So John McElhinney. Thanks so much for for participating in the program. It was really great to have you on, >>right? Thanks, Dave. >>Okay. And I want to thank everyone for participating. Today we have some great guest speakers. And remember, this is a live program. So give us a little bit of time. We're gonna flip this site over toe on demand mode so you can share it with your colleagues and you, or you can come back and and watch the sessions that you heard today. Uh, this is Dave Volonte for the Cube and on shape PTC. Thank you so much for watching innovation for good. Be well, Have a great holiday. And we'll see you next time. Yeah.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting innovation for good. Brought to you by on shape. >>Okay, we're back. This is Dave Volonte and you're watching innovation for good. A program on Cuba 3 65 made possible by on shape of BTC company. We're live today really live TV, which is the heritage of the Cuban. Now we're gonna go to the sources and talkto on shape customers to find out how they're applying technology to create real world innovations that are changing the world. So let me introduce our panel members. Rafael Gomez Fribourg is with the Chan Zuckerberg bio hub. A very big idea. And collaborative nonprofit was initiative that was funded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, and really around diagnosing and curing and better managing infectious diseases. So really timely topic. Philip Tabor is also joining us. He's with silver side detectors which develops neutron detective detection systems. Yet you want to know if early if neutrons and radiation or in places where you don't want them, so this should be really interesting. And last but not least, Matthew Shields is with the Charlottesville schools and is gonna educate us on how he and his team are educating students in the use of modern engineering tools and techniques. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cuban to the program. This should be really interesting. Thanks for coming on. >>Hi. Or pleasure >>for having us. >>You're very welcome. Okay, let me ask each of you because you're all doing such interesting and compelling work. Let's start with Rafael. Tell us more about the bio hub and your role there, please. >>Okay. Yes. As you said, the Bio Hope is a nonprofit research institution, um, funded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. Um and our main mission is to develop new technologies to help advance medicine and help, hopefully cure and manage diseases. Um, we also have very close collaborations with Universe California, San Francisco, Stanford University and the University California Berkeley on. We tried to bring those universities together, so they collaborate more of biomedical topics. And I manage a team of engineers in by joining platform. Um, and we're tasked with creating instruments for the laboratory to help the scientist boats inside the organization and also in the partner universities do their experiments in better ways in ways that they couldn't do before >>in this edition was launched five years ago. It >>was announced at the end of 2016, and we actually started operations in the beginning of 2017, which is when I joined um, so this is our third year. >>And how's how's it going? How does it work? I mean, these things >>take time. It's been a fantastic experience. Uh, the organization works beautifully. Um, it was amazing to see it grow from the beginning. I was employee number 12, I think eso When I came in, it was just a nem p off his building and MP labs. And very quickly we had something running about from anything. Eso I'm very proud of the work that we have done to make that possible. Um And then, of course, that's you mentioned now, with co vid, um, we've been able to do a lot of very cool work, um, very being of the pandemic In March, when there was a deficit of testing, uh, capacity in California, we spun up a testing laboratory in record time in about a week. It was crazy. It was a crazy project. Um, but but incredibly satisfying. And we ended up running all the way until the beginning of November, when the lab was finally shut down, we could process about 3000 samples a day. I think at the end of it all, we were able to test about 100 on the road, 150,000 samples from all over the state. We were providing free testing toe all of the Department of Public Health Department of Public Health in California, which, at the media pandemic, had no way to do testing affordably and fast. So I think that was a great service to the state. Now the state has created a testing system that will serve those departments. So then we decided that it was unnecessary to keep going with testing in the other biopsy that would shut down, >>right? Thank you for that. Now, Now, Philip, you What you do is mind melting. You basically helped keep the world safe. Maybe you describe a little bit more about silver side detectors and what your role is there and how it all works. >>Tour. So we make a nuclear bomb detectors and we also make water detectors. So we try and do our part. Thio Keep the world from blowing up and make it a better place at the same time. Both of these applications use neutron radiation detectors. That's what we make. Put them out by a port border crossing Places like that they can help make sure that people aren't smuggling, shall we say, very bad things. Um, there's also a burgeoning field of research and application where you can use neutrons with some pretty cool physics to find water so you can do things like but a detector up in the mountains and measure snowpack. Put it out in the middle of the field and measure soil moisture content. And as you might imagine, there's some really cool applications in, uh, research and agronomy and public policy for this. >>All right, so it's OK, so it's It's much more than you know, whatever fighting terrorism, it's there's a riel edge, or I kind of i o t application for what you guys do. >>You do both Zito shares. You might >>say a mat. I I look at your role is kind of scaling the brain power for for the future. Maybe tell us more about Charlottesville schools and in the mission that you're pursuing and what you do. >>Thank you. Um, I've been in Charlottesville city schools for about 11 or 12 years. I started their teaching, Um, a handful of classes, math and science and things like that. But Thescore board and my administration had the crazy idea of starting an engineering program about seven years ago. My background is an engineering is an engineering. My masters is in mechanical and aerospace engineering. And, um, I basically spent a summer kind of coming up with what might be a fun engineering curriculum for our students. And it started with just me and 30 students about seven years ago, Um, kind of a home spun from scratch curriculum. One of my goals from the outside was to be a completely project based curriculum, and it's now grown. We probably have about six or 700 students, five or six full time teachers. We now have pre engineering going on at the 5th and 6th grade level. I now have students graduating. Uh, you know, graduating after senior year with, like, seven years of engineering under their belt and heading off to doing some pretty cool stuff. So it's It's been a lot of fun building up a program and, um, and learning a lot in the process. >>That's awesome. I mean, you know, Cuba's. We've been passionate about things like women in tech, uh, diversity stem. You know, not only do we need more more students in stem, we need mawr underrepresented women, minorities, etcetera. We were just talking to John her stock and integrate Grayson about this is do you do you feel is though you're I mean, first of all, the work that you do is awesome, but but I'll go one step further. Do you feel as though it's reaching, um, or, you know, diverse base and And how is that going? >>That's a great question. I think research shows that a lot of people get funneled into one kind of track or career path or set of interests really early on in their educational career. And sometimes that that funnels kind of artificial. And so that's one of the reasons we keep pushing back. Um, so our school systems introducing kindergartners to programming on DSO. We're trying to push back how we expose students to engineering and to stem fields as early as possible, and we've definitely seen the fruits of that in my program. In fact, my engineering program, uh, sprung out of an after school in Extracurricular Science Club that actually three girls started at our school. So I think that actually has helped that three girls started the club That eventually is what led our engineering programs that sort of baked into the DNA and also are a big public school. And we have about 50% of the students are under the poverty line, and we should I mean, Charlottesville, which is a big refugee town. And so I've been adamant from Day one that there are no barriers to entry into the program. There's no test you have to take. You don't have to have be taking a certain level of math or anything like that. That's been a lot of fun. To have a really diverse set of kids and or the program and be successful, >>that's phenomenal. That's great to hear. So, Philip, I wanna come back to you. You know, I think about maybe some day we'll be able to go back to a sporting events, and I know when I when I'm in there, there's somebody up on the roof looking out for me, you know, watching the crowd. And they have my back. And I think in many ways, the products that you build, you know, our similar I may not know they're there, but they're keeping us safe or they're measuring things that that that I don't necessarily see. But I wonder if you could talk about a little bit more detail about the products you build and how they're impacting society. >>Sure, So there are certainly a lot of people who are who are watching, trying to make sure things were going well in keeping you safe that you may or may not be aware of. And we try and support ah lot of them. So we have detectors that are that are deployed in a variety of variety of uses with a number of agencies and governments that dio like I was saying, ports and border crossing some other interesting applications that are looking for looking for signals that should not be there and working closely to fit into the operations these folks do Onda. We also have ah lot of outreach to researchers and scientists trying to help them support the work they're doing, um, using neutron detection for soil moisture monitoring is a some really cool opportunities for doing it at large scale and with much less, um, expense or complication then would have been done previous technologies. Mhm. You know, they were talking about collaboration in the previous segment. We've been able to join a number of conferences for that, virtually including one that was supposed to be held in Boston. But another one that was held, uh, of the University of Heidelberg in Germany. And, uh, this is sort of things that in some ways, the pandemic is pushing people towards greater collaboration than there would have been able to do. Had it all but in person. >>Yeah, we did. Uh, the cube did live works a couple years ago in Boston. It was awesome show. And I think, you know, with this whole trend toward digit, I call it the forced march to digital. Thanks to cove it I think that's just gonna continue. Thio grow Raphael one. If you could describe the process that you used to better understand diseases and what's your organization's involvement? Been in more detail, addressing the cove in pandemic. >>Um, so so we have the bio be structured in, Um um, in a way that foster So the combination of technology and science. So we have to scientific tracks, one about infectious diseases and the other one about understanding just basic human biology how the human body functions and especially how the cells in the human body function on how they're organized to create teachers in the body. Um, and then it has the set of platforms. Um, mind is one of them by engineering that are all technology. Read it. So we have data science platform, all about data analysis, machine learning, things like that. Um, we have a mass spectrometry platform is all about mass spectrometry technologies to, um, exploit those ones in service for the scientists on. We have a genomics platform. That is all about sequencing DNA in our DNA. Um, and then an advanced microscopy. It's all about developing technologies, uh, to look at things with advanced microscopes and the little technologies to marry computation on microscope. So, um, the scientists said the agenda and the platforms we just serve their needs, support their needs, and hopefully develop technologies that help them do their experiments better, faster, or allow them to the experiment that they couldn't do in any other way before. Um And so with cove, it because we have that very strong group of scientists that work on. I have been working on infectious disease before, and especially in viruses, we've been able to very quickly pivot to working on that s O, for example, my team was able to build pretty quickly a machine to automatically purified proteins, and it's being used to purify all these different important proteins in the cove. It virus the SARS cov to virus on Dwyer, sending some of those purified proteins all over the world. Two scientists that are researching the virus and trying to figure out how to develop vaccines, understand how the virus affects the body and all that. So some of the machines we built are having a very direct impact on this. Um, Also for the copy testing lab, we were able to very quickly develop some very simple machines that allowed the lab to function sort of faster and more efficiently. Sort of had a little bit of automation in places where we couldn't find commercial machines that would do it. >>Um, God s o mat. I mean, you gotta be listening to this in thinking about, Okay? Some. Someday your students are gonna be working at organizations like Like like Bio Hub and Silver Side. And you know, a lot of young people that just have I don't know about you guys, but like my kids, they're really passionate about changing the world. You know, there's way more important than, you know, the financial angles and that z e I gotta believe you're seeing that you're right in the front lines there. >>Really? Um, in fact, when I started the curriculum six or seven years ago, one of the first bits of feedback I got from my students is they said Okay, this is a lot of fun. So I had my students designing projects and programming microcontrollers raspberry, PiS and order We nose and things like that. The first bit of feedback I got from students was they said Okay, when do we get to impact the world? I've heard engineering is about making the world a better place, and robots are fun and all, but, you know, where is the real impact? And so, um do Yeah, thanks to the guidance of my students, I'm baking that Maurin. Now I'm like Day one of engineering one. We talk about how the things that the tools they're learning and the skills they're gaining eventually you know, very soon could be could be used to make the world a better place. >>You know, we all probably heard that famous line By Jeff Hammond Barker. The greatest minds of my generation are trying to figure out how to get people to click on ads. E. I think we're really generally generationally finally, at the point where you know young students and engineering and really you know it passionate about affecting society. I wanna get into the product, you know, side and understand how each of you are using on shape and and the value that that it brings. Maybe Raphael, you could start how long you've been using it. You know, what's your experience with it? Let's let's start there. >>I begin for about two years, and I switched to it with some trepidation. You know, I was used to always using the traditional product that you have to install on your computer, that everybody uses that. So I was kind of locked into that, but I started being very frustrated with the way it worked, um, and decided to give on ship chance. Which reputation? Because any change always, you know, causes anxiety. But very quickly my engineers started loving it. Uh, just because it's it's first of all, the learning curve wasn't very difficult at all. You can transfer from one from the traditional product to entree very quickly and easily. You can learn all the concepts very, very fast. It has all the functionality that we needed, and and what's best is that it allows to do things that we couldn't do before or we couldn't do easily. Um, now we can access the our cat documents from anywhere in the world. Um, so when we're in the lab fabricating something or testing a machine, any computer we have next to us or a tablet or on iPhone, we can pull it up and look at the cad and check things or make changes that something that couldn't do before because before you had to pay for every installation off the software for the computer, and I couldn't afford to have 20 installations to have some computers with the cat ready to use them like once every six months would have been very inefficient. So we love that part. And the collaboration features are fantastic. Especially now with Kobe, that we have to have all the remote meetings, eyes fantastic, that you can have another person drive the cad while the whole team is watching that person change the model and do things and point to things that is absolutely revolutionary. We love it. The fact that you have very, very sophisticated version control before it was always a challenge asking people, please, if you create anniversary and apart, how do we name it so that people find it? And then you end up with all these collection of files with names that nobody remembers, what they are, the person left and now nobody knows which version is the right one m s with on shape on the version ING system it has, and the fact that you can go back in history off the document and go back to previous version so easily and then go back to the press and version and explore the history of the part that is truly, um, just world changing for us, that we can do that so easily on for me as a manager to manage this collection of information that is critical for our operations. It makes it so much easier because everything is in one place. I don't have to worry about file servers that go down that I have to administer that have to have I t taken care off that have to figure how to keep access to people to those servers when they're at home. And they need a virtual private network and all of that mess disappears. I just simply give give a personal account on shape. And then, magically, they have access to everything in the way I want. And we can manage the lower documents and everything in a way, that is absolutely fantastic. >>Rafael, what was your what? What were some of the concerns you had mentioned? You had some trepidation. Was it a performance? Was it security? You know, some of the traditional cloud stuff and I'm curious as to how How whether any of those act manifested were they really that you had to manage? What were your concerns? >>Look, the main concern is how long is it going to take for everybody in the team? to learn to use the system like it and buy into it because I don't want to have my engineers using tools against their will write. I want everybody to be happy because that's how they're productive. They're happy and they enjoyed the tools they have. That was my main concern. I was a little bit worried about the whole concept of not having the files in a place where I couldn't quote unquote seat in some serving on site, but that that's kind of an outdated concept, right? So that took a little bit of a mind shift. But very quickly. Then I started thinking, Look, I have a lot of documents on Google Drive like I don't worry about that. Why would I worry about my cat on on shape? Right is the same thing. So I just needed to sort of put things in perspective that way. Um, the other, um, you know, their concern was the learning curve right is like how is he will be for everybody to and for me to learn it on whether it had all of the features that we needed and there were a few features that I actually discussed with, um uh, Cody at on shape on. They were actually awesome about using their scripting language in on shape to sort of mimic some of the features of the old cat, uh, in on shaped in a way that actually works even better than the old system. So it was It was amazing. Yeah. >>Great. Thank you for that, Phillip. What's your experience been? Maybe you could take us through your journey with on shape? >>Sure. So we've been we've been using on shaped Silver Side for coming up on about four years now, and we love it. We're very happy with it. We have a very modular product line, so and we make anything from detectors that would go into backpacks? Two vehicles, two very large things that a shipping container would go through and saw. Excuse me. Shape helps us to track and collaborate faster on the design, have multiple people working a same time on a project. And it also helps us to figure out if somebody else comes to us and say, Hey, I want something new. How we congrats modules from things that we already have. Put them together and then keep track of the design development and the different branches and ideas that we have, how they all fit together. A za design comes together and it's just been fantastic from a mechanical engineering background. I will also say that having used a number of different systems and solid works was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Before I got using on shape, I went, Wow, this is amazing. And I really don't want to design in any other platform after after getting on Lee a little bit familiar with it. >>You know, it's funny, right? I will have the speed of technology progression. I was explaining to some young guns the other day how e used to have a daytime er and that was my life. And if I lost that day, timer, I was dead. And I don't know how we weigh existed without, you know, Google Maps. Eso did we get anywhere? I don't know, but, uh, but so So, Matt, you know, it's interesting to think about, um, you know, some of the concerns that Raphael brought up, you hear? For instance, you know, all the time. Wow. You know, I get my Amazon bill at the end of the month It's through the roof in. But the reality is that Yeah, well, maybe you are doing more, but you're doing things that you couldn't have done before. And I think about your experience in teaching and educating. I mean, you so much more limited in terms of the resource is that you would have had to be able to educate people. So what's your experience been with With on shape and what is it enabled? >>Um, yeah, it was actually talking before we went with on shape. We had a previous CAD program and I was talking to my vendor about it, and he let me know that we were actually one of the biggest CAD shops in the state. Because if you think about it a really big program, you know, really big company might employ 5, 10, 15, 20 cad guys, right? I mean, when I worked for a large defense contractor, I think there were probably 20 of us as the cad guys. I now have about 300 students doing cat. So there's probably more students with more hours of cat under their belt in my building than there were when I worked for the big defense contractor. Um, but like you mentioned, uh, probably our biggest hurdle is just re sources. And so we want We want one of things I've always prided myself and trying to do in this programs provide students with access two tools and skills that they're going to see either in college or in the real world. So it's one of the reason we went with a big professional cad program. There are, you know, sort of k 12 oriented software and programs and things. But, you know, I want my kids coding and python and using slack and using professional type of tools on DSO when it comes to cat. That's just that that was a really hurt. I mean, you know, you could spend $30,000 on one seat of, you know, professional level cad program, and then you need a $30,000 computer to run it on if you're doing a heavy assemblies, Um, and so one of my dreams and it was always just a crazy dream. And I was the way I would always pitcher in my school system and say someday I'm gonna have a kid on a school issued chromebook in subsidized housing on public WiFi doing professional level bad and that that was a crazy statement until a couple of years ago. So we're really excited that I literally and, you know, march in, um, you said the forced march the forced march into, you know, modernity, March 13th kids sitting in my engineering lab that we spent a lot of money on doing. Cad March 14th. Those kids were at home on their school shoot chromebooks on public WiFi, uh, keeping their designs going and collaborating. And then, yeah, I could go on and on about some of the things you know, the features that we've learned since then they're even better. So it's not like this is some inferior, diminished version of the cat. And there's so much about it, E >>wanna I wanna ask you that I may be over my skis on this, but we're seeing we're starting to see the early days of the democratization of CAD and product design. It is the the citizen engineer. I mean, maybe insulting to the engineers in the room, but but is that we're beginning to see that >>I have to believe that everything moves into the cloud. Part of that is democratization that I don't need. I can whether you know, I think artists, you know, I could have a music studio in my basement with a nice enough software package. And Aiken, I could be a professional for now. My wife's a photographer. I'm not allowed to say that I could be a professional photographer with, you know, some cloud based software. And so, yeah, I do think that's part of what we're seeing is more and more technology is moving to the cloud >>Philip or Rafael anything. Your dad, >>I think I mean yeah, that that that combination of cloud based cat and then three D printing that is becoming more and more affordable on ubiquitous It's truly transformative, and I think for education is fantastic. I wish when I was a kid I had the opportunity to play with those kinds of things because I was always the late things. But, you know, the in a very primitive way. So, um, I think there's a dream for kids Thio to be able to do this. And, um, yeah, there's so many other technologies coming on, like Arduino and all of these electronic things that live. Kids play at home very cheaply with things that back in my day would have been unthinkable. >>So we know there's a go ahead. Philip Way >>had a pandemic and silver site moved to a new manufacturing facility this year. I was just on the shop floor, talking with contractors, standing 6 ft apart, pointing at things. But through it all, our CAD system was completely unruffled. Nothing stopped in our development work. Nothing stopped in our support for existing systems in the field. We didn't have to think about it. We had other server issues, but none with our, you know, engineering cad, platform and product development and support world right ahead, which was cool, but also a That's point. I think it's just really cool what you're doing with the kids. The most interesting secondary and college level engineering work that I did was project based. It's an important problem to the world. Go solve it and that is what we do here. That is what my entire career has been. And I'm super excited to see See what your students are gonna be doing, uh, in there home classrooms on their chromebooks now and what they do. Building on that. >>Yeah, I'm super excited to see your kids coming out of college with engineering degrees because yeah, I think that project based experience is so much better than just sitting in a classroom, taking notes and doing math problems on. And I think he will give the kids a much better flavor What engineering is really about. Think a lot of kids get turned off by engineering because they think it's kind of dry because it's just about the math for some very abstract abstract concept, and they are there. But I think the most important thing is just that. Hands on a building and the creativity off, making things that you can touch that you can see that you can see functioning. >>Great. So you know, we all know the relentless pace of technology progression. So when you think about when you're sitting down with the folks that on shape and there the customer advisor for one of the things that you want on shape to do that it doesn't do today >>I could start by saying, I just love some of the things that does do because it's such a modern platform and I think some of these, uh, some some platforms that have a lot of legacy and a lot of history behind them. I think we're dragging some of that behind them. So it's cool to see a platform that seemed to be developed in a modern era. And so that's, you know, it is the Google docks. And so the fact that collaboration and version ing and link sharing is, and, like, platform agnostic abilities the fact that that seems to be just built into the nature of the thing so far, that's super exciting as far as things that it to go from there, Um, I don't know. >>Other than price, >>you can't say I >>can't say lower price. >>Yeah, so far on a PTC s that worked with us. Really well, so I'm not complaining. There. You there? >>Yeah. Yeah. No Gaps, guys. Whitespace, Come on. >>We've been really enjoying the three week update Cadence. You know, there's a new version every three weeks and we don't have to install it. We just get all the latest and greatest goodies. One of the trends that we've been following and enjoying is the the help with a revision management and release work flows. Um, and I know that there's more than on shape is working on that we're very excited for, because that's a big important part about making real hardware and supporting it in the field. Um, something that was cool. They just integrated Cem markup capability In the last release that took, we were doing that anyway, but we were doing it outside of on shapes, and now we get to streamline our workflow and put it in the CAD system where we're making those changes anyway, when we're reviewing drawings and doing this kind of collaboration. And so I think from our perspective, we continue to look forward toa further progress on that. There's a lot of capability in the cloud that I think they're just kind of scratching the surface on you. >>I would. I mean, you're you're asking to knit. Pick. I would say one of the things that I would like to see is is faster regeneration speed. There are a few times with comics necessities that regenerating the document takes a little longer than I would like to. It's not a serious issue, but anyway, I'm being spoiled, >>you know. That's good. I've been doing this a long time and I like toe Ask that question of practitioners and to me, it it's a signal like when you're nit picking and that you're struggling to knit. Pick that to me is a sign of a successful product. And And I wonder, I don't know, uh, have the deep dive into the architecture, But are things like alternative processors? You're seeing them hit the market in a big way. Uh, you know, maybe a helping address the challenge, But I'm gonna ask you the big, chewy question now, then would maybe go to some audience questions when you think about the world's biggest problems. I mean, we're global pandemics. Obviously top of mind. You think about nutrition, you know, feeding the global community. We've actually done a pretty good job of that. But it's not necessarily with the greatest nutrition climate change, alternative energy, the economic divides. You've got geopolitical threats and social unrest. Health care is a continuing problem. What's your vision for changing the world and how product innovation for good can be applied to some of the the problems that that you all are passionate about? Big question. But who wants toe start >>not biased. But for years I've been saying that if you want to solve the economy, the environment, uh, global unrest, pandemics education is the case If you wanna if you want to, um, make progress in those in those realms, I think funding funding education is probably gonna pay off pretty well. >>Absolutely. And I think stem is key to that. I mean, all of the, ah lot of the well being that we have today and then industrialized countries, thanks to science and technology, right, improvements in health care, improvements in communication, transportation, air conditioning. Um, every aspect of life is touched by science and technology. So I think having more kids studying and understanding that is absolutely key. Yeah, I agree, >>Philip, you got anything they had? >>I think there's some big technical problems in the world today, Raphael and ourselves there certainly working on a couple of them. Think they're also collaboration problems and getting everybody doing ableto pull together instead of pulling, pulling separately and to be able to spur the idea is onwards. So that's where I think the education side is really exciting. What Matt is doing and and it just kind of collaboration in general when we could do provide tools to help people do good work? Uh, that is, I think, valuable. >>Yeah, I think that's a very good point. And along those lines, we have some projects that are about creating very low cost instruments for low research settings places in Africa, Southeast Asia, South America so that they can do, um, um, biomedical research that it's difficult to do in those place because they don't have the money to buy the fancy lab machines that cost $30,000 an hour. Um, so we're trying to sort of democratize some of those instruments. And I think thanks to tools like Kahn shaped and is easier, for example, to have a conversation with somebody in Africa and show them the design that we have and discuss the details of it with them. Andi, that's amazing. Right? To have somebody you know, 10 time zones away, Um, looking really life in real time with you about your design and discussing the details or teaching them how to build a machine. Right? Because, um, you know, they have a three d printer. You can you just give them the design and say, like, you build it yourself, uh, even cheaper than and, you know, also billing and shipping it there. Um, so all that that that aspect of it is also so super important, I think, for any of these efforts to improve, um, some of the hardest part was in the world from climate change. Do you say, as you say, poverty, nutrition issues? Um, you know, availability of water. You have that project at about finding water. Um, if we can also help deploy technologies that teach people remotely how to create their own technologies or how to build their own systems that will help them solve those forms locally. I think that's very powerful. >>Yeah, that point about education is right on. I think some people in the audience may be familiar with the work of Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, the second machine age where they sort of put forth the premise that, uh, is it laid it out. Look, for the first time in history, machines air replacing humans from a cognitive perspective. Machines have always replaced humans, but that's gonna have an impact on jobs. But the answer is not toe protect the past from the future. Uh, the answer is education and public policy. That really supports that. So I couldn't agree more. I think it's a really great point. Um, we have We do have some questions from the audience. If if we can. If I can ask you guys, um, you know, this one kind of stands out. How do you see artificial intelligence? I was just talking about machine intelligence. Um, how do you see that? Impacting the design space guys trying to infuse a I into your product development. What can you tell me? >>Um, absolutely. Like, we're using AI for some things, including some of these very low cost instruments that will hopefully help us diagnose certain diseases, especially this is that are very prevalent in the Third World. Um, and some of those diagnostics are these days done by thes armies of technicians that are trained to look under the microscope. But, um, that's a very slow process. Is very error prone and having machine learning systems that can, to the same diagnosis faster, cheaper and also little machines that can be taken to very remote places to these villages that have no access to a fancy microscope to look at a sample from a patient that's very powerful, and I we don't do this. But I have read quite a bit about how certain places air, using a Tribune attorneys to actually help them optimize designs for parts. So you get these very interesting looking parts that you would have never thought off. A person would have never thought off, but that are incredibly light ink earlier strong and I have all sort of properties that are interesting thanks to artificial intelligence machine learning in particular, >>yet another, uh, advantage you get when when your work is in the cloud I've seen. I mean, there's just so many applications that so if the radiology scan is in the cloud and the radiologist is goes to bed at night, radiologist could come in in the morning and and say, Oh, the machine while you were sleeping was using artificial intelligence to scan these 40,000 images. And here's the five that we picked out that we think you should take a closer look at or like Raphael said. I can design my part. My, my, my, my, my you know, mount or bracket or whatever and go to sleep. And then I wake up in the morning. The machine has improved. It for me has made it strider strider stronger and lighter. Um And so just when your when your work is in the cloud, that's just that's a really cool advantage that you get that you can have machines doing some of your design work for you. >>Yeah, we've been watching, uh, you know, this week is this month, I guess is aws re invent and it's just amazing to see how much effort is coming around machine learning machine intelligence. You know, Amazon has sage maker Google's got, you know, embedded you no ML and big query. Certainly Microsoft with Azure is doing tons of stuff and machine learning. I think the point there is that that these things will be infused in tow R and D and in tow software products by the vendor community. And you all will apply that to your business and and build value through the unique data that your collecting you know, in your ecosystems. And and that's how you add value. You don't have to be necessarily, you know, developers of artificial intelligence, but you have to be practitioners to apply that. Does that make sense to you, Philip? >>Yeah, absolutely. And I think your point about value is really well chosen. We see AI involved from the physics simulations all the way up to interpreting radiation data, and that's where the value question, I think, is really important because it's is the output of the AI giving helpful information that the people that need to be looking at it. So if it's curating a serious of radiation alert, saying, Hey, like these are the anomalies you need to look at eyes it, doing that in a way that's going to help a good response on. In some cases, the II is only as good as the people. That sort of gave it a direction and turn it loose. And you want to make sure that you don't have biases or things like that underlying your AI that air going to result in, uh in less than helpful outcomes coming from it. So we spend quite a lot of time thinking about how do we provide the right outcomes to people who are who are relying on our systems? >>That's a great point, right? Humans, air biased and humans build models, so models are inherently biased. But then software is hitting the market. That's gonna help us identify those biases and help us, you know? Of course. Correct. So we're entering Cem some very exciting times, guys. Great conversation. I can't thank you enough for spending the time with us and sharing with our audience the innovations that you're bringing to help the world. So thanks again. >>Thank you so much. >>Thank you. >>Okay. You're welcome. Okay. When we come back, John McElheny is gonna join me. He's on shape. Co founder. And he's currently the VP of strategy at PTC. He's gonna join the program. We're gonna take a look at what's next and product innovation. I'm Dave Volonte and you're watching innovation for good on the Cube, the global leader. Digital technology event coverage. We'll be right back

(upbeat music) >> From San Mateo, it's theCUBE, covering Scalyr Innovation Day, brought to you by Scalyr. >> Hello and welcome to the special Cube Innovation Day here in Silicon Valley in San Mateo, California at Scalyr's Headquarters. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. John Hart's the Tech Lead Back End Engineering here at Scalyr. Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having me John. >> So what's the secret sauce at Scalyr? You guys have unique differentiate as we have covered with some of your peers and the founders are all talking about it. But, you guys have a unique secret sauce. Take a minute to explain that. >> I think, yeah, it's a few different things. First of all, you've got just the design level, which is we don't use keyword indexes. So that's a big one right there off the top. On top of that, you've got a couple of different implementation paths. We've got our own custom written data store. So we're able to really control all the way down to the bytes on disk, how we lay things out, optimize for speed. We have a novel kind of scatter-gather approach for fanning out a query, to make sure we can get all of our nodes involved as quickly as possible. Then, finally, and this is just kind of being smart, which is we have a time series database for repetitive queries and that's on demand. You don't have to do anything, but we're going to speed up your queries in the background if we know it's a good idea. >> Talk about the time series. I think that's interesting because that comes to play. We hear about real time a lot. We talk a lot about in cyber security that time series has been beneficial. Where does time series fit for you guys in here? >> That's a good question. I think one of the big differences with Scalyr versus other uses of time series database is with Scalyr you're outputting your logs, there's all kinds of information in your logs. Some of that might be a good thing to put in a time series database, but I think with a lot of other products, you would have to decide that ahead of time. Like, hey, let's get this metric into the database. With Scalyr, the moment you have anything in your logs that you might want to put into a time series you just start querying it. You put in a dashboard (snaps) you've got a time series. So we're going to back propagate that for everything you've already given us. So all of those queries are fast from there on out. >> So it's built in from the beginning. >> Exactly, and you don't have to do anything. It's just on demand. >> So keywords been what other people have been used for years. That's been standard for these log management software packages and indexes. Indexes can slow things down. We've got a tutorial on that. Why is those two areas, haven't been innovated in awhile? When people just haven't figured it out, you guys have first? What's the differentiation for you guys? Why'd you guys get there? >> I think the main reason is that log data is just fundamentally different than most other things that you might use a database for. There's a couple of different reasons for that. So with log data, you're not in control of it. You can't design it. You know, an index is great if you're making a relational database. You've got control of your columns. You know what you're going to join on. You know what you want to index. Nobody designs their logs like they design their database tables. It's just a bunch of stuff. It's from systems you don't control. It's changing all the time. So just the number of distinct fields that you would have to index is really, really high. So if your system depends on indexing for good performance, you're going to have to make a lot of indexes. And indexes, of course, they're right amplifying. If you've got one gigabyte of raw data, then you've got to put five or six hundred indexes on top of it. You're going to have five or ten gigabytes of raw plus index data. That means you got to do a lot more IO, and at the end of the day, how much you have to read from disk, determines how fast your query's going to be. >> So, in essence indexes creates a lot of overhead. You shouldn't even need to do because of the nature of log files. >> Because the nature of log data, it's overhead that doesn't serve log data very well, yeah. >> And what about the log data that's changing? Cause one of the things we're seeing, Internet of Things, more connected devices, imagine the Teslas that are going to be connecting in, with all their data. >> Right >> All this stuff, cameras. You've got a huge amount of new kind of data. Up, down, status. This is going to be a tsunami of new types of log data. >> Yeah, and none of it are you going to have a ton of control over. Right, it's going to be changing a ton. Maybe you've got 20 different versions of devices out there that are all sending you different versions of logs. You've got to be able to handle all of it. So you want a system that is adaptive to your needs as they come up, as opposed to something you have to plan out with indexes ahead of time. >> So if someone asks you, say you guys say you're faster. Why? Is that true? Is the statement you're faster than others, and if so why? >> It is true. (laughs) And that really comes down to the secret sauce. The brute force, the key to brute force, and I think we've talked about this a little bit today, is you got to bring a lot of force, as quickly as you possibly can. And we do that. We've got a lot of custom code. We're not using off-the-shelf components. We're trying to get that time quick as we can. So I think our median performance is still better than 100 milliseconds. That might be for a query that's talking to two or three hundred machines, or maybe even more. All of which, to get, maybe it's going to scan a terabyte of data. All of that is going to come back within 100 milliseconds. It's extremely fast. >> Talk about why log data is different from other data types, for folks that are in these cloud native environments. Their time is precious. They are looking at a lot of different data. How is log data different? >> I think the fact that it's dynamic in terms of what's coming out is something new. It changes so rapidly. The other really big thing too is the way you query it changes from day to day. Most of the time you're going to your logs, you're trying to troubleshoot a problem. Today's problems are different than yesterdays problems. So every time you go in, you're using it in a different way. So it has to be very fast. It has to be exploratory. And that's one of the big things about Scalyr's speed. Is it enables this really exploratory. You can kind of move through the data quickly, as opposed to making a query, getting a cup of coffee, waiting for the query, and then deciding what you're going to do next. I'm kind of dating myself here, but it's like the first time you ever used Google. You're like, "Whoa, how did that happen?" That's what it's like the first time you use Scalyr. >> And you guys have a unique architecture, we talked about that. You guys have certain speeds. But it's not just the query speed. It's the time it takes to do the query. So you factor in a much bigger perspective than if someone has to build a query and then takes 15 minutes. >> Right. >> Game's over. >> Yeah, and instead you're just clicking on things. We're trying to make it very easy for you to move from oh here's an alert. Well here are the log files that caused that alert. Oh, what's the thread stack for that particular lock. Oh, I can go and look at everything else that happened in that thread. That's five or 10 seconds of Scalyr tops. >> You guys have unique engineering culture, that targets engineers, products built by engineers, for engineers. >> Yep. >> Great story. And it's real, and you guys building it everyday. What is the engineer threshold of pain when it comes to locked data? Have you seen any anecdotal, I mean, 'cause engineers that are in this space, they need access to it. There's SLAs now tied to it. People are sharing data. There's all kind of new ways, reasons why you need to have the Scalyr solution. But what's the pain point for most people to tolerate an inferior solution? >> Well for me, I actually have an answer for this. Right, because before I was Scalyr employee, I was a Scalyr customer and before I was a Scalyr customer, I was a Splunk customer. I used Splunk for about five years before I think Scalyr even necessarily existed and I was really happy with it because I needed it. Right? I had my own company. We were generating tons of logs. My support guys needed to use those logs. And, prior to using something like a Splunk, I was SSHing it to servers to check the log files, which is of course, not scalable. So I was really happy with the product as an idea existed, but it just kept gnawing at us. You know, every time we would query, sometimes it would be fast, sometimes it would be really slow. Sometimes the results would be down because an indexing server was down. It was just. >> You mean the Splunk solution? >> Yeah, the Splunk solution. Yeah, it was just extremely painful. So I read, actually, one of the blog posts written by Steve Newman and thought, that's a great idea. That is how you should attack this problem. No indexes. Brute forces. All the flexibility you get from that. I loved it and then I forgot about it for like six months. (laughs) Because I was busy, right. But then six months later I was really frustrated again with Splunk again being really, really slow, and I thought, what was the name of that company again? I looked them up. I installed it. And within, certainly within a day, I was blown away by the performance. Within a week, I had uninstalled Scalyr, excuse me, Splunk, from every single one of my servers and switched to Scalyr instead. >> And you're happy with that? Does it work for you? Came to join the company? >> Yeah, exactly. In kind of conversations with the support team here, I was one of their early customers to use Windows, so I had a lot of questions, they had questions for me, how did I get it working, it wasn't a supported platform. And all of my emails were responded to by two guys named Steve. So I figured that was probably the support team. Pretty funny they've got a support team of two people, both named Steve. And then at one point, in one email, Steve Newman said to me, "You may have realized there's only two of us here." And that's when I kind of went, "Oh wait, so there's two people total." And two guys I assumed in a basement. They weren't in a basement, but I assumed they were in a basement. They had software that was way better for my needs than Splunk, which at the time was worth probably eight, ten billion dollars. It's a public company. Thousands of engineers. So that's when I thought, "Huh. When I get a chance, "Maybe I should go work with these guys." >> You know it's interesting. Maybe create a new category, brute force as a service. >> Yeah. >> This is what they're doing. They're bringing in the right tool at the right time. >> Yep. >> For the right problem, for speed, and to solve the problem, no? >> Yeah. >> They care how it gets done. >> Get as much data as you can and get that answer back as quickly as you can. >> So this is the big challenge. Final question for you is obviously, you know, a lot of people we talked to in the DevOps world they're really fickle. On one hand, they'll try anything. If they like it, they'll stay with it. But if they don't, you'll know about it. Where's the value point for people to start thinking about Scalyr. Is it ingest to value, ingesting is one part, that's kind of a trial. Where's the value immediately come in? Where do you see, what's the first sign of light value, once the ingestion happens. >> So part of it is this, it's a very short period of time from the ingestion to the time you're querying on it is very, very short. So you got a real time view of what's happening on your servers not a five minutes ago view. That by itself can pay for it right there. If you're a DevOps person and you've got some alarm pinging. If that alarm is from 10 minutes ago, that means your customers are already annoyed. If you're going to have to wait another 10 minutes just to even see what's happening, you've got a really big problem, right. So being able to have the alarm, and you know that's triggering on something that happened a second or two ago, and then immediately being able to dive in with no interruption to your work flow, no reason not to dive in, that's a pretty big one right there. >> So pretty immediate impact. >> Yeah. >> So okay, for people that don't know Scalyr, what should they know about Scalyr as a company from a value proposition as a former customer now, key employee in the back end, and engineering. What is the key things they should know about? >> So speed, we keep talking about it, right? We have a really really good cost basis. Because we're not making those indexes, we don't have to store as much data. It's just generally cheaper for it to run. Right, so we actually have a really good cost point. And we get you from the alerts. You don't have to decide stuff ahead of time. You can do it all on the fly, ad hoc, we get you from the alerts, to your answers as quickly as you possibly can. That's pretty good. >> Every culture has its own unique kind of feature. What's Scalyr's culture here? I mean Intel was Moore's law, Cadence was Moore's law. What's the culture here, at Scalyr like? >> That's a good question. I guess I would say I'm just tremendously proud to be working with these engineers. Right? We're all here because we want to get better and we want to work on really, really hard problems writing our own code, not just running and kind of patching together open source systems that already exist. We want to be doing something cutting edge. So that's I would say the biggest one. >> And big problem's behind that, you've got AI right around the corner. Applying AI is going to be a natural extension. >> Yeah, 'cause we got the data. And can deal with the data. >> Ciao, thanks for the insight. Appreciate it. >> Thank you. Good talking to you. >> John Furrier here. Innovation Day with theCUBE here in Silicon Valley in San Mateo, at Scalyr's headquarters. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Anaheim, California, it's theCUBE, covering Nutanix .NEXT 2019, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix .NEXT here in Anaheim, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We are so excited to welcome back to the program, Dheeraj Pandey, the co-founder/CEO and Chairman of Nutanix. Thank you so much for coming back on theCUBE. >> Thank you for pronouncing my name diligently. >> You are welcome. >> John: Gotta work on that. >> So, Dheeraj, it was a poignant moment in the keynote when you got up there with many of the people who were sort of employee number one, two, and three, four at Nutanix. They are the builders, the dreamers, the visionaries, the innovators, the disruptors of this company, a company that you started. So I'd love you to just start out by reflecting a little bit on your journey and sort of how Nutanix has evolved. >> Yeah, I mean it's a poignant 10 years, you know. The moment itself is poignant and it brought a lot of nostalgia, you know, for just looking at the early folks and how we had to huddle together in the smallest of technical blips that you'd find in our thesis, because our thesis was very bold. It was, like, hey, we can put a lot of hardware into your software. It's, like, the way Apple would say, we'll get rid of the camera and make it into an app. Like, what? There's no need for a camera anymore. So that's what we had to do with data center infrastructure. So, those moments are memorable, they're etched in history and my memory, and every time you get a tough moment now, we actually invoke a lot of those tough moments from the past and say, look, the more things change, the more they remain the same. >> The beautiful thing about theCUBE, is our 10th year as well, we've been following your journey as well. We actually have soundbites of the early interviews, and one of the things I was always impressed with you guys was you stayed the course, you didn't waver on what was fashionable at the time. HCI was an early category. You were misunderstood at the beginning and then the numbers started to show and you guys built a great business. But now, you're 10 years old, you're public. All the numbers are out there. You gotta go the next level. This is your challenge with the team. What's the focus? What's the strategy? What's the marching orders for the team now, as you go past 10 years old? You got competitive pressure. There's marketplace. The numbers are there. It's a big piece of the pie there. >> Yeah. You know, I go back to everything I just said in my last answer as well. The more things change, the more they remain the same. The friction hasn't changed. Five years ago we were a much smaller brand. We didn't have a customer base. We didn't have money in the bank and we still had to keep raising money to fund ourselves. Today, we are running this business, spending, you know, a billion dollars every year now. But it's a free cash flow neutral business, and we have told the Street that we gonna keep running it like that, but just go back to the basics. The basics of this company are what made it come to here. The same basics will need to take it from here to the next 10 years. 10 years is the new zero. I mean, I said, look, we've reset the clock and it's a very metaphorical thing to say, but it's the new zero for us, you know. So going back to the basics are the three Ds I talked about. Data, we are greater data. And we continue to be amazing at data. Reliable, highly available, high performance data management. A greater design. You know, just making things simple, and we're really really really good at delivery and when we suck at it, we go and improve and are very resilient in delivering things, you know, so whenever some things falter within our customer success, customer service, the way we delivering things with your software and subscription, I think nobody can touch us in these three Ds. >> As you guys have proven a great loyalty, customer basis, very loyal on the product. As you have to go multi-cloud, as the Enterprise gets modernized, this is a big part of your current business. What are some of the things that you're looking at, in terms of these new products? Because you don't want to open the door up for either a competitor or a misfire on you guys. You gotta continue to provide product leadership. >> Well, the most important thing is honesty and vulnerability. The fact that these things are not awesome big products yet, but they are awesome nonetheless. So how do you really have the small wins? You know, I go back in time to, Look, it took 10 years for Amazon Prime to become Primetime. It took six years for YouTube to even start to figure out who YouTube is really gonna be, and you know, Google bought Writely, which was the company that became Google Docs. Five years, they didn't know what they were doing with those things, so what's really important for the new products is this long-term greed. You know, the fact that you really have this 10 year view of a multi-product portfolio, but the most important thing is how they gell well together, how they really integrate well together, because if we don't integrate these products, and we just throw it out as things, as opposed to an experience. Customers are, like, I can buy things from Best of Breed. So how do you really make these multi-product look like an experience is where the real Nutanix design value is actually shown. >> One of the things that you guys have a good customer reaction to is the simplicity and how you can integrate well and reduce all these manual tasks, which is, people talk about automation and everything, but you guys have customers saying, "I went from 24 racks to six. "I now run everything with the push of a button. "Not there yet with the one-click but pretty close." That sounds like the multi-cloud game right now, where it is kinda hodge-podge. No one's actually figured out how to bring it all together and orchestrate it. >> That's the money statement, John. That's where the money is. Complexities where we go in and really figure out how to really save money for our customers, make money for our partners and make money for ourselves. >> And the partner-side, HPE, a big announcement that you guys have been part of. They're gonna be coming on today. How's that going? Give us the update on the HPE. >> You know, the energy levels are high, but there's a bell curve of people, you know. You can't have everybody really be an innovator, an early adopter. We're looking for innovators and early adopters. Some great discussions happening with HP account managers. They're our account managers of very large accounts, and the word-of-mouth has to basically play its powerful game actually. >> I wanna ask you about innovation. Earlier, on a CUBE conversation, you talked with our own John Furrier, and you said, we disrupt ourselves, but you also just talked about these products being these sort of long-term play and really thinking about what the, more of a holistic view of what the customers need. I wanna hear about the Nutanix innovation process and sort of how you have kept that culture of a tech start-up now that you are a company with a market cap in the multiple billions. >> You know, as I said before, we are like a billion dollar start-up, you know. And it's not easy, because everybody wants you to grow up, like, behave and grow up, and I saw one of my slides in there taking real potshots of the sand and we haven't changed much, you know. So in many ways, we're reminding everybody that it's still Day Zero and Day One. Is the great cultural gravitas that we need to keep, retained in the business, actually, in the company? You know, having the kind of humor that we had, and you know, keeping it personal and personable with everybody, as opposed to, you know, stiff upper lip, and suits and mahogany tables and corner offices. Those are things that are the antithesis of what Nutanix is. And just keeping it humble, you know. Like, the fact that even though we have layers of management in the middle, how do you go six levels deep and really have a conversation as technical as you wanted it to be and as business incisively as we want it to be? And you know, there's a lot of things you can do by going six levels deep that otherwise were not possible if you just said, look, I just talked to my next level action team, and to us, that's the engine of innovation. >> And how is your leadership changed? >> I have a new customer called Wall Street. >> That's true. >> 'Cause you know, they buy my product. It just happens to be a retail product that you folks can buy, too. It's called NTNX, the ticker. So I have Main Street customers and then I have Wall Street as a customer, and I need to figure out where to really keep them balanced, because I sell products to both of them, and it's a journey. You know, it's never easy, because there's a customer that actually wants instant success. There's another customer that says we are with you for the long haul, and what I need to find in this Wall Street customer is the ones who are actually for the long haul. My leadership, actually, is about balancing the two together. >> So let's talk about the Wall Street thing for a second, because I think that's interesting. You've always said to me, you're gonna play the long game and you do. We've kinda proved that, but Wall Street, they're very short sighted right? So the earnings come out, you gotta deal with the shot clock, as a public company. As you go to Wall Street, how are they looking at the long game? Because there's major examples. Microsoft stock's at an all-time high. They were in the 20s a few years ago. Cloud obviously is validated, so you got a cloud vision, this cloud marketplace. You're in the core enterprise, which has been revitalized with private cloud. Again, proves your thesis originally. So you're in good position and you got the cloud game right there. What are they missing? What's Wall Street missing? >> I think the biggest thing is that in any transformation is actually messy. Look at all the transformations in the last 20 years. The good thing is that those that took the tough call of transforming themselves, they really have done well, you know. And this is not just Microsoft alone, but Adobe, where I sit on the board. There is Autodesk and there is Parametric PTC and Cadence and many many other companies that have gone through this transition of getting out of the box to being software and subscription actually, and that's the journey that we said we couldn't punt and postpone 'cause we wanna be a hybrid cloud company. How can we not have subscription on prem? If subscription is gonna be the off prem, it has to have on prem subscription as well. And I think it requires communication, constant communication, watch, don't be stupid, with Wall Street as well. >> Well, Wall Street likes those valuations. If you look at the SaaS companies, or subscription-based companies, their valuations are really on a multiple, much higher than, >> I mean, look, valuation, to me, is not an end in itself. If you do it right by Main Street, I think this Wall Street thing will take care of itself. >> Awesome. On the long game with your innovation, I gotta ask you about how you're gonna look at the partnerships and integrating in, because the competitor out there in the middle of the room there is VMware and Dell Technologies. They want to go end-to-end and they want to own everything end-to-end. You guys are taking a different approach. Could you share your competitive strategy in terms of how you guys are different than that, because you're partnering? You're competing in a different way. >> Yeah, as we go into becoming a bigger company and yet, having a real child-like brain, I think it's important, really, that we are in this cooperative world and every competitor is also a company we cooperate with. Look, I mean, we run on top of VMware and more than half our customers still use VMware underneath us. We are an app on their platform. So we are a platform company. We are also an app company and our platform should run all apps and our apps should run on all platforms and that's the way we look at it. That's the reason why Microsoft is relevant again, 'cause they're still looking at, rather than a single stack strategy, how do you really look at yourselves as living two lives actually, you know? And to compete, you just have to go back to the three Ds I talked about. If you just keep doing a really good job of data, disrupting the biggest hardware players out there in data, and be really really good with design and elegance and friction-less delivery, I think we'll be in good shape. >> One of the compliments that the analysts on theCUBE always pay to you, Dheeraj, is that you have a really good sense of the wave. You really know which way the technological and economic winds are blowing. I wanna know, what do you read? Who do you talk to? What signals are you paying attention to? Or is it just this innate sense you have that the rest of us can't hope to ever achieve? >> Well, thank for that compliment, first of all. I'm honored. But I just have this simple mantra which is, the more things change, the more they remain the same. So I bring a lot of things from my consumer life because I read a lot about consumer life and I have a little bit of an artist in me and even though I am supposed to be a geek, I was telling somebody I was trying to recruit the other day that, look, I'm really, at heart, an artist, more so than an engineer, and I think a lot of what you see in this conference and this company and the product portfolio, it's really the empathy for the other side. You know, that really brings out a lot of the innovation, and obviously, I don't innovate alone, but the people that are with us in this company, I just try to tell them about the empathy that I invoke for everybody else and I read a lot of history, I'm a big history buff, and not just the last 30 years of IT, which I invoke a lot, but I'm deep into, like, the history of humans, you know. Like, last two weeks, I spent a lot of time reading about Neanderthals and the hybrid Neanderthals with humans, modern humans, and there's another ones that they found in these caves of Denisova. They call Denisovans, you know. So I read a lot of history and that gives me a lot of perspective and a lot of courage and I bring a lot of those things into this new life, that's again, as I said, it's the same as the old one, with some new color. >> You're an entrepreneur. That's what entrepreneurship is all about. What entrepreneurial thing are you working on right now? 'Cause I've known, You've gotta have your hands in some new things. What's the new entrepreneurial thinking or project that you're taking on? >> Well, the one that is very interesting one for operating a business is Capital Allocation, and it's a difficult one because you have to, basically, be somebody who really balances content and delivery, you know, and content is products and delivery is go to market, and when you go to market, it's marketing and sales. So as a company, we were tested in the last nine months to really understand Capital Allocation. I'm a big fan of the book, The Outsiders. I just read this probably a year ago, and you could see that there was some themes in The Outsiders about running the business on free cash flow, which is nothing new. It's not like Amazon invented it. They've been doing it for those 40, 50 years. Second one is Decentralized Decision Making. The third one is a really good capital allocation. So as an entrepreneur, I'm learning to actually understand what it means to decentralize decision making, and do a really good job of capital allocation, and finally, go and tell the Street about why free cash is the way to run a business as opposed to profitability and a gap way, because a lot of our dollars are sitting in the balance sheet, and they aren't in the P&L. So I think really running the business where growth matters, which is about free cash flow, about making sure that we can really create more CEOs in the company, independent decision making, and finally, this idea that you want to run this business as if it was a bunch of businesses, actually. >> Great. >> Awesome. >> One of the things you keep talking about in this interview is balance. You're balancing the needs of Main Street and Wall Street, the needs of your cloud customers, the needs of your employees, while also growing this business. How do you balance at all? As the CEO of this fast-growing company? You said you're an artist. And you read a lot of history. >> Honestly, I'm not a very balanced person. If you ask me, like, work and life, family and work, is because of my wife that I find a balance there. >> So you owe it all to her? >> Yeah, I think you can say that again, and the same thing is true for, like, one of my team members, our COO, David Sangster. He says, "Look, our health, family, and work, "in that order," and honestly, mine is in the reverse right now. So I need to really go and, These kind of conversations remind myself that it's important to actually have some balance. >> Great, well, Dheeraj, always a pleasure having you on theCUBE. >> Pleasure. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for John Furrier. We'll have so much more from Nutanix next coming up on theCUBE just after this. (techno music)