[Music] [Applause] hello everyone welcome to the cube conversation here in palo alto california i'm john furrier host of thecube we got a special breaking news at scale has hired a new ceo chris lynch is the big news and taking over dave mariano with the evp of technology important because one cube alumni and also we've seen about all the big data events doing amazing work in the cloud scale data market for many many years we're very familiar at scale both david and chris lynch both cube alumni chris great to see you congratulations new ceo of atscale thanks john i really appreciate being here so um we know each other you've been on the cube before you're formerly the ceo of vertica sold to hp other ceos before that also a venture capitalist at atlas ventures for that distinguished career why this move right now what's attracted you to at scale take over the helm from the co-founder who will be partnering with you on this it's a great question um i'm still asking myself that but i think what it comes down to is i met dave years ago when i was at atlas and um it didn't work out the time for us to make an investment but i tracked the company and what they were doing and i left accomplished a little over a year ago and working with some companies out in the west coast app and be out here and i reached out to dave and said hey you want to grab dinner which we did and um by the end of the evening he was like you know you should come help us really commercialize this and take it to the next level they've been on our radar they've been on our radar for a while obviously i mean david at hadoop summit i think three four years ago and he was formerly a cloud we kind of hit it off clearly a big data um visionary and also entrepreneur but they had a unique model at that time hadoop was certainly viewed as you know the king of the castle for in big data at that time but cloud scale wasn't on everyone's radar on the mainstream they had a unique perspective has anything changed with the tech is that what's attracted to you the scaled piece of it what's the what's the secret sauce that that got you enticing so so i'm aware of the company's history that's not what got me interested um what got me interested is i think that they're the only player today in in the market that has a production product that can actually take customers from the data center to the cloud and do so transparently and i liken it to what we did at copia we virtualized file systems and frankly when we virtualized http traffic at arrow point so the idea of an abstraction layer a federation layer made sense to me and um you know as a venture capitalist i've seen the lack of adoption of big data workloads in the cloud you know there's a 200 billion dollar opportunity i think these guys are uniquely qualified to take advantage of it so that's really what drove me from a from a business perspective i see this opportunities unique versus anything i've seen on either coast we get a great reputation as an operator also someone who can manage and operate businesses and grow them and ultimately you have some great exits in your day vertica is well known in in the history of tech for two reasons one is it was probably the best deal hp ever has ever done on acquisition value-wise also it was before and during the whole vertica and autonomy autonomy acquisition was billions of dollars so and they ended up throwing that away keeping vertica and that became the flagship so you've seen how companies can take a wave and get in the right position you've done that with stone breaker in the past founder of vertica do you get the same movement here with this company it's the same playbook what's different is it the same what's the opportunity for this company so i think the opportunity for this company is different at vertica it was about executing against the excellent product that they had built in a known market they were targeted for my vision for at scale is to move beyond the data lake hadoop market and really take all the legacy warehousing vendors to the cloud cloud proof those solutions behind the firewall and begin to deliver those workloads in earnest to the cloud transparent to the user irrespective of the bi tool whether the the technology is behind the firewall in front of the firewall and i think that's a game changer certainly we've seen on the cube and the big conversation in the industry has been hybrid cloud multi-cloud but if you squint through that those trend lines it's really about integration right so you mentioned getting people to the cloud how big is that right now from an action standpoint is it is it accelerating is it early stages where is the progress bar on companies accelerating to the cloud it's it's stalled frankly because there are thousands of tens of thousands of applications in the fortune 500 that the the ability to take those applications and that data and move it to the cloud is it's on par with trying to operate do heart surgery on a patient while they're running the boston marathon so it's too difficult it's too disruptive to a business too risky what we do is we create a federation layer that basically abstracts all that complexity from the user and makes that transition transparent so to the user they don't have to care whether it's behind the firewall in front of the firewall what cloud it sits on what analytics store you're drawing from what bi tool it doesn't matter to the user so they've basically been able to separate those two things and that's going to allow people to scale and evolve into the cloud right today cloud is a revolution not an evolution it needs to be an evolution for fortune 500 companies to take advantage of it i got to ask you the hard question because ultimately let amazon they're kicking ass 10 ways from saturday they're obviously the numbers are off the chart even in public sectors just down there last week you got azure retooling and essentially they're going to try to replicate the the uh the congress of scale i think they're going to have a hard time but still no they're not going anywhere either and you get google changing the game focusing on their core competencies and where they can differentiate all that is potentially competition so this company at scale they definitely have tech chops so that's you know we know the team there so they had a lot of credit for that but 25 million dollars raised in their last round of funding total capital day 45 million how are you going to compete how are you going to take this and commercialize this opportunity and not be driftwood instead ride that wave it's a terrific question i actually think that one of the things that excites me about this opportunity it's the first opportunity as an operator that i've had that i haven't been in the david goliath thing i actually don't think that any of those people are competitors i think when atscale wins bi vendors win traditional data stores win and the cloud provider wins and ultimately the customer wins so my view is all those companies you mentioned if google wants to be relevant in the enterprise they need to get those big data workloads to their cloud we can do that we can continue to help amazon do that we can help oracle secure cloud do that we can help microsoft do that and all the time we're future proofing the legacy data stores of the teradatas and the oracles and the ibms so this is the first opportunity that i've seen where the game isn't to go disrupt and call out the competition it's to work with all these people to drive workloads to the cloud in a in a scale that hasn't been done before so you'd have to unseat anyone you've got to ride the cloud wave pretty much yeah we have to we have to demonstrate to these guys that we do what we say we we do um but my view is when we win all those participants can potentially win awesome how about uh staff funding you feel good that enough try powder in there is there another round of funding on the horizon or yeah i mean you know i haven't even started yet but you know my expectation is that in this marketplace with my track record raising capital or attracting capital will not be an issue it'll be about figuring out the business model and making sure it's right and then investing behind that business model it's enough cash now certainly do that talk about the boston california you're going to stay in boston that's news companies based in california you have a pedigree in boston certainly and being a vc down there but also you run businesses down there there's talent down there is there plans for a boston expansion a boston bi-coastal situation what's their opportunity so the company will remain headquartered in san mateo and i'll take up residence here and i'll go back and forth so my family's not moving so i'll have a residence in boston and one here um but you can absolutely expect that i'm going to leverage the ecosystem that i've grown up in and we will have a significant presence on the east coast awesome chris final question machine learning you guys were close to that for a long time at vertica you guys were doing some of the most cutting-edge machine learning before it became super popular as it is now as they call it ai now but essentially that was the beginning of the commodore store database which you guys pioneered speed and using data for competitive advantage how is that now scaled up in the market now how how robust is it how mature is it how ready is it and how does atscale take advantage of of that of that growth so i think that the world of data science in general has matured if you look at one of my proudest investments company called data robot they are the leaders in automated machine learning and their business is growing triple digits every year the level of adoption is really only gated by practitioners and people to apply the technology to these business problems but it's gaining incredible momentum for us i plan to integrate automated ai into components of our architecture which i think makes it really a game changer so of course we expect competition um but by the time that you know they get you know 100 miles behind us you know we're going to hit that what's that button that you have in those teslas you guys drive out here insane mode and it'll be automated machine learning will be powering that what's your impression of the marketplace right now is that um you know obviously you're seeing global landscape you know we see the china situation going on asia a lot of activity a lot of growth outside the united states um and obviously cloud you're seeing region specialties any thoughts on how that's going to play into it is it not relevant to you guys right now what's the what's your thoughts on the global landscape i mean i think it's it's relevant to everyone because i think it's what's driving valuations and this influx of money coming from these different places i mean if if you look at the middle east you know they're writing checks to any sort of tech company they can because they're pr trying to divest of what they know is a dead business right so that's going to drive valuations it's going to drive in my opinion um a lack of discipline and and bad behavior as we've seen you know in 2000 and other times in 2008 um i think for us as a company we're going to be disciplined and you know the fact that we can raise money and raise money attractive valuations isn't a reason to do it if you have a business model of fund that's a reason to do it so you know i don't think it'll be a distraction for us but i think it will increase you know the amount of noise in all the key markets and i think cyber we've seen it you know ai for sure um iot bitcoin all these what's the most exciting thing in the data business that's as it evolves now to the center value proposition that you see and as the ceo now of at scala you're going to capture this i think i would say two things in the in the ai machine learning space i think the fact that with democratization of data you're now actually seeing people applying machine learning way broader in organizations and way deeper than ever before and that's going to transform businesses low-tech business as well as high-tech businesses for us i think that the real opportunity exists it's a question of just taking these lit these legacy workloads and moving them to the cloud and that's not a trivial task not just technically but um you always have to be sensitive to companies ability to absorb technology i think one of the challenges is you know you're trying to transform a business that you know basically was informed as it developed in technology that was 1980. well chris congratulations on the ceo opportunity at at scale um what can people expect from you what what if you can write the narrative of the first couple moves off the line of scrimmage here what are you going to do what's your order of business what can they expect from you well the first thing i'd like to do after i meet the customers and the employees and the par existing partners is go out and get two significant partnerships i like to see a couple partnerships in cloud a couple partnerships with the classic data store vendors so that's probably going to be my first mission to get that moving and you know we'll see how quickly it goes but i think that's super important to do yeah and certainly scale right now has been a big competitive advantage here's a company at scale five year on their five year anniversary interesting gestation period for this big data world because hadoop you can look back into 2010 days hadoop was supposed to be the biggest thing since sliced bread but what happened was the world became bigger and from a date not just outside hadoop gave these guys an opportunity and their architecture fits well you see it's scaling quicker what's your what's your where's your point of scale how do you see this so i think i think that the company probably rightly so at the time hitch their wagon to hadoop but i think as you said it's it's really a subset of the data landscape and it's actually a pretty small one the real opportunity is in driving all the legacy data and analytics stores those islands of analytics and bringing them to the cloud and that like i said i think is a you know 100 billion dollar business well certainly great to see you congratulations getting back at the chief position and did a great job at vertica great journey we followed you on that one that was fantastic and then certainly watch it unfold certainly at hpe create a lot of value congratulations and at scale's got a good hire there congratulations thank you i appreciate it alright this is thecube conversation here inside the palo alto studios i'm john furrier thanks for watching [Music]