>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of you. I path live the release show brought to you by you. >>I path Hi. Welcome back to this special R p A drill down with support from you. I path You're watching The Cube. My name is Dave Volante and Bobby CMO. You know I passed Bobby. Good to see you again. Hope you're doing well. Thanks for coming on. >>Hi, Dave. It's great to see you as well. It's always a pleasure to be on the Cube and even in the virtual format, this is really exciting. >>So, you know, last year at forward, we talked about the possibility of a downturn. Now nobody expected this kind of downturn. But we talked about that. Automation was likely something that was going to stay strong even in the downturn. We were thinking about potential recession or an economic downturn. Stock market dropped, but nothing like this. How are you guys holding up in this posted 19 pandemic? What are you seeing in the marketplace? >>Yeah, we certainly we're not thinking of a black swan or rhino or whatever we call this, but, you know, it's been a pretty crazy couple of months for everybody. You know, when When this first started, we were like everybody else. Not sure how it impact our business. The interesting thing has been that you're in code. It actually brought a reality check through. A lot of companies and organizations realize that it's very few tools to respond quickly, right? Bond with, you know, cost pressures that we're urgent or preserving revenue, perhaps, or responding to Ah, strange resource is, you know, in all centers, or or built to support. You know, the surge in in, um, in the healthcare community. And so r p a became one of those tools that quickly waas knowledge and adopted. And so we went out two months ago to go find those 1st 1st use cases. Talk about him, then. You know, 1st 30 days we had 50 in production, right? Companies, you know, great organizations like Cleveland Clinic, right? You know where they use their parking lot? Give the first tests the swab tests, right of, uh, well, who have proven right? You know, they had a line of 88 hours by, you know, putting a robot in place in two days. They got that line down by 80 or 90% right? It is a huge hit as we see that kind of a kind of benefit all across right now in the world. Right now we have. We were featured in The Wall Street Journal recently with nurses and a large hospital system in Ireland called Matter. The nurses said in the interview that, you know they have. They were able to free up time to be a patient's right, which is what they're there for, anyway, thanks to robots during this during this emergency. So I think you know, it's it's definitely raise The awareness that that this technology is provides an amazing time to value, and that's it's pretty unprecedented in the world of B two B software. >>I want to share some data with you in our community is the first time we've we've shown this. Guys would bring up the data slide, and so this is ah, chart that e. T are produced. There's enterprise technology research. They go out of reporter. They survey CIOs and I T practitioners and a survey in different segments and the use of methodology Net score. And this is sort of how method how Net scores derived. And so what this chart shows is the percent of customers that responded there were about 125 You I path customers that responded. Are you adopting new U I path? Are you increasing spending in 2020? Are you planning on flat spending or decreasing spending? Are you replacing the platform of beacons? And so basically, we take the green, uh, subtract the read from the green, and that gives us net score. But the point is that Bobby abouts about 80% of your customers are planning to spend Maurin 2020 than they spent in 2019 and only about 6% of planning on spending less, which is fairly astounding. I mean, we've been reporting on this for a while in the heat nous in the in the automation market generally and specifically. But are you seeing this in the marketplace? And maybe you could talk about why? >>Well, we just finished our first fiscal quarter into the end of April, and we're still privately held, so we can be, uh, find some insights of our company, but yeah, the the pace of our business picked up actually in in the mark. April timeframe. Um, customer adoption, large customer adoption. Um, the number of new new companies and new logos were at a record high. And, you know, we're entering into this quarter now, and we have some 20 plus $1,000,000 deals that are like that. It closed, right? I mean, that's probably a 30% increase Versus what? How many we have today alone. Right? So our business, you know, is is now well over 400 million and air are we ended last year, 3 60 and the growth rate continues fast. I think you know what's interesting is that the pace of the recode world was already fast, right? The the luxury of time has kind of disappeared. And so people are thinking about, you know, they don't have they can't wait now, months and years for digital transformation. They have to do things in days and days and days and weeks. And and that's where our technology really comes into play. Right? And and and it actually is also coming to play well in the world of the remote workforce. Reality two of the ability for remote workers to get trained while they're home on automation to build automation pipelines to to build automation. Now, with our latest release, you can download our podcast, capture and report what you're doing, and it basically generates the process definition document and the sample files, which allow for faster implementation by our center of excellence. So what's really happening here? We see it is a sense of urgency coming out of this. Prices are coming down the curve. Hopefully, now this is of urgency that our customers are facing in terms of how they respond, you know, and respond digitally to helping their business out. And it varies a lot by industry, our state and local business was really thinking was not going to be the biggest laggard of any industry picked up in a significant way in the last couple of months, New York State, with Governor Cuomo, became a big customer of ours. There's a quote from L. A County, see Iot that I've got here. They just employed us. It's public, this quote, he said. Deputy CIO said Price is always the mother of invention. We can always carry forward the good things they're coming out of this crisis situation. He's referring to our P A is being a lesson. They learned hearing this, that they're going to carry forward. And so we see this state of Oklahoma became a customer and others. So I think that's that's what we're seeing kind of a broad based. It's worldwide. >>You're really organizations can't put it off anymore. I think you're right. It sort of brought forward the future into the present. Now you mentioned 360 million last year. We had forecast 350 million was pretty good for you guys released, so it's happy about that. But so obviously still a strong trajectory. You know, it might have been higher without without covert. We'll never know, but sort of underscores the strength of the space. Um, and February you guys, there was an article that so you're essentially Theo Dan, Daniel Hernandez was quoted. Is that on hold now? Are you guys still sort of thinking about pressing forward or too early to say right? >>Yeah. I mean, I think I think the reality is we have a very, very strong business. We've raised, you know, significant money from great investors, some of which are the leading VCs in the world. and also that the public company investors and, you know, we have, ah, aggressive plan. We have an aggressive plan to build out our platform for hyper automation to continue. The growth path is now becoming the center of companies of I, T and Digital Strategies, not on the side. Right. And so to do that, you know, we're gonna want capital to help fuel our our our ambitions and fuel Our ability to serve our customers and public markets is probably a very, very logical one. As Daniel mentioned in a in a A recent, uh, he's on Bloomberg that he definitely sees. That is ah, maybe accelerating that, You know, we're late Last year, we started focusing on sustainable growth as a company and operational regular. These are important things in addition to having strong growth that, you know, a long term company has to have in place. And I can tell you, um, I'm really excited about the fact that we, you know, we operate very much like a public company. Now, internally, we you know, we do draft earnings releases that aren't public yet, and we do mock earnings, earnings calls, and we have hired Thomas Hansen is runs our chief revenue officer with storage backgrounds. And so you're gonna interview as well. These are these are these are the best of the best, right? That joint, they're joined this company, they're joining alongside the arm Kalonzo the world that are part of this company. And so I think, Yeah, I think it's an AR It's likely. And and it's gonna We're here to be a long term leader in this decade of automation. >>Well, and one of the other things that we forecast on our breaking analysis we took a look at the total available market kind of like into it. Early days of service Now is you know, people were really not fully understanding the market and chillin C it is is quite large, so video. So when we look at the competition, you know, you guys, if I showed you the same wheel with automation anywhere, it would also look strong. You know, some of the others, maybe not a strong but still stronger than many of the segments. I mean, for instance, you know, on Prem hardware. You know, compared with that and you know the automation space in general across the board is very, very strong. So I wonder if maybe you could talk a little bit about how you guys differentiate from the competition. How you see that? >>Yeah, I think you know, we've We've come a long way in the last three years, right? In terms of becoming the market leader, having the highest market share, we're very open and transparent about our numbers with We've long had the vision of a robot. Every person, uh, and and we've been delivering on that on on that vision and ah, building out a platform that helps companies, you know, transform digitally enterprise wide. Right. So, you know, I don't see any of our competitors with a platform for hyper automation like this. We have an incredible focus on the ability to help people actually find the ideas, build the pipeline, score the pipelines and integrate those with the automation center of excellence. Right? We have the ability now with our latest release to help test automation testers now not only in the world of art A but actually take robotic robots and and architecture into doing test automation. The traditional test automation market in a much better and faster way So you know, we're innovating at a pace that that it is, I think, much faster than I don't. I don't know automation anywhere. I won't share any their numbers. You know, who knows what the numbers are. We have guesses, but I'm fairly certain that we continue to gain share on them. But you know, what's most important is customer adoption, and we've also seen a number of customers switch from some of our competitors to us. Our competitors are undercapitalized and middle. Invest in R and D. This is an investment area, really build a platform out from our competitors have architectures that are hard to upgrade, right? This has been a big source of pain for companies that have been on our competitors. Where upgrades are difficult requires them to retest every time where our upgrades are very rolling, you know, are very smooth. We have an insider program which you know, I don't think any of our competitors have. If you go inside that you had pat that your customer every single bit every single review betting, private preview, public preview and general availability, you can provide feedback on and the customers can score up new ideas. They drive our our roadmap. Right. And this is I think we operate differently. I think our growth is a is a good indication of that. And, you know, and there are new competitors like Microsoft. But I think you know, you know, medium or long term, you know, they're gonna make effort around our, um and you know, they're behind the, um, automation is really hard. The buried entry here is not it's not. Not easy. And we're going to keep me on that platform, play out, and I think that's ah, that's what makes us so different. Um and ah, you know, we have the renewal numbers, retention numbers, expansion numbers and and the revenue numbers to improve that, uh, you know, we're number one. >>Well, so I mean, there's a lot of ways to skin the cat, and you're right. You guys are really focused, you know, you automation anywhere really focused on this space, and you shared with us how you differentiate there. But as you point out Microsoft, they sort of added on I had talked to Allan, preferably the day from paga. You know, those guys don't position themselves as our PC, but they have r p A. I talked to, you know, our mutual friend Robert Young John the other day, right? They're piling onto this this trend, right? So why not? Right, It's it's ah, it's hot. But so, you know, clearly you guys are innovating there. I want to talk about your vision before we get into the latest product release two things that I would call out the term hyper automation with, I think is the Gartner term. And then it will probably stick. And then this this idea of a robot for every person How would you describe your vision? >>Yeah, I mean, we think that robots can and improve, you know, the the lives of of or pers everywhere, right? We think in every every function, every role. And we see that already, the job satisfaction and the people don't want to do the mundane, repetitive work, right? The new hires coming out of college, you know, they're gonna be excel and sequel server. We're no longer the tools of productivity. For them, it's it's your path. We have business. Schools that have committed top tier business schools have committed to deploying your path or to putting you're passing every force in the school these students are graduating with the right path is their most important skill going into companies. And they're gonna expect to be able to use robots within their companies in their daily lives. A swell. So, you know, we have customers today that are rolling out a robot for every person you know. We had Ah, Conoco Phillips on just earlier in our launch, talking about citizen developers, enabling says, developer armies of developers and growing enterprise wide. See, Intel was on as well from Singapore, the large telco. They're doing the exact same thing. So I think you know, I think this is this is this is this is about broad based digital transformation. Everybody participating And what happens is the leading companies to do this, you know, they're going to get the benefit of benefits out of it. It can reinvest that productivity, benefits and data science and analytics and serving customers and in, you know, and and, ah, new product ideas. And so, you know, this is this. You know, automation is going to fuel now the ability for companies to really differentiate and serve their customers better. And it's only needed enterprise wide view on it that you really maximizing. Take Amazon, for example, a great customer during during this prices. You know, they're trying to hire hundreds of thousands of people, right? Help in the fact that in their in their distribution centers elsewhere, this all served demand to help people who like you and I home or ordering things that we need, right? Well, they're use your path robots all throughout their HR hr on boarding HR recruiting HR administration And so helping them has been a big during this prices surge of robots is helping them actually hire workers. You know another example of Schneider Electric and amazing customer of ours. They're bringing their plants, their manufacturing facilities, implants back online faster by using robots to help manage the PPE personal protective equipment in the plant allow people workers to get back to work faster. Right? So what's happening is is, you know in that in those cases is your different examples of robots and different functions, right? In all cases, it's about helping grow a company faster. It's about helping protect workers. It's about helping getting revenue machines back up and running after Kobe is going to be critical to get back to work faster. So I'm I'm really excited about the fact that as people think about automation across the organization, the number of ideas and Aaron opportunities for improvement are are we're just starting to tap that potential. >>Well, this is why I think the vision is so important because you're talking about things that are transformative. Now, as you well know, one of the criticisms of RPS. So you have people, the suppliers and just yeah, we, you know, looking at mundane tasks, just automating mundane tasks like sometimes paving the cow path and say, you're very much aware of that criticism. But if I look at the recent announcements, you're really starting to build out that vision that you just talked about. They're really four takeaways. You sort of extending the core PAP platform, injecting AI end some or and more automation end to end automation really taken that full lifestyles lifecycle systems view and the last one is sort of putting it talks to the robot. For every person that sort of citizen automation, if you will, that sort of encompasses your product announcements. So it wasn't just sort of a point Announcement really is a underscores the platform. I wonder if you could just What do we need to know about you guys? Just that out. >>So we think about how we think about the rolls back to a division of robots person how automation can help different roles. And so this product launch $20 for this large scale launch that you just articulated, um, impacts in a fax and helps many different kinds of new roles Certainly process analysts now who examined processes, passes performance improvements. You know, they're a user of our process mining solution in our past. Find a solution that helps speed on our way. Arpaio engine, no testers and quality engineers. Now they can actually use studio pro and actually used test robots are brand new, and our new test manager is sort of the orchestration and management of test executions. Now they can participate in in leveraged power of robots and what they do as well. And we kind of think about that, you know, kind of across the board in our organization across the platform. They can use tools like you have path insights in Europe. If you're an analyst or your, uh ah. B I, this intelligence person really know what's going on with robots in terms of our wife for my organization and provide that up to the, you know, sea levels in the board of directors in real time. So I think that's that's the big part. Here is we're bringing, and we're helping bring in many, many different kinds of roles different kinds of people. Data scientist. You mentioned AI. Now data scientists can build a model. The models applied to ai fabric an orchestrator. It's drag and drop by our developer in studio, and now you can turn, you know, a a mundane, rules based task right into an experience based ones where a robot can help make a decision right. Based on experience and data, they can tweak and tune that model and data scientists can interact, you know, with the automation is flowing through your path. So I think that's how we think about it, right? You know, one of the great new capabilities, as well as the ability to engage line workers, dispatch out workers If you're a telco or or retail story retail store workers you know the robots can work with humans out in the field. We've got one real large manufacturer with 18,000 drivers in a DST direct store delivery scenario. And you know the ability for them to interact with robots and help them do their job in the field. Our customers better after the list data entry and data manipulation, multiple systems. So I this is this makes us very unique in our vision and in our execution. And again, I don't I have not heard of a single ah example by competitors that has any kind of a vision or articulation to be able to help a company enterprise wide and, you know, with the speed and the and the full, full vision that we have. >>Okay, so you're not worried about downturns. You can't control black swans Anyway, you're not worried about the competition. It feels like you know, you're worried about what you're worried about. You want about growing too fast. Additionally, deploying the the capital that you've raised. What worries you? >>Yeah. You know, we're paranoid or paranoid company, right? And when it comes to the market and and trying to drive, I think we've done a lot to help actually push the rock up the hill in terms of really, really driving our market, building the market, and we want to continue that right and not let up. So there's this kind of desire to never let up, right? Well, we always remind ourselves we must work harder, must work harder. We must work harder. And that's that's That's sort of this this mentality around ourselves, by the smartest people. Hire the smartest people you work with our customers, our customers are priority. Do that with really high excellence and really high sincerity that it comes through and everything that we do, you know, to build a world class operation to be, you know, Daniel DNS. When I first met him, he said, You know, I really want to be the enemy of the great news ecology company that serve customers really well. And it was amazing things for society, and and, you know, we're on that track, but we've got, you know, we're in the in the in the early innings. So, you know, making sure that we also run our business in a way that, um, you know, uh, is ready to be Ah, you know, publicly successful company on being able to raise new sources of capital to fund our ambitions and our ideas. I mean, you saw the number of announcements from our 24 release. It reminded me of an AWS re invent conference, where it's just innovation, innovation, innovation, innovation. And these are very real. They're not made up mythical announcements that some of our competitors do about launching some kind of discovery box doesn't exist, right? These are very real with real customers behind them, and and so you know, just doing that with the same level of tenacity. But being, you know, old, fast, immersed and humble, which are four core culture values along the way and not losing that Azeri grow. That's that's something we talk about maintaining that culture that's super critical to us. >>Everybody's talking about Okay, What What's gonna be permanent? Postpone it. I was just listening to Julie Sweet, CEO of Accenture, and she was saying that, you know, prior to Covic, they had data that showed that the top 25% of companies that have leaned into digital transformation were outperforming. You know, the balance of their peers, and I know question now that the the rest of that base really is going to be focused on automation. Automation is is really going to be one of those things that is high, high priority now and really for the next decade and beyond. So, Bobby, thanks so much for coming on the Cube and supporting us in this in this r p. A drill down. Really appreciate it, >>Dave. It's always a pleasure as always. Great to see you. Thank you. >>Alright. And thank you for watching everybody. Dave Volante. We'll be right back right after this short break. You're watching the cube. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> Narrator: From around the globe it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of UiPath Live, the release show. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Hi everybody this is Dave Valenti, welcome back to our RPA Drill Down. Ted Kummert is here he is Executive Vice President for Products and Engineering at UiPath. Ted, thanks for coming on, great to see you. >> Dave, it's great to be here, thanks so much. >> Dave your background is pretty interesting, you started as a Silicon Valley Engineer, they pulled you out, you did a huge stint at Microsoft. You got experience in SAS, you've got VC chops with Madrona. And at Microsoft you saw it all, the NT, the CE Space, Workflow, even MSN you did stuff with MSN, and then the all important data. So I'm interested in what attracted you to UiPath? >> Yeah Dave, I feel super fortunate to have worked in the industry in this span of time, it's been an amazing journey, and I had a great run at Microsoft it was fantastic. You mentioned one experience in the middle there, when I first went to the server business, the enterprise business, I owned our Integration and Workflow products, and I would say that's the first I encountered this idea. Often in the software industry there are ideas that have been around for a long time, and what we're doing is refining how we're delivering them. And we had ideas we talked about in terms of Business Process Management, Business Activity Monitoring, Workflow. The ways to efficiently able somebody to express the business process in a piece of software. Bring systems together, make everybody productive, bring humans into it. These were the ideas we talked about. Now in reality there were some real gaps. Because what happened in the technology was pretty different from what the actual business process was. And so lets fast forward then, I met Madrona Venture Group, Seattle based Venture Capital Firm. We actually made a decision to participate in one of UiPath's fundraising rounds. And that's the first I really came encountered with the company and had to have more than an intellectual understanding of RPA. 'Cause when I first saw it, I said "oh, I think that's desktop automation" I didn't look very close, maybe that's going to run out of runway, whatever. And then I got more acquainted with it and figured out "Oh, there's a much bigger idea here". And the power is that by really considering the process and the implementation from the humans work in, then you have an opportunity really to automate the real work. Not that what we were doing before wasn't significant, this is just that much more powerful. And that's when I got really excited. And then the companies statistics and growth and everything else just speaks for itself, in terms of an opportunity to work, I believe, in one of the most significant platforms going in the enterprise today, and work at one of the fastest growing companies around. It was like almost an automatic decision to decide to come to the company. >> Well you know, you bring up a good point you think about software historically through our industry, a lot of it was 'okay here's this software, now figure out how to map your processes to make it all work' and today the processes, especially you think about this pandemic, the processes are unknown. And so the software really has to be adaptable. So I'm wondering, and essentially we're talking about a fundamental shift in the way we work. And is there really a fundamental shift going on in how we write software and how would you describe that? >> Well there certainly are, and in a way that's the job of what we do when we build platforms for the enterprises, is try and give our customers a new way to get work done, that's more efficient and helps them build more powerful applications. And that's exactly what RPA does, the efficiency, it's not that this is the only way in software to express a lot of this, it just happens to be the quickest. You know in most ways. Especially as you start thinking about initiatives like our StudioX product to what we talk about as enabling citizen developers. It's an expression that allows customers to just do what they could have done otherwise much more quickly and efficient. And the value on that is always high, certainly in an unknown era like this, it's even more valuable, there are specific processes we've been helping automate in the healthcare, in financial services, with things like SBA Loan Processing, that we weren't thinking about six months ago, or they weren't thinking about six months ago. We're all thinking about how we're reinventing the way we work as individuals and corporations because of what's going on with the coronavirus crisis, having a platform like this that gives you agility and mapping the real work to what your computer state and applications all know how to do, is even more valuable in a climate like that. >> What attracted us originally to UiPath, we knew Bobby Patrick CMO, he said "Dave, go download a copy, go build some automations and go try it with some other companies". So that really struck us as wow, this is actually quite simple. Yet at the same time, and so you've of course been automating all these simple tasks, but now you've got real aspiration, you're glomming on to this term of Hyperautomation, you've made some acquisitions, you've got a vision, that really has taken you beyond 'paving the cow path' I sometimes say, of all these existing processes. It's really trying to discover new processes and opportunities for automation, which you would think after 50 or whatever years we've been in this industry, we'd have attacked a lot of it, but wow, seems like we have a long way to go. Again, especially what we're learning through this pandemic. Your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I'd say Hyperautomation. It's actually a Gartner term, it's not our term. But there is a bigger idea here, built around the core automation platform. So let's talk for a second just what's not about the core platform and then what Hyperautomation really means around that. And I think of that as the bookends of how do I discover and plan, how do I improve my ability to do more automations, and find the real opportunities that I have. And how do I measure and optimize? And that's a lot of what we delivered in 20.4 as a new capability. So let's talk about discover and plan. One aspect of that is the wisdom of the crowd. We have a product we call Automation Hub that is all about that. Enabling people who have ideas, they're the ones doing the work, they have the observation into what efficiencies can be. Enabling them to either with our Ask Capture Utility capture that and document that, or just directly document that. And then, people across the company can then collaborate eventually moving on building the best ideas out of that. So there's capturing the crowd, and then there's a more scientific way of capturing actually what the opportunities are. So we've got two products we introduced. One is process mining, and process mining is about going outside in from the, let's call it the larger processes, more end to end processes in the enterprise. Things like order-to-cash and procure-to-pay, helping you understand by watching the events, and doing the analytics around that, where your bottle necks, where are you opportunities. And then task mining said "let's watch an individual, or group of individuals, what their tasks are, let's watch the log of events there, let's apply some machine learning processing to that, and say here's the repetitive things we've found." And really helping you then scientifically discover what your opportunities are. And these ideas have been along for a long time, process mining is not new. But the connection to an automation platform, we think is a new and powerful idea, and something we plan to invest a lot in going forward. So that's the first bookend. And then the second bookend is really about attaching rich analytics, so how do I measure it, so there's operationally how are my robots doing? And then there's everything down to return on investment. How do I understand how they are performing, verses what I would have spent if I was continuing to do them the old way. >> Yeah that's big 'cause (laughing) the hero reports for the executives to say "hey, this is actually working" but at the same time you've got to take a systems view. You don't want to just optimize one part of the system at the detriment to others. So you talk about process mining, which is kind of discovering the backend systems, ERP and the like, where the task mining it sounds like it's more the collaboration and front end. So that whole system thinking, really applies, doesn't it? >> Yeah. Very much so. Another part of what we talked about then, in the system is, how do we capture the ideas and how do we enable more people to build these automations? And that really gets down to, we talk about it in our company level vision, is a robot for every person. Every person should have a digital assistant. It can help you with things you do less frequently, it can help you with things you do all the time to do your job. And how do we help you create those? We've released a new tool we call StudioX. So for our RPA Developers we have Studio, and StudioX is really trying to enable a citizen developer. It's not unlike the art that we saw in Business Intelligence there was the era where analytics and reporting were the domain of experts, and they produced formalized reports that people could consume. But the people that had the questions would have to work with them and couldn't do the work themselves. And then along comes ClickView and Tableau and Power BI enabling the self services model, and all of a sudden people could do that work themselves, and that enabled powerful things. We think the same arch happens here, and StudioX is really our way of enabling that, citizen developer with the ideas to get some automation work done on their own. >> Got a lot in this announcement, things like document understanding, bring your own AI with AI fabric, how are you able to launch so many products, and have them fit together, you've made some acquisitions. Can you talk about the architecture that enables you to do that? >> Yeah, it's clearly in terms of ambition, and I've been there for 10 weeks, but in terms of ambition you don't have to have been there when they started the release after Forward III in October to know that this is the most ambitious thing that this company has ever done from a release perspective. Just in terms of the surface area we're delivering across now as an organization, is substantive. We talk about 1,000 feature improvements, 100's of discreet features, new products, as well as now our automation cloud has become generally available as well. So we've had muscle building over this past time to become world class at offering SAS, in addition to on-premises. And then we've got this big surface area, and architecture is a key component of how you can do this. How do you deliver efficiently the same software on-premises and in the cloud? Well you do that by having the right architecture and making the right bets. And certainly you look forward, how are companies doing this today? It's really all about Cloud-Native Platform. But it's about an architecture such that we can do that efficiently. So there is a lot about just your technical strategy. And then it's just about a ton of discipline and customer focus. It keeps you focused on the right things. StudioX was a great example of we were led by customers through a lot of what we actually delivered, a couple of the major features in it, certainly the out of box templates, the studio governance features, came out of customer suggestions. I think we had about 100 that we have sitting in the backlog, a lot of which we've already done, and really being disciplined and really focused on what customers are telling. So make sure you have the right technical strategy and architecture, really follow your customers, and really stay disciplined and focused on what matters most as you execute on the release. >> What can we learn from previous examples, I think about for instance SQL Server, you obviously have some knowledge in it, it started out pretty simple workloads and then at the time we all said "wow, it's a lot more powerful to come from below that it is, if a Db2, or an Oracle sort of goes down market", Microsoft proved that, obviously built in the robustness necessary, is there a similar metaphor here with regard to things like governance and security, just in terms of where UiPath started and where you see it going? >> Well I think the similarities have more to do with we have an idea of a bigger platform that we're now delivering against. In the database market, that was, we started, SQL Server started out as more of just a transactional database product, and ultimately grew to all of the workloads in the data platform, including transaction for transactional apps, data warehousing and as well as business intelligence. I see the same analogy here of thinking more broadly of the needs, and what the ability of an integrated platform, what it can do to enable great things for customers, I think that's a very consistent thing. And I think another consistent thing is know who you are. SQL Server knew exactly who it had to be when it entered the database market. That it was going to set a new benchmark on simplicity, TCO, and that was going to be the way it differentiated. In this case, we're out ahead of the market, we have a vision that's broader than a lot of the market is today. I think we see a lot of people coming in to this space, but we see them building to where we were, and we're out ahead. So we are operating from a leadership position, and I'm not going to tell you one's easier that the other, and both you have to execute with great urgency. But we're really executing out ahead, so we've got to keep thinking about, and there's no one's tail lights to follow, we have to be the ones really blazing the trail on what all of this means. >> I want to ask you about this incorporation of existing systems. Some markets they take off, it's kind of a one shot deal, and the market just embeds. I think you guys have bigger aspirations than that, I look at it like a service now, misunderstood early on, built the platform and now really is fundamental part of a lot of enterprises. I also look at things like EDW, which again, you have some experience in. In my view it failed to live up to a lot of it's promises even though it delivered a lot of value. You look at some of the big data initiatives, you know EDW still plugs in, it's the system of record, okay that's fine. How do you see RPA evolving? Are we going to incorporate, do we have to embrace existing business process systems? Or is this largely a do-over in your opinion? >> Well I think it's certainly about a new way of building automation, and it's starting to incorporate and include the other ways, for instance in the current release we added support for long running workflow, it was about human workflow based scenarios, now the human is collaborating with the robot, and we built those capabilities. So I do see us combining some of the old and new way. I think one of the most significant things here, is also that impact that AI and ML based technologies and skills can have on the power of the automations that we deliver. We've certainly got a surface area that, I think about our AI and ML strategy in two parts, that we are building first class first party skills, that we're including in the platform, and then we're building a platform for third parties and customers to bring their what their data science teams have delivered, so those can also be a part of our ecosystem, and part of automations. And so things like document understanding, how do I easily extract data from more structured, semi-structured and completely unstructured documents, accurately? And include those in my automations. Computer vision which gives us an ability to automate at a UI level across other types of systems than say a Windows and a browser base application. And task mining is built on a very robust, multi layer ML system, and the innovation opportunity that I think just consider there, you know continue there. You think it's a macro level if there's aspects of machine learning that are about captured human knowledge, well what exactly is an automation that captured where you're capturing a lot of human knowledge. The impact of ML and AI are going to be significant going out into the future. >> Yeah, I want to ask you about them, and I think a lot of people are just afraid of AI, as a separate thing and they have to figure out how to operationalize it. And I think companies like UiPath are really in a position to embed UI into applications AI into applications everywhere, so that maybe those folks that haven't climbed on the digital bandwagon, who are now with this pandemic are realizing "wow, we better accelerate this" they can actually tap machine intelligence through your products and others as well. Your thoughts on that sort of narrative? >> Yeah, I agree with that point of view, it's AI and ML is still maturing discipline across the industry. And you have to build new muscle, and you build new muscle and data science, and it forces you to think about data and how you manage your data in a different way. And that's a journey we've been on as a company to not only build our first party skills, but also to build the platform. It's what's given us the knowledge that to help us figure out, well what do we need to include here so our customers can bring their skills, actually to our platform, and I do think this is a place where we're going to see the real impact of AI and ML in a broader way. Based on the kind of apps it is and the kind of skills we can bring to bear. >> Okay last question, you're ten weeks in, when you're 50, 100, 200 weeks in, what should we be watching, what do you want to have accomplished? >> Well we're listening, we're obviously listening closely to our customers, right now we're still having a great week, 'cause there's nothing like shipping new software. So right now we're actually thinking deeply about where we're headed next. We see there's lots of opportunities and robot for every person, and that initiative, and so we're launched a bunch of important new capabilities there, and we're going to keep working with the market to understand how we can, how we can add additional capability there. We've just got the GA of our automation cloud, I think you should expect more and more services in our automation cloud going forward. I think this area we talked about, in terms of AI and ML and those technologies, I think you should expect more investment and innovation there from us and the community, helping our customers, and I think you will also see us then, as we talked about this convergence of the ways we bring together systems through integrate and build business process, I think we'll see a convergence into the platform of more of those methods. I look ahead to the next releases, and want to see us making some very significant releases that are advancing all of those things, and continuing our leadership in what we talk about now as the Hyperautomation platform. >> Well Ted, lot of innovation opportunities and of course everybody's hopping on the automation bandwagon. Everybody's going to want a piece of your RPA hide, and you're in the lead, we're really excited for you, we're excited to have you on theCUBE, so thanks very much for all your time and your insight. Really appreciate it. >> Yeah, thanks Dave, great to spend this time with you. >> All right thank you for watching everybody, this is Dave Velanti for theCUBE, and our RPA Drill Down Series, keep it right there we'll be right back, right after this short break. (calming instrumental music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of UiPath Live, the Release Show. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Every body welcome back, to this special presentation, theCUBE has been covering the RPA space for quite some time. UiPath just had recently a huge launch, and Daniel Dines, as the CEO and founder of UiPath, has set forth the vision, of a robot for every person. (Giggles) pretty substantial goals that he has. And Brandon Node is here. He's the Senior Vice President of Product at UiPath. Brandon, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me. >> So that is a really ambitious goal. And, we're going to poke at that a little bit, and ask you to sort of defend it. Give us some proof points and help us understand sort of why you guys are so confident in this vision. You guys obviously the leader in RPA, growing like crazy, you've shared some metrics, very transparent. So we'd love to have these transparent and open honest computation. So I'm going to start with just sort of the basic, I mean, people understand RPA, just as in terms of automating a lot of mundane tasks, these tasks, you know, are often very repetitive or rules based. They're sort of interacting with existing applications. Now, in the early days of RPA, these are stable legacy apps with people sitting in front of a screen. So I guess my first question to you is, you know, some of the criticisms of RPA have been that if the app changes, you know, the robot breaks. So, first of all, is that the correct way to be thinking about the state of RPA. Today, is that an outdated view? And let's get into it so we can understand how we achieve robot for every person. >> Your thought sure. So I think it's a fair point in that RPA, by definition is built on top of applications. And it's always been the case that you need to be in coordination with your release teams with the application teams to understand what's happening there. Do I think it's a fair statement on where the industry is? I don't think so I think that is a small component of what the center of excellence looks at. And when you look at RPA, at scale today, there are many considerations governance, change management training, things that make these companies successful and these companies that are embracing it as part of their strategic plan for digital transformation. So for sure, it's a part of the story. But I would say, it's just a small part, the bigger part of the story is really about how you bring RPA into the culture. And that's what I think we'll talk about some more with the robot for every person. >> Yeah, definitely. You know, and I want to get back into that sort of how you make RPA strategic but before we get there, so a lot of people have said. Okay, you know're your interacting with existing legacy applications stable. There's no problem, you kind of sort of refuted that. But a lot of people also talk about a point into the API economy that API's are really a way that your platform or other your competitors platform can interact with applications. And that begins to sort of widen the opportunity, sort of modernize both infrastructure and applications. Where do where does the API economy, the whole equation? >> Sure. When you look at RPA, we shouldn't look at it as just a narrow set of implementations. RPA is capable of connecting directly to API's directly to it interfaces to you know, mouse and click style integrations as well as deeper levels, connecting directly to the lower levels of the application bypassing the mouse and keyboard entirely. So think about RPA, not just as keyboard and mouse automations, but also benefiting from all of those API's that exists, also being able to span the full spectrum of automation. >> So I want to talk sometimes I joke, you know, tongue in cheek, it's sort of a pejorative, I say, hey, RPA sometimes paves the cow path. But you know, what if my cow path works, and I can pave it and allows me to go faster and automate. So what? There's other opportunities I can I can attack. So my question is, where are you seeing people really applying RPA today, and how rapidly are they going forward? You know, really transforming. You mentioned digital transformation. And you guys announced a ton of product getting into it where do you see them in terms of glomming on to some of those more strategic areas >> Yeah, absolutely. So we've had lots of conversation around what the right methodology is for RPA, kind of like you said, should I just automate the process as it is? Or should I break down the process, assess it, re-engineer it and then automate? And the answer is, we have customers all over the spectrum. And there's a lot to be said for automating the process as is, if a robot can do it in a minute and a half as is. But if I re engineer it, it can do it in a minute flat. Where's your time best spent? And I think the biggest consideration that companies need to have right now with regard to automation is just really around opportunity costs. If I can automate a process as is and put my re-engineering team on to a bigger problem, that's going to get a bigger lift for the organization. ploy those people there, right? So what you end up having is this kind of mosaic of opportunities. How much does it cost to automate? How much does it cost to re engineer? What's my benefit going to be from that automation or from that re engineering, and now you have different tools that you can apply to your backlog. So, for sure, RPA can automate things as it is as is as well as do take that re-engineering approach and make sure that you are getting the most out of that automation. In terms of the strategic nature of it. Again, all over the map. You know, we've always said automate the mundane automate the repeatable. I was a customer before I was an employee, some of my automations were actually my most critical things, the things that I couldn't let fall through the cracks under any circumstances. So while they were maybe relatively easy for a human To do the compliance pick up that I had the guaranteed delivery pick up that I had, to me made it worth it. >> How does artificial intelligence address some of this in terms of, of making RPA more strategic. In one hand, it is going to inject some, simplicity into the process. On the other hand, you know, people cerned about AI, where does it fit? In? What form does it take? Is it natural language processing? Is it? Is it actually taking actions like systems of agency? How should we think about that? >> Sure. I think about it as, again, a spectrum. You know, so many of these questions, there's not a single answer. There. It's really about what you want to accomplish and how you're going to approach it. So for instance, let's say I'm a company and I want to build the next best action AI model or ML model. right, I'm going to start with the data that I have from my operation. So I may want to use RPA. To help extract data out of processes the build repository that I'm going to build my, my model off of, or let's say I, you know, we have customers that are implementing complex models to help with with their customers. And they have those models being surfaced through RPA. So now I have the model, but I want a human to review it before it takes action. I can surface that in an attended automation in a form or something that's pre built that gives the agent guidance on what to do. And then at the fully autonomous side, you have AI and ML models attached to chat bots that are hooked into RPA processes that can service customers in real time. >> You know, I want to ask you about sort of Product versus platforms in their, their book, the second Machine Age Andy McAfee and Erik brynjolfsson MIT professors years ago sort of laid out, they said products or platforms beat products. And I think a lot of the criticisms of EA around point products, you guys made a big deal. In your your last release, you didn't really talk specifically about this. But to me, my one of my takeaways is, you're building out a platform, you talked about a spectrum. You know, you've got, you know, studio x versus low code, you've got your studio, which is for RPA developers, you got Studio Pro, for hardcore, you know what to do quality assurance, so you've really got a spectrum of capabilities. So it strikes me that one of the ways in which you get to a robot for every person is that you've got a platform that can evolve, you know, with the market. And I wonder if you could sort of talk about that and really try to plug it into that vision that Daniel set out a couple years ago. >> Absolutely. You know, to be honest, this always been a blessing and a curse for us, right? When you install UiPath, you have all of these tools, all of these capabilities. And you've got some places that you can start immediately we place a number of pre existing code bases and modules up on our marketplace. For instance, we have sample code that you can use that we provide. But still, you need to take the platform and customize it for your applications for your business. And when we talk about the platform mindset, really what our primary goal is, is to build something robust enough, flexible enough, reliable enough that any company can use it within their operations. And you see that that's borne out on our customer list that we publish. And we talked about, you have every industry covered, every region covered, and and that's our Challenge is really to make something robust enough to be everywhere, but intuitive and understandable enough that anyone can pick an entry point and begin to use that platform. >> So when we talk about a robot for every person, I want to know better definition around a person we talking about every worker, or is it even more sort of ambitious. >> More ambitious, because it's not just a worker, an employee, it includes students, teachers, take the broadest definition. And think about how taking advantage of automation or being able to write your own automations is beneficial. There's, there's no limit my son is in first grade. He's taking a class right now as part of his curriculum, on the basics of coding. He's doing loops and retries and step based algorithm. Islamic teaching, this is something that's ubiquitous, this applies to everybody. >> That's awesome. Scary at the same time. [Laughter] So I'm talking about this idea of bringing your own AI to the equation. You guys referenced that a little bit of your kind of fabric approach. But can you clarify sort of how you see that playing out? >> This goes straight back to the platform concept, right? If it's the case, that you already have an existing model, and I talk to customers almost daily, who have some form of intelligence existing within their platform today, right? It could be a model that helps with payment processing. Could be that next best action model, right? Data science has been on its own rocket ship for the past couple decades. And by now, most enterprise companies already have models that they're using. Or somewhere or something, we don't want to come in and say, rebuild that model with us. We're not a takeout company. We're an integration company. So we want you to be able to use those existing models, connect them directly to orchestrator. And once it's connected to orchestrator, that means that your developers can access those models directly within the automations that they're writing. So the ability to attach what you already have, those assets that you've already been working on, and make it one click, one drag and drop accessible to your developers is huge. >> It is huge. I mean, I think that's you can observe markets, the ones that have less friction in terms of, you know, their deployments tend to have greater adoption, you're not asking people to rip and replace. This is really sort of additive and you can get some quick wins. I want to come back to mentioned, you know, security, you mentioned that you've got to be in sync with your your teams. What's the right regime? I'm particularly interested in the security and compliance piece because a lot of times users when they hear it security, compliance governance, they go slow me down, say no. How do you help square that circle? >> Yeah, it's a great question. And it's funny because the narrative has changed so much. A year and a half ago, we were educating people on you know, the fact that robots won't go rogue, they won't. All of a sudden just start doing things that you haven't told him to do or haven't programmed in. Right. It was very much a fear of the unknown. I don't have those conversations anymore. Now the conversations with customers are really around. I will enable people to build around automations. I wanted to democratize RPA but I don't want people to automate things. That I don't want them to, for instance, I have a legacy database, it has a limited amount of bandwidth of capacity. So if all of my developers hit that database at once, I could slow down the the access to that database. So maybe I want to blacklist that from my development environments, because that's off limits for automation. And from our standpoint, we're completely okay with this. We want customers to use RPA for the right tools for their organization and give them the ability to build governance into the development tools and into the overall framework, so that it's very much in line with what their expectations. >> Brandon, I really appreciate you helping me wrap up this sort of RPA market analysis, the post UI path, Folks, you can you can DM me @DaveVellante or hit me on Twitter, and you know, love to hear your comment. UiPath as I've said, very open and transparent in the organization, go hit them up, challenge them as I have. Brandon again, thanks so much for for coming on theCUBE and helping us with this program. >> Great. Thanks for having me. It's always great to be here. All right, you're welcome. And thank you everybody for watching Dave volante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. 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>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of you. I path live the release show brought to you by you. I path everyone. Welcome back. This is Dave Vellante for the human. We've been covering the r P a market now for quite some time. Yeah, I pastor said this huge announcement. Then we're gonna update you on the space. As you know, we've been quantifying this with our partners at ET are one of the areas that you I path is obviously focused on talking about scaling. If you wanna win in r p. A. You got a scale you want to scale. You gotta have cloud, though. Eric Metaphor is here. He's the director of product management. That you either path, We're gonna talk Cloud. Tara. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you. Didn't get to see you as well. >>Yes. So you know, you guys have this huge announcement. Um, there are really four major components, if you will. That you extended the core platform. You talked about more automation? More ai smarter robots. The whole end to end. When you guys talk about the what? Sometimes it gets a little buzz, wordy, but that hyper automation, it's got to be end end. You've got to take a systems view, and then you got to put the tools in the hands of regular people. If you want to have a robot for every person, it's got to be simple. You've got to democratize uh, R p A. So my question is, where does the cloud fit into all this? >>You know, the cloud is the one that wraps it all up together. So for us, it's very important to make it easy for people to start instantly. You when you when you start to decide that you want to do in investment in r P A. And you really want to get started very quickly. And the second thing is, you eventually want to grow that are being investment, and the cloud makes it super easy for you to scale out of it. So Cloud makes it easy for you to start instantly and scaling. >>You think about the cloud you know, kind of started with. I guess it's sort of started with Salesforce back in 1999 kind of pre cloud. But certainly, you know so many functions and software areas have been cloud ified. You saw it with the email. You certainly where you start with I t s m. Which was kind of a heavy lift. You certainly see it with With HR. You seen it with data protection and backup. You see, do you see r p A. Is kind of the next big wave of cloud ification. >>Well, I absolutely think that cloud is gonna be very big in our be a. So from our perspective, when you start thinking about are you really thinking about automation? You want your automation is the light up and to save you money and to cut time for you and the investment thing that's going to remind what's going through your mind is not setting up infrastructure and, you know, configuring machines and selling software to make our p possible that the cloud makes it super easy for you to just cut down that I t infrastructure investment and go right ahead into what you really care about, which is the automation. So I think it's gonna be big that we allow you to just go directly to automation. I want RB start thinking about automation for good infrastructure lead that blood. >>So there's obviously you hear a lot of narrative in the marketplace about Cloud Cloud native. You see some companies or dogmatic will never do on had Frank's loop in a little while ago. So we're not doing our friend. That's Ah, that's a halfway house. You guys have taken a different approach, obviously started on Prem and now you're moving to the cloud. What? What's your philosophy on that? You know, Why wouldn't everybody do Cloud >>makes sense. So for us, we're very pragmatic about We believe that customers are different stages in their cloud adoption. Some people are extremely cloud friendly and have already put in place at plans for making sure that everything is already in the cloud. There are companies that are cloud native. They were born in the cloud that if you go a nascent install a piece of software in the local server, they would just laugh at you. So that's on one end of the spectrum and you want to make sure that those people can take full capability of our. On the other hand, there are people who are still, you know, coming from on Prem servers who are trying to move to the cloud to have plans to move to the cloud who would like to try some components in the CLI. But they still have some legacy systems that exist on Prem or a lot of systems that exist, and we want to make sure that those people are also able to take care of our key. And on the other end of the spectrum, there are industries or some companies and some industries that just are not ready for the cloud at all. And from our perspective, we want to democratize our key. We want our P available for everyone. So it is our philosophy that we're going to give you a multitude of the women options. If you want on Prem all the way, we got it. If you want cloud all the way we got, you want the hybrid assistant, We got it. We're just going to make it possible for you. And the deployment choice is your choice >>and the experience on Prem and Cloud. It's substantially identical. Would you say it's completely identical? What? What's the Delta? >>That is absolutely one of our goals. It is absolutely a gore for Google for you. I have to make sure that if you are an on Prem customer and you are starting to use some cloud, that your experiences seamless between on premises and in the cloud if you are a cloud customer and you have some components that still exist on Prem, if you want to use them, is very important for us that you have that common experience between both. So our software is designed with a common experience of the core, and it's actually the same software that runs from a user experience perspective in the cloud and on premises. Now, obviously, a lot of the infrastructure is different than a lot of the security aspects are different. But the user experience itself is, you know, consistently the same and intentionally that way. >>So when people talk about cloud or not, this is often site, you know, several things. Clearly, Layton sees a factor. If your data lives on, you know, on Prem, maybe you want to do things on Prem. There's local laws, data sovereignty. Uh, there's there's corporate edicts. Okay, we're not going to the cloud now. Maybe with Covad, that's that's changing somewhat, but so what are you hearing from customers just in terms of the rationale on Prem versus Cloud Hybrid. What are some of the decision points? >>Those are all good points, Dave. That's exactly the kind of stuff that we hear from our customers. So I think the main things that we hear in terms of cloud is about security people rightfully. So. When you start talking about cloud that they start asking, Can I really trust you as a vendor? With my data, I'm giving you my sales data. I'm giving you my HR data. I mean, this is some confidential information. Can I really trust you with that data? So that's one thing we absolutely, I start taking care off with large focus on security, and I can definitely dive deeper into that if you want. In addition to that, privacy and data sovereignty and where data lives is a big deal. So from our perspective, we host your data as an enterprise customer in three different locations. We host demand. We have servers in the United States. We have servers in Europe. We have servers in Japan, and as a customer you get to choose where data lives and we keep it the way you thoughts s so that kind of helps with data sovereignty because some countries, as you mentioned or some cos there's mentioned really have strict rules about that. Also, that helps with the legacy aspect. So if you're a customer in Japan, you would really prefer to use our Japan Data Center as opposed to a You know, your it's simple. >>The customers care, like where your cloud infrastructure lives. Are they asking you about that? They did they? Did they probe you on that? I mean specifically in terms of your cloud partner, like maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >>Absolutely. People definitely care about who we use and where the data is going to lie. And so from our perspective, for example, we're partnered with Microsoft and all our infrastructures. They don't Microsoft Azure, and, uh, we use data centers from Microsoft Azure through the whole start stuff, and that's a really good for multiple reads as it provides some very good uptime and reliability guarantees. In addition to that, they have service around the world that we can utilize so that we can expect, for example, for a next frontier becomes for example, in Australia, New Zealand. Then we want to create a reason they're being on top of Azure really allows us to go and spend that off pretty quickly and help customers that way. >>So we don't want things about Cloud is you can you can experiment very cheaply and you can fail fast and then iterating. So one of the things that struck me about your announcement was your community edition. I always look for, you know, Is there a community edition? Is that in addition, free for life? Is it neutered? In other words, can I actually do anything with it? Um, so I was happy to see that you guys had that. And also happy to see I mean, you've got I think it's early days for you, but I think that you have 200 enterprise customers, two orders of magnitude greater than that from the community edition. Did I get that right? >>That's great. Yes, absolutely. So when you think about the automation, cloud comes into play. But we have a community, the one for community, and that is the free version. And it's as you said, it's not like a pretrial or three limited time or something. It was just free as in free, free forever. We're gonna keep it to you. That's all you need. Just use it. No questions asked. You know, be happy with it. And the community edition actually is, is a fully functional product, and it allows you to do to get to attended robots one unattended robot and you get the option of connecting up the studio to two studios for designing animations. Work with those s so it's it's it allows it. That's all your automation needs, like small automation needs. Just go ahead and use it. If you're a small company or an individual or a small team, just use the community edition and you want to use that production. That's fine. No problem. That's all you need to go for it, then the and we have tens of thousands of community customers that are actively using the product. I'm not talking about the people that have ever signed up on left. Those are a lot more than that, but I'm talking about actually actively using the product. We've got tens of thousands of users as they're using it every month and built on that same infrastructure comes our Enterprise Edition, and the Enterprise edition is a basically the same infrastructure. But it adds a number of capabilities that are useful for a larger enterprise, of course, the most important of which is an uptime guarantee. So, you know, with the community edition, obviously we keep the service. Often we have very good response times, but with enterprise, you actually get enough time guarantee. In addition to that, you get access to our sport. They have a dedicated support team that works 24 7 around the clock and multiple reasons, and you get guaranteed response times with the mass away. On top of that, you get to be able to purchase is many robots as you want, and the list goes on and on and on. And it's very easy to go. Like you said, from playing with community, working with community, using that doing a trial, it's instinct as well. You just click a button, and all of a sudden, now you have five robots that each night that you can use for 60 days, and from there you can just go ahead and buy. >>We'll talk more about the uptime guarantee is that basically Azure s l A. So the data layer on top of that, you know, what are we measuring there? You could add some color. >>Absolutely. A startup and guarantee is built on top of azure, obviously. But we provide our own uptime guarantee regardless of what happens in the underlying system. Eso From our perspective, we guarantee that the service is going to be out at a specific amount of time. So we measure the number of minutes every month that the service should actually be up. And we measure the number of ministers service experiences, any kind of downtime. And we measure down. I'm in multiple ways. So we do outside in testing. Or, you know, if you're a customer, are you able to reach our service or not that we do incredible detail the monitoring and reporting on the life off our service itself from inside and And we look at any minute, any of those the services that we use underlying services are not responding to customers, and we count those down as well. So and we guarantee that there's a specific number of minutes that the service will be down, and that's >>it. And So if I understand it, you're really taking an application. You It's not the light on the server. It's It's the it's Can I get to you as a customer? Yeah. My state, my service, your >>perspective. Are you able to reach our service and do what you're expected to do with it? That's what you as a customer, really care about and in turn, that's the right way for us to be measuring up. >>And if I don't? If you don't hit, that s L. A. What? I get re credit. So how does that >>work? Absolutely, we have in our agreements and provision for penalties on the outside, we don't hit that escalate. And similarly for support. You know, if you call support, you're guaranteed depending on the severity of the issue on the back of contract that sport. Uh, you know how many minutes it takes us for somebody to be engaged with you on that issue? And we have very good numbers and hitting. That s L. A. And if we don't? They're also penalties on the outside for that. I think this is a real enterprise services you'd expect. >>Yeah, Great. I want to get to take some examples. You've got a couple 100 customers I think you mentioned should hopefully was up and running very quickly. I think you had some other examples, but but what can you share with us in terms of actual experience that your customers have seen? >>Absolutely. So we were thinking a very measured and careful approach, actually launching our service. So even though our service literally just launched last week fully to the world, we have actually been enabling enterprise customers we've been. We started a private preview with four customers and back in April of last year. And then we extended that to a public preview for any customer to try our service, as is no payment but also no guarantees. Back in the day, I want to say June of last year and then it took us all the way to December to feel comfortable that the services of the place where when we launch it, customers are going to get an excellent quality. And that's when we did a what we call a limited availability where we started on boarding enterprise customers step by step. We started with 10. We went to 50. We went to 100 now we have a couple 100 customers that already signed up, using the enterprise product every day as a guaranteed service and getting that Sele's that we've promised. So this was the time when we said, You know what? I think we've definitely been meeting our SL A's for five months running. Now we feel very comfortable lunch the rest, >>even if it's anecdotal. Have you discerned appreciable change in people's attitude toward cloud as a result of over? >>Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, it's just the aspect of working from home and having a lot of people just not available either demand infrastructure or demand servers made. A lot of people think about what is the best way to continue to run on information while they're at it. And obviously there's nothing easier than granting access to someone in the cloud to access a service from home. Then, if you were to bring them access to an on premise service with BP and all that stuff, and then if you want the provisioning new robots and machines and you have to do that again on premises, you know it's it's it's a lot more complicated. So a lot of customers are really starting to look at the cloud so many of the conversations that we would have, obviously we come in and they would ask us about the capabilities of our system. They would ask about security that ask a lot of things and those discussions, you know, anywhere between, you know, a few days to sometimes a few months. You know, some customers is just a great for those. The volume of customers that's asking about cloud is definitely increasing good for us. Obviously the number of deals were signed exalts increasing. But most importantly, I think that the number of customers that are benefiting from the value of starting instantly like cloud scale easily in the cloud. And you mentioned the example of Chipotle. And while that was engagement that we had obviously for the core of it, you know, they were very impressed with what they were able to do with The came in and falling and team had budgeted about two weeks to get started and set up everything so that they can build on top of that in their automation. And they, they chose wisely, do start in the cloud and As a result, they were done and all set up in one day. So it is definitely a huge difference between what you're able to get in the cloud person. So what you're doing? >>Well, you have passed all about automation. And and so is the cloud. The superpowers of this decade Cloud data A You guys were, you know, at the heart of all those Eric. Thanks so much for coming on the cube in explaining sort of your cloud angle. Really Appreciate your time. >>Thank you very much, Dave. It's a pleasure to be here. >>Alright? And thank you for watching everybody. More coverage on the r p. A market analysis digging into your past recent announcement stable people want to have right back right after this short break. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>> Automation is being viewed as increasingly strategic by business executives. A prominent example can be seen in the form of robotic process automation, RPA. Despite the pandemic, RPA continues to show strong growth in the market, and that's really confirmed in the survey data from our partner, ETR. Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and welcome to this special presentation from the CUBE team with support from UI Path. Earlier this month UI Path had a big launch event and today we're going to provide some perspective and analysis of the market. We're also going to interview some of the UI Path execs to get a better understanding of the market trends and the competitive environment. Let me lay out the program. It's going to start with my independent, unsponsored breaking analysis segment. This is pure editorial. In this first video we're going to discuss some of the RPA challenges and early issues that customers had with RPA. And we're going to update you on the market, we're going to look at the latest ETR spending data. We have some comments on the competition. And we're particularly going to focus on of course, UI path, but also automation anywhere, Blue Prism, and we even have some thoughts on Pega Systems. Now you can go to wikibond.com and read the full analysis of that breaking analysis. It's also on siliconangle.com if you really want more details on this data. After that, we have four UI Path execs that we interview including the CMO, Bobby Patrick, Ted Cumert their new head of products. He's going to talk to us about software development and platform architectures. And then we also interview Terek Madcore about RPA in the cloud. And then we're going to close with Brandon Knott. And I'm going to push Brandon a little bit on how much of that UI Path vision, i/e a robot for every person. How much of that is real, how much of that is marketing hype, and what can we expect going forward in terms of that adoption? So thanks for watching everybody. I hope you enjoy the program.

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation we've been reporting that the Kovan pandemic has created a bifurcated IT spending outlook legacy on print on-prem infrastructure in traditional software licensing models they're giving away two approaches that enable more flexibility in business agility automation initiatives that reduce human labor labor that's not value add has really been gaining traction for the past 18 months the pandemic has only accelerated to focus on such efforts and robotic process automation or RPA along with machine intelligence have been the beneficiaries relative to other segments of the IT stack welcome to this week's wiki Vaughn cube insights powered by ETR my name is Dave Volante and in this breaking analysis we're gonna update you on the latest demand picture for the red-hot RP a sector will also focus on two main areas today first we're gonna review the basics of the RP a space for those that may not be as familiar with the market next we'll share with you the spending data and outlook in the RT ARPA space from ETR and we're really dig into the kovat impact on this market segment and take a look at the competitive outlook we're gonna pay particular attention to the leaders in this space and then we're gonna wrap up so let me start with kind of the RPI basics if you're not familiar with our PA here's what you really need to know happy hour PA gained traction by taking software robots and pointing them at existing applications to mimic human behavior and automate repeatable and well understood processes keyboard behavior that is now a challenge with early RPA implementations is that most customers chose to point these bots at legacy backend office systems now that the open emails and fill out forms and the like so that's great because it digitizes processes around legacy systems awesome ROI but the problem is that these bots will they interact with a user interface of that application and many of these apps they really don't have an API so any change in data or the interface breaks the automation down now more recently automations are interacting to apps through api's that makes them less brittle but of course you know the quality of api's as you well know will vary so enter your machine intelligence into the equation there's been a lot of discussion around the intersection of our PA and AI and that's allowed organizations to automate more processes that do so in a way that takes an augmentation approach using things like natural language processing or speech recognition and machine learning to iterate and improve automations and you know this trend holds a lot of promise and is a lot of talk about it in the marketplace particularly in the form of really trying to understand which processes to automate and where the best ROI can be achieved for organization but it's important to note it's really still early days with this AI intersection nonetheless investors you know they're ahead of the game they've they've poured money into this space as we've been reporting now for you know well over a year or two uipath an automation anywhere have raised close to two billion dollars and have been growing very very rapidly we're gonna talk more about that existing players like blue prism they've actually benefited from the automation tailwind and other you know process business process players take for example like Pegasus Toombs I mean they started in the early 80s they've added our PA to their platform as have many others by the way including Microsoft who has barely been trying to crack into this market for a while in fact Microsoft just bought a small company called soft emotive and to really try to shore up its RP a game but you know just a quick aside in our view Microsoft is their well behind the leaders it's gonna take years for them to get where the leaders are today yeah but it's Microsoft so you don't want to ignore them now the big buzzword here is hyper automation evidently it's a torrent a coin term coined by Gartner and uipath has picked up on this in a big way and so is automation anywhere now those both those companies are in hyper growth so it plays more established companies for example pega yeah they look at the term differently you know of course their vision is Rp a is a small portion of their their their vision these established firms they want to incorporate their business process automation z' that have been built over decades into a systems view of the organization using existing platforms the upstarts of course they want to build from new platforms what's really happening in the marketplace and like in many situations is this emergence of a hybrid you know quasi-equilibrium here we saw this in mainframes who certainly you know saw it in middleware enterprise data warehouses and we've seen it in the cloud you know where most companies don't just throw away the investments that they've made in legacy systems now they're stable they're operationalized and rather what they do is they overlay the more modern technologies and they kind of create an abstraction layer of their business that incorporates the old and the new but the growth is much much higher in the new as we know it and that leads me to the TAM the total available market let's look at the RPM you know we think the TAM expansion opportunity is pretty substantial we put this chart together awhile back that really underscores that the progression of our PA from you know simple BOTS automating back-office functions to really infusing automations in virtually all applications you know if you expand the definition beyond our PA software into the broader automation opportunities the other thing about it this this could be a much much larger than depicted here maybe well over a hundred billion dollar Tam as a I powered automation becomes fundamental to every organization in their operating model anyway it's a big opportunity and the data suggests that it's growing rapidly so let's turn to the data let's look at the spending and bring ETR into the equation so which technologies are showing new adoptions in tech on balance the tech sector has done pretty well despite this pandemic at the time of this video the Nasdaq Composite is up about a point and a half year to date and as we know from previous surveys that heading into 2020 there was a pullback in a narrowing of new technology adoptions as organizations began to operationalize their digital initiatives and place bets this chart shows new adoptions across three survey dates the gray is April last year the blue is January which is pre-pandemic really and the survey of more than 1,200 IT buyers is really the latest one which is the April so this survey took place at the height of the US lockdown and you can see look at all PA it's got 22% new adoptions what does that mean it means that 22% of the customers in the survey we're planning our PA spend there that are planning for our PA spend are planning new adoptions now that's a figure that says hi as machine learning and artificial intelligence and of course as we said these two technologies are increasingly playing a role together so our PA adoptions more than containers more than videoconferencing which has had this tailwind from work from home and more than cloud more than mobile device management so it's really one of the hottest sectors in terms of new adoptions now let's look at some of the players in our PA and try to really better understand their positions here's a chart that uses the two primary met work net metrics that we've been sharing over the past year net score or spending momentum is on the y-axis and market share which is a measure of pervasiveness in the data set is on the x-axis the chart plots are PA players in the et our data set and you can see uipath in automate anyway our the to market leaders they show both spending momentum and market awareness then you see blue prism and peg is in there and the rest of the pack and I'll say this about pegye systems I recently spoke to their CEO Alan trifler he's an amazing self-made billionaire he's got a great business you know peg that really doesn't see you know itself anyway as an RPA play and I don't either our PA is really a small part of their story but they're in the data set and certainly automation related so it's what's showing but it's a bit of an oranges and tangerines comparison now notice in the upper right of this chart you can see that the net scores are in the green shade and there's a little bit of red in there but remember net score is a simple metric sort of like Net Promoter Score in PS it subtracts customer spending less from those spending more and that's the difference and you can see very very strong net scores for both uipath in automation anywhere and I'm gonna discuss that more in a moment but there's lots of green in the chart and even pega or as I said it's really not an RPA specialist they've got a solid net score now let's look at a time series of this net score in the spending momentum what we do here is this chart takes the three leaders uipath automation anywhere and blue prism and it plots their net scores over time goes all the way back to the January 18 survey now let me make a couple of points here uipath in automation anywhere 70% plus net scores is very impressive and amongst the highest in the data set even though you see some of the Lawson momentum in the UI path line and the convergence with automation anywhere they're both very very strong and you can see in the upper right you can see the shared end which is an indicator of the presence of the company in the data set how many response is out of the 1200 plus so you might say well wait a minute you I passed the I had they had layoffs last fall and automation anywhere they more recently just recently had layoffs how can they show such strength well I make a few points first fast-growing companies like this that have raised you know nearly a billion dollars each they've got investors to serve and they're going to course-correct when they feel like there's some slack in the system yet to me it's not a sign of fundamental trouble second both of these companies are going to continue to invest heavily on research and development uipath has 60 openings on its website mostly in engineering automation anywhere they only have nine openings but I would expect both companies to up their engineering hiring especially given the Microsoft acquisition today third remember this is not an indicator of the amount of money spent in absolute dollars rather it looks at spending momentum of the doll in dollar terms as well if you were to cut the data by larger companies let's say the Fortune 1000 where the average contract values are higher you'd see that you I pass a net score jumps to 77% automation anywhere would drop into the 60s and blue prison would stay about the same where it is today today so let's look for example in the global 2000 so we'll expand that notion of a fortune 1000 let's go to the global 2000 where there's more of an end slice and you can see the picture changes from the overall data sample this chart shows the net scores in the global 2000 where the ends are more than 25 responses across all the three surveys gray as last April blue was January yellow is April 2020 and you can see the year-on-year decline and the modest step down during the the Colvin lockdown which again surveyed in April but still very elevated net scores for uipath and automation anywhere and respectable for the other so the point is Co vyd has not really crushed the RPA market I mean if anything is witnessed by the new adoptions it's maybe it's certainly better off than most IT sectors now let's dig into the net scores of the two leaders a little bit more uipath and automation anywhere remember net scores of very important metric and I want to spend the moment explaining how we use it you see this wheel chart this red green gray it really shows how the net score method is applied now we've taken the UI path example from the April survey net score works by asking buyers relative to last year are you adopting new that's the 28% are you increasing spend by 6 percent or greater that's 51 percent are you expecting flat spending that's 15 percent or a decrease in spend of 6 percent or more or finally are you replacing the vendor checking them out so look at this you can see for UI path added up 79 percent of respondents expect to increase spending in 2020 relative to 2019 and again remember this survey was taken at the height of the kovat lockdown let me show you the data for automation anywhere same exact methodology 72 percent of automation anywhere a customer's plan to spend more only 1 percent plan to spend less with zero replacements so very strong fundamentals as it relates to spending momentum for both UI path and automation anywhere now how is presents or what we call market share in the data set changing on a year-on-year basis well this is the last data point that I want to show and it relates to that metric of market share which again is the measure of pervasiveness it's calculated by dividing the number of mentions of a vendor in a sector by the total mentions of that sector in this case RP a and this chart shows the year-on-year change in customer growth comparing market share from the April 20 survey with that from the April 19 data and you can see the yellow line at 11% is the sector average uipath has the fastest growth automation anywhere is growing faster than the market average and blue prism is below the average now this looks back to last year and it'll be interesting to see how this picture changes with the next survey based on what we're seeing with the next net scores which is a forward-looking metric all right let's wrap so we're seeing that the bifurcated market is high that the automation trend generally is real and that the RP a drill down specifically shows us an example in action we think that kovat 919 not hit these numbers would actually be higher by maybe as much as 10% but in the near near to mid term we would expect a pretty fast return to normal patterns of demand if I put normal and air quotes for our PA in fact you know we don't expect a real v-shaped recovery across the board but our PA is you know one of those areas where we actually may see such a rebound the pandemic really underscores the need to accelerate digital transformations our PA we think is going to be a central player in that movie along with AI the cloud all right we have to leave it there for now so remember these episodes they're all available as podcasts just all you got to do is search breaking analysis podcasts please subscribe to the series would appreciate that and check out ETR dot plus for all the data I also publish a full report every week on wiki bound comm tons of data there as well and Silicon angle comm has all the news and I published there alright this is Dave Volante thanks for watching this episode of the cube insights powered by ETR we'll see you next time [Music]

(upbeat music) >> Hi everyone. Welcome back to this Cube conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE." Got a great conversation around Cloud Native, Cloud Native Journey, how enterprises are looking at Cloud Native and putting it all together. And it comes down to operations, developer productivity, and security. It's the hottest topic in technology. We got Chris Jones here in the studio, director of Product Management for Platform9. Chris, thanks for coming in. >> Hey, thanks. >> So when we always chat about, when we're at KubeCon. KubeConEU is coming up and in a few, in a few months, the number one conversation is developer productivity. And the developers are driving all the standards. It's interesting to see how they just throw everything out there and whatever gets adopted ends up becoming the standard, not the old school way of kind of getting stuff done. So that's cool. Security Kubernetes and Containers are all kind of now that next level. So you're starting to see the early adopters moving to the mainstream. Enterprises, a variety of different approaches. You guys are at the center of this. We've had a couple conversations with your CEO and your tech team over there. What are you seeing? You're building the products. What's the core product focus right now for Platform9? What are you guys aiming for? >> The core is that blend of enabling your infrastructure and PlatformOps or DevOps teams to be able to go fast and run in a stable environment, but at the same time enable developers. We don't want people going back to what I've been calling Shadow IT 2.0. It's, hey, I've been told to do something. I kicked off this Container initiative. I need to run my software somewhere. I'm just going to go figure it out. We want to keep those people productive. At the same time we want to enable velocity for our operations teams, be it PlatformOps or DevOps. >> Take us through in your mind and how you see the industry rolling out this Cloud Native journey. Where do you see customers out there? Because DevOps have been around, DevSecOps is rocking, you're seeing AI, hot trend now. Developers are still in charge. Is there a change to the infrastructure of how developers get their coding done and the infrastructure, setting up the DevOps is key, but when you add the Cloud Native journey for an enterprise, what changes? What is the, what is the, I guess what is the Cloud Native journey for an enterprise these days? >> The Cloud Native journey or the change? When- >> Let's start with the, let's start with what they want to do. What's the goal and then how does that happen? >> I think the goal is that promise land. Increased resiliency, better scalability, and overall reduced costs. I've gone from physical to virtual that gave me a higher level of density, packing of resources. I'm moving to Containers. I'm removing that OS layer again. I'm getting a better density again, but all of a sudden I'm running Kubernetes. What does that, what does that fundamentally do to my operations? Does it magically give me scalability and resiliency? Or do I need to change what I'm running and how it's running so it fits that infrastructure? And that's the reality, is you can't just take a Container and drop it into Kubernetes and say, hey, I'm now Cloud Native. I've got reduced cost, or I've got better resiliency. There's things that your engineering teams need to do to make sure that application is a Cloud Native. And then there's what I think is one of the largest shifts of virtual machines to containers. When I was in the world of application performance monitoring, we would see customers saying, well, my engineering team have this Java app, and they said it needs a VM with 12 gig of RAM and eight cores, and that's what we gave it. But it's running slow. I'm working with the application team and you can see it's running slow. And they're like, well, it's got all of its resources. One of those nice features of virtualization is over provisioning. So the infrastructure team would say, well, we gave it, we gave it all a RAM it needed. And what's wrong with that being over provisioned? It's like, well, Java expects that RAM to be there. Now all of a sudden, when you move to the world of containers, what we've got is that's not a set resource limit, really is like it used to be in a VM, right? When you set it for a container, your application teams really need to be paying attention to your resource limits and constraints within the world of Kubernetes. So instead of just being able to say, hey, I'm throwing over the fence and now it's just going to run on a VM, and that VMs got everything it needs. It's now really running on more, much more of a shared infrastructure where limits and constraints are going to impact the neighbors. They are going to impact who's making that decision around resourcing. Because that Kubernetes concept of over provisioning and the virtualization concept of over provisioning are not the same. So when I look at this problem, it's like, well, what changed? Well, I'll do my scale tests as an application developer and tester, and I'd see what resources it needs. I asked for that in the VM, that sets the high watermark, job's done. Well, Kubernetes, it's no longer a VM, it's a Kubernetes manifest. And well, who owns that? Who's writing it? Who's setting those limits? To me, that should be the application team. But then when it goes into operations world, they're like, well, that's now us. Can we change those? So it's that amalgamation of the two that is saying, I'm a developer. I used to pay attention, but now I need to pay attention. And an infrastructure person saying, I used to just give 'em what they wanted, but now I really need to know what they've wanted, because it's going to potentially have a catastrophic impact on what I'm running. >> So what's the impact for the developer? Because, infrastructure's code is what everybody wants. The developer just wants to get the code going and they got to pay attention to all these things, or don't they? Is that where you guys come in? How do you guys see the problem? Actually scope the problem that you guys solve? 'Cause I think you're getting at I think the core issue here, which is, I've got Kubernetes, I've got containers, I've got developer productivity that I want to focus on. What's the problem that you guys solve? >> Platform operation teams that are adopting Cloud Native in their environment, they've got that steep learning curve of Kubernetes plus this fundamental change of how an app runs. What we're doing is taking away the burden of needing to operate and run Kubernetes and giving them the choice of the flexibility of infrastructure and location. Be that an air gap environment like a, let's say a telco provider that needs to run a containerized network function and containerized workloads for 5G. That's one thing that we can deploy and achieve in a completely inaccessible environment all the way through to Platform9 running traditionally as SaaS, as we were born, that's remotely managing and controlling your Kubernetes environments on-premise AWS. That hybrid cloud experience that could be also Bare Metal, but it's our platform running your environments with our support there, 24 by seven, that's proactively reaching out. So it's removing a lot of that burden and the complications that come along with operating the environment and standing it up, which means all of a sudden your DevOps and platform operations teams can go and work with your engineers and application developers and say, hey, let's get, let's focus on the stuff that, that we need to be focused on, which is running our business and providing a service to our customers. Not figuring out how to upgrade a Kubernetes cluster, add new nodes, and configure all of the low level. >> I mean there are, that's operations that just needs to work. And sounds like as they get into the Cloud Native kind of ops, there's a lot of stuff that kind of goes wrong. Or you go, oops, what do we buy into? Because the CIOs, let's go, let's go Cloud Native. We want to, we got to get set up for the future. We're going to be Cloud Native, not just lift and shift and we're going to actually build it out right. Okay, that sounds good. And when we have to actually get done. >> Chris: Yeah. >> You got to spin things up and stand up the infrastructure. What specifically use case do you guys see that emerges for Platform9 when people call you up and you go talk to customers and prospects? What's the one thing or use case or cases that you guys see that you guys solve the best? >> So I think one of the, one of the, I guess new use cases that are coming up now, everyone's talking about economic pressures. I think the, the tap blows open, just get it done. CIO is saying let's modernize, let's use the cloud. Now all of a sudden they're recognizing, well wait, we're spending a lot of money now. We've opened that tap all the way, what do we do? So now they're looking at ways to control that spend. So we're seeing that as a big emerging trend. What we're also sort of seeing is people looking at their data centers and saying, well, I've got this huge legacy environment that's running a hypervisor. It's running VMs. Can we still actually do what we need to do? Can we modernize? Can we start this Cloud Native journey without leaving our data centers, our co-locations? Or if I do want to reduce costs, is that that thing that says maybe I'm repatriating or doing a reverse migration? Do I have to go back to my data center or are there other alternatives? And we're seeing that trend a lot. And our roadmap and what we have in the product today was specifically built to handle those, those occurrences. So we brought in KubeVirt in terms of virtualization. We have a long legacy doing OpenStack and private clouds. And we've worked with a lot of those users and customers that we have and asked the questions, what's important? And today, when we look at the world of Cloud Native, you can run virtualization within Kubernetes. So you can, instead of running two separate platforms, you can have one. So all of a sudden, if you're looking to modernize, you can start on that new infrastructure stack that can run anywhere, Kubernetes, and you can start bringing VMs over there as you are containerizing at the same time. So now you can keep your application operations in one environment. And this also helps if you're trying to reduce costs. If you really are saying, we put that Dev environment in AWS, we've got a huge amount of velocity out of it now, can we do that elsewhere? Is there a co-location we can go to? Is there a provider that we can go to where we can run that infrastructure or run the Kubernetes, but not have to run the infrastructure? >> It's going to be interesting too, when you see the Edge come online, you start, we've got Mobile World Congress coming up, KubeCon events we're going to be at, the conversation is not just about public cloud. And you guys obviously solve a lot of do-it-yourself implementation hassles that emerge when people try to kind of stand up their own environment. And we hear from developers consistency between code, managing new updates, making sure everything is all solid so they can go fast. That's the goal. And that, and then people can get standardized on that. But as you get public cloud and do it yourself, kind of brings up like, okay, there's some gaps there as the architecture changes to be more distributed computing, Edge, on-premises cloud, it's cloud operations. So that's cool for DevOps and Cloud Native. How do you guys differentiate from say, some the public cloud opportunities and the folks who are doing it themselves? How do you guys fit in that world and what's the pitch or what's the story? >> The fit that we look at is that third alternative. Let's get your team focused on what's high value to your business and let us deliver that public cloud experience on your infrastructure or in the public cloud, which gives you that ability to still be flexible if you want to make choices to run consistently for your developers in two different locations. So as I touched on earlier, instead of saying go figure out Kubernetes, how do you upgrade a hundred worker nodes in place upgrade. We've solved that problem. That's what we do every single day of the week. Don't go and try to figure out how to upgrade a cluster and then upgrade all of the, what I call Kubernetes friends, your core DNSs, your metrics server, your Kubernetes dashboard. These are all things that we package, we test, we version. So when you click upgrade, we've already handled that entire process. So it's saying don't have your team focused on that lower level piece of work. Get them focused on what is important, which is your business services. >> Yeah, the infrastructure and getting that stood up. I mean, I think the thing that's interesting, if you look at the market right now, you mentioned cost savings and recovery, obviously kind of a recession. I mean, people are tightening their belts for sure. I don't think the digital transformation and Cloud Native spend is going to plummet. It's going to probably be on hold and be squeezed a little bit. But to your point, people are refactoring looking at how to get the best out of what they got. It's not just open the tap of spend the cash like it used to be. Yeah, a couple months, even a couple years ago. So okay, I get that. But then you look at the what's coming, AI. You're seeing all the new data infrastructure that's coming. The containers, Kubernetes stuff, got to get stood up pretty quickly and it's got to be reliable. So to your point, the teams need to get done with this and move on to the next thing. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> 'Cause there's more coming. I mean, there's a lot coming for the apps that are building in Data Native, AI-Native, Cloud Native. So it seems that this Kubernetes thing needs to get solved. Is that kind of what you guys are focused on right now? >> So, I mean to use a customer, we have a customer that's in AI/ML and they run their platform at customer sites and that's hardware bound. You can't run AI machine learning on anything anywhere. Well, with Platform9 they can. So we're enabling them to deliver services into their customers that's running their AI/ML platform in their customer's data centers anywhere in the world on hardware that is purpose-built for running that workload. They're not Kubernetes experts. That's what we are. We're bringing them that ability to focus on what's important and just delivering their business services whilst they're enabling our team. And our 24 by seven proactive management are always on assurance to keep that up and running for them. So when something goes bump at the night at 2:00am, our guys get woken up. They're the ones that are reaching out to the customer saying, your environments have a problem, we're taking these actions to fix it. Obviously sometimes, especially if it is running on Bare Metal, there's things you can't do remotely. So you might need someone to go and do that. But even when that happens, you're not by yourself. You're not sitting there like I did when I worked for a bank in one of my first jobs, three o'clock in the morning saying, wow, our end of day processing is stuck. Who else am I waking up? Right? >> Exactly, yeah. Got to get that cash going. But this is a great use case. I want to get to the customer. What do some of the successful customers say to you for the folks watching that aren't yet a customer of Platform9, what are some of the accolades and comments or anecdotes that you guys hear from customers that you have? >> It just works, which I think is probably one of the best ones you can get. Customers coming back and being able to show to their business that they've delivered growth, like business growth and productivity growth and keeping their organization size the same. So we started on our containerization journey. We went to Kubernetes. We've deployed all these new workloads and our operations team is still six people. We're doing way more with growth less, and I think that's also talking to the strength that we're bringing, 'cause we're, we're augmenting that team. They're spending less time on the really low level stuff and automating a lot of the growth activity that's involved. So when it comes to being able to grow their business, they can just focus on that, not- >> Well you guys do the heavy lifting, keep on top of the Kubernetes, make sure that all the versions are all done. Everything's stable and consistent so they can go on and do the build out and provide their services. That seems to be what you guys are best at. >> Correct, correct. >> And so what's on the roadmap? You have the product, direct product management, you get the keys to the kingdom. What is, what is the focus? What's your focus right now? Obviously Kubernetes is growing up, Containers. We've been hearing a lot at the last KubeCon about the security containers is getting better. You've seen verification, a lot more standards around some things. What are you focused on right now for at a product over there? >> Edge is a really big focus for us. And I think in Edge you can look at it in two ways. The mantra that I drive is Edge must be remote. If you can't do something remotely at the Edge, you are using a human being, that's not Edge. Our Edge management capabilities and being in the market for over two years are a hundred percent remote. You want to stand up a store, you just ship the server in there, it gets racked, the rest of it's remote. Imagine a store manager in, I don't know, KFC, just plugging in the server, putting in the ethernet cable, pressing the power button. The rest of all that provisioning for that Cloud Native stack, Kubernetes, KubeVirt for virtualization is done remotely. So we're continuing to focus on that. The next piece that is related to that is allowing people to run Platform9 SaaS in their data centers. So we do ag app today and we've had a really strong focus on telecommunications and the containerized network functions that come along with that. So this next piece is saying, we're bringing what we run as SaaS into your data center, so then you can run it. 'Cause there are many people out there that are saying, we want these capabilities and we want everything that the Platform9 control plane brings and simplifies. But unfortunately, regulatory compliance reasons means that we can't leverage SaaS. So they might be using a cloud, but they're saying that's still our infrastructure. We're still closed that network down, or they're still on-prem. So they're two big priorities for us this year. And that on-premise experiences is paramount, even to the point that we will be delivering a way that when you run an on-premise, you can still say, wait a second, well I can send outbound alerts to Platform9. So their support team can still be proactively helping me as much as they could, even though I'm running Platform9s control plane. So it's sort of giving that blend of two experiences. They're big, they're big priorities. And the third pillar is all around virtualization. It's saying if you have economic pressures, then I think it's important to look at what you're spending today and realistically say, can that be reduced? And I think hypervisors and virtualization is something that should be looked at, because if you can actually reduce that spend, you can bring in some modernization at the same time. Let's take some of those nos that exist that are two years into their five year hardware life cycle. Let's turn that into a Cloud Native environment, which is enabling your modernization in place. It's giving your engineers and application developers the new toys, the new experiences, and then you can start running some of those virtualized workloads with KubeVirt, there. So you're reducing cost and you're modernizing at the same time with your existing infrastructure. >> You know Chris, the topic of this content series that we're doing with you guys is finding the right path, trusting the right path to Cloud Native. What does that mean? I mean, if you had to kind of summarize that phrase, trusting the right path to Cloud Native, what does that mean? It mean in terms of architecture, is it deployment? Is it operations? What's the underlying main theme of that quote? What's the, what's? How would you talk to a customer and say, what does that mean if someone said, "Hey, what does that right path mean?" >> I think the right path means focusing on what you should be focusing on. I know I've said it a hundred times, but if your entire operations team is trying to figure out the nuts and bolts of Kubernetes and getting three months into a journey and discovering, ah, I need Metrics Server to make something function. I want to use Horizontal Pod Autoscaler or Vertical Pod Autoscaler and I need this other thing, now I need to manage that. That's not the right path. That's literally learning what other people have been learning for the last five, seven years that have been focused on Kubernetes solely. So the why- >> There's been a lot of grind. People have been grinding it out. I mean, that's what you're talking about here. They've been standing up the, when Kubernetes started, it was all the promise. >> Chris: Yep. >> And essentially manually kind of getting in in the weeds and configuring it. Now it's matured up. They want stability. >> Chris: Yeah. >> Not everyone can get down and dirty with Kubernetes. It's not something that people want to generally do unless you're totally into it, right? Like I mean, I mean ops teams, I mean, yeah. You know what I mean? It's not like it's heavy lifting. Yeah, it's important. Just got to get it going. >> Yeah, I mean if you're deploying with Platform9, your Ops teams can tinker to their hearts content. We're completely compliant upstream Kubernetes. You can go and change an API server flag, let's go and mess with the scheduler, because we want to. You can still do that, but don't, don't have your team investing in all this time to figure it out. It's been figured out. >> John: Got it. >> Get them focused on enabling velocity for your business. >> So it's not build, but run. >> Chris: Correct? >> Or run Kubernetes, not necessarily figure out how to kind of get it all, consume it out. >> You know we've talked to a lot of customers out there that are saying, "I want to be able to deliver a service to my users." Our response is, "Cool, let us run it. You consume it, therefore deliver it." And we're solving that in one hit versus figuring out how to first run it, then operate it, then turn that into a consumable service. >> So the alternative Platform9 is what? They got to do it themselves or use the Cloud or what's the, what's the alternative for the customer for not using Platform9? Hiring more people to kind of work on it? What's the? >> People, building that kind of PaaS experience? Something that I've been very passionate about for the past year is looking at that world of sort of GitOps and what that means. And if you go out there and you sort of start asking the question what's happening? Just generally with Kubernetes as well and GitOps in that scope, then you'll hear some people saying, well, I'm making it PaaS, because Kubernetes is too complicated for my developers and we need to give them something. There's some great material out there from the likes of Intuit and Adobe where for two big contributors to Argo and the Argo projects, they almost have, well they do have, different experiences. One is saying, we went down the PaaS route and it failed. The other one is saying, well we've built a really stable PaaS and it's working. What are they trying to do? They're trying to deliver an outcome to make it easy to use and consume Kubernetes. So you could go out there and say, hey, I'm going to build a Kubernetes cluster. Sounds like Argo CD is a great way to expose that to my developers so they can use Kubernetes without having to use Kubernetes and start automating things. That is an approach, but you're going to be going completely open source and you're going to have to bring in all the individual components, or you could just lay that, lay it down, and consume it as a service and not have to- >> And mentioned to it. They were the ones who kind of brought that into the open. >> They did. Inuit is the primary contributor to the Argo set of products. >> How has that been received in the market? I mean, they had the event at the Computer History Museum last fall. What's the momentum there? What's the big takeaway from that project? >> Growth. To me, growth. I mean go and track the stars on that one. It's just, it's growth. It's unlocking machine learning. Argo workflows can do more than just make things happen. Argo CD I think the approach they're taking is, hey let's make this simple to use, which I think can be lost. And I think credit where credit's due, they're really pushing to bring in a lot of capabilities to make it easier to work with applications and microservices on Kubernetes. It's not just that, hey, here's a GitOps tool. It can take something from a Git repo and deploy it and maybe prioritize it and help you scale your operations from that perspective. It's taking a step back and saying, well how did we get to production in the first place? And what can be done down there to help as well? I think it's growth expansion of features. They had a huge release just come out in, I think it was 2.6, that brought in things that as a product manager that I don't often look at like really deep technical things and say wow, that's powerful. But they have, they've got some great features in that release that really do solve real problems. >> And as the product, as the product person, who's the target buyer for you? Who's the customer? Who's making that? And you got decision maker, influencer, and recommender. Take us through the customer persona for you guys. >> So that Platform Ops, DevOps space, right, the people that need to be delivering Containers as a service out to their organization. But then it's also important to say, well who else are our primary users? And that's developers, engineers, right? They shouldn't have to say, oh well I have access to a Kubernetes cluster. Do I have to use kubectl or do I need to go find some other tool? No, they can just log to Platform9. It's integrated with your enterprise id. >> They're the end customer at the end of the day, they're the user. >> Yeah, yeah. They can log in. And they can see the clusters you've given them access to as a Platform Ops Administrator. >> So job well done for you guys. And your mind is the developers are moving 'em fast, coding and happy. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah. >> And and from a customer standpoint, you reduce the maintenance cost, because you keep the Ops smoother, so you got efficiency and maintenance costs kind of reduced or is that kind of the benefits? >> Yeah, yep, yeah. And at two o'clock in the morning when things go inevitably wrong, they're not there by themselves, and we're proactively working with them. >> And that's the uptime issue. >> That is the uptime issue. And Cloud doesn't solve that, right? Everyone experienced that Clouds can go down, entire regions can go offline. That's happened to all Cloud providers. And what do you do then? Kubernetes isn't your recovery plan. It's part of it, right, but it's that piece. >> You know Chris, to wrap up this interview, I will say that "theCUBE" is 12 years old now. We've been to OpenStack early days. We had you guys on when we were covering OpenStack and now Cloud has just been booming. You got AI around the corner, AI Ops, now you got all this new data infrastructure, it's just amazing Cloud growth, Cloud Native, Security Native, Cloud Native, Data Native, AI Native. It's going to be all, this is the new app environment, but there's also existing infrastructure. So going back to OpenStack, rolling our own cloud, building your own cloud, building infrastructure cloud, in a cloud way, is what the pioneers have done. I mean this is what we're at. Now we're at this scale next level, abstracted away and make it operational. It seems to be the key focus. We look at CNCF at KubeCon and what they're doing with the cloud SecurityCon, it's all about operations. >> Chris: Yep, right. >> Ops and you know, that's going to sound counterintuitive 'cause it's a developer open source environment, but you're starting to see that Ops focus in a good way. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Infrastructure as code way. >> Chris: Yep. >> What's your reaction to that? How would you summarize where we are in the industry relative to, am I getting, am I getting it right there? Is that the right view? What am I missing? What's the current state of the next level, NextGen infrastructure? >> It's a good question. When I think back to sort of late 2019, I sort of had this aha moment as I saw what really truly is delivering infrastructure as code happening at Platform9. There's an open source project Ironic, which is now also available within Kubernetes that is Metal Kubed that automates Bare Metal as code, which means you can go from an empty server, lay down your operating system, lay down Kubernetes, and you've just done everything delivered to your customer as code with a Cloud Native platform. That to me was sort of the biggest realization that I had as I was moving into this industry was, wait, it's there. This can be done. And the evolution of tooling and operations is getting to the point where that can be achieved and it's focused on by a number of different open source projects. Not just Ironic and and Metal Kubed, but that's a huge win. That is truly getting your infrastructure. >> John: That's an inflection point, really. >> Yeah. >> If you think about it, 'cause that's one of the problems. We had with the Bare Metal piece was the automation and also making it Cloud Ops, cloud operations. >> Right, yeah. I mean, one of the things that I think Ironic did really well was saying let's just treat that piece of Bare Metal like a Cloud VM or an instance. If you got a problem with it, just give the person using it or whatever's using it, a new one and reimage it. Just tell it to reimage itself and it'll just (snaps fingers) go. You can do self-service with it. In Platform9, if you log in to our SaaS Ironic, you can go and say, I want that physical server to myself, because I've got a giant workload, or let's turn it into a Kubernetes cluster. That whole thing is automated. To me that's infrastructure as code. I think one of the other important things that's happening at the same time is we're seeing GitOps, we're seeing things like Terraform. I think it's important for organizations to look at what they have and ask, am I using tools that are fit for tomorrow or am I using tools that are yesterday's tools to solve tomorrow's problems? And when especially it comes to modernizing infrastructure as code, I think that's a big piece to look at. >> Do you see Terraform as old or new? >> I see Terraform as old. It's a fantastic tool, capable of many great things and it can work with basically every single provider out there on the planet. It is able to do things. Is it best fit to run in a GitOps methodology? I don't think it is quite at that point. In fact, if you went and looked at Flux, Flux has ways that make Terraform GitOps compliant, which is absolutely fantastic. It's using two tools, the best of breeds, which is solving that tomorrow problem with tomorrow solutions. >> Is the new solutions old versus new. I like this old way, new way. I mean, Terraform is not that old and it's been around for about eight years or so, whatever. But HashiCorp is doing a great job with that. I mean, so okay with Terraform, what's the new address? Is it more complex environments? Because Terraform made sense when you had basic DevOps, but now it sounds like there's a whole another level of complexity. >> I got to say. >> New tools. >> That kind of amalgamation of that application into infrastructure. Now my app team is paying way more attention to that manifest file, which is what GitOps is trying to solve. Let's templatize things. Let's version control our manifest, be it helm, customize, or just a straight up Kubernetes manifest file, plain and boring. Let's get that version controlled. Let's make sure that we know what is there, why it was changed. Let's get some auditability and things like that. And then let's get that deployment all automated. So that's predicated on the cluster existing. Well why can't we do the same thing with the cluster, the inception problem. So even if you're in public cloud, the question is like, well what's calling that API to call that thing to happen? Where is that file living? How well can I manage that in a large team? Oh my God, something just changed. Who changed it? Where is that file? And I think that's one of big, the big pieces to be sold. >> Yeah, and you talk about Edge too and on-premises. I think one of the things I'm observing and certainly when DevOps was rocking and rolling and infrastructures code was like the real push, it was pretty much the public cloud, right? >> Chris: Yep. >> And you did Cloud Native and you had stuff on-premises. Yeah you did some lifting and shifting in the cloud, but the cool stuff was going in the public cloud and you ran DevOps. Okay, now you got on-premise cloud operation and Edge. Is that the new DevOps? I mean 'cause what you're kind of getting at with old new, old new Terraform example is an interesting point, because you're pointing out potentially that that was good DevOps back in the day or it still is. >> Chris: It is, I was going to say. >> But depending on how you define what DevOps is. So if you say, I got the new DevOps with public on-premise and Edge, that's just not all public cloud, that's essentially distributed Cloud Native. >> Correct. Is that the new DevOps in your mind or is that? How would you, or is that oversimplifying it? >> Or is that that term where everyone's saying Platform Ops, right? Has it shifted? >> Well you bring up a good point about Terraform. I mean Terraform is well proven. People love it. It's got great use cases and now there seems to be new things happening. We call things like super cloud emerging, which is multicloud and abstraction layers. So you're starting to see stuff being abstracted away for the benefits of moving to the next level, so teams don't get stuck doing the same old thing. They can move on. Like what you guys are doing with Platform9 is providing a service so that teams don't have to do it. >> Correct, yeah. >> That makes a lot of sense, So you just, now it's running and then they move on to the next thing. >> Chris: Yeah, right. >> So what is that next thing? >> I think Edge is a big part of that next thing. The propensity for someone to put up with a delay, I think it's gone. For some reason, we've all become fairly short-tempered, Short fused. You know, I click the button, it should happen now, type people. And for better or worse, hopefully it gets better and we all become a bit more patient. But how do I get more effective and efficient at delivering that to that really demanding- >> I think you bring up a great point. I mean, it's not just people are getting short-tempered. I think it's more of applications are being deployed faster, security is more exposed if they don't see things quicker. You got data now infrastructure scaling up massively. So, there's a double-edged swords to scale. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah. I mean, maintenance, downtime, uptime, security. So yeah, I think there's a tension around, and one hand enthusiasm around pushing a lot of code and new apps. But is the confidence truly there? It's interesting one little, (snaps finger) supply chain software, look at Container Security for instance. >> Yeah, yeah. It's big. I mean it was codified. >> Do you agree that people, that's kind of an issue right now. >> Yeah, and it was, I mean even the supply chain has been codified by the US federal government saying there's things we need to improve. We don't want to see software being a point of vulnerability, and software includes that whole process of getting it to a running point. >> It's funny you mentioned remote and one of the thing things that you're passionate about, certainly Edge has to be remote. You don't want to roll a truck or labor at the Edge. But I was doing a conversation with, at Rebars last year about space. It's hard to do brake fix on space. It's hard to do a, to roll a someone to configure satellite, right? Right? >> Chris: Yeah. >> So Kubernetes is in space. We're seeing a lot of Cloud Native stuff in apps, in space, so just an example. This highlights the fact that it's got to be automated. Is there a machine learning AI angle with all this ChatGPT talk going on? You see all the AI going the next level. Some pretty cool stuff and it's only, I know it's the beginning, but I've heard people using some of the new machine learning, large language models, large foundational models in areas I've never heard of. Machine learning and data centers, machine learning and configuration management, a lot of different ways. How do you see as the product person, you incorporating the AI piece into the products for Platform9? >> I think that's a lot about looking at the telemetry and the information that we get back and to use one of those like old idle terms, that continuous improvement loop to feed it back in. And I think that's really where machine learning to start with comes into effect. As we run across all these customers, our system that helps at two o'clock in the morning has that telemetry, it's got that data. We can see what's changing and what's happening. So it's writing the right algorithms, creating the right machine learning to- >> So training will work for you guys. You have enough data and the telemetry to do get that training data. >> Yeah, obviously there's a lot of investment required to get there, but that is something that ultimately that could be achieved with what we see in operating people's environments. >> Great. Chris, great to have you here in the studio. Going wide ranging conversation on Kubernetes and Platform9. I guess my final question would be how do you look at the next five years out there? Because you got to run the product management, you got to have that 20 mile steer, you got to look at the customers, you got to look at what's going on in the engineering and you got to kind of have that arc. This is the right path kind of view. What's the five year arc look like for you guys? How do you see this playing out? 'Cause KubeCon is coming up and we're you seeing Kubernetes kind of break away with security? They had, they didn't call it KubeCon Security, they call it CloudNativeSecurityCon, they just had in Seattle inaugural events seemed to go well. So security is kind of breaking out and you got Kubernetes. It's getting bigger. Certainly not going away, but what's your five year arc of of how Platform9 and Kubernetes and Ops evolve? >> It's to stay on that theme, it's focusing on what is most important to our users and getting them to a point where they can just consume it, so they're not having to operate it. So it's finding those big items and bringing that into our platform. It's something that's consumable, that's just taken care of, that's tested with each release. So it's simplifying operations more and more. We've always said freedom in cloud computing. Well we started on, we started on OpenStack and made that simple. Stable, easy, you just have it, it works. We're doing that with Kubernetes. We're expanding out that user, right, we're saying bring your developers in, they can download their Kube conflict. They can see those Containers that are running there. They can access the events, the log files. They can log in and build a VM using KubeVirt. They're self servicing. So it's alleviating pressures off of the Ops team, removing the help desk systems that people still seem to rely on. So it's like what comes into that field that is the next biggest issue? Is it things like CI/CD? Is it simplifying GitOps? Is it bringing in security capabilities to talk to that? Or is that a piece that is a best of breed? Is there a reason that it's been spun out to its own conference? Is this something that deserves a focus that should be a specialized capability instead of tooling and vendors that we work with, that we partner with, that could be brought in as a service. I think it's looking at those trends and making sure that what we bring in has the biggest impact to our users. >> That's awesome. Thanks for coming in. I'll give you the last word. Put a plug in for Platform9 for the people who are watching. What should they know about Platform9 that they might not know about it or what should? When should they call you guys and when should they engage? Take a take a minute to give the plug. >> The plug. I think it's, if your operations team is focused on building Kubernetes, stop. That shouldn't be the cloud. That shouldn't be in the Edge, that shouldn't be at the data center. They should be consuming it. If your engineering teams are all trying different ways and doing different things to use and consume Cloud Native services and Kubernetes, they shouldn't be. You want consistency. That's how you get economies of scale. Provide them with a simple platform that's integrated with all of your enterprise identity where they can just start consuming instead of having to solve these problems themselves. It's those, it's those two personas, right? Where the problems manifest. What are my operations teams doing, and are they delivering to my company or are they building infrastructure again? And are my engineers sprinting or crawling? 'Cause if they're not sprinting, you should be asked the question, do I have the right Cloud Native tooling in my environment and how can I get them back? >> I think it's developer productivity, uptime, security are the tell signs. You get that done. That's the goal of what you guys are doing, your mission. >> Chris: Yep. >> Great to have you on, Chris. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Chris: Thanks very much. 0 Okay, this is "theCUBE" here, finding the right path to Cloud Native. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE." Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Hey, friends. Welcome back to theCUBE's Live coverage of AWS re:Invent 2022 in Sin City. We are so excited to be here with tens of thousands of people. This is our third day of coverage, really the second full day of the show, but we started Monday night. You're going to get wall-to-wall coverage on theCUBE. You probably know that because you've been watching. I'm Lisa Martin and I'm here with Paul Gill. Paul, this is great. We have had such great conversations. We've been talking a lot about data. Every company is a data company, has to be a data company. We've been talking about developers, the developer experience, and how that's so influential in business decisions for businesses in every industry. >> And it's a key element of what's going on here on the floor at re:Invent is developers, the theme of developers just permeates the show. Lots and lots of boots here devoted to DevOps and Agile approaches. And certainly that is one of the things that the Cloud enables is your team to rethink the way they develop software, and that's what we're going to talk about next. >> That is what we're going to talk about next. We have two guests from Split. split.io is the URL if you want to check it out. Chris Demars joins us Developer advocate. Chris, great to have you and PaaS, VP of Engineering guys thank you so much for joining us on the program. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Talk to us Pierre, we'll start with you. For the audience that might not know Split what does the company do? What's the value in it for customers? What are you all about? >> Sure. So in very simple terms, for those who are familiar, we do feature flags, feature management and experimentation. And essentially that two essential feature of the Agile transformation as you were mentioning and elements that really helps getting as much art we can from the team in term of productivity and in term of impact. And we basically help with those elements. And so that's a very short... >> 'Excellent, very nice. Chris, you were saying before we went live you do a lot of speaking at conferences, you're often in front of large audiences. As the developer advocate, what are some of the key requirements you're hearing from the developer community that organizations need to be encompassing? >> I think community is key. Like community is at the forefront of developer advocacy and developer relations. Like you want to go where the developers are and developers want to hear those stories in those personalized pieces of the puzzle. And when you're able to talk about modern Web and software technology and loop in product with that and still keep talking about those things and bring that to them, like that is on top of the list when it comes to developer advocacy and being embedded within the developer community. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> Tell us about feature flags, because I would assume that for our viewers who are not developers, who are not familiar with Agile technologies, the Agile approaches that might be, may be a new term, what are feature flags? How do you use them? >> Sure, I can start with that. So feature flag is a tool that you embed in your code that allows you to control the activation of your code essentially. And that's allows you to really validate things in a much better and solve way and also attach measurement to it. So, when you're writing your new feature, you just put essentially an if statement around it, if my feature flag is on, then I actually do all those things with soft, then I don't do any of those things and then within our platform, then you can control the activation. Do you want to turn it on for yourself just to try it out? Do you want your QA team to start validating it? Do you want 5% of your users 10%? And start seeing how they interacting with the product. That's what feature flag is. >> It's an amazing piece of any part of the stack, right? 'Cause I'm a Web accessibility and an UI specialist and being able to control the UI with a feature flag and being able to turn on and off those features based on percentage, locale, all of those things. It's very, very powerful. >> What are some of the scenarios which you would use feature flags? You have been testing? >> Yeah, yeah. We actually, you can imagine we use it for pretty much everything. So, as Chris was saying, in the front-end, everything you want to change, you basically can validate and attach measurements. So you can do AB testing, so you can see the impact, you can see if there is a change in performance. We use it also for a lot of backend services and changes and a lot of even infrastructure changes where we can control the traffic and where it goes. So we can validate that things are operating the way that they should before we fully done the market I think. >> 'It can be as small as, you know having a checkout button here and then writing an AB test and running an experiment and moving that checkout button somewhere else because then you can get conversion rates and see which one performed better to a certain amount of people and whatever performed better, that's the feature you would go with. >> Chris, talk about the value of the impact in feature flags for the developer from a developer experience perspective, a productivity perspective. >> So I think that having that feature and being able to write that UI, let's say that you have a checkout button, right? And there's specific content there's verbiage on that checkout button. And then let's say that another team within the organization wants to change that because the conversion is different. You can make those changes, still have it in production and then have it tested. So you don't have to cut specific branches or like test URLs to give to QA, you can do all of that behind that flag. And then once everything is good to go, push it out there and then based on those metrics and that data, see which one performs better and then that's the one that you would go with. >> One of the things with feature flag and it goes to like our main theme of 'What a Release, What a Relief' is that it gives autonomy to the teams and to the developers, enable them to move independently from others. So the deployment can go but their code is not activated until they decide to. And so, they are not impeding anybody else. It makes releases a lot safer, a lot simpler and it gives a lot more speed to everybody because when you do releases with five teams, 10 teams, pushing the code at the same time, you have such a high-risk of breaking something that it's you know... So it's a huge effort and it requires a lot of attention from a lot of people. If anything happens, all those teams needs to investigate. When you decouple all those things, the deployments are essentially not doing anything per se until every individual team activate those things independently. So if anything goes wrong, only them are affected and they don't have to depend on anybody else to get their thing out. So it really helps them making their life a lot safer and gives them a lot more speed because they have autonomy. >> So, why come to re:Invent? What do you get with this audience that you don't get elsewhere? >> Why to re:Invent? I think like re:Invent in the Cloud and AWS is a lot about getting speed to companies to build better product and faster. And essentially like the tool we provide and the technology and the platform we provide is really at the heart of that in itself. And so that's why we feel we have really great conversation with all the people on the floor. >> 'the people who have the right mindset for adopting... >> For me, it's very much community and networking, I love developer community and just community in general is my lifeblood. That's why I travel so much and I talk about these things and I'm with people and if it's not about the products, the story and the story is what gets people. That's why I love being here and being with my team and it's amazing. >> And what is that story? If you had an elevator pitch to give, what would you tell me? >> Hoo, if you were in a late release or deploy at night. I've been there, I'm sure you've been there, it doesn't matter what you're doing. We don't want be up until two, three in the morning doing those things, right? Our product helps alleviate those stresses. And you talking about accessibility, what I do, you know, a big piece of that are hidden impairments like anxiety will stress and anxiety go hand in hand and you want to alleviate that all across the board for everybody involved. >> As you see organizations shift Agile technologies and to parallel development and continuous release cycles, what are some of the biggest barriers they encounter in changing that mindset? >> Ooh, what do you think? >> It depends on where they are in the organization. The Agile transformation is a journey and it's also a change of mindset, it's a change of process. So depending on where they are then they might have some areas where they need a little bit more effort in those directions. What we see is that feature flag just the control of the layout. It's usually something that's fairly easily adopted. Thinking about measurement and attaching measurement to it is often something that requires a little bit more thinking. Like engineers are not really used to thinking about AB testing. It feels like more of a product management thing but AB testing is important also for performance informations like errors and all those things. There is a lot of risk management to be done. We do that through monitoring with APMs, but with feature flag and with Split, you can do that at a feature level and it really gives a great insight. And that's usually something that takes a little bit more digestion from the developers to really get their mind around it and get to it. But there's a lot of value to it. >> I'm looking at the split I/O website and I like the tagline shorten time from code to customer. As customers in any industry, as consumers, we have this expectation that we can get whatever we want anytime 24 by 7 and it's going to be a relevant experience. So it sounds to me like from a speed perspective, there's a lot of business impact that Split can help organizations make from getting releases faster, getting cut faster time-to-market, delivering what customers expect because we all expect real-time these days. Nobody wants to wait. >> Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I think that has to do with the going back to the decoupling of things that, you know... Not having to go through so many teams to have it tested and getting away from all the meetings about meetings to review the metrics, right? We all love meetings about meetings. >> No. (laughs loudly) >> Right, exactly, exactly. So being able to take that away and being able to push all of that stuff into production, getting it tested while it's in production and then being able to turn those features on, it's already there without having to do another deployment. And I think, like that's really powerful to me at least. >> Does your solution have value at the security level as well? >> Yes. So that's one of the particularity on the way we do things is like the way you control the feature flag, you have kind of two ways of doing it. Either the piece of code, the SDKs that we provide, the library we provide, you that you put in your code could come back to our platform and check. The way we do it is we send the rules back to the SDK so the whole evaluation is local. The evaluation is extremely fast and it's very secure because it's all happening within your environment. You never have to share any information, no PI whatsoever, contrary it to some of the other tools that you might find on the market. >> So the theme of the booth is 'What a Release, What a Relief'. What are some of the things that you're hearing as you're engaging folks on the show floor this week? >> Oh, what is Aura Photography and can I take a picture of. (everyone laughs loudly) I think just a lot of the stresses of... They're like the release cycle and you know, having to go through so many teams. I feel like that's a common theme that I've heard of. >> Yeah, we see a number of teams organization that still have like really big deployments with like a lot of teams basically coming together, pushing the code together, and there's a lot of pain in it. It's like, it's a huge effort by huge teams. You get 10, 20 people that have to have watch over it at always weird hours, and I think there is a lot of pain to that and that resonate a lot with people. And when we talk about monitoring at the future level, that also helps a lot. Like I was part of organizations before where we had a dedicated staff engineer to just monitor and fix performance on a daily basis because it's such a huge problem and it affects so much the performance of the company. And so essentially, you have this person that tries to look at is a performance being degraded today with the deployment of yesterday and what went out yesterday and you have so many things that went out. It's so hard to control. With what we provide, we tell you exactly which feature flag is responsible for the degradation. And so, you don't need that person to focus on that anymore. And you can focus on delivering value a lot better. >> I think it also might take away the need for extensive release notebooks and playbooks, right? 'Cause when you do bring all those teams together, it's certain people that are in that meeting and there's a PDF saying, all right, we check this off the list, we check this off the list. I think that might alleviate some of that overhead as well. >> Streamlining processes, process efficiencies, workforce productivity improvements, big impact. >> And that gets code quicker to the user. >> You talk about decoupling deploy from release. What do you mean by that? What's the value? >> So the deployment in my definition is essentially getting the code out to production. The release is activating the code in production. And often people do both of those things at the same time, right? But there's a huge risk when you do that because if anything goes wrong, now you need to revert everything which is not a short operation often and takes a lot of effort. And so now, if you can basically push your code to production but separate the activation of it, the release of it, then it goes a lot faster. It's a lot. You have a lot of autonomy and decoupling and if anything goes wrong, it's the click of a button and it's off. So like there's a lot of safety that comes with it and we know that any outages as a high cost for all the companies. So it's like, if you can reduce the outage to like five seconds... >> Right. >> It's a lot better than basically several hours. >> Can you talk about the value out of Split versus DIY and where are most of your customers in this process? Do they have a bunch of tools, a bunch of processes, a bunch of teams, and you're really helping them consolidate streamline? >> The one thing I hear a lot is we rolled our own AB testing and feature flagging system, but some of the issues I've seen and I've heard are that they don't have all those metrics or they have to work with a specific data team to get those metrics. And then you go back to having those meetings about meetings... >> Lisa: Dependencies. >> Right, you have a data team that's putting together a report that is then presented to you and then that's got to be presented to a stakeholder and then that stakeholder makes a decision whether to turn on feature A or feature B, right? Our product from my understanding is we have those metrics already built in and you can have that at your disposal. >> Yeah, the other thing I would add to that is like we see a number of people, they start on the feature flag journey just because they have a high risk thing that they need to put out. So they do the minimal thing to basically control it somehow, but it works only in one part of the stacks. They can't basically leverage it anywhere else and it's very limited in capability so that it just serve the purpose that was needed at that time. They don't have a dedicated team to manage it. So it just there, but it's very constrained and it's not supported effectively. The other thing is like for those companies is like they have a question to ask themselves. It's like do they want to invest resources in managing that kind of tool or is it not so core to their business that they want essentially to have vendor deal with it at a much lower price and they would have to invest resources for them to support it, and... >> Sounds like feature flags are kind of a team building. Have you have a team building dimension to them? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> It takes a team for sure. >> Yeah, and then once you add like AB testing and the feature flag, it's the collaboration between product management and engineering. It can go even further. Like two executives like to basically, you know, view the impact, understand the impact. So it goes from the control to the risk management to the product and to the impact and measuring the flow of delivery and the communication around it. >> Here we are at re:Invent, so many thousands of people as I mentioned, we're on the second full-day of the event. What have you heard from AWS that really excites you about being in their ecosystem? Any news in particular that jumps out at you that really speaks to improving that developer experience as if we've heard a lot of focus on the developer? >> Chris: Yeah, I haven't heard much, have you? >> So, I arrived yesterday, I haven't followed yet all the announcement, I'm just like, >> there's so many- >> on the news, yeah, yeah. >> So I'm on the booth at the same time. >> I stopped counting at 15 during the Keynote this morning. >> Many of them just can't keep up, there's so much happening at one time's so much. >> This event is a can of content, can of news re:Invent. It is hard. But yesterday they were spent so much time talking about data and how... And I always think every company today has to be a data company, have to be a software company, we were just talking with Capital One and they think of themselves as a technology company that does banking. And sometimes, I'll talk with retailers that think of themselves as technology companies that do retail and they love that but that's what companies like Split have to enable these days. It's companies to become technology companies, deliver code faster to customer because the customer's demanding it. We're not going to want less stuff slower. >> Yeah, I mean it's so essential I think for me like I joined Split because of that premises. Like every company now is a software company and every company has really to compete in innovation. You know all those banks, Capital One like we see it a lot in the financial industry where our message resonates extremely strongly is really in a high-competitive environment and they have to be innovative and innovation comes when people have speed and autonomy. And if you basically provide that to teams and the tools to basically get some signals and some quick feedback loop, that's how you get innovation. Like you can't decide what to build but you can basically provide the tools to enable them to think about. >> Right, you can experiment more flexibly right, faster. >> And developers have to be empowered, right? >> Yes. >> I think that's the probably one of the number one messages I've heard at all the shows we've done this year. How influential the developer is in the direction of the business. >> Autonomy and empowerment are two main factors 'cause I'm a front end developer at heart and I want to work on cool stuff and we're doing cool stuff. Like we are doing cool stuff. We can't talk about all of it, right? But I think we're doing a lot of cool things at Split and I'm really stoked to be a part of the team and grow developer relations, grow developer advocacy and be along for the journey. >> Yeah, I love that. Last question for both of you, same question. If you had a bumper sticker and you were going to put it on a fancy shiny new car, car of your choice about Split, what would it say? Pierre I'll start with you then Chris. >> Bumper sticker. >> On the spot question. >> On the question, (everyone laughs happily) I mean the easy answer is probably written on my t-shirt. Like, you know, 'What a Release, What a Relief'. I think that the first step for teams is like, you can have a message that's very like even further, you know, the Agile transformation is a journey and I basically tell people, you need to first crawl, walk and run and I think the 'What a Release, What a Relief' is a good step to like getting to the working. And I think like that would be the first bumper sticker before I get to the further one about AP testing and innovative. >> Love it. Chris, what would your bumper sticker say? >> It would say Split software, feature flags for the masses. Hard stop. >> Mic drop. >> Done. >> Awesome guys, thank you so much for joining Paul and me on the program. It's been outstanding introducing Split to our audience, what you do, how you're impacting the developer experience and ultimately, the business and the end customer on the backend who just wants things to work. We appreciate your insights, we appreciate your time. >> Thanks so much for having us. >> Appreciate it. >> Our pleasure. For our guests and Paul Gillin, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, which you know is the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (bright upbeat music)

>>When Oracle acquired my SQL via the Sun acquisition, nobody really thought the company would put much effort into the platform preferring to focus all the wood behind its leading Oracle database, Arrow pun intended. But two years ago, Oracle surprised many folks by announcing my SQL Heatwave a new database as a service with a massively parallel hybrid Columbia in Mary Mary architecture that brings together transactional and analytic data in a single platform. Welcome to our latest database, power panel on the cube. My name is Dave Ante, and today we're gonna discuss Oracle's MySQL Heat Wave with a who's who of cloud database industry analysts. Holgar Mueller is with Constellation Research. Mark Stammer is the Dragon Slayer and Wikibon contributor. And Ron Westfall is with Fu Chim Research. Gentlemen, welcome back to the Cube. Always a pleasure to have you on. Thanks for having us. Great to be here. >>So we've had a number of of deep dive interviews on the Cube with Nip and Aggarwal. You guys know him? He's a senior vice president of MySQL, Heatwave Development at Oracle. I think you just saw him at Oracle Cloud World and he's come on to describe this is gonna, I'll call it a shock and awe feature additions to to heatwave. You know, the company's clearly putting r and d into the platform and I think at at cloud world we saw like the fifth major release since 2020 when they first announced MySQL heat wave. So just listing a few, they, they got, they taken, brought in analytics machine learning, they got autopilot for machine learning, which is automation onto the basic o l TP functionality of the database. And it's been interesting to watch Oracle's converge database strategy. We've contrasted that amongst ourselves. Love to get your thoughts on Amazon's get the right tool for the right job approach. >>Are they gonna have to change that? You know, Amazon's got the specialized databases, it's just, you know, the both companies are doing well. It just shows there are a lot of ways to, to skin a cat cuz you see some traction in the market in, in both approaches. So today we're gonna focus on the latest heat wave announcements and we're gonna talk about multi-cloud with a native MySQL heat wave implementation, which is available on aws MySQL heat wave for Azure via the Oracle Microsoft interconnect. This kind of cool hybrid action that they got going. Sometimes we call it super cloud. And then we're gonna dive into my SQL Heatwave Lake house, which allows users to process and query data across MyQ databases as heatwave databases, as well as object stores. So, and then we've got, heatwave has been announced on AWS and, and, and Azure, they're available now and Lake House I believe is in beta and I think it's coming out the second half of next year. So again, all of our guests are fresh off of Oracle Cloud world in Las Vegas. So they got the latest scoop. Guys, I'm done talking. Let's get into it. Mark, maybe you could start us off, what's your opinion of my SQL Heatwaves competitive position? When you think about what AWS is doing, you know, Google is, you know, we heard Google Cloud next recently, we heard about all their data innovations. You got, obviously Azure's got a big portfolio, snowflakes doing well in the market. What's your take? >>Well, first let's look at it from the point of view that AWS is the market leader in cloud and cloud services. They own somewhere between 30 to 50% depending on who you read of the market. And then you have Azure as number two and after that it falls off. There's gcp, Google Cloud platform, which is further way down the list and then Oracle and IBM and Alibaba. So when you look at AWS and you and Azure saying, hey, these are the market leaders in the cloud, then you start looking at it and saying, if I am going to provide a service that competes with the service they have, if I can make it available in their cloud, it means that I can be more competitive. And if I'm compelling and compelling means at least twice the performance or functionality or both at half the price, I should be able to gain market share. >>And that's what Oracle's done. They've taken a superior product in my SQL heat wave, which is faster, lower cost does more for a lot less at the end of the day and they make it available to the users of those clouds. You avoid this little thing called egress fees, you avoid the issue of having to migrate from one cloud to another and suddenly you have a very compelling offer. So I look at what Oracle's doing with MyQ and it feels like, I'm gonna use a word term, a flanking maneuver to their competition. They're offering a better service on their platforms. >>All right, so thank you for that. Holger, we've seen this sort of cadence, I sort of referenced it up front a little bit and they sat on MySQL for a decade, then all of a sudden we see this rush of announcements. Why did it take so long? And and more importantly is Oracle, are they developing the right features that cloud database customers are looking for in your view? >>Yeah, great question, but first of all, in your interview you said it's the edit analytics, right? Analytics is kind of like a marketing buzzword. Reports can be analytics, right? The interesting thing, which they did, the first thing they, they, they crossed the chasm between OTP and all up, right? In the same database, right? So major engineering feed very much what customers want and it's all about creating Bellevue for customers, which, which I think is the part why they go into the multi-cloud and why they add these capabilities. And they certainly with the AI capabilities, it's kind of like getting it into an autonomous field, self-driving field now with the lake cost capabilities and meeting customers where they are, like Mark has talked about the e risk costs in the cloud. So that that's a significant advantage, creating value for customers and that's what at the end of the day matters. >>And I believe strongly that long term it's gonna be ones who create better value for customers who will get more of their money From that perspective, why then take them so long? I think it's a great question. I think largely he mentioned the gentleman Nial, it's largely to who leads a product. I used to build products too, so maybe I'm a little fooling myself here, but that made the difference in my view, right? So since he's been charged, he's been building things faster than the rest of the competition, than my SQL space, which in hindsight we thought was a hot and smoking innovation phase. It kind of like was a little self complacent when it comes to the traditional borders of where, where people think, where things are separated between OTP and ola or as an example of adjacent support, right? Structured documents, whereas unstructured documents or databases and all of that has been collapsed and brought together for building a more powerful database for customers. >>So I mean it's certainly, you know, when, when Oracle talks about the competitors, you know, the competitors are in the, I always say they're, if the Oracle talks about you and knows you're doing well, so they talk a lot about aws, talk a little bit about Snowflake, you know, sort of Google, they have partnerships with Azure, but, but in, so I'm presuming that the response in MySQL heatwave was really in, in response to what they were seeing from those big competitors. But then you had Maria DB coming out, you know, the day that that Oracle acquired Sun and, and launching and going after the MySQL base. So it's, I'm, I'm interested and we'll talk about this later and what you guys think AWS and Google and Azure and Snowflake and how they're gonna respond. But, but before I do that, Ron, I want to ask you, you, you, you can get, you know, pretty technical and you've probably seen the benchmarks. >>I know you have Oracle makes a big deal out of it, publishes its benchmarks, makes some transparent on on GI GitHub. Larry Ellison talked about this in his keynote at Cloud World. What are the benchmarks show in general? I mean, when you, when you're new to the market, you gotta have a story like Mark was saying, you gotta be two x you know, the performance at half the cost or you better be or you're not gonna get any market share. So, and, and you know, oftentimes companies don't publish market benchmarks when they're leading. They do it when they, they need to gain share. So what do you make of the benchmarks? Have their, any results that were surprising to you? Have, you know, they been challenged by the competitors. Is it just a bunch of kind of desperate bench marketing to make some noise in the market or you know, are they real? What's your view? >>Well, from my perspective, I think they have the validity. And to your point, I believe that when it comes to competitor responses, that has not really happened. Nobody has like pulled down the information that's on GitHub and said, Oh, here are our price performance results. And they counter oracles. In fact, I think part of the reason why that hasn't happened is that there's the risk if Oracle's coming out and saying, Hey, we can deliver 17 times better query performance using our capabilities versus say, Snowflake when it comes to, you know, the Lakehouse platform and Snowflake turns around and says it's actually only 15 times better during performance, that's not exactly an effective maneuver. And so I think this is really to oracle's credit and I think it's refreshing because these differentiators are significant. We're not talking, you know, like 1.2% differences. We're talking 17 fold differences, we're talking six fold differences depending on, you know, where the spotlight is being shined and so forth. >>And so I think this is actually something that is actually too good to believe initially at first blush. If I'm a cloud database decision maker, I really have to prioritize this. I really would know, pay a lot more attention to this. And that's why I posed the question to Oracle and others like, okay, if these differentiators are so significant, why isn't the needle moving a bit more? And it's for, you know, some of the usual reasons. One is really deep discounting coming from, you know, the other players that's really kind of, you know, marketing 1 0 1, this is something you need to do when there's a real competitive threat to keep, you know, a customer in your own customer base. Plus there is the usual fear and uncertainty about moving from one platform to another. But I think, you know, the traction, the momentum is, is shifting an Oracle's favor. I think we saw that in the Q1 efforts, for example, where Oracle cloud grew 44% and that it generated, you know, 4.8 billion and revenue if I recall correctly. And so, so all these are demonstrating that's Oracle is making, I think many of the right moves, publishing these figures for anybody to look at from their own perspective is something that is, I think, good for the market and I think it's just gonna continue to pay dividends for Oracle down the horizon as you know, competition intens plots. So if I were in, >>Dave, can I, Dave, can I interject something and, and what Ron just said there? Yeah, please go ahead. A couple things here, one discounting, which is a common practice when you have a real threat, as Ron pointed out, isn't going to help much in this situation simply because you can't discount to the point where you improve your performance and the performance is a huge differentiator. You may be able to get your price down, but the problem that most of them have is they don't have an integrated product service. They don't have an integrated O L T P O L A P M L N data lake. Even if you cut out two of them, they don't have any of them integrated. They have multiple services that are required separate integration and that can't be overcome with discounting. And the, they, you have to pay for each one of these. And oh, by the way, as you grow, the discounts go away. So that's a, it's a minor important detail. >>So, so that's a TCO question mark, right? And I know you look at this a lot, if I had that kind of price performance advantage, I would be pounding tco, especially if I need two separate databases to do the job. That one can do, that's gonna be, the TCO numbers are gonna be off the chart or maybe down the chart, which you want. Have you looked at this and how does it compare with, you know, the big cloud guys, for example, >>I've looked at it in depth, in fact, I'm working on another TCO on this arena, but you can find it on Wiki bod in which I compared TCO for MySEQ Heat wave versus Aurora plus Redshift plus ML plus Blue. I've compared it against gcps services, Azure services, Snowflake with other services. And there's just no comparison. The, the TCO differences are huge. More importantly, thefor, the, the TCO per performance is huge. We're talking in some cases multiple orders of magnitude, but at least an order of magnitude difference. So discounting isn't gonna help you much at the end of the day, it's only going to lower your cost a little, but it doesn't improve the automation, it doesn't improve the performance, it doesn't improve the time to insight, it doesn't improve all those things that you want out of a database or multiple databases because you >>Can't discount yourself to a higher value proposition. >>So what about, I wonder ho if you could chime in on the developer angle. You, you followed that, that market. How do these innovations from heatwave, I think you used the term developer velocity. I've heard you used that before. Yeah, I mean, look, Oracle owns Java, okay, so it, it's, you know, most popular, you know, programming language in the world, blah, blah blah. But it does it have the, the minds and hearts of, of developers and does, where does heatwave fit into that equation? >>I think heatwave is gaining quickly mindshare on the developer side, right? It's not the traditional no sequel database which grew up, there's a traditional mistrust of oracles to developers to what was happening to open source when gets acquired. Like in the case of Oracle versus Java and where my sql, right? And, but we know it's not a good competitive strategy to, to bank on Oracle screwing up because it hasn't worked not on Java known my sequel, right? And for developers, it's, once you get to know a technology product and you can do more, it becomes kind of like a Swiss army knife and you can build more use case, you can build more powerful applications. That's super, super important because you don't have to get certified in multiple databases. You, you are fast at getting things done, you achieve fire, develop velocity, and the managers are happy because they don't have to license more things, send you to more trainings, have more risk of something not being delivered, right? >>So it's really the, we see the suite where this best of breed play happening here, which in general was happening before already with Oracle's flagship database. Whereas those Amazon as an example, right? And now the interesting thing is every step away Oracle was always a one database company that can be only one and they're now generally talking about heat web and that two database company with different market spaces, but same value proposition of integrating more things very, very quickly to have a universal database that I call, they call the converge database for all the needs of an enterprise to run certain application use cases. And that's what's attractive to developers. >>It's, it's ironic isn't it? I mean I, you know, the rumor was the TK Thomas Curian left Oracle cuz he wanted to put Oracle database on other clouds and other places. And maybe that was the rift. Maybe there was, I'm sure there was other things, but, but Oracle clearly is now trying to expand its Tam Ron with, with heatwave into aws, into Azure. How do you think Oracle's gonna do, you were at a cloud world, what was the sentiment from customers and the independent analyst? Is this just Oracle trying to screw with the competition, create a little diversion? Or is this, you know, serious business for Oracle? What do you think? >>No, I think it has lakes. I think it's definitely, again, attriting to Oracle's overall ability to differentiate not only my SQL heat wave, but its overall portfolio. And I think the fact that they do have the alliance with the Azure in place, that this is definitely demonstrating their commitment to meeting the multi-cloud needs of its customers as well as what we pointed to in terms of the fact that they're now offering, you know, MySQL capabilities within AWS natively and that it can now perform AWS's own offering. And I think this is all demonstrating that Oracle is, you know, not letting up, they're not resting on its laurels. That's clearly we are living in a multi-cloud world, so why not just make it more easy for customers to be able to use cloud databases according to their own specific, specific needs. And I think, you know, to holder's point, I think that definitely lines with being able to bring on more application developers to leverage these capabilities. >>I think one important announcement that's related to all this was the JSON relational duality capabilities where now it's a lot easier for application developers to use a language that they're very familiar with a JS O and not have to worry about going into relational databases to store their J S O N application coding. So this is, I think an example of the innovation that's enhancing the overall Oracle portfolio and certainly all the work with machine learning is definitely paying dividends as well. And as a result, I see Oracle continue to make these inroads that we pointed to. But I agree with Mark, you know, the short term discounting is just a stall tag. This is not denying the fact that Oracle is being able to not only deliver price performance differentiators that are dramatic, but also meeting a wide range of needs for customers out there that aren't just limited device performance consideration. >>Being able to support multi-cloud according to customer needs. Being able to reach out to the application developer community and address a very specific challenge that has plagued them for many years now. So bring it all together. Yeah, I see this as just enabling Oracles who ring true with customers. That the customers that were there were basically all of them, even though not all of them are going to be saying the same things, they're all basically saying positive feedback. And likewise, I think the analyst community is seeing this. It's always refreshing to be able to talk to customers directly and at Oracle cloud there was a litany of them and so this is just a difference maker as well as being able to talk to strategic partners. The nvidia, I think partnerships also testament to Oracle's ongoing ability to, you know, make the ecosystem more user friendly for the customers out there. >>Yeah, it's interesting when you get these all in one tools, you know, the Swiss Army knife, you expect that it's not able to be best of breed. That's the kind of surprising thing that I'm hearing about, about heatwave. I want to, I want to talk about Lake House because when I think of Lake House, I think data bricks, and to my knowledge data bricks hasn't been in the sites of Oracle yet. Maybe they're next, but, but Oracle claims that MySQL, heatwave, Lakehouse is a breakthrough in terms of capacity and performance. Mark, what are your thoughts on that? Can you double click on, on Lakehouse Oracle's claims for things like query performance and data loading? What does it mean for the market? Is Oracle really leading in, in the lake house competitive landscape? What are your thoughts? >>Well, but name in the game is what are the problems you're solving for the customer? More importantly, are those problems urgent or important? If they're urgent, customers wanna solve 'em. Now if they're important, they might get around to them. So you look at what they're doing with Lake House or previous to that machine learning or previous to that automation or previous to that O L A with O ltp and they're merging all this capability together. If you look at Snowflake or data bricks, they're tacking one problem. You look at MyQ heat wave, they're tacking multiple problems. So when you say, yeah, their queries are much better against the lake house in combination with other analytics in combination with O ltp and the fact that there are no ETLs. So you're getting all this done in real time. So it's, it's doing the query cross, cross everything in real time. >>You're solving multiple user and developer problems, you're increasing their ability to get insight faster, you're having shorter response times. So yeah, they really are solving urgent problems for customers. And by putting it where the customer lives, this is the brilliance of actually being multicloud. And I know I'm backing up here a second, but by making it work in AWS and Azure where people already live, where they already have applications, what they're saying is, we're bringing it to you. You don't have to come to us to get these, these benefits, this value overall, I think it's a brilliant strategy. I give Nip and Argo wallet a huge, huge kudos for what he's doing there. So yes, what they're doing with the lake house is going to put notice on data bricks and Snowflake and everyone else for that matter. Well >>Those are guys that whole ago you, you and I have talked about this. Those are, those are the guys that are doing sort of the best of breed. You know, they're really focused and they, you know, tend to do well at least out of the gate. Now you got Oracle's converged philosophy, obviously with Oracle database. We've seen that now it's kicking in gear with, with heatwave, you know, this whole thing of sweets versus best of breed. I mean the long term, you know, customers tend to migrate towards suite, but the new shiny toy tends to get the growth. How do you think this is gonna play out in cloud database? >>Well, it's the forever never ending story, right? And in software right suite, whereas best of breed and so far in the long run suites have always won, right? So, and sometimes they struggle again because the inherent problem of sweets is you build something larger, it has more complexity and that means your cycles to get everything working together to integrate the test that roll it out, certify whatever it is, takes you longer, right? And that's not the case. It's a fascinating part of what the effort around my SQL heat wave is that the team is out executing the previous best of breed data, bringing us something together. Now if they can maintain that pace, that's something to to, to be seen. But it, the strategy, like what Mark was saying, bring the software to the data is of course interesting and unique and totally an Oracle issue in the past, right? >>Yeah. But it had to be in your database on oci. And but at, that's an interesting part. The interesting thing on the Lake health side is, right, there's three key benefits of a lakehouse. The first one is better reporting analytics, bring more rich information together, like make the, the, the case for silicon angle, right? We want to see engagements for this video, we want to know what's happening. That's a mixed transactional video media use case, right? Typical Lakehouse use case. The next one is to build more rich applications, transactional applications which have video and these elements in there, which are the engaging one. And the third one, and that's where I'm a little critical and concerned, is it's really the base platform for artificial intelligence, right? To run deep learning to run things automatically because they have all the data in one place can create in one way. >>And that's where Oracle, I know that Ron talked about Invidia for a moment, but that's where Oracle doesn't have the strongest best story. Nonetheless, the two other main use cases of the lake house are very strong, very well only concern is four 50 terabyte sounds long. It's an arbitrary limitation. Yeah, sounds as big. So for the start, and it's the first word, they can make that bigger. You don't want your lake house to be limited and the terabyte sizes or any even petabyte size because you want to have the certainty. I can put everything in there that I think it might be relevant without knowing what questions to ask and query those questions. >>Yeah. And you know, in the early days of no schema on right, it just became a mess. But now technology has evolved to allow us to actually get more value out of that data. Data lake. Data swamp is, you know, not much more, more, more, more logical. But, and I want to get in, in a moment, I want to come back to how you think the competitors are gonna respond. Are they gonna have to sort of do a more of a converged approach? AWS in particular? But before I do, Ron, I want to ask you a question about autopilot because I heard Larry Ellison's keynote and he was talking about how, you know, most security issues are human errors with autonomy and autonomous database and things like autopilot. We take care of that. It's like autonomous vehicles, they're gonna be safer. And I went, well maybe, maybe someday. So Oracle really tries to emphasize this, that every time you see an announcement from Oracle, they talk about new, you know, autonomous capabilities. It, how legit is it? Do people care? What about, you know, what's new for heatwave Lakehouse? How much of a differentiator, Ron, do you really think autopilot is in this cloud database space? >>Yeah, I think it will definitely enhance the overall proposition. I don't think people are gonna buy, you know, lake house exclusively cause of autopilot capabilities, but when they look at the overall picture, I think it will be an added capability bonus to Oracle's benefit. And yeah, I think it's kind of one of these age old questions, how much do you automate and what is the bounce to strike? And I think we all understand with the automatic car, autonomous car analogy that there are limitations to being able to use that. However, I think it's a tool that basically every organization out there needs to at least have or at least evaluate because it goes to the point of it helps with ease of use, it helps make automation more balanced in terms of, you know, being able to test, all right, let's automate this process and see if it works well, then we can go on and switch on on autopilot for other processes. >>And then, you know, that allows, for example, the specialists to spend more time on business use cases versus, you know, manual maintenance of, of the cloud database and so forth. So I think that actually is a, a legitimate value proposition. I think it's just gonna be a case by case basis. Some organizations are gonna be more aggressive with putting automation throughout their processes throughout their organization. Others are gonna be more cautious. But it's gonna be, again, something that will help the overall Oracle proposition. And something that I think will be used with caution by many organizations, but other organizations are gonna like, hey, great, this is something that is really answering a real problem. And that is just easing the use of these databases, but also being able to better handle the automation capabilities and benefits that come with it without having, you know, a major screwup happened and the process of transitioning to more automated capabilities. >>Now, I didn't attend cloud world, it's just too many red eyes, you know, recently, so I passed. But one of the things I like to do at those events is talk to customers, you know, in the spirit of the truth, you know, they, you know, you'd have the hallway, you know, track and to talk to customers and they say, Hey, you know, here's the good, the bad and the ugly. So did you guys, did you talk to any customers my SQL Heatwave customers at, at cloud world? And and what did you learn? I don't know, Mark, did you, did you have any luck and, and having some, some private conversations? >>Yeah, I had quite a few private conversations. The one thing before I get to that, I want disagree with one point Ron made, I do believe there are customers out there buying the heat wave service, the MySEQ heat wave server service because of autopilot. Because autopilot is really revolutionary in many ways in the sense for the MySEQ developer in that it, it auto provisions, it auto parallel loads, IT auto data places it auto shape predictions. It can tell you what machine learning models are going to tell you, gonna give you your best results. And, and candidly, I've yet to meet a DBA who didn't wanna give up pedantic tasks that are pain in the kahoo, which they'd rather not do and if it's long as it was done right for them. So yes, I do think people are buying it because of autopilot and that's based on some of the conversations I had with customers at Oracle Cloud World. >>In fact, it was like, yeah, that's great, yeah, we get fantastic performance, but this really makes my life easier and I've yet to meet a DBA who didn't want to make their life easier. And it does. So yeah, I've talked to a few of them. They were excited. I asked them if they ran into any bugs, were there any difficulties in moving to it? And the answer was no. In both cases, it's interesting to note, my sequel is the most popular database on the planet. Well, some will argue that it's neck and neck with SQL Server, but if you add in Mariah DB and ProCon db, which are forks of MySQL, then yeah, by far and away it's the most popular. And as a result of that, everybody for the most part has typically a my sequel database somewhere in their organization. So this is a brilliant situation for anybody going after MyQ, but especially for heat wave. And the customers I talk to love it. I didn't find anybody complaining about it. And >>What about the migration? We talked about TCO earlier. Did your t does your TCO analysis include the migration cost or do you kind of conveniently leave that out or what? >>Well, when you look at migration costs, there are different kinds of migration costs. By the way, the worst job in the data center is the data migration manager. Forget it, no other job is as bad as that one. You get no attaboys for doing it. Right? And then when you screw up, oh boy. So in real terms, anything that can limit data migration is a good thing. And when you look at Data Lake, that limits data migration. So if you're already a MySEQ user, this is a pure MySQL as far as you're concerned. It's just a, a simple transition from one to the other. You may wanna make sure nothing broke and every you, all your tables are correct and your schema's, okay, but it's all the same. So it's a simple migration. So it's pretty much a non-event, right? When you migrate data from an O LTP to an O L A P, that's an ETL and that's gonna take time. >>But you don't have to do that with my SQL heat wave. So that's gone when you start talking about machine learning, again, you may have an etl, you may not, depending on the circumstances, but again, with my SQL heat wave, you don't, and you don't have duplicate storage, you don't have to copy it from one storage container to another to be able to be used in a different database, which by the way, ultimately adds much more cost than just the other service. So yeah, I looked at the migration and again, the users I talked to said it was a non-event. It was literally moving from one physical machine to another. If they had a new version of MySEQ running on something else and just wanted to migrate it over or just hook it up or just connect it to the data, it worked just fine. >>Okay, so every day it sounds like you guys feel, and we've certainly heard this, my colleague David Foyer, the semi-retired David Foyer was always very high on heatwave. So I think you knows got some real legitimacy here coming from a standing start, but I wanna talk about the competition, how they're likely to respond. I mean, if your AWS and you got heatwave is now in your cloud, so there's some good aspects of that. The database guys might not like that, but the infrastructure guys probably love it. Hey, more ways to sell, you know, EC two and graviton, but you're gonna, the database guys in AWS are gonna respond. They're gonna say, Hey, we got Redshift, we got aqua. What's your thoughts on, on not only how that's gonna resonate with customers, but I'm interested in what you guys think will a, I never say never about aws, you know, and are they gonna try to build, in your view a converged Oola and o LTP database? You know, Snowflake is taking an ecosystem approach. They've added in transactional capabilities to the portfolio so they're not standing still. What do you guys see in the competitive landscape in that regard going forward? Maybe Holger, you could start us off and anybody else who wants to can chime in, >>Happy to, you mentioned Snowflake last, we'll start there. I think Snowflake is imitating that strategy, right? That building out original data warehouse and the clouds tasking project to really proposition to have other data available there because AI is relevant for everybody. Ultimately people keep data in the cloud for ultimately running ai. So you see the same suite kind of like level strategy, it's gonna be a little harder because of the original positioning. How much would people know that you're doing other stuff? And I just, as a former developer manager of developers, I just don't see the speed at the moment happening at Snowflake to become really competitive to Oracle. On the flip side, putting my Oracle hat on for a moment back to you, Mark and Iran, right? What could Oracle still add? Because the, the big big things, right? The traditional chasms in the database world, they have built everything, right? >>So I, I really scratched my hat and gave Nipon a hard time at Cloud world say like, what could you be building? Destiny was very conservative. Let's get the Lakehouse thing done, it's gonna spring next year, right? And the AWS is really hard because AWS value proposition is these small innovation teams, right? That they build two pizza teams, which can be fit by two pizzas, not large teams, right? And you need suites to large teams to build these suites with lots of functionalities to make sure they work together. They're consistent, they have the same UX on the administration side, they can consume the same way, they have the same API registry, can't even stop going where the synergy comes to play over suite. So, so it's gonna be really, really hard for them to change that. But AWS super pragmatic. They're always by themselves that they'll listen to customers if they learn from customers suite as a proposition. I would not be surprised if AWS trying to bring things closer together, being morely together. >>Yeah. Well how about, can we talk about multicloud if, if, again, Oracle is very on on Oracle as you said before, but let's look forward, you know, half a year or a year. What do you think about Oracle's moves in, in multicloud in terms of what kind of penetration they're gonna have in the marketplace? You saw a lot of presentations at at cloud world, you know, we've looked pretty closely at the, the Microsoft Azure deal. I think that's really interesting. I've, I've called it a little bit of early days of a super cloud. What impact do you think this is gonna have on, on the marketplace? But, but both. And think about it within Oracle's customer base, I have no doubt they'll do great there. But what about beyond its existing install base? What do you guys think? >>Ryan, do you wanna jump on that? Go ahead. Go ahead Ryan. No, no, no, >>That's an excellent point. I think it aligns with what we've been talking about in terms of Lakehouse. I think Lake House will enable Oracle to pull more customers, more bicycle customers onto the Oracle platforms. And I think we're seeing all the signs pointing toward Oracle being able to make more inroads into the overall market. And that includes garnishing customers from the leaders in, in other words, because they are, you know, coming in as a innovator, a an alternative to, you know, the AWS proposition, the Google cloud proposition that they have less to lose and there's a result they can really drive the multi-cloud messaging to resonate with not only their existing customers, but also to be able to, to that question, Dave's posing actually garnish customers onto their platform. And, and that includes naturally my sequel but also OCI and so forth. So that's how I'm seeing this playing out. I think, you know, again, Oracle's reporting is indicating that, and I think what we saw, Oracle Cloud world is definitely validating the idea that Oracle can make more waves in the overall market in this regard. >>You know, I, I've floated this idea of Super cloud, it's kind of tongue in cheek, but, but there, I think there is some merit to it in terms of building on top of hyperscale infrastructure and abstracting some of the, that complexity. And one of the things that I'm most interested in is industry clouds and an Oracle acquisition of Cerner. I was struck by Larry Ellison's keynote, it was like, I don't know, an hour and a half and an hour and 15 minutes was focused on healthcare transformation. Well, >>So vertical, >>Right? And so, yeah, so you got Oracle's, you know, got some industry chops and you, and then you think about what they're building with, with not only oci, but then you got, you know, MyQ, you can now run in dedicated regions. You got ADB on on Exadata cloud to customer, you can put that OnPrem in in your data center and you look at what the other hyperscalers are, are doing. I I say other hyperscalers, I've always said Oracle's not really a hyperscaler, but they got a cloud so they're in the game. But you can't get, you know, big query OnPrem, you look at outposts, it's very limited in terms of, you know, the database support and again, that that will will evolve. But now you got Oracle's got, they announced Alloy, we can white label their cloud. So I'm interested in what you guys think about these moves, especially the industry cloud. We see, you know, Walmart is doing sort of their own cloud. You got Goldman Sachs doing a cloud. Do you, you guys, what do you think about that and what role does Oracle play? Any thoughts? >>Yeah, let me lemme jump on that for a moment. Now, especially with the MyQ, by making that available in multiple clouds, what they're doing is this follows the philosophy they've had the past with doing cloud, a customer taking the application and the data and putting it where the customer lives. If it's on premise, it's on premise. If it's in the cloud, it's in the cloud. By making the mice equal heat wave, essentially a plug compatible with any other mice equal as far as your, your database is concern and then giving you that integration with O L A P and ML and Data Lake and everything else, then what you've got is a compelling offering. You're making it easier for the customer to use. So I look the difference between MyQ and the Oracle database, MyQ is going to capture market more market share for them. >>You're not gonna find a lot of new users for the Oracle debate database. Yeah, there are always gonna be new users, don't get me wrong, but it's not gonna be a huge growth. Whereas my SQL heatwave is probably gonna be a major growth engine for Oracle going forward. Not just in their own cloud, but in AWS and in Azure and on premise over time that eventually it'll get there. It's not there now, but it will, they're doing the right thing on that basis. They're taking the services and when you talk about multicloud and making them available where the customer wants them, not forcing them to go where you want them, if that makes sense. And as far as where they're going in the future, I think they're gonna take a page outta what they've done with the Oracle database. They'll add things like JSON and XML and time series and spatial over time they'll make it a, a complete converged database like they did with the Oracle database. The difference being Oracle database will scale bigger and will have more transactions and be somewhat faster. And my SQL will be, for anyone who's not on the Oracle database, they're, they're not stupid, that's for sure. >>They've done Jason already. Right. But I give you that they could add graph and time series, right. Since eat with, Right, Right. Yeah, that's something absolutely right. That's, that's >>A sort of a logical move, right? >>Right. But that's, that's some kid ourselves, right? I mean has worked in Oracle's favor, right? 10 x 20 x, the amount of r and d, which is in the MyQ space, has been poured at trying to snatch workloads away from Oracle by starting with IBM 30 years ago, 20 years ago, Microsoft and, and, and, and didn't work, right? Database applications are extremely sticky when they run, you don't want to touch SIM and grow them, right? So that doesn't mean that heat phase is not an attractive offering, but it will be net new things, right? And what works in my SQL heat wave heat phases favor a little bit is it's not the massive enterprise applications which have like we the nails like, like you might be only running 30% or Oracle, but the connections and the interfaces into that is, is like 70, 80% of your enterprise. >>You take it out and it's like the spaghetti ball where you say, ah, no I really don't, don't want to do all that. Right? You don't, don't have that massive part with the equals heat phase sequel kind of like database which are more smaller tactical in comparison, but still I, I don't see them taking so much share. They will be growing because of a attractive value proposition quickly on the, the multi-cloud, right? I think it's not really multi-cloud. If you give people the chance to run your offering on different clouds, right? You can run it there. The multi-cloud advantages when the Uber offering comes out, which allows you to do things across those installations, right? I can migrate data, I can create data across something like Google has done with B query Omni, I can run predictive models or even make iron models in different place and distribute them, right? And Oracle is paving the road for that, but being available on these clouds. But the multi-cloud capability of database which knows I'm running on different clouds that is still yet to be built there. >>Yeah. And >>That the problem with >>That, that's the super cloud concept that I flowed and I I've always said kinda snowflake with a single global instance is sort of, you know, headed in that direction and maybe has a league. What's the issue with that mark? >>Yeah, the problem with the, with that version, the multi-cloud is clouds to charge egress fees. As long as they charge egress fees to move data between clouds, it's gonna make it very difficult to do a real multi-cloud implementation. Even Snowflake, which runs multi-cloud, has to pass out on the egress fees of their customer when data moves between clouds. And that's really expensive. I mean there, there is one customer I talked to who is beta testing for them, the MySQL heatwave and aws. The only reason they didn't want to do that until it was running on AWS is the egress fees were so great to move it to OCI that they couldn't afford it. Yeah. Egress fees are the big issue but, >>But Mark the, the point might be you might wanna root query and only get the results set back, right was much more tinier, which been the answer before for low latency between the class A problem, which we sometimes still have but mostly don't have. Right? And I think in general this with fees coming down based on the Oracle general E with fee move and it's very hard to justify those, right? But, but it's, it's not about moving data as a multi-cloud high value use case. It's about doing intelligent things with that data, right? Putting into other places, replicating it, what I'm saying the same thing what you said before, running remote queries on that, analyzing it, running AI on it, running AI models on that. That's the interesting thing. Cross administered in the same way. Taking things out, making sure compliance happens. Making sure when Ron says I don't want to be American anymore, I want to be in the European cloud that is gets migrated, right? So tho those are the interesting value use case which are really, really hard for enterprise to program hand by hand by developers and they would love to have out of the box and that's yet the innovation to come to, we have to come to see. But the first step to get there is that your software runs in multiple clouds and that's what Oracle's doing so well with my SQL >>Guys. Amazing. >>Go ahead. Yeah. >>Yeah. >>For example, >>Amazing amount of data knowledge and, and brain power in this market. Guys, I really want to thank you for coming on to the cube. Ron Holger. Mark, always a pleasure to have you on. Really appreciate your time. >>Well all the last names we're very happy for Romanic last and moderator. Thanks Dave for moderating us. All right, >>We'll see. We'll see you guys around. Safe travels to all and thank you for watching this power panel, The Truth About My SQL Heat Wave on the cube. Your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>>Good afternoon, brilliant humans, and welcome back to the Cube. We're live in Detroit, Michigan at Cub Con, and I'm joined by John Furrier. John three exciting days buzzing. How you doing? >>That's great. I mean, we're coming down to the third day. We're keeping the energy going, but this segment's gonna be awesome. The CD foundation's doing amazing work. Developers are gonna be running businesses and workflows are changing. Productivity's the top conversation, and you're gonna start to see a coalescing of the communities who are continuous delivery, and it's gonna be awesome. >>And, and our next guess is an outstanding person to talk about this. We are joined by Stephen Chin, the chair of the CD Foundation. Steven, thanks so much for being here. >>No, no, my pleasure. I mean, this has been an amazing week quote that CubeCon with all of the announcements, all of the people who came out here to Detroit and, you know, fantastic. Like just walking around, you bump into all the right people here. Plus we held a CD summit zero day events, and had a lot of really exciting announcements this week. >>Gotta love the shirt. I gotta say, it's one of my favorites. Love the logos. Love the love the branding. That project got traction. What's the news in the CD foundation? I tried to sneak in the back. I got a little laid into your co-located event. It was packed. Everyone's engaged. It was really looked, look really cool. Give us the update. >>What's the news? Yeah, I know. So we, we had a really, really powerful event. All the key practitioners, the open source leads and folks were there. And one of, one of the things which I think we've done a really good job in the past six months with the CD foundation is getting back to the roots and focusing on technical innovation, right? This is what drives foundations, having strong projects, having people who are building innovation, and also bringing in a new innovation. So one of the projects which we added to the CD foundation this week is called Persia. So it's a, it's a decentralized package repository for getting open source libraries. And it solves a lot of the problems which you get when you have centralized infrastructure. You don't have the right security certificates, you don't have the right verification libraries. And these, these are all things which large companies provision and build out inside of their infrastructure. But the open source communities don't have the benefit of the same sort of really, really strong architecture. A lot of, a lot of the systems we depend upon. It's >>A good point, yeah. >>Yeah. I mean, if you think about the systems that developers depend upon, we depend upon, you know, npm, ruby Gems, Mayn Central, and these systems been around for a while. Like they serve the community well, right? They're, they're well supported by the companies and it's, it's, it's really a great contribution that they give us. But every time there's an outage or there's a security issue, guess, guess how many security issues that our, our research team found at npm? Just ballpark. >>74. >>So there're >>It's gotta be thousands. I mean, it's gotta be a lot of tons >>Of Yeah, >>They, they're currently up to 60,000 >>Whoa. >>Vulnerable, malicious packages in NPM and >>Oh my gosh. So that's a super, that's a jar number even. I know it was gonna be huge, but Holy mo. >>Yeah. So that's a software supply chain in actually right there. So that's, that's open source. Everything's out there. What's, how do, how does, how do you guys fix that? >>Yeah, so per peria kind of shifts the whole model. So when, when you think about a system that can be sustained, it has to be something which, which is not just one company. It has to be a, a, a set of companies, be vendor neutral and be decentralized. So that's why we donated it to the Continuous Delivery Foundation. So that can be that governance body, which, which makes sure it's not a single company, it is to use modern technologies. So you, you, you just need something which is immutable, so it can't be changed. So you can rely on it. It has to have a strong transaction ledger so you can see all of the history of it. You can build up your software, build materials off of it, and it, it has to have a strong peer-to-peer architecture, so it can be sustained long term. >>Steven, you mentioned something I want to just get back to. You mentioned outages and disruption. I, you didn't, you didn't say just the outages, but this whole disruption angle is interesting if something happens. Talk about the impact of the developer. They stalled, inefficiencies create basically disruption. >>No, I mean, if, if, so, so if you think about most DevOps teams in big companies, they support hundreds or thousands of teams and an hour of outage. All those developers, they, they can't program, they can't work. And that's, that's a huge loss of productivity for the company. Now, if you, if you take that up a level when MPM goes down for an hour, how many millions of man hours are wasted by not being able to get your builds working by not being able to get your codes to compile. Like it's, it's >>Like, yeah, I mean, it's almost hard to fathom. I mean, everyone's, It's stopped. Exactly. It's literally like having the plug pulled >>Exactly on whenever you're working on, That's, that's the fundamental problem we're trying to solve. Is it, it needs to be on a, like a well supported, well architected peer to peer network with some strong backing from big companies. So the company is working on Persia, include J Frog, which who I work for, Docker, Oracle. We have Deploy hub, Huawei, a whole bunch of other folks who are also helping out. And when you look at all of those folks, they all have different interests, but it's designed in a way where no single party has control over the network. So really it's, it's a system system. You, you're not relying upon one company or one logo. You're relying upon a well-architected open source implementation that everyone can rely >>On. That's shared software, but it's kind of a fault tolerant feature too. It's like, okay, if something happens here, you have a distributed piece of it, decentralized, you're not gonna go down. You can remediate. All right, so where's this go next? I mean, cuz we've been talking about the role of developer. This needs to be a modern, I won't say modern upgrade, but like a modern workflow or value chain. What's your vision? How do you see that? Cuz you're the center of the CD foundation coming together. People are gonna be coalescing multiple groups. Yeah. >>What's the, No, I think this is a good point. So there, there's a, a lot of different continuous delivery, continuous integration technologies. We're actually, from a Linux Foundation standpoint, we're coalescing all the continued delivery events into one big conference >>Next. You just made an announcement about this earlier this week. Tell us about CD events. What's going on, what's in, what's in the cooker? >>Yeah, and I think one of the big announcements we had was the 0.1 release of CD events. And CD events allows you to take all these systems and connect them in an event scalable, event oriented architecture. The first integration is between Tecton and Capin. So now you can get CD events flowing cleanly between your, your continuous delivery and your observability. And this extends through your entire DevOps pipeline. We all, we all need a standards based framework Yep. For how we get all the disparate continuous integration, continuous delivery, observability systems to, to work together. That's also high performance. It scales with our needs and it, it kind of gives you a future architecture to build on top of. So a lot of the companies I was talking with at the CD summit Yeah. They were very excited about not only using this with the projects we announced, but using this internally as an architecture to build their own DevOps pipelines on. >>I bet that feels good to hear. >>Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. >>Yeah. You mentioned Teton, they just graduated. I saw how many projects have graduated? >>So we have two graduated projects right now. We have Jenkins, which is the first graduated project. Now Tecton is also graduated. And I think this shows that for Tecton it was, it was time, the very mature project, great support, getting a lot of users and having them join the set of graduated projects. And the continuous delivery foundation is a really strong portfolio. And we have a bunch of other projects which also are on their way towards graduation. >>Feels like a moment of social proof I bet. >>For you all. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, it's really good. Yeah. >>How long has the CD Foundation been around? >>The CD foundation has been around for, i, I won't wanna say the exact number of years, a few years now. >>Okay. >>But I, I think that it, it was formed because what we wanted is we wanted a foundation which was purpose built. So CNCF is a great foundation. It has a very large umbrella of projects and it takes kind of that big umbrella approach where a lot of different efforts are joining it, a lot of things are happening and you can get good traction, but it produces its own bottlenecks in process. Having a foundation which is just about continuous delivery caters to more of a DevOps, professional DevOps audience. I think this, this gives a good platform for best practices. We're working on a new CDF best practices Yeah. Guide. We're working when use cases with all the member companies. And it, it gives that thought leadership platform for continuous delivery, which you need to be an expert in that area >>And the best practices too. And to identify the issues. Because at the end of the day, with the big thing that's coming out of this is velocity and more developers coming on board. I mean, this is the big thing. More people doing more. Yeah. Well yeah, I mean you take this open source continuous thunder away, you have more developers coming in, they be more productive and then people are gonna even either on the DevOps side or on the straight AP upside. And this is gonna be a huge issue. And the other thing that comes out that I wanna get your thoughts on is the supply chain issue you talked about is hot verifications and certifications of code is such big issue. Can you share your thoughts on that? Because Yeah, this is become, I won't say a business model for some companies, but it's also becoming critical for security that codes verified. >>Yeah. Okay. So I, I think one of, one of the things which we're specifically doing with the Peria project, which is unique, is rather than distributing, for example, libraries that you developed on your laptop and compiled there, or maybe they were built on, you know, a runner somewhere like Travis CI or GitHub actions, all the libraries being distributed on Persia are built by the authorized nodes in the network. And then they're, they're verified across all of the authorized nodes. So you nice, you have a, a gar, the basic guarantee we're giving you is when you download something from the Peria network, you'll get exactly the same binary as if you built it yourself from source. >>So there's a lot of trust >>And, and transparency. Yeah, exactly. And if you remember back to like kind of the seminal project, which kicked off this whole supply chain security like, like whirlwind it was SolarWinds. Yeah. Yeah. And the exact problem they hit was the build ran, it produced a result, they modified the code of the bill of the resulting binary and then they signed it. So if you built with the same source and then you went through that same process a second time, you would've gotten a different result, which was a malicious pre right. Yeah. And it's very hard to risk take, to take a binary file Yep. And determine if there's malicious code in it. Cuz it's not like source code. You can't inspect it, you can't do a code audit. It's totally different. So I think we're solving a key part of this with Persia, where you're freeing open source projects from the possibility of having their binaries, their packages, their end reduces, tampered with. And also upstream from this, you do want to have verification of prs, people doing code reviews, making sure that they're looking at the source code. And I think there's a lot of good efforts going on in the open source security foundation. So I'm also on the governing board of Open ssf >>To Do you sleep? You have three jobs you've said on camera? No, I can't even imagine. Yeah. Didn't >>You just spin that out from this open source security? Is that the new one they >>Spun out? Yeah, So the Open Source Security foundation is one of the new Linux Foundation projects. They, they have been around for a couple years, but they did a big reboot last year around this time. And I think what they really did a good job of now is bringing all the industry players to the table, having dialogue with government agencies, figuring out like, what do we need to do to support open source projects? Is it more investment in memory, safe languages? Do we need to have more investment in, in code audits or like security reviews of opensource projects. Lot of things. And all of those things require money investments. And that's what all the companies, including Jay Frogger doing to advance open source supply chain security. I >>Mean, it's, it's really kind of interesting to watch some different demographics of the developers and the vendors and the customers. On one hand, if you're a hardware person company, you have, you talk zero trust your software, your top trust, so your trusted code, and you got zero trust. It's interesting, depending on where you're coming from, they're all trying to achieve the same thing. It means zero trust. Makes sense. But then also I got code, I I want trust. Trust and verified. So security is in everything now. So code. So how do you see that traversing over? Is it just semantics or what's your view on that? >>The, the right way of looking at security is from the standpoint of the hacker, because they're always looking for >>Well said, very well said, New >>Loop, hope, new loopholes, new exploits. And they're, they're very, very smart people. And I think when you, when you look some >>Of the smartest >>Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I, I work with, well former hackers now, security researchers, >>They converted, they're >>Recruited. But when you look at them, there's like two main classes of like, like types of exploits. So some, some attacker groups. What they're looking for is they're looking for pulse zero days, CVEs, like existing vulnerabilities that they can exploit to break into systems. But there's an increasing number of attackers who are now on the opposite end of the spectrum. And what they're doing is they're creating their own exploits. So, oh, they're for example, putting malicious code into open source projects. Little >>Trojan horse status. Yeah. >>They're they're getting their little Trojan horses in. Yeah. Or they're finding supply chain attacks by maybe uploading a malicious library to NPM or to pii. And by creating these attacks, especially ones that start at the top of the supply chain, you have such a large reach. >>I was just gonna say, it could be a whole, almost gives me chills as we're talking about it, the systemic, So this is this >>Gnarly nation state attackers, like people who wanted serious >>Damages. Engineered hack just said they're high, highly funded. Highly skilled. Exactly. Highly agile, highly focused. >>Yes. >>Teams, team. Not in the teams. >>Yeah. And so, so one, one example of this, which actually netted quite a lot of money for the, for the hacker who exposed it was, you guys probably heard about this, but it was a, an attack where they uploaded a malicious library to npm with the same exact namespace as a corporate library and clever, >>Creepy. >>It's called a dependency injection attack. And what happens is if you, if you don't have the right sort of security package management guidelines inside your company, and it's just looking for the latest version of merging multiple repositories as like a, like a single view. A lot of companies were accidentally picking up the latest version, which was out in npm uploaded by Alex Spearson was the one who did the, the attack. And he simultaneously reported bug bounties on like a dozen different companies and netted 130 k. Wow. So like these sort of attacks that they're real Yep. They're exploitable. And the, the hackers >>Complex >>Are finding these sort of attacks now in our supply chain are the ones who really are the most dangerous. That's the biggest threat to us. >>Yeah. And we have stacker ones out there. You got a bunch of other services, the white hat hackers get the bounties. That's really important. All right. What's next? What's your vision of this show as we end Coan? What's the most important story coming outta Coan in your opinion? And what are you guys doing next? >>Well, I, I actually think this is, this is probably not what most hooks would say is the most exciting story to con, but I find this personally the best is >>I can't wait for this now. >>So, on, on Sunday, the CNCF ran the first kids' day. >>Oh. >>And so they had a, a free kids workshop for, you know, underprivileged kids for >>About, That's >>Detroit area. It was, it was taught by some of the folks from the CNCF community. So Arro, Eric hen my, my older daughter, Cassandra's also an instructor. So she also was teaching a raspberry pie workshop. >>Amazing. And she's >>Here and Yeah, Yeah. She's also here at the show. And when you think about it, you know, there's always, there's, there's, you know, hundreds of announcements this week, A lot of exciting technologies, some of which we've talked about. Yeah. But it's, it's really what matters is the community. >>It this is a community first event >>And the people, and like, if we're giving back to the community and helping Detroit's kids to get better at technology, to get educated, I think that it's a worthwhile for all of us to be here. >>What a beautiful way to close it. That is such, I'm so glad you brought that up and brought that to our attention. I wasn't aware of that. Did you know that was >>Happening, John? No, I know about that. Yeah. No, that was, And that's next generation too. And what we need, we need to get down into the elementary schools. We gotta get to the kids. They're all doing robotics club anyway in high school. Computer science is now, now a >>Sport, in my opinion. Well, I think that if you're in a privileged community, though, I don't think that every school's doing robotics. And >>That's why Well, Cal Poly, Cal Poly and the universities are stepping up and I think CNCF leadership is amazing here. And we need more of it. I mean, I'm, I'm bullish on this. I love it. And I think that's a really great story. No, >>I, I am. Absolutely. And, and it just goes to show how committed CNF is to community, Putting community first and Detroit. There has been such a celebration of Detroit this whole week. Stephen, thank you so much for joining us on the show. Best Wishes with the CD Foundation. John, thanks for the banter as always. And thank you for tuning in to us here live on the cube in Detroit, Michigan. I'm Savannah Peterson and we are having the best day. I hope you are too.

(soft music) >> Good morning from Detroit, Michigan. theCUBE is live on our second day of coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. John, great to be back with you. The buzz is here, no doubt. We've been talking a lot about the developers. And one of the biggest bottlenecks that they face in software delivery, is when they're stuck waiting for access to environments. >> Yeah, this next segment's going to be very interesting. It's a company that's making DevOps more productive, but recognizing the reality of how people are working remotely, but also company to company developers. People are collaborating in all kinds of forms, so this is really going to be a great segment. >> Exactly. Two new guests to theCUBE who know theCUBE, but are first time on theCUBE from Release Hub, Tommy McClung, it's CEO and Matt Carter, it's CMO. Guys, great to have you on the program. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us here. >> So we want to dig into Release Hub, so the audience really gets an understanding. But Tommy, I want to get an understanding of your background. >> Sure. >> You've been at Release Hub for what, three years? >> Yep, I'm the co-founder. >> Before that you were at TrueCar? >> I was, yeah, I was the CTO at TrueCar. And prior to that, I've been a software engineer my entire career. I've started a couple of companies before this. Software engineer at heart. I've been working on systems management and making developers productive since 2000, long time. So it's fun to be working on developer productivity stuff. And this is our home and this is where I feel the most comfortable. >> Lisa: Yeah. And Matt, you're brand new to the company as it's chief marketing officer. >> Matt: Yeah, so I just joined earlier this month, so really excited to be here. I came over from Docker, so it's great to be able to keep working with developers and helping them, not only get their jobs done better and faster, but just get more delight out of what they do every day, that's a super important privilege to me and it's exciting to go and work on this at Release here. >> Well, they're lucky to have you. And we work together, Matt, at Docker, in the past. Developer productivity's always been a key, but communities are now more important. We've been seeing on theCUBE that developers are going to decide the standards, they're going to vote with their axes and their code. And what they decide to work on, it has to be the best. And that's going to be the new defacto standard. You guys have a great solution that I like. And I love the roots from the software engineering background because that's the hardest thing right now, is how do you scale the software, making things simpler and easier. And when things happen, you don't want to disrupt the tool chains, you want to make sure the code is right, you guys have a unique solution. Can you take a minute to explain what it is and why it's so important? >> Tommy: Yeah, I'll use a little bit of my experience to explain it. I was the CTO of a company that had 300 engineers, and sharing a handful of environments, really slowed everybody down, you bottleneck there. So in order to unlock the productivity of that team, developers need environments for development, they need it for testing, they need it for staging, you run your environments in production. So the environment is the key building block in every software development process. And like my last company, there were very few of them, one or two, everybody sharing them. And so the idea at Release is to make environments available on demand, so if a developer needs one for anything, they can spin one up. So if they want to write their code in a environment based in the cloud, they can do that, if they want to test on a poll request, an environment will automatically spin up. And the environments are full stack, include all the services, data, settings, configuration that runs the app. So developers literally get an isolated copy of the application, so they can develop knowing they're not stepping on other developers' toes. >> John: Can you give an example of what that looks like? Do they have to pre-configure the environment, or how does that work? Can you give an example? >> Yeah, sure. You have to, just like infrastructure is code, we call this environments is code. So you need to define your environment, which we have a lot of tools that help you do that. Analyze your repositories, help you define that environment. Now that you have the template for that, you can easily use that template to derive multiple environments out of it. A key part of this is everybody wants to make sure their development and data is secure. It runs within the AWS account of our customer. So we're the control plane that orchestrates it and the data and applications run within the context of their AWS account, so it's- >> John: What's the benefit? >> Tommy: Well, bottlenecking, increased developer productivity, developer happiness is a big one. Matt talks about this all the time, keeping developers in flow, so that they're focused on the job and not being distracted with, "Hey DevOps team, I need you to go spin up an environment." And a lot of times in larger organizations, not just the environments, but the process to get access to resources is a big issue. And so DevOps was designed to let developers take control of their own development process, but were still bottlenecking, waiting for environments, waiting for resources from the DevOps team, so this allows that self-service capability to really be there for the developer. >> Lisa: Matt, talk about... Target audience is the developer, talk about though... Distill that down into the business value. What am I, if I'm a financial services organization, or a hospital, or a retailer in e-commerce, what is my business value going to be with using technology like this and delighting those developers? >> Matt: I think there's three things that really matter to the developers and to the financial leader in the organization, A, developers are super expensive and they have a lot of opportunities. So if a developer's not happy and finding joy and productivity in what they're doing, they're going to look elsewhere. So that's the first thing, the second thing is that when you're running a business, productivity is one measure, but also, are you shipping something confidently the first time, or do you have to go back and fix things? And by having the environment spun up with all of your name space established, your tendencies are managed, all of your data being brought in, you're testing against a very high fidelity version of your application when you check in code. And so by doing that, you're testing things more quickly, and they talk a lot about shifting left, but it's making that environment as fully functional and featured as possible. So you're looking at something as it will appear in production, not a subset of that. And then the last thing, and this is one where the value of Figma is very important, a lot of times, you'll spin up an environment on AWS and you may forget about it and might just keep running and chewing up resources. Knowing that when you're done it goes away, means that you're not spending money on things just sitting there on your AWS instance, which is very important for competitors. >> Lisa: So I hear retention of developers, you're learning that developers, obviously business impact their speed to value as well. >> Tommy: Yep. >> And trust, you're enabling your customers to instill trust in their developers with them. >> Tommy: That's right, yeah. >> Matt: And trust and delight, they can be across purposes, a developer wants to move fast and they're rewarded for being creative, whereas your IT team, they're rewarded for predictability and consistency, and those can be opposing forces. And by giving developers a way to move quickly and the artifact that they're creating is something that the IT team understands and works within their processes, allows you to let both teams do what they care about and not create a friction there. >> John: What about the environment as a service? I love that 'cause it makes it sound like it's scaling in the cloud, which you have mentioned you do that. Is it for companies that are working together? So I don't want to spin up an environment, say we're a businesses, "Hey, let's do a deal. "I'm going to integrate my solution into yours. "I got to get my developers to maybe test it out, "so I'm spinning up an environment with you guys," then what do I do? >> Tommy: Well as far as if you're a customer of ours, is that the way you're asking? Well, a lot of times, it's being used a lot in internal development. So that's the first use case, is I'm a developer, you have cross collaboration amongst teams, so a developer tools. And what you're talking about is more, I'm using an environment for a demo environment, or I'm creating a new feature that I want to share with a customer, That's also possible. So if I'm a developer and I'm building a feature and it's for a specific customer of mine, I can build that feature and preview it with the customer before it actually goes into production. So it's a sandbox product development area for the developers to be actually integrating with their customers very, very quickly before it actually makes its way to all of the end users. >> A demo? >> It could be a demo. >> It's like a collaboration feature? >> Sandbox environment. We have customers- >> Kind of like we're seeing more of this collaboration with developers. This becomes a well- >> Tommy: And it's not even just collaboration with internal teams, it's now you're collaborating with your customer while you're building your software, which is actually really difficult to do if you only have one environment, you can't have- >> John: Yeah, I think that's a killer right there, that's the killer app right there. >> Matt: Instead of sending a Figma to a customer, this is what's going to look like, it's two dimensions, this is the app. That is a massive, powerful difference. >> Absolutely. In terms of customer delay, customer retention, employee engagement, those are all inextricably linked. Can you share, Matt, the voice of the customer? I just saw the release with TripActions, I've been a TripActions user myself, but give us this sense, I know that you're brand new, but the voice of the customer, what is it? What is it reflecting? How is it reinforcing your value prop? >> Matt: I think the voice that comes through consistently is instead of spending time building the system that is hard to do and complicated and takes our engineering cycles, our engineers can focus on whether it's platform engineering, new features and whatnot, it's more valuable to the company to build features, it's more exciting for a developer to build features and to not have to keep going back and doing things manually, which you're doing a... This is what we do all day long. To do it as a sideline is hard. And the customers are excited 'cause they get to move onto higher value activities with their time. >> Lisa: And everybody wants that, everybody wants to be able to contribute high value projects, programs for their organization rather than doing the boring stuff. >> Tommy: Yeah. I think with TripActions specifically, a lot of platform engineering teams are trying to build something like this in house, and it's a lot of toil, it's work that isn't value added, it enables developers to get their job done, but it's not really helping the business deliver a feature to the user. And so this whole movement of platform engineering, this is what those groups are doing and we're a big enabler to those teams, to get that to market faster. >> John: You're targeting businesses, enterprises, developers. >> That's right. >> Mainly, right, developers? >> Yeah. >> What's the business model? How are you guys making money? What's the strategy there? >> Yeah, I mean we really like to align with the value that we deliver. So if a user creates an environment, we get paid when that happens. So it's an on-demand, if you use the environment, you pay us, if you don't, you don't. >> John: Typical cloud-based pricing. >> Yeah. >> Pay as you go. >> Tommy: Usage based pricing. >> Is there a trigger on certain of how it gets cost? Is it more of the environment size, or what's the- >> Yeah, I mean there's a different tier for if you have really large, complicated environments. And that's the trend, that distributed applications aren't simple anymore, so if you have a small little rails app, it's going to be cheaper than if you have a massive distributed system. But manageable, the idea here is that this should help you save money over investing deeply into a deep platform engineering team. So it's got to be cost effective and we're really cognizant of that. >> So you got a simple approach, which is great. Talk about the alternative. What does it look like for a customer that you want to target? What's their environment? What does it look like, so that if I'm a customer, I would know I need to call you guys at Relief Hub. Is it sprawl? Is it multiple tool chains? Chaos, mayhem? What does it look like? >> Tommy: Yeah, let's have Matty, Matt could do this one. >> When you look at the systems right now, I think complexity is the word that keeps coming up, which is that, whether you're talking about multi-cloud or actually doing it, that's a huge thing. Microservices proliferation are happening over and over again, different languages. What I'm excited about with Release, is not dissimilar from what we saw in the Docker movement, which is that there's all this great stuff out there, but there's that common interface there, so you can actually run it locally on your machine, do your dev and test, and know that it's going to operate with, am I using Couchbase or Postgres or whatever, I don't care, it's going to work this way. Similar with Release, people are having to build a lot of these bespoke solutions that are purpose built for one thing and they're not designed to the platform. And the platform for platform engineering gives us a way to take that complexity out the equation, so you're not limited to what you can do, or, "Oh crud, I want to move to something else, "I have to start over again," that process is going to be consistent no matter what you're doing. So you're not worried about evolution and success and growth, you know that you've got a foundation that's going to grow. Doing it on your own, you have to build things in that very bespoke, specific manner, and that just creates a lot more toil than you'd want to get if you were using a platform and focusing on the value after your company. >> Matt Klein was just on here. He was with Lyft, he was the one who open source Envoy, which became very popular. We asked him what he thought about the future and he's like, it's too hard to work with all this stuff. He was mentioning Yamo code, but he got triggered a little bit, but his point was there's a lot to pull together. And it sounds like you guys have this solution, back in the old days, spin up some EC2, compute, similar way, right? "Hey, I don't want to person a server, I person a server, rack and stack, top of rack switch, I'm going to go to the cloud, use EC2. >> Tommy: Yeah, I mean just think about if- >> You're an environment version of that. Why wait for it to be built? >> Yeah. >> Is that what I'm getting- >> Yeah, I mean, and an application today isn't just the EC2 instances, it's all of your data, it's your configuration. Building it one time is actually complicated to get your app to work it, doing it lots of times to make your developers productive with copies of that, is incredibly difficult. >> John: So you saw the problem of developers waiting around for someone to provision an environment. >> Tommy: That's right. >> So they can do whatever they want to do. >> Tommy: That's right. >> Test, ship, do, play around, test the customer. Whatever that project scope is, they're waiting around versus spinning up an environment. >> Yeah, absolutely, 100%. >> And that's the service. >> That's what it is. >> Take time, reduce the steps it takes, make it more productive. >> And build an amazing developer experience that you know your developers are going to love. If you're at Facebook or Google, they have thousands of DevOps people building platforms. If you're a company that doesn't have that resource, you have a choice of go build this yourself, which is a distraction, or invest in something like us and focus on your core. >> John: You got Matt on board, got a new CMO, you got enterprise class features and I saw the press release. Talk about the origination story, why you developed it, and then take a minute to give a plug for the company, on what you're looking for, I'm sure you're hiring, what's going on? >> Tommy: Yeah, I've been an entrepreneur for 20 years. My last experience at TrueCar, I saw this problem firsthand. And as the CTO of that company, I looked into the market for a solution to this, 'cause we had this problem of 300 developers, environments needed for everything. So we ended up building it ourselves and it costs multiple millions of dollars to build it. And so as the buyer at the time, I was like, man, I would've spent to solve this, and I just couldn't. So as a software engineer at heart, having seen this problem my entire career, it was just a natural thing to go work on. So yeah, I mean, for anybody that wants to create unlimited environments for their team, just go to releasehub.com. It's pretty self-explanatory, how to give it a shot and try it out. >> Environments is a service, from someone who had the problem, fixed it, built it- >> That's right. >> For other people. What are you guys hiring, looking for some people? >> Yeah, we have engineering hires, sales hires, Matt's got a few marketing hires coming, >> Matt: I was going to say, got some marketing coming. >> Selfishly he has that. (John laughs) The team's growing and it's a really great place to work. We're 100% remote. Part of this helps that, we build this product and we use it every day, so you get to work on what you build and dog food, it's pretty cool. >> Great solution. >> We love remote development environments. Being here and watching that process where building a product and a feature for the team to work better, wow, we should share this with customers. And the agility to deliver that was really impressive, and definitely reinforced how excited I am to be here 'cause we're building stuff for ourselves, which is- >> Matt: Well we're psyched that you're here in theCUBE. Matt, what's your vision for marketing? You got a hiring plan, you got a vision, I'm sure you got some things to do. What's your goals? What's your objective? >> My goal is... The statement people say, you can't market to developers. And I don't want to market to developers, I want to make sure developers are made aware of how they can learn new things in a really efficient way, so their capabilities grow. If we get people more and more successful with what they're doing, give them joy, reduce their toil and create that flow, we help them do things that make you excited, more creative. And that's to me, the reward of this. You teach people how to do that. And wow, these customers, they're building the greatest innovations in the world, I get to be part of that, which is awesome. >> Lisa: Yeah. Delighted developers has so many positive business outcomes that I'm sure organizations in any industry are going to be able to achieve. So exciting stuff, guys. Thank you so much for joining John and me on the program. Good luck with the growth and congrats on what you've enabled so far in just a few short years. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> Thanks you so much. >> Thank you for having us on. >> Appreciate it. >> Pleasure. >> Thank you. >> For our guests and for John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, live in Detroit, at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon '22. We're back after a short break. (soft music)

(upbeat synth intro music) >> Hey everyone and welcome to Detroit, Michigan. theCUBE is live at KubeCon CloudNativeCon, North America 2022. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. John, this event, the keynote that we got out of a little while ago was, standing room only. The Solutions hall is packed. There's so much buzz. The community is continuing to mature. They're continuing to contribute. One of the big topics is Cloud Native at Scale. >> Yeah, I mean, this is a revolution happening. The developers are coming on board. They will be running companies. Developers, structurally, will be transforming companies with just, they got to get powered somewhere. And, I think, the Cloud Native at Scale speaks to getting everything under the covers, scaling up to support developers. In this next segment, we have two Kube alumnis. We're going to talk about Cloud Native at Scale. Some of the things that need to be there in a unified architecture, should be great. >> All right, it's going to be fantastic. Let's go under the covers here, as John mentioned, two alumni with us, Madhura Maskasky joins us, co-founder of Platform9. Sirish Raghuram, also co-founder of Platform9 joins us. Welcome back to theCUBE. Great to have you guys here at KubeCon on the floor in Detroit. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Excited to be here >> So, talk to us. You guys have some news, Madhura, give us the sneak peak. What's going on? >> Definitely, we are very excited. So, we have John, not too long ago we spoke about our very new open source project called Arlon. And, we were talking about the launch of Arlon in terms of its first release and etcetera. And, just fresh hot of the press, we, Platform9 had its 5.6 release which is its most recent release of our product. And there's a number of key interesting announcements that we'd like to share as part of that. I think, the prominent one is, Platform9 added support for EKS Kubernetes cluster management. And, so, this is part of our vision of being able to add value, no matter where you run your Kubernetes clusters, because, Kubernetes or cluster management, is increasingly becoming commodity. And, so, I think the companies that succeed are going to add value on top, and are going to add value in a way that helps end users, developers, DevOps solve problems that they encounter as they start running these environments, with a lot of scale and a lot of diversity. So, towards that, key features in the 5.6 six release. First, is the very first package release of the product online, which is the open source project that we've kicked off to do cluster and application, entire cluster management at scale. And, then there's few other very interesting capabilities coming out of that. >> I want to just highlight something and then get your thoughts on this next, this release 5.6. First of all, 5.6, it's been around for a while, five reps, but, now, more than ever, you mentioned the application in Ops. You're seeing WebAssembly trends, you're seeing developers getting more and more advanced capability. It's going to accelerate their ability to write code and compose applications. So, you're seeing a application tsunami coming. So, the pressure is okay, they're going to need infrastructure to run all that stuff. And, so, you're seeing more clusters being spun up, more intelligence trying to automate. So you got the automation, so you got the dynamic, the power dynamic of developers and then under the covers. What does 5.6 do to push the mission forward for developers? How would you guys summarize that for people watching? what's in it for them right now? >> So it's, I think going back to what you just said, right, the breadth of applications that people are developing on top of something like Kubernetes and Cloud Native, is always growing. So, it's not just a number of clusters, but also the fact that different applications and different development groups need these clusters to be composed differently. So, a certain version of the application may require some set of build components, add-ons, and operators, and extensions. Whereas, a different application may require something entirely different. And, now, you take this in an enterprise context, right. Like, we had a major media company that worked with us. They have more than 10,000 pods being used by thousands of developers. And, you now think about the breadth of applications, the hundreds of different applications being built. how do you consistently build, and compose, and manage, a large number of communities clusters with a a large variety of extensions that these companies are trying to manage? That's really what I think 5.6 is bringing to the table. >> Scott Johnston just was on here early as the CEO of Docker. He said there's more applications being pushed now than in the history of application development combined. There's more and more apps coming, more and more pressure on the system. >> And, that's where, if you go, there's this famous landscape chart of the CNCF ecosystem technologies. And, the problem that people here have is, how do they put it all together? How do they make sense of it? And, what 5.6 and Arlon and what Platform9 is doing is, it's helping you declaratively capture blueprints of these clusters, using templates, and be able to manage a small number of blueprints that helps you make order out of the chaos of these hundreds of different projects, that are all very interesting and powerful. >> So Project Arlon really helping developers produce the configuration and the deployment complexities of Kubernetes at scale. >> That's exactly right. >> Talk about the, the impact on the business side. Ease of use, what's the benefits for 5.6? What's does it turn into for a benefit standpoint? >> Yeah, I think the biggest benefit, right, is being able to do Cloud Native at Scale faster, and while still keeping a very lean Ops team that is able to spend, let's say 70 plus percent of their time, caring for your actual business bread and butter applications, and not for the infrastructure that serves it, right. If you take the analogy of a restaurant, you don't want to spend 70% of your time in building the appliances or setting up your stoves etcetera. You want to spend 90 plus percent of your time cooking your own meal, because, that is your core key ingredient. But, what happens today in most enterprises is, because, of the level of automation, the level of hands-on available tooling, being there or not being there, majority of the ops time, I would say 50, 70% plus, gets spent in making that kitchen set up and ready, right. And, that is exactly what we are looking to solve, online. >> What would a customer look like, or prospect environment look like that would be really ready for platform9? What, is it more apps being pushed, big push on application development, or is it the toil of like really inefficient infrastructure, or gaps in skills of people? What does an environment look like? So, someone needs to look at their environment and say, okay, maybe I should call platform9. What's it look like? >> So, we generally see customers fall into two ends of the barbell, I would say. One, is the advanced communities users that are running, I would say, typically, 30 or more clusters already. These are the people that already know containers. They know, they've container wise... >> Savvy teams. >> They're savvy teams, a lot of them are out here. And for them, the problem is, how do I manage the complexity at scale? Because, now, the problem is how do I scale us? So, that's one end of the barbell. The other end of the barbell, is, how do we help make Kubernetes accessible to companies that, as what I would call the mainstream enterprise. We're in Detroit in Motown, right, And, we're outside of the echo chamber of the Silicon Valley. Here's the biggest truth, right. For all the progress that we made as a community, less than 20% of applications in the enterprise today are running on Kubernetes. So, what does it take? I would say it's probably less than 10%, okay. And, what does it take, to grow that in order of magnitude? That's the other kind of customer that we really serve, is, because, we have technologies like Kube Word, which helps them take their existing applications and start adopting Kubernetes as a directional roadmap, but, while using the existing applications that they have, without refactoring it. So, I would say those are the two ends of the barbell. The early adopters that are looking for an easier way to adopt Kubernetes as an architectural pattern. And, the advanced savvy users, for whom the problem is, how do they operationally solve the complexity of managing at scale. >> And, what is your differentiation message to both of those different user groups, as you talked about in terms of the number of users of Kubernetes so far? The community groundswell is tremendous, but, there's a lot of opportunity there. You talked about some of the barriers. What's your differentiation? What do you come in saying, this is why Platform9 is the right one for you, in the both of these groups. >> And it's actually a very simple message. We are the simplest and easiest way for a new user that is adopting Kubernetes as an architectural pattern, to get started with existing applications that they have, on the infrastructure that they have. Number one. And, for the savvy teams, our technology helps you operate with greater scale, with constrained operations teams. Especially, with the economy being the way it is, people are not going to get a lot more budget to go hire a lot more people, right. So, that all of them are being asked to do more with less. And, our team, our technology, and our teams, help you do more with less. >> I was talking with Phil Estes last night from AWS. He's here, he is one of their engineer open source advocates. He's always on the ground pumping up AWS. They've had great success, Amazon Web Services, with their EKS. A lot of people adopting clusters on the cloud and on-premises. But Amazon's doing well. You guys have, I think, a relationship with AWS. What's that, If I'm an Amazon customer, how do I get involved with Platform9? What's the hook? Where's the value? What's the product look like? >> Yeah, so, and it kind of goes back towards the point we spoke about, which is, Kubernetes is going to increasingly get commoditized. So, customers are going to find the right home whether it's hyperscalers, EKS, AKS, GKE, or their own infrastructure, to run Kubernetes. And, so, where we want to be at, is, with a project like Arlon, Sirish spoke about the barbell strategy, on one end there is these advanced Kubernetes users, majority of them are running Kubernetes on AKS, right? Because, that was the easiest platform that they found to get started with. So, now, they have a challenge of running these 50 to 100 clusters across various regions of Amazon, across their DevTest, their staging, their production. And, that results in a level of chaos that these DevOps or platform... >> So you come in and solve that. >> That is where we come in and we solve that. And it, you know, Amazon or EKS, doesn't give you tooling to solve that, right. It makes it very easy for you to create those number of clusters. >> Well, even in one hyperscale, let's say AWS, you got regions and locations... >> Exactly >> ...that's kind of a super cloud problem, we're seeing, opportunity problem, and opportunity is that, on Amazon, availability zones is one thing, but, now, also, you got regions. >> That is absolutely right. You're on point John. And the way we solve it, is by using infrastructure as a code, by using GitOps principles, right? Where you define it once, you define it in a yaml file, you define exactly how for your DevTest environment you want your entire infrastructure to look like, including EKS. And then you stamp it out. >> So let me, here's an analogy, I'll throw out this. You guys are like, someone learns how to drive a car, Kubernetes clusters, that's got a couple clusters. Then once they know how to drive a car, you give 'em the sports car. You allow them to stay on Amazon and all of a sudden go completely distributed, Edge, Global. >> I would say that a lot of people that we meet, we feel like they're figuring out how to build a car with the kit tools that they have. And we give them a car that's ready to go and doesn't require them to be trying to... ... they can focus on driving the car, rather than trying to build the car. >> You don't want people to stop, once they get the progressions, they hit that level up on Kubernetes, you guys give them the ability to go much bigger and stronger. >> That's right. >> To accelerate that applications. >> Building a car gets old for people at a certain point in time, and they really want to focus on is driving it and enjoying it. >> And we got four right behind us, so, we'll get them involved. So that's... >> But, you're not reinventing the wheel. >> We're not at all, because, what we are building is two very, very differentiated solutions, right. One, is, we're the simplest and easiest way to build and run Cloud Native private clouds. And, this is where the operational complexity of trying to do it yourself. You really have to be a car builder, to be able to do this with our Platform9. This is what we do uniquely that nobody else does well. And, the other end is, we help you operate at scale, in the hyperscalers, right. Those are the two problems that I feel, whether you're on-prem, or in the cloud, these are the two problems people face. How do you run a private cloud more easily, more efficiently? And, how do you govern at scale, especially in the public clouds? >> I want to get to two more points before we run out of time. Arlon and Argo CD as a service. We previously mentioned up coming into KubeCon, but, here, you guys couldn't be more relevant, 'cause Intuit was on stage on the keynote, getting an award for their work. You know, Argo, it comes from Intuit. That ArgoCon was in Mountain View. You guys were involved in that. You guys were at the center of all this super cloud action, if you will, or open source. How does Arlon fit into the Argo extension? What is Argo CD as a service? Who's going to take that one? I want to get that out there, because, Arlon has been talked about a lot. What's the update? >> I can talk about it. So, one of the things that Arlon uses behind the scenes, is it uses Argo CD, open source Argo CD as a service, as its key component to do the continuous deployment portion of its entire, the infrastructure management story, right. So, we have been very strongly partnering with Argo CD. We, really know and respect the Intuit team a lot. We, as part of this effort, in 5.6 release, we've also put out Argo CD as a service, in its GA version, right. Because, the power of running Arlon along with Argo CD as a service, in our mind, is enabling you to run on one end, your infrastructure as a scale, through GitOps, and infrastructure as a code practices. And on the other end, your entire application fleet, at scale, right. And, just marrying the two, really gives you the ability to perform that automation that we spoke about. >> But, and avoid the problem of sprawl when you have distributed teams, you have now things being bolted on, more apps coming out. So, this is really solves that problem, mainly. >> That is exactly right. And if you think of it, the way those problems are solved today, is, kind of in disconnected fashion, which is on one end you have your CI/CD tools, like Argo CD is an excellent one. There's some other choices, which are managed by a separate team to automate your application delivery. But, that team, is disconnected from the team that does the infrastructure management. And the infrastructure management is typically done through a bunch of Terraform scripts, or a bunch of ad hoc homegrown scripts, which are very difficult to manage. >> So, Arlon changes sure, as they change the complexity and also the sprawl. But, that's also how companies can die. They're growing fast, they're adding more capability. That's what trouble starts, right? >> I think in two ways, right. Like one is, as Madhura said, I think one of the common long-standing problems we've had, is, how do infrastructure and application teams communicate and work together, right. And, you've seen Argo's really get adopted by the application teams, but, it's now something that we are making accessible for the infrastructure teams to also bring the best practices of how application teams are managing applications. You can now use that to manage infrastructure, right. And, what that's going to do is, help you ultimately reduce waste, reduce inefficiency, and improve the developer experience. Because, that's what it's all about, ultimately. >> And, I know that you just released 5.6 today, congratulations on that. Any customer feedback yet? Any, any customers that you've been able to talk to, or have early access? >> Yeah, one of our large customers is a large SaaS retail company that is B2C SaaS. And, their feedback has been that this, basically, helps them bring exactly what I said in terms of bring some of the best practices that they wanted to adopt in the application space, down to the infrastructure management teams, right. And, we are also hearing a lot of customers, that I would say, large scale public cloud users, saying, they're really struggling with the complexity of how to tame the complexity of navigating that landscape and making it consumable for organizations that have thousands of developers or more. And that's been the feedback, is that this is the first open source standard mechanism that allows them to kind of reuse something, as opposed to everybody feels like they've had to build ad hoc solutions to solve this problem so far. >> Having a unified infrastructure is great. My final question, for me, before I end up, for Lisa to ask her last question is, if you had to explain Platform9, why you're relevant and cool today, what would you say? >> If I take that? I would say that the reason why Platform9, the reason why we exist, is, putting together a cloud, a hybrid cloud strategy for an enterprise today, historically, has required a lot of DIY, a lot of building your own car. Before you can drive a car, or you can enjoy the car, you really learn to build and operate the car. And that's great for maybe a 100 tech companies of the world, but, for the next 10,000 or 50,000 enterprises, they want to be able to consume a car. And that's why Platform9 exists, is, we are the only company that makes this delightfully simple and easy for companies that have a hybrid cloud strategy. >> Why you cool and relevant? How would you say it? >> Yeah, I think as Kubernetes becomes mainstream, as containers have become mainstream, I think automation at scale with ease, is going to be the key. And that's exactly what we help solve. Automation at scale and with ease. >> With ease and that differentiation. Guys, thank you so much for joining me. Last question, I guess, Madhura, for you, is, where can Devs go to learn more about 5.6 and get their hands on it? >> Absolutely. Go to platform9.com. There is info about 5.6 release, there's a press release, there's a link to it right on the website. And, if they want to learn about Arlon, it's an open source GitHub project. Go to GitHub and find out more about it. >> Excellent guys, thanks again for sharing what you're doing to really deliver Cloud Native at Scale in a differentiated way that adds ostensible value to your customers. John, and I, appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks so much >> Our pleasure. For our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Live from Detroit, Michigan at KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2022. Stick around, John and I will be back with our next guest. Just a minute. (light synth outro music)

>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi everybody. Welcome back to Las Vegas. You're watching the Cube's coverage of UI Path Forward. Five. We reach cruising altitude on day two. Christina Seacrest is here. She's the process Artificial intelligence and automation GPS automation leader at ey. And Bob PCIs, executive director for Intelligent Automation for the state of Tennessee. Folks, welcome to the cube. Thank you for Adam. >>Good >>To have you. Okay, I don't know if I messed up that title, Christina, but it's kind of interesting. You got process, you got ai, you got automation, you got gps. What's your role? >>I have a lot of rules, so thank you for that. Yeah, so my focus is first and foremost automation. So how do you get things like UI path into our clients, but also I focus specifically in our government and public sector clients. So sled specifically. So state local education. So that's why I'm here with the state of Tennessee. And then we also like to take it beyond automation. So how do you bring an artificial intelligence and all the technologies that come with that. So really full end to end spectrum of >>Automation. So Bob, when you think about the sort of the, the factors that are driving your organization of, how did you describe that, Those sort of external factors that inform your strategy. What, what's, what are the catalysts for how you determine to deploy technology? >>Well, it was primarily that we know tendency has a tendency to provide good customer service, but we want to get to a great status best in class, if you will. And we had an external advisory review where it said, Hey, you know, we could make automation to improve our customer experience. And so that was like a directive of the, the state leaders to go across the board and automate all processes statewide, starting with the 23 executive agencies. >>So where's the focus from that standpoint? Is it on just providing better interfaces to your constituents, your customers? Is it cutting costs or you actually have more budget to invest? Kind of a combination of >>Those? Yeah, so it's, it's really both qualitative and quantitative, right? So quantitative is where we're able to reduce hours and therefore we can redirect people to more less mundane work, if you will. And then qualitative is where we're able to reduce the errors, improve data quality, reduce cycle time for our citizens, you know, when they're making requests, et cetera. So it's, I think it's a combination of both of those quantitative and qualitative metrics that we are mandated in, in micromanaged, quite frankly to, to bring, make those >>Numbers. So I'm from Massachusetts, when I go to a a mass.gov website, I say, all this was done in the 1990s and you could just see where the different stovepipes were, were. But then every now and then you'll hit one and you'll say, Wow, okay, this is up to, it's such a great experience. And then the flip side of that is you want your employees to be happy and not have to do all this mundane work so you can retain the best people. You don't have to. So you're living that in, in state and, and local. So where did you start your automation journey? What role did EY play? Let's go. Yeah, >>Sure. So I, I, I think the thought for process automation was probably three or four years ago, but then we started the program about 18 months ago and there was a lot of, let's say behind the scenes work before we could bring EY in, you know, like what resources was I gonna have in, in the state that were gonna help me address all of the agency simultaneously, right? Cuz normally you'll see a project that'll do be more siloed across the state and say, we're gonna do this agency, we're gonna do this division. Well, you have 40 other agencies that are, you know, the momentum is it's just gonna fall, it wayside. So how we looked at it was let's blanket it and go across all 23 agencies at the same time, you know, identify common processes that are used across 40 divisions, for example, right? >>So, so what we basically did is we procured the software, you know, did the contracts, and then it was really about, I designed, I'm gonna say a multistream approach where they were, we could run multiple work streams, independent define all the architectures, required dev tests, production, the disaster recovery at the same time in parallel developed the center of excellence, the operation model, the processes, methodologies. And the third one was, let's go out to a few divisions, business administration, health, you know, health, human resources, and be able to do a process inventory to see what was there. And then based on that, there's all this theory of well let's do a proof of concept. Let's do a proof of technology, let's do apply. Well, the bottom line is rpa technology's been around for a long time. It's proven there's nothing to prove. But really what was important to prove before we decided to go, you know, full tilt was, you know, develop a proof of perceived business value. >>Are we gonna bring in the, the business value, the hours and the qu qualitative metrics that is expected by our ex executive team, The leadership, we were able to do that, you know, with the help of help of ey, we built out the prototypes and we got the green light to go forward, got ey to start, and then we just basically went pedal to the metal. We had our foundation already defined. We built up the architecture in less than one to two months. Now, in, in a public sector or private sector, it's just not heard of, right? But we have a tendency with EYs technical team, myself, we look around the, the road around the rock instead, the rock in the road, right? So we ended up coming up with a very unique, very easy to easy to handle architecture that was very scalable. And then were able to hit the ground running and deploy in production by December where head of >>Was EY involved in the whole, you know, dev test production, dr. Center of excellence, the, the process inventory or did you bring them in? Did you kind of do that internally then bring EY in for the proof of >>Value? EY was actually awarded the contract for soup to nuts, basically the first phase, which was those four work streams I told you about. And they worked with myself and the state of Tennessee infrastructure architecture teams. We needed to get these things defined and signed off the architecture so we could expedite getting them built out. And then they, and they basically ran all four work streams, you know, the process, inventory, the prototype, the, the proof of perceived business value, the building out the center of excellence, working with myself. And, and this wasn't just us in a, a vacuum, we ended up having to, I mean, I could do the strategy, I could do the technology and I could said the roadmap and all the good stuff, but we had to actually meet with a lot of the state or tendency organizations on change management. How do we end up putting this process or an automation in the middle of the, the normal traditional process, right? So there was a lot of interaction there and getting their feedback and then tweaking our operational model based on feedback from the state of Tennessee. So it was all very collective collaborative. I think that would be the keyword is collaborative and then building out everything. So then, and then we ended up going to the next way where they knew so much and we were, we had such a tight timeframe that we continued with ey. >>So Christina, Bob mentioned center of excellence a couple of times in the state of Tennessee, but then beyond state of Tennessee, other organizations you've worked with in this space, what's the relationship between center of excellence and this thing we've been hearing about over the last couple of days, the citizen developer has that been, has, has, has that been leveraged in the state of Tennessee? Bob, have you seen that leveraged in other places? Christina? What's that relationship look like? >>Yeah, so we don't leverage that, that model yet we have centralized model and there's reasons for that. So we don't end up having maverick's, runoff runoffs have one off, have, you know, have a a UI path version or down this division or have another RPA tool in another division, right? So then all of a sudden we're, we have a maintenance nightmare. Manageability nightmare. So we basically, you know, I I I negotiate an ELA with UI path, so therefore if anyone wants to go do another automation on another division, or they would basically follow our model, our design, our coe, our quality gates. We we're the gatekeepers to bring into production. >>Got it. Now, yeah. Now Christina, what's your perspective? Because I can imagine Nashville and Memphis might have very different ideas about a lot of things. Yeah. Little Tennessee reference there, but what, what, what about what, what about other places are you, are you seeing the citizen developer leveraged in, in some kinds of places more than others or >>What? Yeah. Yeah. And that's part of, because of the foundation we're building. Yeah. So we laid, you know, when, when Bob talks about the first phase of eight weeks, that was amazingly fast, even in that's ridiculous. Spoke about it to say you're gonna lay these four foundations. I was excited, like, I was like, wow, this, this is a very serious client. They wanna go fast and they wanna get that momentum, but the AUM was laid out so we could propel ourselves. So we are at 40 automations right now. We're in the works of creating 80 more automations in this next year. We'll be at 120 really quickly. The AUM is critical. And I will say at a client, I've, I've worked with over 50 clients on automation programs. The way state of Tennessee treats the aom and they abide by it, it is the living document of how you go and go fast. Got it. And the one thing I would say is it's also allowed us to have such immense quality. So I always talk about you put in forward, you put in another 80, we're at 98% uptime on all our automations, meaning they don't go down. And that's because of the AOM we set up. And the natural progression is going to be how do you take it to citizen developer? How do you take it to, we call, you know, process automation plus, >>But methodically, methodically, not just throwing it out at the beginning and, and hoping the chaos >>Works. Exactly. Exactly. And >>The ratio of of bots to automations, is that one to one or you have automation? Oh no, the single bot is doing multiple. So how many bots are you talking about? >>We're doing, Bob, you're gonna answer this better than I will, but the efficiency is amazing. We've been pushing that. >>So our ratio now, cause we have a high density architecture we put in is four bots, excuse me, four processes. The one bot and four bots, The one virtual machine EC two server. Right? So it's four to one, four to one. Now what we're going to get by next summer, we'll do more analysis. We'll probably get the six to one, six to one that's made serious shrinkage of our footprint from a machine, you know, management perspective from 60 down to seven right now we're gonna add the next chunk. We add another 80 automations in FIS gear 24. We're only gonna add two more bot, two more servers. Right? So that's only 10 running like close to 200 bucks. >>And, and is doing this on prem in the cloud? >>No, our, the architecture's fully >>Oh, cloud based >>Ct. Yeah. So we use UiPath SAS model. Yeah. Right. So that handles the orchestrator, the attended bots, all the other tooling you need automation hub, process minor et etc. Etc. Cetera. And then on the state side in aws we have, we use unattended bots, cert bots that have to go down into the legacy systems, et cetera. And they're sitting on EC two instances. >>Was there, was there a security not hole that you had to get through internally? What was that like? >>No, actually we, we, we were lock and step with the security team on this. I mean, there are some standards and templates and you know, what we had to follow, you know, but they're doing an assessment every single release, they do assessments on little bots, what systems it's activating or are accessing, et cetera. The data, because you have fedra data of FTI data, you know, in the public sector to make sure we're not touching it. >>Do you guys golf? >>I do, yeah. Not Well, yes, >>If you mean I I like golf but not don't golf well, but so you know what, what a mulligan is. If you had a Mulligan right, for the state of Tennessee, what'd you learn? What would you do differently? You know, what are some of the gotchas you see maybe Christina in, in other customers and then maybe specifically state of Tennessee, >>Right? I would say, you know, it is the intangibles. So when we talk about our clients that go fast and go big, like state of Tennessee, it's because that, that we call it phase zero that gets done that Bob did. It's about making sure you've got the sponsorship. So we've got executive sponsorship all the way up. You've got amazing stakeholder engagement. So you're communicating the value of what we're trying to do. And you're, you're showing them the value. We have been really focused on the return on investment and we'll talk a little bit about that, but it's how do you make sure that when you do, you know, states are different with those agencies, you have such an opportunity to maximize return on investment if you do it right, because you're not talking about automation in one agency, you're talking it across multiple agencies. We call that the multiplier effect. And that's huge. And if you understand that and how to actually apply that, the value you get is amazing. So I, I don't, I can't say there's a mulligan here, Bob, you may think of some, I know on other clients, if you don't line up your stakeholders and you don't set the expectations early on, you meander and you may get five, six automations in over the year. You know, when I go to clients and say, we're doing 40, we're doing 80, they're like, >>Wow, that's the, but that's the bottom line. Gotcha. Is if you, if you want to have an operational impact and have multiple zeros, you gotta go through that process that you said up front. >>Exactly. A >>Anything you do differently, Bob? >>Well, I I what I do differently, I mean, I think, I mean we, we did get executive sponsorship, you know, and in one area, but we still have to go out to all the 23 agencies and get, and bring awareness and kind of like set the hook to bring 'em in, right? Bring 'em to the, to the, to the lake. Right. And, and I think if, if it was more of a blanket top down, getting every agency to agree to, you know, in investigate automation, it would've been a lot easier. So we're, we're, we're getting it done. We've gone through 13 agencies already and less than a year, all of our releases are sprinkling across multiple agencies. So it's not like a silo. I'll look at that. Everyone at every agency is being impacted. So I think that's great. But I, I think our, our Mueller now is just trying to make sure we have enough backlog to do the next sprints. >>Is it, you know, the ROI on these initiatives is, is, is so clear and so fast. Is it self-funding? Is there gain sharing or do you just give business, give money back to the state and have to scramble for more? Do you get to, you know, get a lick off that cone? >>Unfortunately we don't, but I, I, I try to see if we could get some property like, nah, we don't do that. It's all cost, cost based. But, but our ROI is very attractive, I think for, for doing a whole state, you know, transformation. I think our ROI is three and a half to four years. Right. And that's pretty mind blowing. Even if you look at private sector or, I, I think some of the, the key things which people are noticing, even though we're in public sector, we're we are very nimble. This project is extremely nimble. We've had people come in, exactly, we need this, so we're gonna get penalized. Okay, knock it out in four hours, four days. Right? So it's that nimbleness that you just don't hear of even in private sector or public sector. And we're just able to do that for all the collaboration we do across ey, across myself and across all the other organizations that I, that I kind of drag along or what have, >>What do you, what do you, do you see any limits to the opportunities here? I mean, is this a decade long opportunity? Is you have that much runway >>Or that's just not my dna, so we're gonna, we're gonna probably do it like in four years, but Well, when >>You say do it, I mean, will you be done at that point? Or do you see the weight, >>Look at, you know, we could boil the ocean and I think this is one of the reasons why we're successful is we could boil the ocean and and be, it will be 10 attended 20 year program. Yeah. Okay. Or we looked at it, we had some of EY guys look at it and say, I said, what's the 25 80 rule? Meaning, you know, give me, So if we had 500 processes, tell me how many processes will gimme 80% of the hours. And it was 125, it was a 25 80 rule. I said, that's what we're doing it, we're doing, we're gonna do the 80% of the hours quantifiably. Now when we're done with that pass, then we'll have those other ones that are bringing 20% of the hours, that's when we might be bringing citizens in. That's what we're bringing state workers in. But at that same time, we will be going back in the wave and doing advanced ai. Right. Or advance ia, in other words. So right now we do rpa, ocr, icr, but you know, there's NL ml nps, there's virtual agents and stuff. So that's like the wave we're gonna do through the ones we've already gone through. Got it. Right. So it'll probably be a two or three wave or iterations. >>Cool. Guys, thanks so much for coming into the cube. Great story. Really appreciate you taking us through it. Thank you so much for having us. You're very welcome. All right, keep it right there. Dave Nicholson. The Dave ante. We back at UI path forward five from the Venetian in Las Vegas. Keep it right there.

>>Oracle continues to enhance my sequel Heatwave at a very rapid pace. The company is now in its fourth major release since the original announcement in December 2020. 1 of the main criticisms of my sequel, Heatwave, is that it only runs on O. C I. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and as a lock in to Oracle's Cloud. Oracle recently announced that heat wave is now going to be available in AWS Cloud and it announced its intent to bring my sequel Heatwave to Azure. So my secret heatwave on AWS is a significant TAM expansion move for Oracle because of the momentum AWS Cloud continues to show. And evidently the Heatwave Engineering team has taken the development effort from O. C I. And is bringing that to A W S with a number of enhancements that we're gonna dig into today is senior vice president. My sequel Heatwave at Oracle is back with me on a cube conversation to discuss the latest heatwave news, and we're eager to hear any benchmarks relative to a W S or any others. Nippon has been leading the Heatwave engineering team for over 10 years and there's over 100 and 85 patents and database technology. Welcome back to the show and good to see you. >>Thank you. Very happy to be back. >>Now for those who might not have kept up with the news, uh, to kick things off, give us an overview of my sequel, Heatwave and its evolution. So far, >>so my sequel, Heat Wave, is a fully managed my secret database service offering from Oracle. Traditionally, my secret has been designed and optimised for transaction processing. So customers of my sequel then they had to run analytics or when they had to run machine learning, they would extract the data out of my sequel into some other database for doing. Unlike processing or machine learning processing my sequel, Heat provides all these capabilities built in to a single database service, which is my sequel. He'd fake So customers of my sequel don't need to move the data out with the same database. They can run transaction processing and predicts mixed workloads, machine learning, all with a very, very good performance in very good price performance. Furthermore, one of the design points of heat wave is is a scale out architecture, so the system continues to scale and performed very well, even when customers have very large late assignments. >>So we've seen some interesting moves by Oracle lately. The collaboration with Azure we've we've covered that pretty extensively. What was the impetus here for bringing my sequel Heatwave onto the AWS cloud? What were the drivers that you considered? >>So one of the observations is that a very large percentage of users of my sequel Heatwave, our AWS users who are migrating of Aurora or so already we see that a good percentage of my secret history of customers are migrating from GWS. However, there are some AWS customers who are still not able to migrate the O. C. I to my secret heat wave. And the reason is because of, um, exorbitant cost, which was charges. So in order to migrate the workload from AWS to go see, I digress. Charges are very high fees which becomes prohibitive for the customer or the second example we have seen is that the latency of practising a database which is outside of AWS is very high. So there's a class of customers who would like to get the benefits of my secret heatwave but were unable to do so and with this support of my secret trip inside of AWS, these customers can now get all the grease of the benefits of my secret he trip without having to pay the high fees or without having to suffer with the poorly agency, which is because of the ws architecture. >>Okay, so you're basically meeting the customer's where they are. So was this a straightforward lifted shift from from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to AWS? >>No, it is not because one of the design girls we have with my sequel, Heatwave is that we want to provide our customers with the best price performance regardless of the cloud. So when we decided to offer my sequel, he headed west. Um, we have optimised my sequel Heatwave on it as well. So one of the things to point out is that this is a service with the data plane control plane and the console are natively running on AWS. And the benefits of doing so is that now we can optimise my sequel Heatwave for the E. W s architecture. In addition to that, we have also announced a bunch of new capabilities as a part of the service which will also be available to the my secret history of customers and our CI, But we just announced them and we're offering them as a part of my secret history of offering on AWS. >>So I just want to make sure I understand that it's not like you just wrapped your stack in a container and stuck it into a W s to be hosted. You're saying you're actually taking advantage of the capabilities of the AWS cloud natively? And I think you've made some other enhancements as well that you're alluding to. Can you maybe, uh, elucidate on those? Sure. >>So for status, um, we have taken the mind sequel Heatwave code and we have optimised for the It was infrastructure with its computer network. And as a result, customers get very good performance and price performance. Uh, with my secret he trade in AWS. That's one performance. Second thing is, we have designed new interactive counsel for the service, which means that customers can now provision there instances with the council. But in addition, they can also manage their schemas. They can. Then court is directly from the council. Autopilot is integrated. The council we have introduced performance monitoring, so a lot of capabilities which we have introduced as a part of the new counsel. The third thing is that we have added a bunch of new security features, uh, expose some of the security features which were part of the My Secret Enterprise edition as a part of the service, which gives customers now a choice of using these features to build more secure applications. And finally, we have extended my secret autopilot for a number of old gpus cases. In the past, my secret autopilot had a lot of capabilities for Benedict, and now we have augmented my secret autopilot to offer capabilities for elderly people. Includes as well. >>But there was something in your press release called Auto thread. Pooling says it provides higher and sustained throughput. High concerns concerns concurrency by determining Apple number of transactions, which should be executed. Uh, what is that all about? The auto thread pool? It seems pretty interesting. How does it affect performance? Can you help us understand that? >>Yes, and this is one of the capabilities of alluding to which we have added in my secret autopilot for transaction processing. So here is the basic idea. If you have a system where there's a large number of old EP transactions coming into it at a high degrees of concurrency in many of the existing systems of my sequel based systems, it can lead to a state where there are few transactions executing, but a bunch of them can get blocked with or a pilot tried pulling. What we basically do is we do workload aware admission control and what this does is it figures out, what's the right scheduling or all of these algorithms, so that either the transactions are executing or as soon as something frees up, they can start executing, so there's no transaction which is blocked. The advantage to the customer of this capability is twofold. A get significantly better throughput compared to service like Aurora at high levels of concurrency. So at high concurrency, for instance, uh, my secret because of this capability Uh oh, thread pulling offers up to 10 times higher compared to Aurora, that's one first benefit better throughput. The second advantage is that the true part of the system never drops, even at high levels of concurrency, whereas in the case of Aurora, the trooper goes up, but then, at high concurrency is, let's say, starting, uh, level of 500 or something. It depends upon the underlying shit they're using the troopers just dropping where it's with my secret heatwave. The truth will never drops. Now, the ramification for the customer is that if the truth is not gonna drop, the user can start off with a small shape, get the performance and be a show that even the workload increases. They will never get a performance, which is worse than what they're getting with lower levels of concurrency. So this let's leads to customers provisioning a shape which is just right for them. And if they need, they can, uh, go with the largest shape. But they don't like, you know, over pay. So those are the two benefits. Better performance and sustain, uh, regardless of the level of concurrency. >>So how do we quantify that? I know you've got some benchmarks. How can you share comparisons with other cloud databases especially interested in in Amazon's own databases are obviously very popular, and and are you publishing those again and get hub, as you have done in the past? Take us through the benchmarks. >>Sure, So benchmarks are important because that gives customers a sense of what performance to expect and what price performance to expect. So we have run a number of benchmarks. And yes, all these benchmarks are available on guitar for customers to take a look at. So we have performance results on all the three castle workloads, ol DB Analytics and Machine Learning. So let's start with the Rdp for Rdp and primarily because of the auto thread pulling feature. We show that for the IPCC for attended dataset at high levels of concurrency, heatwave offers up to 10 times better throughput and this performance is sustained, whereas in the case of Aurora, the performance really drops. So that's the first thing that, uh, tend to alibi. Sorry, 10 gigabytes. B B C c. I can come and see the performance are the throughput is 10 times better than Aurora for analytics. We have done a comparison of my secret heatwave in AWS and compared with Red Ship Snowflake Googled inquiry, we find that the price performance of my secret heatwave compared to read ship is seven times better. So my sequel, Heat Wave in AWS, provides seven times better price performance than red ship. That's a very, uh, interesting results to us. Which means that customers of Red Shift are really going to take the service seriously because they're gonna get seven times better price performance. And this is all running in a W s so compared. >>Okay, carry on. >>And then I was gonna say, compared to like, Snowflake, uh, in AWS offers 10 times better price performance. And compared to Google, ubiquity offers 12 times better price performance. And this is based on a four terabyte p PCH workload. Results are available on guitar, and then the third category is machine learning and for machine learning, uh, for training, the performance of my secret heatwave is 25 times faster compared to that shit. So all the three workloads we have benchmark's results, and all of these scripts are available on YouTube. >>Okay, so you're comparing, uh, my sequel Heatwave on AWS to Red Shift and snowflake on AWS. And you're comparing my sequel Heatwave on a W s too big query. Obviously running on on Google. Um, you know, one of the things Oracle is done in the past when you get the price performance and I've always tried to call fouls you're, like, double your price for running the oracle database. Uh, not Heatwave, but Oracle Database on a W s. And then you'll show how it's it's so much cheaper on on Oracle will be like Okay, come on. But they're not doing that here. You're basically taking my sequel Heatwave on a W s. I presume you're using the same pricing for whatever you see to whatever else you're using. Storage, um, reserved instances. That's apples to apples on A W s. And you have to obviously do some kind of mapping for for Google, for big query. Can you just verify that for me, >>we are being more than fair on two dimensions. The first thing is, when I'm talking about the price performance for analytics, right for, uh, with my secret heat rape, the cost I'm talking about from my secret heat rape is the cost of running transaction processing, analytics and machine learning. So it's a fully loaded cost for the case of my secret heatwave. There has been I'm talking about red ship when I'm talking about Snowflake. I'm just talking about the cost of these databases for running, and it's only it's not, including the source database, which may be more or some other database, right? So that's the first aspect that far, uh, trip. It's the cost for running all three kinds of workloads, whereas for the competition, it's only for running analytics. The second thing is that for these are those services whether it's like shit or snowflakes, That's right. We're talking about one year, fully paid up front cost, right? So that's what most of the customers would pay for. Many of the customers would pay that they will sign a one year contract and pay all the costs ahead of time because they get a discount. So we're using that price and the case of Snowflake. The costs were using is their standard edition of price, not the Enterprise edition price. So yes, uh, more than in this competitive. >>Yeah, I think that's an important point. I saw an analysis by Marx Tamer on Wiki Bond, where he was doing the TCO comparisons. And I mean, if you have to use two separate databases in two separate licences and you have to do et yelling and all the labour associated with that, that that's that's a big deal and you're not even including that aspect in in your comparison. So that's pretty impressive. To what do you attribute that? You know, given that unlike, oh, ci within the AWS cloud, you don't have as much control over the underlying hardware. >>So look hard, but is one aspect. Okay, so there are three things which give us this advantage. The first thing is, uh, we have designed hateful foreign scale out architecture. So we came up with new algorithms we have come up with, like, uh, one of the design points for heat wave is a massively partitioned architecture, which leads to a very high degree of parallelism. So that's a lot of hype. Each were built, So that's the first part. The second thing is that although we don't have control over the hardware, but the second design point for heat wave is that it is optimised for commodity cloud and the commodity infrastructure so we can have another guys, what to say? The computer we get, how much network bandwidth do we get? How much of, like objects to a brand that we get in here? W s. And we have tuned heat for that. That's the second point And the third thing is my secret autopilot, which provides machine learning based automation. So what it does is that has the users workload is running. It learns from it, it improves, uh, various premieres in the system. So the system keeps getting better as you learn more and more questions. And this is the third thing, uh, as a result of which we get a significant edge over the competition. >>Interesting. I mean, look, any I SV can go on any cloud and take advantage of it. And that's, uh I love it. We live in a new world. How about machine learning workloads? What? What did you see there in terms of performance and benchmarks? >>Right. So machine learning. We offer three capabilities training, which is fully automated, running in France and explanations. So one of the things which many of our customers told us coming from the enterprise is that explanations are very important to them because, uh, customers want to know that. Why did the the system, uh, choose a certain prediction? So we offer explanations for all models which have been derailed by. That's the first thing. Now, one of the interesting things about training is that training is usually the most expensive phase of machine learning. So we have spent a lot of time improving the performance of training. So we have a bunch of techniques which we have developed inside of Oracle to improve the training process. For instance, we have, uh, metal and proxy models, which really give us an advantage. We use adaptive sampling. We have, uh, invented in techniques for paralysing the hyper parameter search. So as a result of a lot of this work, our training is about 25 times faster than that ship them health and all the data is, uh, inside the database. All this processing is being done inside the database, so it's much faster. It is inside the database. And I want to point out that there is no additional charge for the history of customers because we're using the same cluster. You're not working in your service. So all of these machine learning capabilities are being offered at no additional charge inside the database and as a performance, which is significantly faster than that, >>are you taking advantage of or is there any, uh, need not need, but any advantage that you can get if two by exploiting things like gravity. John, we've talked about that a little bit in the past. Or trainee. Um, you just mentioned training so custom silicon that AWS is doing, you're taking advantage of that. Do you need to? Can you give us some insight >>there? So there are two things, right? We're always evaluating What are the choices we have from hybrid perspective? Obviously, for us to leverage is right and like all the things you mention about like we have considered them. But there are two things to consider. One is he is a memory system. So he favours a big is the dominant cost. The processor is a person of the cost, but memory is the dominant cost. So what we have evaluated and found is that the current shape which we are using is going to provide our customers with the best price performance. That's the first thing. The second thing is that there are opportunities at times when we can use a specialised processor for vaccinating the world for a bit. But then it becomes a matter of the cost of the customer. Advantage of our current architecture is on the same hardware. Customers are getting very good performance. Very good, energetic performance in a very good machine learning performance. If you will go with the specialised processor, it may. Actually, it's a machine learning, but then it's an additional cost with the customers we need to pay. So we are very sensitive to the customer's request, which is usually to provide very good performance at a very low cost. And we feel is that the current design we have as providing customers very good performance and very good price performance. >>So part of that is architectural. The memory intensive nature of of heat wave. The other is A W s pricing. If AWS pricing were to flip, it might make more sense for you to take advantage of something like like cranium. Okay, great. Thank you. And welcome back to the benchmarks benchmarks. Sometimes they're artificial right there. A car can go from 0 to 60 in two seconds. But I might not be able to experience that level of performance. Do you? Do you have any real world numbers from customers that have used my sequel Heatwave on A W s. And how they look at performance? >>Yes, absolutely so the my Secret service on the AWS. This has been in Vera for, like, since November, right? So we have a lot of customers who have tried the service. And what actually we have found is that many of these customers, um, planning to migrate from Aurora to my secret heat rape. And what they find is that the performance difference is actually much more pronounced than what I was talking about. Because with Aurora, the performance is actually much poorer compared to uh, like what I've talked about. So in some of these cases, the customers found improvement from 60 times, 240 times, right? So he travels 100 for 240 times faster. It was much less expensive. And the third thing, which is you know, a noteworthy is that customers don't need to change their applications. So if you ask the top three reasons why customers are migrating, it's because of this. No change to the application much faster, and it is cheaper. So in some cases, like Johnny Bites, what they found is that the performance of their applications for the complex storeys was about 60 to 90 times faster. Then we had 60 technologies. What they found is that the performance of heat we have compared to Aurora was 100 and 39 times faster. So, yes, we do have many such examples from real workloads from customers who have tried it. And all across what we find is if it offers better performance, lower cost and a single database such that it is compatible with all existing by sequel based applications and workloads. >>Really impressive. The analysts I talked to, they're all gaga over heatwave, and I can see why. Okay, last question. Maybe maybe two and one. Uh, what's next? In terms of new capabilities that customers are going to be able to leverage and any other clouds that you're thinking about? We talked about that upfront, but >>so in terms of the capabilities you have seen, like they have been, you know, non stop attending to the feedback from the customers in reacting to it. And also, we have been in a wedding like organically. So that's something which is gonna continue. So, yes, you can fully expect that people not dressed and continue to in a way and with respect to the other clouds. Yes, we are planning to support my sequel. He tripped on a show, and this is something that will be announced in the near future. Great. >>All right, Thank you. Really appreciate the the overview. Congratulations on the work. Really exciting news that you're moving my sequel Heatwave into other clouds. It's something that we've been expecting for some time. So it's great to see you guys, uh, making that move, and as always, great to have you on the Cube. >>Thank you for the opportunity. >>All right. And thank you for watching this special cube conversation. I'm Dave Volonte, and we'll see you next time.

>> TheCUBE presents HPE Discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2022. We're here at the Venetian convention center in Las Vegas Dave Vellante for John Furrier. Cam Amirs here is the director of technical alliances at Cribl'. Cam, good to see you. >> Good to see you too. >> Cribl'. Cool name. Tell us about it. >> So let's see. Cribl' has been around now for about five years selling products for the last two years. Fantastic company, lots of growth, started there 2020 and we're roughly 400 employees now. >> And what do you do? Tell us more. >> Yeah, sure. So I run the technical alliances team and what we do is we basically look to build integrations into platforms such as HPE GreenLake and Ezmeral. And we also work with a lot of other companies to help get data from various sources into their destinations or, you know other enrichments of data in that data pipeline. >> You know, you guys have been on theCUBE. Clint's been on many times, Ed Bailey was on our startup showcase. You guys are successful in this overfunded observability space. So, so you guys have a unique approach. Tell us about why you guys are successful in the product and some of the things you've been doing there. >> Yeah, absolutely. So our product is very complimentary to a lot of the technologies that already exist. And I used to joke around that everyone has these like pretty dashboards and reports but they completely glaze over the fact that it's not easy to get the data from those sources to their destinations. So for us, it's this capability with Cribl' Stream to get that data easily and repeatably into these destinations. >> Yeah. You know, Cam, you and I are both at the Snowflake Summit to John's point. They were like a dozen observability companies there. >> Oh yeah. >> And really beginning to be a crowded space. So explain what value you bring to that ecosystem. >> Yeah, sure. So the ecosystem that we see there is there are a lot of people that are kind of sticking to like effectively getting data and showing you dashboards reports about monitoring and things of that sort. For us, the value is how can we help customers kind of accelerate their adoption of these platforms, how to go from like your legacy SIM or your legacy monitoring solution to like the next-gen observability platform or next-gen security platform >> and what you do really well is the integration and bringing those other toolings to, to do that? >> Correct, correct. And we make it repeatable. >> How'd you end up here? >> HP? So we actually had a customer that actually deployed our software on the HPS world platform. And it was kind of a light bulb moment that, okay this is actually a different approach than going to your traditional, you know, AWS, Google, et cetera. So we decided to kind of hunt this down and figure out how we could be a bigger player in this space. >> You saw the data fabric announcement? I'm not crazy about the term, data fabric is an old NetApp term, and then Gartner kind of twisted it. I like data mesh, but anyway, it doesn't matter. We kind of know what it is, but but when you see an announcement like that how do you look at it? You know, what does it mean to to Cribl' and your customers? >> Yeah. So what we've seen is that, so we work with the data fabric team and we're able to kind of route our data to their, as a data lake, so we can actually route the data from, again all these very sources into this data lake and then have it available for whatever customers want to do with it. So one of the big things that I know Clint talks about is we give customers this, we sell choice. So we give them the ability to choose where they want to send their data, whether that's, you know HP's data lake and data fabric or some other object store or some other destination. They have that choice to do so. >> So you're saying that you can stream with any destination the customer wants? What are some examples? What are the popular destinations? >> Yeah so a lot of the popular destinations are your typical object stores. So any of your cloud object stores, whether it be AWS three, Google cloud storage or Azure blob storage. >> Okay. And so, and you can pull data from any source? >> Laughter: I'd be very careful, but absolutely. What we've seen is that a lot of people like to kind of look at traditional data sources like Syslog and they want to get it to us, a next-gen SIM, but to do so it needs to be converted to like a web hook or some sort of API call. And so, or vice versa, they have this brand new Zscaler for example, and they want to get that data into their SIM but there's no way to do it 'cause a SIM only accepts it as a Syslog event. So what we can do is we actually transform the data and make it so that it lands into that SIM in the format that it needs to be and easily make that a repeatable process >> So, okay. So wait, so not as a Syslog event but in whatever format the destination requires? >> Correct, correct. >> Okay. What are the limits on that? I mean, is this- >> Yeah. So what we've seen is that customers will be able to take, for example they'll take this Syslog event, it's unstructured data but they need to put it into say common information model for Splunk or Elastic common schema for Elastic search or just JSON format for Elastic. And so what we can do is we can actually convert those events so that they land in that transformed state, but we can also route a copy of that event in unharmed fashion, to like an S3 bucket for object store for that long term compliance user >> You can route it to any, basically any object store. Is that right? Is that always the sort of target? >> Correct, correct. >> So on the message here at HPE, first of all I'll get to the marketplace point in a second, but it's cloud to edge is kind of their theme. So data streaming sounds expensive. I mean, you know so how do you guys deal with the streaming egress issue? What does that mean to customers? You guys claim that you can save money on that piece. It's a hotly contested discussion point. >> Laughter: So one of the things that we actually just announced in our 350 release yesterday is the capability of getting data from Windows events, or from Windows hosts, I'm sorry. So a product that we also have is called Cribl' Edge. So our capability of being able to collect data from the edge and then transit it out to whether it be an on-prem, or self-hosted deployment of Cribl', or or maybe some sort of other destination object store. What we do is we actually take the data in in transit and reduce the volume of events. So we can do things like remove white space or remove events that are not really needed and compress or optimize that data so that the egress cost to your point are actually lowered. >> And your data reduction approach is, is compression? It's a compression algorithm? >> So it is a combination, yeah, so it's a combination. So there's some people what they'll do is they'll aggregate the events. So sometimes for example, VPC flow logs are very chatty and you don't need to have all those events. So instead you convert those to metrics. So suddenly you reduced those events from, you know high volume events to metrics that are so small and you still get the same value 'cause you still see the trends and everything. And if later on down the road, you need to reinvestigate those events, you can rehydrate that data with Cribl' replay >> And you'll do the streaming in real time, is that right? >> Yeah. >> So Kafka, is that what you would use? Or other tooling? >> Laughter: So we are complimentary to a Kafka deployment. Customer's already deployed and they've invested in Kafka, We can read off of Kafka and feed back into Kafka. >> If not, you can use your tooling? >> If not, we can be replacing that. >> Okay talk about your observations in the multi-cloud hybrid world because hybrid obviously everyone knows it's a steady state now. On public cloud, on premise edge all one thing, cloud operations, DevOps, data as code all the things we talk about. What's the customer view? You guys have a unique position. What's going on in the customer base? How are they looking at hybrid and specifically multi-cloud, is it stitching together multiple hybrids? Or how do you guys work across those landscapes? >> So what we've seen is a lot of customers are in multiple clouds. That's, you know, that's going to happen. But what we've seen is that if they want to egress data from say one cloud to another the way that we've architected our solution is that we have these worker nodes that reside within these hybrid, these other cloud event these other clouds, I should say so that transmitting data, first egress costs are lowered, but being able to have this kind of, easy way to collect the data and also stitch it back together, join it back together, to a single place or single location is one option that we offer customers. Another solution that we've kind of announced recently is Search. So not having to move the data from all these disparate data sources and data lakes and actually just search the data in place. That's another capability that we think is kind of popular in this hybrid approach. >> And talk about now your relationship with HPE you guys obviously had customers that drove you to Greenlake, obviously what's your experience with them and also talk about the marketplace presence. Is that new? How long has that been going on? Have you seen any results? >> Yeah, so we've actually just started our, our journey into this HPE world. So the first thing was obviously the customer's bringing us into this ecosystem and now our capabilities of, I guess getting ready to be on the marketplace. So having a presence on the marketplace has been huge giving us kind of access to just people that don't even know who we are, being that we're, you know a five year old company. So it's really good to have that exposure. >> So you're going to get customers out of this? >> That's the idea. [Laughter] >> Bring in new market, that's the idea of their GreenLake is that partners fill in. What's your impression so far of GreenLake? Because there seems to be great momentum around HP and opening up their channel their sales force, their customer base. >> Yeah. So it's been very beneficial for us, again being a smaller company and we are a channel first company so that obviously helps, you know bring out the word with other channel partners. But HP has been very, you know open arm kind of getting us into the system into the ecosystem and obviously talking, or giving the good word about Cribl' to their customers. >> So, so you'll be monetizing on GreenLake, right? That's the, the goal. >> That's the goal. >> What do you have to do to get into a position? Obviously, you got a relationship you're in the marketplace. Do you have to, you know, write to their API's or do you just have to, is that a checkbox? Describe what you have to do to monetize. >> Sure. So we have to first get validated on the platform. So the validation process validates that we can work on the Ezmeral GreenLake platform. Once that's been completed, then the idea is to have our logo show up on the marketplace. So customers say, Hey, look, I need to have a way to get transit data or do stuff with data specifically around logs, metrics, and traces into my logging solution or my SIM. And then what we do with them on the back end is we'll see this transaction occur right to their API to basically say who this customer is. 'Cause again, the idea is to have almost a zero touch kind of involvement, but we will actually have that information given to us. And then we can actually monetize on top of it. >> And the visualization component will come from the observability vendor. Is that right? Or is that somewhat, do you guys do some of that? >> So the visualization is right now we're basically just the glue that gets the data to the visualization engine. As we kind of grow and progress our search product that's what will probably have more of a visualization component. >> Do you think your customers are going to predominantly use an observability platform for that visualization? I mean, obviously you're going to get there. Are they going to use Grafana? Or some other tool? >> Or yeah, I think a lot of customers, obviously, depending on what data and what they're trying to accomplish they will have that choice now to choose, you know Grafana for their metrics, logs, et cetera or some sort of security product for their security events but same data, two different kind of use cases. And we can help enable that. >> Cam, I want to ask you a question. You mentioned you were at Splunk and Clint, the CEO and co-founder, was at Splunk too. That brings up the question I want to get your perspective on, we're seeing a modern network here with HPE, with Aruba, obviously clouds kind of going next level you got on premises, edge, all one thing, distributed computing basically, cyber security, a data problem that's solved a lot by you guys and people in this business, making sure data available machine learnings are growing and powering AI like you read about. What's changed in this business? Because you know, Splunking logs is kind of old hat you know, and now you got observability. Unification is a big topic. What's changed now? What's different about the market today around data and these platforms and, and tools? What's your perspective on that? >> I think one of the biggest things is people have seen the amount of volume of data that's coming in. When I was at Splunk, when we hit like a one terabyte deal that was a big deal. Now it's kind of standard. You're going to do a terabyte of data per day. So one of the big things I've seen is just the explosion of data growth, but getting value out of that data is very difficult. And that's kind of why we exist because getting all that volume of data is one thing. But being able to actually assert value from it, that's- >> And that's the streaming core product? That's the whole? >> Correct. >> Get data to where it needs to be for whatever application needs whether it's cyber or something else. >> Correct, correct. >> What's the customer uptake? What's the customer base like for you guys now? How many, how many customers you guys have? What are they doing with the data? What are some of the common things you're seeing? >> Yeah. I mean, it's, it's the basic blocking and tackling, we've significantly grown our customer base and they all have the same problem. They come to us and say, look, I just need to get data from here to there. And literally the routing use case is our biggest use case because it's simple and you take someone that's a an expensive engineer and operations engineer instead of having them going and doing the plumbing of data of just getting logs from one source to another, we come in and actually make that a repeatable process and make that easy. And so that's kind of just our very basic value add right from the get go. >> You can automate that, automate that, make it repeatable. Say what's in the name? Where'd the name come from? >> So Cribl', if you look it up, it's actually kind of an old shiv to get to siphon dirt from gold, right? So basically you just, that's kind of what we do. We filter out all the dirt and leave you the gold bits so you can get value. >> It's kind of what we do on theCUBE. >> It's kind of the gold nuggets. Get all these highlights, hitting Twitter, the golden, the gold nuggets. Great to have you on. >> Cam, thanks for, for coming on, explaining that sort of you guys are filling that gap between, Hey all the observability claims, which are all wonderful but then you got to get there. They got to have a route to get there. That's what got to do. Cribl' rhymes with tribble. Dave Vellante for John Furrier covering HPE Discover 2022. You're watching theCUBE. We'll be right back.