>>Okay. We're back here inside the cube, our flagship program about the events and extract the signal from the noise. This is strata conference. O'Reilly media is a big data event. We're talking about Hadoop analytics, data platforms, and big is come into the enterprise from the front door. As we heard them yesterday. I'm John Frey with Dave Volante, wiki.org. And we're here with Jack Norris, our cube alumni, and a favorite guest here. You're a in charge executive at map. Our, you guys are leading the charge with this use of a dupe. Welcome back to the cube. Thank you. Okay, so what's, let's chat about what's going on. What's your take on all the big news out here for the distributions. I'll the big power moose. You guys have a relationship with EMC. Okay. Exclusive relationship with those guys. Intel's got a distribution Horton versus with Microsoft, a lot of things going on. So this is your wheelhouse. So what's your take on the Hadoop action here? >>Well, I think there's an article in Forbes where I think they, they said it best. This is showing that map bars had the right strategy all along. And what we're seeing is, is basically there's a fairly low bar to taking a patchy Hadoop and providing a distribution. And so we're seeing a lot of new entrance in the market and there's, there's a lot of options. If you want to try Hadoop and experiment and get started. And then there's production class Hadoop, which includes enterprise data protection, snapshots mirrors, ability to integrate. And that's basically map R so start and test and dev with, with a lot of options and then move into production, class >>Mapbox. So break it down for the folks out there who are tipping the toe in the water and hearing all the noise. Cause it's right now, the noise level is very high, right? With the, with the recent announcements. But you guys have been doing business obviously for many years in this area. So when people say, Hey, I want to get a Hadoop distribution with enterprise. What, what should they be looking for? Okay. Because it's not that easy to kind of swing through the noise. So could you share with the folks out there, what, what to look for in like the, the table stakes, the check boxes? Cause there's a lot of claims. There's a lot of noise is this. And that is a lot of different options. Some teams have more committers or no committers than others, so that's all noise, but let's what are the key things that customers need to know? So I think there's, miling, >>There's three areas. All right. One is kind of how it integrates into your enterprise. And with Hadoop, you have the Hadoop distributed file system API. That's how you interact. Well, if you're able to also use standard tools that can use standard file and database access, it makes it much, much easier. So map ours unique and supporting NFS and making that happen. That's a, that's a big difference. The second is on dependability and there's high availability capabilities and then there's data protection. So I'll focus on snapshots as an example, you've got data replicated and Hindu. That's great. But if you have a user error, an application error, that's replicated just as quickly. So having the ability to recover and double-edged in time. Yeah. So if I can say, Hey, I made a mistake. Can I go back two minutes earlier with snapshots that makes it possible map ours, unique and snapshot support. And then finally, there's there's disaster recovery mirroring where you can go across clusters, mirror, what's going on across the land and being able to recover in the case of a disaster where you lose a whole cluster or use a whole >>Section and that's not available in >>Other, those aren't available either. That's >>NFS, >>Snapshots has been on the JIRA list for over five years. >>Yeah. Okay. So I wonder >>If I could find that and then there's third. Cause I said three and almost said two, the third is performance and scale and, but >>That'd be for >>Integration, dependability and speed. >>Okay. So dependability Jr's part of the VR snapshots. MDR. Okay. So let's talk about the performance because you guys had asked a Google's a big partner of you guys. So we should, we just had them on the cube strata. So you have to have a record setting. Do you have a record setting? EMC take that. Well, you work with DMC. So let me talk about the performance real quick. Then we'll talk about some of the EMC conversations, but performance, you have a variety of diverse performance benchmarks, Google you have within the enterprise. Can you talk about those? >>So, so what we announced this week was the minute sort world record. So minutes or runs across technologies is just, how can you, you know, how much data can you sort in 60 seconds? And if you look back at, at the previous record that was done in the labs with Microsoft with special purpose software, and they did 1.4 terabytes Hadoop hasn't been used since 2009, it's been several years because it's got features in there that work against performance. Things like checkpointing and logging because it assumes you've got long running MapReduce jobs. So we set the record with our distribution of Hadoop. So we have kind of one hand tied behind our back, given that technology. Secondly, we sent it in the cloud, which is the other hand tied behind our back because it's a, it's a virtualized environment. So we set the record with just with your legs And a 1.5 terabytes in 60 seconds. Very proud of that. >>Well, that's interesting because we've been doing a lot of labs testing, Dave and I and our teams on cost. Right. So, yeah. And it's an interesting benchmark because you always don't look at the nuance, the cost to compare a cloud performance versus bare metal. Most people don't factor into setup, cost of deployment. Exactly. So can you just quickly talk about that and how significant of an order of magnitude of your customer? >>So the, the previous Hadoop record took 3,400 servers about 27,000 cores, 13, 13,000, almost 14,000 discs and did 600 gigs, actually a little less than that at 5 78. And on Google, we did it with 2020 100 virtual instances, 8,000 cores did 1.5 terabytes >>And costs. You spin up the Google versus >>Basically if you look at that and you assume conservatively 4,000 per server, it's $13.8 million worth of hardware previously. And the cost to do that run on Google was $20 and 33 cents. >>Well, you got to discount. I mean, come on a partner mean it really costs that much. I mean, they that's what they would charge for it. Actually >>We are map artist's case on that minute. If you look at the Asheville charges to be 1200, >>Okay. It's not six millions, so millions to thousands. Yep. Okay. That's impressive. We'll have to go look at the numbers. Like we're going to look at GreenPlum's numbers in the next couple of weeks when talking about the Google relationship and men were that the up way with that was that >>Very excited about it. We're actually deployed throughout the cloud. We've got multiple partners Google's in limited preview. So we've got a number of customers kind of, you know, testing that and, and doing some really interesting things. >>So we monitor the data center market. I'll see with our proprietary tool that you know about the viewfinder and crowd spots and thing is that the data center verticals interesting, right? If you look at the sentiment analysis of what the conversation is on, on just the Twitter data, it's Facebook, apple, these companies. And when we dig into the numbers, it's not so much the companies, it's the fact that their data center operations are significantly being looked at as the leading indicator for where CEO's are going. So I want to ask you in your conversations with your customers, what are the conversations around moving to the cloud and where are they on that transition? Because we hear, yeah, one of the cloud for all the benefits you were mentioning, but Google and Facebook, these are the gold standards as, as architecture necessarily a cut and paste architecture, but they see the benefits that they're doing. So what are your conversations with your enterprise customers around the cloud cloud architecture and what other features besides replication and disaster recovery, are they, are they looking at >>Well, it's basically work, workload driven and dataset driven. So data that's already in the cloud are kind of a natural first step is, well, why don't I do the analysis there as well? So things like Google earth and digital advertising data, that's real interesting candidates for that also periodic workload. So if they have workloads that need to spin up and spin down, the, the cloud works, works really well for that. And in some cases it's driven by their own environments. They've got data centers that are approaching capacity and they need to kind of do offloads and then looking at the, at the cloud because it's easy to get up running quickly and uses an alternative. >>I want to do come back to one of your three sort of value props here, particularly the dependability piece and specifically the snapshot. So somebody asked me one time, how do you know a couple of years ago, how do you back up a petabyte as he could do this thing? And then his answer was, well, you don't know. So I want to, I want to ask you how your customers are protecting and, and, and, and what you guys are bringing to the table. >>So snapshots is not a bolt on feature. It's basically a low level feature based on the underlying data architecture. So when we architected that from the beginning, snapshots was, was a, was a core feature. And if you use a technique called redirect on, right, you're not copying the data, right? So you can do efficient, you can do a petabyte snapshot, you know, basically almost instantaneously because you're tracking the pointers of the latest blocks that have been written. So if, if the data change rate is, is basically, data's not changing, you can snapshot every minute and not have any additional storage overhead. >>Right. Okay. And, and so you can set that. So you, you map, map, our technologies will allow them to set that, dial that up, dial it down and switches. >>So we support logical volumes. So you can set policies at that volume and you can say, well, this volume is critical data. And then I can set policies. Well, critical data is every minute. And then I can change what the definition of critical data is. Maybe it's every five minutes, et cetera. So you can set up these different policies at volumes and have snapshots happen independently for each. >>Can you do that by workload or dataset or by application or whatever I get essentially provided as a service, as opposed to kind of a one size fits all approach. >>Exactly. And that, that also corresponds to user access, administrative privileges, you know, other features and policies within the, within the cluster. >>How about the, you know, this whole trend toward bringing SQL into, into Hadoop. What's, what's your take on that? And what's your angle? >>So interactive, SQL's an important aspect because you've got so many people trained in the organization and, and leverage, you know, sequel, but it's one of many use cases that needs to run across a big data platform. So there's a range of big data analytics, batch analytics, interactive capabilities with sequel, database operations, no sequel search streaming, all those are kind of functions that need to run across a platform. So it's a piece, but it's not the big driver, because what we've seen is that there's higher rival rate of machine generated data and machine generated response to respond to those for digital advertising, for recommendation engines for fraud detection can really move the needle for an organization, have huge swings and profitability >>And the ball down the field big time. Yeah. And >>Having an interactive piece with a kind of a human element involved, it doesn't really scale and work on a 24 by seven basis. >>Jack final question, we're over now by a minute. But when I ask a one party question, obviously, very competitive landscape right now in terms of competitiveness, the stakes are higher because the demand in the market market opportunities is massive. What's map ours business strategy going forward, no change in direction. Is it going to be same old, same old. You guys have any new things going down and you see the marketplace. >>We've got a huge lead when it comes to kind of mission critical enterprise grade features. And our focus is one platform. So the ability to support enterprise Hadoop, enterprise HBase and provide those full capabilities for ease of use for dependability, for performance. And, you know, we've seen a lot of companies test on one distribution and switch to map are and will continue to help that in the future. >>Well, we, we will, we will say we've been covering this big data space now going on four years now, Dave and I, and we've watched all the players pivot a few times. You guys have not, you guys have been true to your mission from day one and that we know where you stand. No one, everyone knows where you stand enterprise grade. It's a good strategy. I think everyone's putting that on their label now. So enterprise grade Washington, we call it a congratulations map art and said the cube. We'll be right back with our next guest here on day three wall-to-wall coverage at O'Reilly media. When do our news, our next from 12 to one, we'll be right back after this short break.

>>Hi everybody. We're back. This is Dave Volante from Wiki bond.org. We're live at strata in Santa Clara, California. This is Silicon angle TVs, continuous coverage of the strata conference. So Riley media or Raleigh media is a great partner of ours. And thanks to them for allowing us to be here. We've been going all week cause it's day three for us. I'm here with Jeff Kelly Wiki bonds that lead big data analysts. And we're here with Jack Norris. Who's the VP of marketing at Matt bar Jack. Welcome to the cube. Thank you, Dave. Thanks very much for coming on. And you know, we've been going all week. You guys are a great sponsor of ours. Thank you for the support. We really appreciate it. How's the show going for you? >>Great. A lot of attention, a lot of focus, a lot of discussion about Hadoop and big data. >>Yeah. So you guys getting a lot of traffic. I mean, it says I hear this 2,500 people here up from 1400 last year. So that's >>Yeah, we've had like five, six people deep in the, in the booth. So I think there's a lot of, a lot of interests. There's interesting. >>You know, when we were here last year, when you looked at the, the infrastructure and the competitive landscape, there wasn't a lot going on and just a very short time, that's completely changed. And you guys have had your hand in that. So, so that's good. Competition is a good thing, right? And, and obviously customers want choice, but so we want to talk about that a little bit. We want to talk about map bar, the kind of problems you're solving. So why don't we start there? What is map are all about? And you've got your own distribution of, of, of enterprise Hadoop. You make it Hadoop enterprise ready? Let's start there. >>Okay. Yeah, I mean, we invested heavily in creating a alternative distribution one that took the best of the open source community with the best of the map, our innovations, and really it's, it's about making Hadoop more applicable, broader use cases, more mission, critical support, you know, being able to sit in and work in a lights out data center environment. >>Okay. So what was the problem that you set out to solve? Why, why do, why do we need another distribution of Hadoop? Let me ask it that way. Get nice and close to. >>So there, there are some just big issues with, with the duke. >>One of those issues, let's talk about that. There's >>Some ease of use issues. There's some deep dependability issues. There's some, some performance. So, you know, let's take those in order right now. If you look at some of the distributions, Apache Hadoop, great technology, but it requires a programmer, right? To get access to the data it's through the Hadoop API, you can't really see the data. So there's a lot of focus of, you know, what do I do once the data's in there opening that up, providing a full file based access, right? So I can look at it and treat it like enterprise storage, see the data, use my standard tools, standard commands, you know, drag and drop from a file browser. You can do that with Matt bar. You can't do that with other districts >>Talking about mountain HDFS as a NFS correct >>Example. Correct. And then, and then just the underlying storage services. The fact that it's append only instead of full random read-write, you know, causes some, some issues. So, you know, that's some of the, the ease of use features. There's a whole lot. We could discuss there. Big picture for reliability. Dependability is there's a single point of failure, multiple single points of failure within Hadoop. So you risk data loss. So people have looked at Hadoop. Traditionally is, is batch oriented. Scratchpad right. We were out to solve that, right? We want to make sure that you can use it for mission critical data, that you don't have a risk of a data loss that you've got full high availability. You've got the full data protection in terms of snapshots and mirroring that you would expect with the enterprise products. >>It gets back to when you guys were, you know, thinking about doing this. I'm not even sure you were at the company at the time, but you, your DNA was there and you're familiar with it. So you guys saw this big data movement. You saw this at duke moon and you said, okay, this is cool. It's going to be big. And it's gonna take a long time for the community to fix all these problems. We can fix them. Now let's go do that. Is that the general discussion? Yeah. >>You know, I think, I think the what's different about this. This is the first open source package. The first open source project that's created a market. If you look at the other open source, you know, Linux, my SQL, et cetera, it was really late in the life cycle of a product. Everyone knew what the features were. It was about, you know, giving an alternative choice, better Unix. Your, your, the focus is on innovation and our founders, you know, have deep enterprise background or CTO was at Google and charge of big table, understands MapReduce at scale, spent time as chief software architect at Spinnaker, which was kind of the fastest clustered Nazanin on the planet. So recognize that the underlying layers of Hadoop needed some rearchitecture and needed some deep investment and to do that effectively and do that quickly required a whole lot of focus. And we thought that was the best way to go to market. >>Talk about the early validation from customers. Obviously you guys didn't just do this in a vacuum, I presume. So you went out and talked to some customers. Yeah. >>What sorts of conversations with customers, why we're in stealth mode? We're probably the loudest stealth >>As you were nodding. And I mean, what were they telling you at the time? Yeah, please go do this. >>The, what we address weren't secrets. I there've been gyrus for open for four or five years on, on these issues. >>Yeah. But at the same time, Jack, you've got this, you got this purist community out there that says, I don't want to, I don't want to rip out HDFS. You know, I want it to be pure. What'd you, what'd you say to those guys, you just say, okay, thank you. We, we understand you're not a prospect. >>And I think, I think that, you know, duke has a huge amount of momentum. And I think a lot of that momentum is that there isn't any risks to adopting Hadoop, right? It's not like the fractured no SQL market where there's 122 different entrance, which one's going to win. Hadoop's got the ecosystem. So when you say pure, it's about the API APIs, it's about making sure that if I create a MapReduce job, it's going to run an Apache. It's going to run a map bar. It's going to run on the other distributions. That's where I think that the heat and the focus is now to do that. You also have to have innovation occurring up and down the stack that that provides choice and alternatives for. >>So when I'm talking about purists, I don't, I agree with you the whole lock-in thing, which is the elephant in the room here. People will worry about lock-in >>Pun intended. >>No, no, but good one good catch. But so, but you're basically saying, Hey, where we're no more locked in than cloud era. Right. I mean, they've got their own >>Actually. I think we're less because it's so easy to get data in and out with our NFS. That there's probably less so, >>So, and I'm gonna come back to that. But so for instance, many, when I, when I say peers, I mean some users in ISV, some guys we've had on here, we had an Abby Mehta from Triceda on the other day, for instance, he's one who said, I just don't have time to mess with that stuff and figure out all that API integration. I mean, there are people out there that just don't want to go that route. Okay. But, but you're saying I'm, I'm inferring this plenty who do right. >>And the, and by the API route, I want to make sure I understand what you're saying. You >>Talked about, Hey, it's all about the API integration. It's not >>About, it's not the, it it's about the API APIs being consistent, a hundred percent compatible. Right. So if I, you know, write a program, that's, that's going after HDFS and the HDFS API, I want to make sure that that'll run on other distributions. Right. >>And that's your promise. Yeah. Okay. All right. So now where I was going with this was th again, there are some peers to say, oh, I just don't want to mess with all that. Now let's talk about what that means to mess with all that. So comScore was a big, high profile case study for you guys. They, they were cloud era customer. They basically, in my understanding is a couple of days migrated from Cloudera to Mapbox. And the impetus was, let's talk about that. Why'd they do that >>Performance data protection, ease of use >>License fee issues. There was some license issues there as well, right? The, the, your, your maintenance pricing was more attractive. Is that true? Or >>I read more mainly about price performance and reliability, and, you know, they tested our stuff at work real well in a test environment, they put it in production environment. Didn't actually tell all their users, they had one guys debug the software for half a day because something was wrong. It finished so quickly. >>So, so it took him a couple of days to migrate and then boom, >>Boom. And they've, they handle about 30 billion objects a day. So there, you know, the use of that really high performance support for, for streaming data flows, you know, they're talking about, they're doing forecasts and insights into web behavior, and, you know, they w the earlier they can do that, the better off they are. So >>Greg, >>So talk about the implications of, of your approach in terms of the customer base. So I'm, I'm imagining that your customers are more, perhaps advanced than a lot of your typical Hadoop users who are just getting started tinkering with Hadoop. Is it fair to say, you know, your customers know what they want and they want performance and they want it now. And they're a little more advanced than perhaps some of the typical early adopters. >>We've got people to go to our website and download the free version. And some of them are just starting off and getting used to Hadoop, but we did specifically target those very experienced Hadoop users that, you know, we're kind of, you know, stubbing their toes on, on the issues. And so they're very receptive to the message of we've made it faster. We've made it more reliable, you know, we've, we've added a lot of ease of use to the, to the Hindu. >>So I found this, let me interrupt, go back to what I was saying before is I found this comment that I found online from Mike Brown comScore. Skipio I presume you mean, he said comScore's map our direct access NFS feature, which exposes a duke distributed file system data as NFS files can then be easily mounted, modified, or overwritten. So that's a data access simplification. You also said we could capitalize on the purchase of map bar with an annual maintenance charge versus a yearly cost per node. NFS allowed our enterprise systems to easily access the data in the cluster. So does that make sense to you that, that enterprise of that annual maintenance charge versus yearly cost per node? I didn't get that. >>Oh, I think he's talking about some, some organizations prefer to do a perpetual license versus a subscription model that's >>Oh, okay. So the traditional way of licensing software >>And that, that you have to do it basically reinforces the fact that we've really invested in have kind of a, a product, you know, orientation rather than just services on top of, of some opensource. >>Okay. So you go in, you license it and then yeah. Perpetual license. >>Then you can also start with the free edition that does all the performance NFS support kick the tires >>Before you buy it. Sorry. Sorry, Jeff. Sorry to interrupt. No, no problem >>At all. So another topic, a lot of interest is security making a dupe enterprise ready. One of the pillars, there is security, making sure access controls, for instance, making sure let's talk about how you guys approach that and maybe how you differentiate from some of the other vendors out there, or the other >>Full Kerberos support. We Lincoln to enterprise standards for access eldap, et cetera. We leveraged the Linux, Pam security, and we also provide volume control. So, you know, right now in Hindu in Apache to dupe other distributions, you put policies at the file level or the entire cluster. And we see many organizations having separate physical clusters because of that limitation, right? And we'd provide volume. So you can define a volume. And in that volume control, access control, administrative privileges data protection class, and, you know, in a sense kind of segregate that content. And that provides a lot of, a lot of control and a lot more, you know, security and protection and separation of data. >>That scenario, the comScore scenario, common where somebody's moving off an existing distribution onto a map are, or, or you more going, going, seeing demand from new customers that are saying, Hey, what's this big data thing I really want to get into it. How's it shake out there >>Right now? There's this huge pent up demand for these features. And we're seeing a lot of people that have run on other distributions switched to map our >>A little bit of everything. How about, can you talk a little bit about your, your channel? You go to market strategy, maybe even some of your ecosystem and partnerships in the little time. >>Sure. So EMC is a big partner of the EMC Greenplum Mr. Edition is basically a map R you can start with any of our additions and upgrade to that. Greenplum with just a licensed key that gives us worldwide service and support. It's been a great partnership. >>We hear a lot of proof of concepts out there >>For, yeah. And then it just hit the news news today about EMC's distribution, Mr. Distribution being available with UCS Cisco's ECS gear. So now that's further expanded the, the footprint that we have about. >>Okay. So you're the EMC relationship. Anything else that you can share with us? >>We have other announcements coming out and >>Then you want to pre-announce in the queue. >>Oops. Did I let that slip >>It's alive? So be careful. And so, in terms of your, your channel strategy, you guys mostly selling direct indirect combination, >>It's it? It, it's kind of an indirect model through these, these large partners with a direct assist. >>Yeah. Okay. So you guys come in and help evangelize. Yep. Excellent. All right. Do you have anything else before we gotta got a roll here? >>Yeah, I did wonder if you could talk a little bit about, you mentioned EMC Greenplum so there's a lot of talk about the data warehouse market, the MPB data warehouses, versus a Hadoop based on that relationship. I'm assuming that Matt BARR thinks well, they're certainly complimentary. Can you just touch on that? And, you know, as opposed to some who think, well, Hadoop is going to be the platform where we go, >>Well, th th there's just, I mean, if you look at the typical organization, they're just really trying to get their, excuse me, their arms around a lot of this machine generated content, this, you know, unstructured data that just growing like wildfire. So there's a lot of Paducah specific use cases that are being rolled out. They're also kind of data lakes, data, oceans, whatever you want to call it, large pools where that information is then being extracted and loaded into data warehouses for further analysis. And I think the big pivot there is if it's well understood what the issue is, you define the schema, then there's a whole host of, of data warehouse applications out there that can be deployed. But there's many things where you don't really understand that yet having to dupe where you don't need to find a schema a is a, is a big value, >>Jack, I'm sorry. We have to go run a couple of minutes behind. Thank you very much for coming on the cube. Great story. Good luck with everything. And sounds like things are really going well and market's heating up and you're in the right place at the right time. So thank you again. Thank you to Jeff. And we'll be right back everybody to the strata conference live in Santa Clara, California, right after this word from our.

(lively peaceful music) >> Live, from New York, it's The Cube. Covering "The Cube New York City 2018." Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem partners. >> Well, everyone, welcome back to The Cube special conversation here in New York City. We're live for Cube NYC. This is our ninth year covering the big data ecosystem, now evolved into AI, machine learning, cloud. All things data in conjunction with Strata Conference, which is going on right around the corner. This is the Cube studio. I'm John Furrier. Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Mick Hollison, who is the CMO, Chief Marketing Officer, of Cloudera. Welcome to The Cube, thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> So Cloudera, obviously we love Cloudera. Cube started in Cloudera's office, (laughing) everyone in our community knows that. I keep, keep saying it all the time. But we're so proud to have the honor of working with Cloudera over the years. And, uh, the thing that's interesting though is that the new building in Palo Alto is right in front of the old building where the first Palo Alto office was. So, a lot of success. You have a billboard in the airport. Amr Awadallah is saying, hey, it's a milestone. You're in the airport. But your business is changing. You're reaching new audiences. You have, you're public. You guys are growing up fast. All the data is out there. Tom's doing a great job. But, the business side is changing. Data is everywhere, it's a big, hardcore enterprise conversation. Give us the update, what's new with Cloudera. >> Yeah. Thanks very much for having me again. It's, it's a delight. I've been with the company for about two years now, so I'm officially part of the problem now. (chuckling) It's been a, it's been a great journey thus far. And really the first order of business when I arrived at the company was, like, welcome aboard. We're going public. Time to dig into the S-1 and reimagine who Cloudera is going to be five, ten years out from now. And we spent a good deal of time, about three or four months, actually crafting what turned out to be just 38 total words and kind of a vision and mission statement. But the, the most central to those was what we were trying to build. And it was a modern platform for machine learning analytics in the cloud. And, each of those words, when you unpack them a little bit, are very, very important. And this week, at Strata, we're really happy on the modern platform side. We just released Cloudera Enterprise Six. It's the biggest release in the history of the company. There are now over 30 open-source projects embedded into this, something that Amr and Mike could have never imagined back in the day when it was just a couple of projects. So, a very very large and meaningful update to the platform. The next piece is machine learning, and Hilary Mason will be giving the kickoff tomorrow, and she's probably forgotten more about ML and AI than somebody like me will ever know. But she's going to give the audience an update on what we're doing in that space. But, the foundation of having that data management platform, is absolutely fundamental and necessary to do good machine learning. Without good data, without good data management, you can't do good ML or AI. Sounds sort of simple but very true. And then the last thing that we'll be announcing this week, is around the analytics space. So, on the analytic side, we announced Cloudera Data Warehouse and Altus Data Warehouse, which is a PaaS flavor of our new data warehouse offering. And last, but certainly not least, is just the "optimize for the cloud" bit. So, everything that we're doing is optimized not just around a single cloud but around multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud, and really trying to bridge that gap for enterprises and what they're doing today. So, it's a new Cloudera to say the very least, but it's all still based on that core foundation and platform that, you got to know it, with very early on. >> And you guys have operating history too, so it's not like it's a pivot for Cloudera. I know for a fact that you guys had very large-scale customers, both with three letter, letters in them, the government, as well as just commercial. So, that's cool. Question I want to ask you is, as the conversation changes from, how many clusters do I have, how am I storing the data, to what problems am I solving because of the enterprises. There's a lot of hard things that enterprises want. They want compliance, all these, you know things that have either legacy. You guys work on those technical products. But, at the end of the day, they want the outcomes, they want to solve some problems. And data is clearly an opportunity and a challenge for large enterprises. What problems are you guys going after, these large enterprises in this modern platform? What are the core problems that you guys knock down? >> Yeah, absolutely. It's a great question. And we sort of categorize the way we think about addressing business problems into three broad categories. We use the terms grow, connect, and protect. So, in the "grow" sense, we help companies build or find new revenue streams. And, this is an amazing part of our business. You see it in everything from doing analytics on clickstreams and helping people understand what's happening with their web visitors and the like, all the way through to people standing up entirely new businesses based simply on their data. One large insurance provider that is a customer of ours, as an example, has taken on the challenge and asked us to engage with them on building really, effectively, insurance as a service. So, think of it as data-driven insurance rates that are gauged based on your driving behaviors in real time. So no longer simply just using demographics as the way that you determine, you know, all 18-year old young men are poor drivers. As it turns out, with actual data you can find out there's some excellent 18 year olds. >> Telematic, not demographics! >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly! >> That Tesla don't connect to the >> Exactly! And Parents will love this, love this as well, I think. So they can find out exactly how their kids are really behaving by the way. >> They're going to know I rolled through the stop signs in Palo Alto. (laughing) My rates just went up. >> Exactly, exactly. So, so helping people grow new businesses based on their data. The second piece is "Connect". This is not just simply connecting devices, but that's a big part of it, so the IOT world is a big engine for us there. One of our favorite customer stories is a company called Komatsu. It's a mining manufacturer. Think of it as the ones that make those, just massive mines that are, that are all over the world. They're particularly big in Australia. And, this is equipment that, when you leave it sit somewhere, because it doesn't work, it actually starts to sink into the earth. So, being able to do predictive maintenance on that level and type and expense of equipment is very valuable to a company like Komatsu. We're helping them do that. So that's the "Connect" piece. And last is "Protect". Since data is in fact the new oil, the most valuable resource on earth, you really need to be able to protect it. Whether that's from a cyber security threat or it's just meeting compliance and regulations that are put in place by governments. Certainly GDPR is got a lot of people thinking very differently about their data management strategies. So we're helping a number of companies in that space as well. So that's how we kind of categorize what we're doing. >> So Mick, I wonder if you could address how that's all affected the ecosystem. I mean, one of the misconceptions early on was that Hadoop, Big Data, is going to kill the enterprise data warehouse. NoSQL is going to knock out Oracle. And, Mike has always said, "No, we are incremental". And people are like, "Yeah, right". But that's really, what's happened here. >> Yes. >> EDW was a fundamental component of your big data strategies. As Amr used to say, you know, SQL is the killer app for, for big data. (chuckling) So all those data sources that have been integrated. So you kind of fast forward to today, you talked about IOT and The Edge. You guys have announced, you know, your own data warehouse and platform as a service. So you see this embracing in this hybrid world emerging. How has that affected the evolution of your ecosystem? >> Yeah, it's definitely evolved considerably. So, I think I'd give you a couple of specific areas. So, clearly we've been quite successful in large enterprises, so the big SI type of vendors want a, want a piece of that action these days. And they're, they're much more engaged than they were early days, when they weren't so sure all of this was real. >> I always say, they like to eat at the trough and then the trough is full, so they dive right in. (all laughing) They're definitely very engaged, and they built big data practices and distinctive analytics practices as well. Beyond that, sort of the developer community has also begun to shift. And it's shifted from simply people that could spell, you know, Hive or could spell Kafka and all of the various projects that are involved. And it is elevated, in particular into a data science community. So one of additional communities that we sort of brought on board with what we're doing, not just with the engine and SPARK, but also with tools for data scientists like Cloudera Data Science Workbench, has added that element to the community that really wasn't a part of it, historically. So that's been a nice add on. And then last, but certainly not least, are the cloud providers. And like everybody, they're, those are complicated relationships because on the one hand, they're incredibly valuable partners to it, certainly both Microsoft and Amazon are critical partners for Cloudera, at the same time, they've got competitive offerings. So, like most successful software companies there's a lot of coopetition to contend with that also wasn't there just a few years ago when we didn't have cloud offerings, and they didn't have, you know, data warehouse in the cloud offerings. But, those are things that have sort of impacted the ecosystem. >> So, I've got to ask you a marketing question, since you're the CMO. By the way, great message UL. I like the, the "grow, connect, protect." I think that's really easy to understand. >> Thank you. >> And the other one was modern. The phrase, say the phrase again. >> Yeah. It's the "Cloudera builds the modern platform for machine learning analytics optimized for the cloud." >> Very tight mission statement. Question on the name. Cloudera. >> Mmhmm. >> It's spelled, it's actually cloud with ERA in the letters, so "the cloud era." People use that term all the time. We're living in the cloud era. >> Yes. >> Cloud-native is the hottest market right now in the Linux foundation. The CNCF has over two hundred and forty members and growing. Cloud-native clearly has indicated that the new, modern developers here in the renaissance of software development, in general, enterprises want more developers. (laughs) Not that you want to be against developers, because, clearly, they're going to hire developers. >> Absolutely. >> And you're going to enable that. And then you've got the, obviously, cloud-native on-premise dynamic. Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud. So is there plans to think about that cloud era, is it a cloud positioning? You see cloud certainly important in what you guys do, because the cloud creates more compute, more capabilities to move data around. >> Sure. >> And (laughs) process it. And make it, make machine learning go faster, which gives more data, more AI capabilities, >> It's the flywheel you and I were discussing. >> It's the flywheel of, what's the innovation sandwich, Dave? You know? (laughs) >> A little bit of data, a little bit of machine itelligence, in the cloud. >> So, the innovation's in play. >> Yeah, Absolutely. >> Positioning around Cloud. How are you looking at that? >> Yeah. So, it's a fascinating story. You were with us in the earliest days, so you know that the original architecture of everything that we built was intended to be run in the public cloud. It turns out, in 2008, there were exactly zero customers that wanted all of their data in a public cloud environment. So the company actually pivoted and re-architected the original design of the offerings to work on-prim. And, no sooner did we do that, then it was time to re-architect it yet again. And we are right in the midst of doing that. So, we really have offerings that span the whole gamut. If you want to just pick up you whole current Cloudera environment in an infrastructure as a service model, we offer something called Altus Director that allows you to do that. Just pick up the entire environment, step it up onto AWUS, or Microsoft Azure, and off you go. If you want the convenience and the elasticity and the ease of use of a true platform as a service, just this past week we announced Altus Data Warehouse, which is a platform as a service kind of a model. For data warehousing, we have the data engineering module for Altus as well. Last, but not least, is everybody's not going to sign up for just one cloud vendor. So we're big believers in multi-cloud. And that's why we support the major cloud vendors that are out there. And, in addition to that, it's going to be a hybrid world for as far out as we can see it. People are going to have certain workloads that, either for economics or for security reasons, they're going to continue to want to run in-house. And they're going to have other workloads, certainly more transient workloads, and I think ML and data science will fall into this camp, that the public cloud's going to make a great deal of sense. And, allowing companies to bridge that gap while maintaining one security compliance and management model, something we call a Shared Data Experience, is really our core differentiator as a business. That's at the very core of what we do. >> Classic cloud workload experience that you're bringing, whether it's on-prim or whatever cloud. >> That's right. >> Cloud is an operating environment for you guys. You look at it just as >> The delivery mechanism. In effect. Awesome. All right, future for Cloudera. What can you share with us. I know you're a public company. Can't say any forward-looking statements. Got to do all those disclaimers. But for customers, what's the, what's the North Star for Cloudera? You mentioned going after a much more hardcore enterprise. >> Yes. >> That's clear. What's the North Star for you guys when you talk to customers? What's the big pitch? >> Yeah. I think there's a, there's a couple of really interesting things that we learned about our business over the course of the past six, nine months or so here. One, was that the greatest need for our offerings is in very, very large and complex enterprises. They have the most data, not surprisingly. And they have the most business gain to be had from leveraging that data. So we narrowed our focus. We have now identified approximately five thousand global customers, so think of it as kind of Fortune or Forbes 5000. That is our sole focus. So, we are entirely focused on that end of the market. Within that market, there are certain industries that we play particularly well in. We're incredibly well-positioned in financial services. Very well-positioned in healthcare and telecommunications. Any regulated industry, that really cares about how they govern and maintain their data, is really the great target audience for us. And so, that continues to be the focus for the business. And we're really excited about that narrowing of focus and what opportunities that's going to build for us. To not just land new customers, but more to expand our existing ones into a broader and broader set of use cases. >> And data is coming down faster. There's more data growth than ever seen before. It's never stopping.. It's only going to get worse. >> We love it. >> Bring it on. >> Any way you look at it, it's getting worse or better. Mick, thanks for spending the time. I know you're super busy with the event going on. Congratulations on the success, and the focus, and the positioning. Appreciate it. Thanks for coming on The Cube. >> Absolutely. Thank you gentlemen. It was a pleasure. >> We are Cube NYC. This is our ninth year doing all action. Everything that's going on in the data world now is horizontally scaling across all aspects of the company, the society, as we know. It's super important, and this is what we're talking about here in New York. This is The Cube, and John Furrier. Dave Vellante. Be back with more after this short break. Stay with us for more coverage from New York City. (upbeat music)

>> Live from New York, It's theCUBE! Covering theCUBE New York City 2018. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBE live in New York City, here for CUBE NYC. In conjunct with Strata Conference, Strata Data, Strata Hadoop This is our ninth year covering the big data ecosystem which has evolved into machine learning, A.I., data science, cloud, a lot of great things happening all things data, impacting all businesses I'm John Furrier, your host with Dave Vellante and Peter Burris, Peter is filling in for Dave Vellante. Next guest, Stephanie McReynolds who is the CMO, VP of Marketing for Alation, thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> Good to see you. So you guys have a pretty spectacular exhibit here in New York. I want to get to that right away, top story is Attack of the Bots. And you're showing a great demo. Explain what you guys are doing in the show. >> Yah, well it's robot fighting time in our booth, so we brought a little fun to the show floor my kids are.. >> You mean big data is not fun enough? >> Well big data is pretty fun but occasionally you got to get your geek battle on there so we're having fun with robots but I think the real story in the Alation booth is about the product and how machine learning data catalogs are helping a whole variety of users in the organization everything from improving analyst productivity and even some business user productivity of data to then really supporting data scientists in their work by helping them to distribute their data products through a data catalog. >> You guys are one of the new guard companies that are doing things that make it really easy for people who want to use data, practitioners that the average data citizen has been called, or people who want productivity. Not necessarily the hardcore, setting up clusters, really kind of like the big data user. What's that market look like right now, has it met your expectations, how's business, what's the update? >> Yah, I think we have a strong perspective that for us to close the final mile and get to real value out of the data, it's a human challenge, there's a trust gap with managers. Today on stage over at STRATA it was interesting because Google had a speaker and it wasn't their chief data officer it was their chief decision scientist and I think that reflects what that final mile is is that making decisions and it's the trust gap that managers have with data because they don't know how the insides are coming to them, what are all the details underneath. In order to be able to trust decisions you have to understand who processed the data, what decision making criteria did they use, was this data governed well, are we introducing some bias into our algorithms, and can that be controlled? And so Alation becomes a platform for supporting getting answers to those issues. And then there's plenty of other companies that are optimizing the performance of those QUERYS and the storage of that data, but we're trying to really to close that trust gap. >> It's very interesting because from a management standpoint we're trying to do more evidence based management. So there's a major trend in board rooms, and executive offices to try to find ways to acculturate the executive team to using data, evidence based management healthcare now being applied to a lot of other domains. We've also historically had a situation where the people who focused or worked with the data was a relatively small coterie of individuals that crave these crazy systems to try to bring those two together. It sounds like what you're doing, and I really like the idea of the data scientists, being able to create data products that then can be distributed. It sounds like you're trying to look at data as an asset to be created, to be distributed so they can be more easily used by more people in your organization, have we got that right? >> Absolutely. So we're now seeing we're in just over a hundred production implementations of Alation, at large enterprises, and we're now seeing those production implementations get into the thousands of users. So this is going beyond those data specialists. Beyond the unicorn data scientists that understand the systems and math and technology. >> And business. >> And business, right. In business. So what we're seeing now is that a data catalog can be a point of collaboration across those different audiences in an enterprise. So whereas three years ago some of our initial customers kept the data catalog implementations small, right. They were getting access to the specialists to this catalog and asked them to certify data assets for others, what were starting to see is a proliferation of creation of self service data assets, a certification process that now is enterprise-wide, and thousands of users in these organizations. So Ebay has over a thousand weekly logins, Munich Reinsurance was on stage yesterday, their head of data engineering said they have 2,000 users on Alation at this point on their data lake, Fiserv is going to speak on Thursday and they're getting up to those numbers as well, so we see some really solid organizations that are solving medical, pharmaceutical issues, right, the largest re insurer in the world leading tech companies, starting to adopt a data catalog as a foundation for how their going to make those data driven decisions in the organization. >> Talk about how the product works because essentially you're bringing kind of the decision scientists, for lack of a better word, and productivity worker, almost like a business office suite concept, as a SAS, so you got a SAS model that says "Hey you want to play with data, use it but you have to do some front end work." Take us through how you guys roll out the platform, how are your customers consuming the service, take us through the engagement with customers. >> I think for customers, the most interesting part of this product is that it displays itself as an application that anyone can use, right? So there's a super familiar search interface that, rather than bringing back webpages, allows you to search for data assets in your organization. If you want more information on that data asset you click on those search results and you can see all of the information of how that data has been used in the organization, as well as the technical details and the technical metadata. And I think what's even more powerful is we actually have a recommendation engine that recommends data assets to the user. And that can be plugged into Tablo and Salesworth, Einstein Analytics, and a whole variety of other data science tools like Data Haiku that you might be using in your organization. So this looks like a very easy to use application that folks are familiar with that you just need a web browser to access, but on the backend, the hard work that's happening is the automation that we do with the platform. So by going out and crawling these source systems and looking at not just the technical descriptions of data, the metadata that exists, but then being able to understand by parsing the sequel weblogs, how that data is actually being used in the organization. We call it behavior I.O. by looking at the behaviors of how that data's being used, from those logs, we can actually give you a really good sense of how that data should be used in the future or where you might have gaps in governing that data or how you might want to reorient your storage or compute infrastructure to support the type of analytics that are actually being executed by real humans in your organization. And that's eye opening to a lot of I.T. sources. >> So you're providing insights to the data usage so that the business could get optimized for whether it's I.T. footprint component, or kinds of use cases, is that kind of how it's working? >> So what's interesting is the optimization actually happens in a pretty automated way, because we can make recommendations to those consumers of data of how they want to navigate the system. Kind of like Google makes recommendations as you browse the web, right? >> If you misspell something, "Oh did you mean this", kind of thing? >> "Did you mean this, might you also be interested in this", right? It's kind of a cross between Google and Amazon. Others like you may have used these other data assets in the past to determine revenue for that particular region, have you thought about using this filter, have you thought about using this join, did you know that you're trying to do analysis that maybe the sales ops guy has already done, and here's the certified report, why don't you just start with that? We're seeing a lot of reuse in organizations, wherein the past I think as an industry when Tablo and Click and all these B.I tools that were very self service oriented started to take off it was all about democratizing visualization by letting every user do their own thing and now we're realizing to get speed and accuracy and efficiency and effectiveness maybe there's more reuse of the work we've already done in existing data assets and by recommending those and expanding the data literacy around the interpretation of those, you might actually close this trust gap with the data. >> But there's one really important point that you raised, and I want to come back to it, and that is this notion of bias. So you know, Alation knows something about the data, knows a lot about the metadata, so therefore, I don't want to say understands, but it's capable of categorizing data in that way. And you're also able to look at the usage of that data by parsing some of sequel statements and then making a determination of the data as it's identified is appropriately being used based on how people are actually applying it so you can identify potential bias or potential misuse or whatever else it might be. That is an incredibly important thing. As you know John, we had an event last night and one of the things that popped up is how do you deal with emergence in data science in A.I, etc. And what methods do you put in place to actually ensure that the governance model can be extended to understand how those things are potentially in a very soft way, corrupting the use of the data. So could you spend a little bit more time talking about that because it's something a lot of people are interested in, quite frankly we don't know about a lot of tools that are doing that kind of work right now. It's an important point. >> I think the traditional viewpoint was if we just can manage the data we will be able to have a govern system. So if we control the inputs then well have a safe environment, and that was kind of like the classic single source of truth, data warehouse type model. >> Stewards of the data. >> What we're seeing is with the proliferation of sources of data and how quickly with IOT and new modern sources, data is getting created, you're not able to manage data at that point of that entry point. And it's not just about systems, it's about individuals that go on the web and find a dataset and then load it into a corporate database, right? Or you merge an Excel file with something that in a database. And so I think what we see happening, not only when you look at bias but if you look at some of the new regulations like [Inaudible] >> Sure. Ownership, [Inaudible] >> The logic that you're using to process that data, the algorithm itself can be biased, if you have a biased training data site that you feed it into a machine learning algorithm, the algorithm itself is going to be biased. And so the control point in this world where data is proliferating and we're not sure we can control that entirely, becomes the logic embedded in the algorithm. Even if that's a simple sequel statement that's feeding a report. And so Alation is able to introspect that sequel and highlight that maybe there is bias at work and how this algorithm is composed. So with GDPR the consumer owns their own data, if they want to pull it out from a training data set, you got to rerun that algorithm without that consumer data and that's your control point then going forward for the organization on different governance issues that pop up. >> Talk about the psychology of the user base because one of the things that shifted in the data world is a few stewards of data managed everything, now you've got a model where literally thousands of people of an organization could be users, productivity users, so you get a social component in here that people know who's doing data work, which in a way, creates a new persona or class of worker. A non techy worker. >> Yeah. It's interesting if you think about moving access to the data and moving the individuals that are creating algorithms out to a broader user group, what's important, you have to make sure that you're educating and training and sharing knowledge with that democratized audience, right? And to be able to do that you kind of want to work with human psychology, right? You want to be able to give people guidance in the course of their work rather than have them memorize a set of rules and try to remember to apply those. If you had a specialist group you can kind of control and force them to memorize and then apply, the more modern approach is to say "look, with some of these machine learning techniques that we have, why don't we make a recommendation." What you're going to do is introduce bias into that calculation. >> And we're capturing that information as you use the data. >> Well were also making a recommendation to say "Hey do you know you're doing this? Maybe you don't want to do that." Most people are using the data are not bad actors. They just can't remember all the rule sets to apply. So what were trying to do is cut someone behaviorally in the act before they make that mistake and say hey just a bit of a reminder, a bit of a coaching moment, did you know what you're doing? Maybe you can think of another approach to this. And we've found that many organizations that changes the discussion around data governance. It's no longer this top down constraint to finding insight, which frustrates an audience, is trying to use that data. It's more like a coach helping you improve and then social aspect of wanting to contribute to the system comes into play and people start communicating, collaborating, the platform and curating information a little bit. >> I remember when Microsoft Excel came out, the spreadsheet, or Lotus 123, oh my God, people are going to use these amazing things with spreadsheets, they did. You're taking a similar approach with analytics, much bigger surface area of work to kind of attack from a data perspective, but in a way kind of the same kind of concept, put the hands of the users, have the data in their hands so to speak. >> Yeah, enable everyone to make data driven decisions. But make sure that they're interpreting that data in the right way, right? Give them enough guidance, don't let them just kind of attack the wild west and fair it out. >> Well looking back at the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet example, I remember when a finance department would send a formatted spreadsheet with all the rules for how to use it out of 50 different groups around the world, and everyone figured out that you can go in and manipulate the macros and deliver any results they want. And so it's that same notion, you have to know something about that, but this site, in many respects Stephanie you're describing a data governance model that really is more truly governance, that if we think about a data asset it's how do we mediate a lot of different claims against that set of data so that its used appropriately, so its not corrupted, so that it doesn't effect other people, but very importantly so that the out6comes are easier to agree upon because there's some trust and there's some valid behaviors and there's some verification in the flow of the data utilization. >> And where we give voice to a number of different constituencies. Because business opinions from different departments can run slightly counter to one another. There can be friction in how to use particular data assets in the business depending on the lens that you have in that business and so what were trying to do is surface those different perspectives, give them voice, allow those constituencies to work that out in a platform that captures that debate, captures that knowledge, makes that debate a knowledge of foundation to build upon so in many ways its kind of like the scientific method, right? As a scientist I publish a paper. >> Get peer reviewed. >> Get peer reviewed, let other people weigh in. >> And it becomes part of the canon of knowledge. >> And it becomes part of the canon. And in the scientific community over the last several years you see that folks are publishing their data sets out publicly, why can't an enterprise do the same thing internally for different business groups internally. Take the same approach. Allow others to weigh in. It gets them better insights and it gets them more trust in that foundation. >> You get collective intelligence from the user base to help come in and make the data smarter and sharper. >> Yeah and have reusable assets that you can then build upon to find the higher level insights. Don't run the same report that a hundred people in the organization have already run. >> So the final question for you. As you guys are emerging, starting to do really well, you have a unique approach, honestly we think it fits in kind of the new guard of analytics, a productivity worker with data, which is we think is going to be a huge persona, where are you guys winning, and why are you winning with your customer base? What are some things that are resonating as you go in and engage with prospects and customers and existing customers? What are they attracted to, what are they like, and why are you beating the competition in your sales and opportunities? >> I think this concept of a more agile, grassroots approach to data governance is a breath of fresh air for anyone who spend their career in the data space. Were at a turning point in industry where you're now seeing chief decision scientists, chief data officers, chief analytic officers take a leadership role in organizations. Munich Reinsurance is using their data team to actually invest and hold new arms of their business. That's how they're pushing the envelope on leadership in the insurance space and were seeing that across our install base. Alation becomes this knowledge repository for all of those mines in the organization, and encourages a community to be built around data and insightful questions of data. And in that way the whole organization raises to the next level and I think its that vision of what can be created internally, how we can move away from just claiming that were a big data organization and really starting to see the impact of how new business models can be creative in these data assets, that's exciting to our customer base. >> Well congratulations. A hot start up. Alation here on theCUBE in New York City for cubeNYC. Changing the game on analytics, bringing a breath of fresh air to hands of the users. A new persona developing. Congratulations, great to have you. Stephanie McReynolds. Its the cube. Stay with us for more live coverage, day one of two days live in New York City. We'll be right back.

>> Live from New York, it's theCUBE covering theCUBE New York City 2018. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem partners. (techy music) >> Hello, everyone, welcome to this CUBE special presentation here in New York City for CUBENYC. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. This is our ninth year covering the big data industry, starting with Hadoop World and evolved over the years. This is our ninth year, Dave. We've been covering Hadoop World, Hadoop Summit, Strata Conference, Strata Hadoop. Now it's called Strata Data, I don't know what Strata O'Reilly's going to call it next. As you all know, theCUBE has been present for the creation at the Hadoop big data ecosystem. We're here for our ninth year, certainly a lot's changed. AI's the center of the conversation, and certainly we've seen some horses come in, some haven't come in, and trends have emerged, some gone away, your thoughts. Nine years covering big data. >> Well, John, I remember fondly, vividly, the call that I got. I was in Dallas at a storage networking world show and you called and said, "Hey, we're doing "Hadoop World, get over there," and of course, Hadoop, big data, was the new, hot thing. I told everybody, "I'm leaving." Most of the people said, "What's Hadoop?" Right, so we came, we started covering, it was people like Jeff Hammerbacher, Amr Awadallah, Doug Cutting, who invented Hadoop, Mike Olson, you know, head of Cloudera at the time, and people like Abi Mehda, who at the time was at B of A, and some of the things we learned then that were profound-- >> Yeah. >> As much as Hadoop is sort of on the back burner now and people really aren't talking about it, some of the things that are profound about Hadoop, really, were the idea, the notion of bringing five megabytes of code to a petabyte of data, for example, or the notion of no schema on write. You know, put it into the database and then figure it out. >> Unstructured data. >> Right. >> Object storage. >> And so, that created a state of innovation, of funding. We were talking last night about, you know, many, many years ago at this event this time of the year, concurrent with Strata you would have VCs all over the place. There really aren't a lot of VCs here this year, not a lot of VC parties-- >> Mm-hm. >> As there used to be, so that somewhat waned, but some of the things that we talked about back then, we said that big money and big data is going to be made by the practitioners, not by the vendors, and that's proved true. I mean... >> Yeah. >> The big three Hadoop distro vendors, Cloudera, Hortonworks, and MapR, you know, Cloudera's $2.5 billion valuation, you know, not bad, but it's not a $30, $40 billion value company. The other thing we said is there will be no Red Hat of big data. You said, "Well, the only Red Hat of big data might be "Red Hat," and so, (chuckles) that's basically proved true. >> Yeah. >> And so, I think if we look back we always talked about Hadoop and big data being a reduction, the ROI was a reduction on investment. >> Yeah. >> It was a way to have a cheaper data warehouse, and that's essentially-- Well, what did we get right and wrong? I mean, let's look at some of the trends. I mean, first of all, I think we got pretty much everything right, as you know. We tend to make the calls pretty accurately with theCUBE. Got a lot of data, we look, we have the analytics in our own system, plus we have the research team digging in, so you know, we pretty much get, do a good job. I think one thing that we predicted was that Hadoop certainly would change the game, and that did. We also predicted that there wouldn't be a Red Hat for Hadoop, that was a production. The other prediction was is that we said Hadoop won't kill data warehouses, it didn't, and then data lakes came along. You know my position on data lakes. >> Yeah. >> I've always hated the term. I always liked data ocean because I think it was much more fluidity of the data, so I think we got that one right and data lakes still doesn't look like it's going to be panning out well. I mean, most people that deploy data lakes, it's really either not a core thing or as part of something else and it's turning into a data swamp, so I think the data lake piece is not panning out the way it, people thought it would be. I think one thing we did get right, also, is that data would be the center of the value proposition, and it continues and remains to be, and I think we're seeing that now, and we said data's the development kit back in 2010 when we said data's going to be part of programming. >> Some of the other things, our early data, and we went out and we talked to a lot of practitioners who are the, it was hard to find in the early days. They were just a select few, I mean, other than inside of Google and Yahoo! But what they told us is that things like SQL and the enterprise data warehouse were key components on their big data strategy, so to your point, you know, it wasn't going to kill the EDW, but it was going to surround it. The other thing we called was cloud. Four years ago our data showed clearly that much of this work, the modeling, the big data wrangling, et cetera, was being done in the cloud, and Cloudera, Hortonworks, and MapR, none of them at the time really had a cloud strategy. Today that's all they're talking about is cloud and hybrid cloud. >> Well, it's interesting, I think it was like four years ago, I think, Dave, when we actually were riffing on the notion of, you know, Cloudera's name. It's called Cloudera, you know. If you spell it out, in Cloudera we're in a cloud era, and I think we were very aggressive at that point. I think Amr Awadallah even made a comment on Twitter. He was like, "I don't understand "where you guys are coming from." We were actually saying at the time that Cloudera should actually leverage more cloud at that time, and they didn't. They stayed on their IPO track and they had to because they had everything betted on Impala and this data model that they had and being the business model, and then they went public, but I think clearly cloud is now part of Cloudera's story, and I think that's a good call, and it's not too late for them. It never was too late, but you know, Cloudera has executed. I mean, if you look at what's happened with Cloudera, they were the only game in town. When we started theCUBE we were in their office, as most people know in this industry, that we were there with Cloudera when they had like 17 employees. I thought Cloudera was going to run the table, but then what happened was Hortonworks came out of the Yahoo! That, I think, changed the game and I think in that competitive battle between Hortonworks and Cloudera, in my opinion, changed the industry, because if Hortonworks did not come out of Yahoo! Cloudera would've had an uncontested run. I think the landscape of the ecosystem would look completely different had Hortonworks not competed, because you think about, Dave, they had that competitive battle for years. The Hortonworks-Cloudera battle, and I think it changed the industry. I think it couldn't been a different outcome. If Hortonworks wasn't there, I think Cloudera probably would've taken Hadoop and making it so much more, and I think they wouldn't gotten more done. >> Yeah, and I think the other point we have to make here is complexity really hurt the Hadoop ecosystem, and it was just bespoke, new projects coming out all the time, and you had Cloudera, Hortonworks, and maybe to a lesser extent MapR, doing a lot of the heavy lifting, particularly, you know, Hortonworks and Cloudera. They had to invest a lot of their R&D in making these systems work and integrating them, and you know, complexity just really broke the back of the Hadoop ecosystem, and so then Spark came in, everybody said, "Oh, Spark's going to basically replace Hadoop." You know, yes and no, the people who got Hadoop right, you know, embraced it and they still use it. Spark definitely simplified things, but now the conversation has turned to AI, John. So, I got to ask you, I'm going to use your line on you in kind of the ask-me-anything segment here. AI, is it same wine, new bottle, or is it really substantively different in your opinion? >> I think it's substantively different. I don't think it's the same wine in a new bottle. I'll tell you... Well, it's kind of, it's like the bad wine... (laughs) Is going to be kind of blended in with the good wine, which is now AI. If you look at this industry, the big data industry, if you look at what O'Reilly did with this conference. I think O'Reilly really has not done a good job with the conference of big data. I think they blew it, I think that they made it a, you know, monetization, closed system when the big data business could've been all about AI in a much deeper way. I think AI is subordinate to cloud, and you mentioned cloud earlier. If you look at all the action within the AI segment, Diane Greene talking about it at Google Next, Amazon, AI is a software layer substrate that will be underpinned by the cloud. Cloud will drive more action, you need more compute, that drives more data, more data drives the machine learning, machine learning drives the AI, so I think AI is always going to be dependent upon cloud ends or some sort of high compute resource base, and all the cloud analytics are feeding into these AI models, so I think cloud takes over AI, no doubt, and I think this whole ecosystem of big data gets subsumed under either an AWS, VMworld, Google, and Microsoft Cloud show, and then also I think specialization around data science is going to go off on its own. So, I think you're going to see the breakup of the big data industry as we know it today. Strata Hadoop, Strata Data Conference, that thing's going to crumble into multiple, fractured ecosystems. >> It's already starting to be forked. I think the other thing I want to say about Hadoop is that it actually brought such great awareness to the notion of data, putting data at the core of your company, data and data value, the ability to understand how data at least contributes to the monetization of your company. AI would not be possible without the data. Right, and we've talked about this before. You call it the innovation sandwich. The innovation sandwich, last decade, last three decades, has been Moore's law. The innovation sandwich going forward is data, machine intelligence applied to that data, and cloud for scale, and that's the sandwich of innovation over the next 10 to 20 years. >> Yeah, and I think data is everywhere, so this idea of being a categorical industry segment is a little bit off, I mean, although I know data warehouse is kind of its own category and you're seeing that, but I don't think it's like a Magic Quadrant anymore. Every quadrant has data. >> Mm-hm. >> So, I think data's fundamental, and I think that's why it's going to become a layer within a control plane of either cloud or some other system, I think. I think that's pretty clear, there's no, like, one. You can't buy big data, you can't buy AI. I think you can have AI, you know, things like TensorFlow, but it's going to be a completely... Every layer of the stack is going to be impacted by AI and data. >> And I think the big players are going to infuse their applications and their databases with machine intelligence. You're going to see this, you're certainly, you know, seeing it with IBM, the sort of Watson heavy lift. Clearly Google, Amazon, you know, Facebook, Alibaba, and Microsoft, they're infusing AI throughout their entire set of cloud services and applications and infrastructure, and I think that's good news for the practitioners. People aren't... Most companies aren't going to build their own AI, they're going to buy AI, and that's how they close the gap between the sort of data haves and the data have-nots, and again, I want to emphasize that the fundamental difference, to me anyway, is having data at the core. If you look at the top five companies in terms of market value, US companies, Facebook maybe not so much anymore because of the fake news, though Facebook will be back with it's two billion users, but Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, who am I... And Microsoft, those five have put data at the core and they're the most valuable companies in the stock market from a market cap standpoint, why? Because it's a recognition that that intangible value of the data is actually quite valuable, and even though banks and financial institutions are data companies, their data lives in silos. So, these five have put data at the center, surrounded it with human expertise, as opposed to having humans at the center and having data all over the place. So, how do they, how do these companies close the gap? How do the companies in the flyover states close the gap? The way they close the gap, in my view, is they buy technologies that have AI infused in it, and I think the last thing I'll say is I see cloud as the substrate, and AI, and blockchain and other services, as the automation layer on top of it. I think that's going to be the big tailwind for innovation over the next decade. >> Yeah, and obviously the theme of machine learning drives a lot of the conversations here, and that's essentially never going to go away. Machine learning is the core of AI, and I would argue that AI truly doesn't even exist yet. It's machine learning really driving the value, but to put a validation on the fact that cloud is going to be driving AI business is some of the terms in popular conversations we're hearing here in New York around this event and topic, CUBENYC and Strata Conference, is you're hearing Kubernetes and blockchain, and you know, these automation, AI operation kind of conversations. That's an IT conversation, (chuckles) so you know, that's interesting. You've got IT, really, with storage. You've got to store the data, so you can't not talk about workloads and how the data moves with workloads, so you're starting to see data and workloads kind of be tossed in the same conversation, that's a cloud conversation. That is all about multi-cloud. That's why you're seeing Kubernetes, a term I never thought I would be saying at a big data show, but Kubernetes is going to be key for moving workloads around, of which there's data involved. (chuckles) Instrumenting the workloads, data inside the workloads, data driving data. This is where AI and machine learning's going to play, so again, cloud subsumes AI, that's the story, and I think that's going to be the big trend. >> Well, and I think you're right, now. I mean, that's why you're hearing the messaging of hybrid cloud and from the big distro vendors, and the other thing is you're hearing from a lot of the no-SQL database guys, they're bringing ACID compliance, they're bringing enterprise-grade capability, so you're seeing the world is hybrid. You're seeing those two worlds come together, so... >> Their worlds, it's getting leveled in the playing field out there. It's all about enterprise, B2B, AI, cloud, and data. That's theCUBE bringing you the data here. New York City, CUBENYC, that's the hashtag. Stay with us for more coverage live in New York after this short break. (techy music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas it's the Cube. Covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to IBM Think 2018. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and this is our third day of wall-to-wall coverage of IBM Think. Dinesh Nirmal is here, he's the Vice-President of Analytics Development at IBM. Dinesh, great to see you again. >> I know. >> We just say each other a couple of weeks ago. >> I know, in New York. >> Yeah and, of course, in Big Data SV >> Right. >> Over at the Strata Conference. So, great to see you again. >> Well, Thank you. >> A little different venue here. We had real intimate in New York City and in San Jose. >> I know, I know. >> Massive. What are your thoughts on bringing all the clients together like this? >> I mean, it's great because we have combined all the conferences into one, which obviously helps because the message is very clear to our clients on what we are doing end-to-end, but the feedback has been tremendous. I mean, you know, very positive. >> What has the feedback been like in terms of how you guys are making progress in the analytics group? What are they like? What are they asking you for more of? >> Right. So on the analytics side, the data is growing you know, by terabytes a day and the questions is how do they create insights into this massive amount of data that they have in their premise or on Cloud. So we have been working to make sure that how can we build the tools to enable our customers to create insights whether the data is on private cloud, public, or hybrid. And that's a very unique valid proposition that we bring to our customers. Regardless of where your data is, we can help you whether it's cloud, private, or hybrid. >> Well so, we're living in this multi-petabyte world now. Like overnight it became multi-petabyte. And one of the challenges of course people have is not only how do you deal with that volume of data, but how do I act on it and get insights quickly. How do I operationalize it? So maybe you can talk about some of the challenges of operationalizing data. >> Right. So, when I look at machine learning, there is three D's I always say and you know, the first D is the data, the development of the model, and the deployment of the model. When I talk about operationalization, especially the deployment piece, is the one that gets the most challenging for our enterprise customers. Once you clean the data and you build the model how do you take that model and you bring it your existing infrastructure. I mean, you know, look at your large enterprises. Right? I mean, you know, they've been around for decades. So they have third party software. They have existing infrastructure. They have legacy systems. >> Dave: A zillion data marks and data warehouses >> Data marks, so into all of that, how do you infuse machine learning, becomes very challenging. I met with the CTO of a major bank a few months ago, and his statement kind of stands out to me. Where he said, "Dinesh, it only took us three weeks to build the model. It's been 11 months, we still haven't deployed it". So that's the challenge our customers face and that's where we bring in the skillset. Not just the tools but we bring the skills to enable and bring that into production. >> So is that the challenge? It's the skillsets or is it the organizational inertia around well I don't have the time to do that now because I've got to get this report out or ... >> Dinesh: Right Maybe you can talk about that a little. Right. So that is always there. Right? I mean, because once a priority is set obviously the different challenges pull you in different directions, so every organization faces that to a large extent. But I think if you take from a pure technical perspective, I would say the challenge is two things. Getting the right tools, getting the right skills. So, with IBM, what we are focusing is how do we bring the right tools, regardless of the form factor you have, whether Cloud, Private Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, and then how do we bring the right skills into it. So this week we announce the data science lead team, who can come in and help you with building models. Looking at the use cases. Should we be using vanilla machine learning or should we be using deep learning. All those things and how do we bring that model into the production environment itself. So I would say tools and skills. >> So skills wise, in the skills there's at least two paths. It's like the multi-tool athlete. You've got the understanding of the tech. >> Dinesh: Right. >> You know, the tools, most technology people say hey, I'll figure that out. But then there's this data and digital >> Right. >> Skills. It's like this double deep skills that is challenging. So you're saying you can help. >> Right. Sort of kick-start that and how does that work? That sort of a services engagement? That's part of the ... >> So, once you identify a use case, the data science lead team can come in, because they have the some level of vertical knowledge of your industry. They are very trained data scientists. So they can come assess the use case. Help you pick the algorithms to build it. And then help you deploy, cleanse the data. I mean, you bring up a very, very good point. I mean, let's just look at the data, right. The personas that's involved in data; there is the data engineer, there's the data scientist, there's the data worker, there's the data steward, there's the CTO. So, that's just the data piece. Right? I mean, there's so many personas that have to come together. And that's why I said the skills a very critical piece of all it, but also, working together. The collaboration is important. >> Alright, tell us more about IBM Cloud Private for data. We've heard about IBM Cloud Private. >> Danish: Right. >> Cloud Private for Data is new. What's that all about? >> Right, so we announced IBM Cloud Private for Data this week and let me tell you, Dave, this has been the most significant announcement from an analytic perspective, probably in a while, that we are getting such a positive response. And, I will tell you why. So when you look at the platform, our customers want three things. One, they want to be able to build on top of the platform. They want it to be open and they want it to be extensible. And we have all three available. The platform is built on Kubernetes. So it's completely open, it's scalable, it's elastic. All those features comes with it. And then we put that end-to-end so you can ingest the data, you can cleanse it or transform it. You can build models or do deep analytics on it. You can visualize it. So you can do everything on the platform. So I'll take an example, like block chain, for example, I mean you have, if I were to simplify it, Right? You have the ledger, where you are, obviously, putting your transactions in and then you have a stay database where you are putting your latest transactions in. The ledger's unstructured. So, how do you, as that is getting filled, How do you ingest that, transform it on the fly, and be able to write into a persistent place and do analytics on it. Only a platform can do with that kind of volume of data. And that's where the data platform brings in, which is very unique especially on the modern applications that you want to do. >> Yes, because if you don't have the platform ... Let's unpack this a little bit. You've got a series of bespoke products and then you've got, just a lot of latency in terms of the elapsed times to get to the insights. >> Dinesh: Right. >> Along the way you've got data consistency issues, data quality >> Dinesh: Right >> maybe is variable. Things change. >> Right. I mean, think about it, right. If you don't have the platform then you have side-load products. So all of a sudden you've got to get a product for your governance, your integration catalog. You need to get a product for ingest. You got to get a product for persistence. You got to get a product for analytics. You got to get a product for visualization. And then you add the complexity of the different personas working together between the multitude of products. You have a mess in your hand at that point. The platform solves that problem because it brings you an integrated end-to-end solution that you can use to build, for example, block chain in this case. >> Okay, I've asked you this before, but I've got to again and get it on record with Think. So, a lot of people would hear that and say Okay but it's a bunch of bespoke products that IBM has taken they've put a UI layer on top and called it a platform. So, what defines a platform and how have you not done that? >> Right. >> And actually created the platform? >> Right. So, we are taking the functionality of the existing parts and that's what differentiates us. Right? If you look at our governance portfolio, I can sit here and very confidently say no one can match that, so >> Dave: Sure. We obviously have that strength >> Real Tap >> Right, Real Tap. That we can bring. So we are bringing the functionality. But what we have done is we are taking the existing products and disintegrated in to micro services so we can make it cloud native. So that is a huge step for us, right? And then once you make that containerized and micro services it fits into the open platform that we talked about before. And now you have an end-to-end, well orchestrated pipeline that's available in the platform that can scale and be elastic as needed. So, it's not that we are bringing the products, we are bringing the functionality of it. >> But I want to keep on this for a second, so the experience for the user is different if you microserviced what you say because if you just did what I said and put a layer a UI layer on top, you would be going into these stovepipes and then cul-de-sac and then coming back >> Dinesh: Right. And coming back. So, the development effort for that must have been >> Oh, yeah. >> Fairly massive. You could have done the UI layer in, you know, in months. >> Right, right, right, then it is not really cloud native way of doing it, right? I mean, if you're just changing the UI and the experience, that's completely different. What we have done is that we have completely re-architected the underlying product suite to meet the experience and the underlying platform layer. So, what can happen? How long did this take? What kind of resources did you have to throw at this from a development standpoint? >> So this has been in development for 12-18 months. >> Yeah. >> And we put, you know, a tremendous amount of resources to make this happen. I mean, fortunately in our case we have the depth, we have the functionality. So it was about translating that into the cloud native way of doing the app development. >> So did you approach this with sort of multiple small teams? Or was there a larger team? What was your philosophy here? >> It was multiple small teams, right. So if you look at our governance portfolio we got to take our governance catalog, rewrite that code. If we look at our master data management portfolio, we got to take, so it's multiple of small teams with very core focus. >> I mean, I ask you these questions because I think it adds credibility to the claims that you're making about we have a platform not a series of bespoke products. >> Right and we demoed it. Actually tomorrow at 11, I'm going to deep dive into the architecture of the whole platform itself. How we built it. What are the components we used and I'm going to demo it. So the code is up and running and we are going to put it out there into Cube for everybody to go us it. >> At Mandalay Bay, where is that demo? >> It's in Mandalay Bay, yeah. >> Okay. >> We have a session at 11:30. >> Talk more about machine learning and how you've infused machine learning into the portfolio. >> Right. So, every part of our product portfolio has machinery so, I'll take two examples. One is DB2. So today, DB2 Optimizer is a cost-based optimizer. We have taken the optimizer and infused machine learning into it to say, you know, based on the query that's coming in take the right access path, predict the right access path and take it. And that has been such a great experience because we are seeing 30-50 percent performance improvement in most of the queries that we run through the machinery. So that's one. The other one is the classification, so let's say, you have a business term and you want to classify. So, if you have a zip code, we can use in our catalog to say there's an 80% chance this particular number is a zip code and then it can learn over time, if you tell it, no that's not a zip code, that's a post code in Canada. So the next time you put that in there it has learned. So every product we have infused machine learning and that's our goal is to become completely a cognitive platform pretty soon. I mean, you know, so that has also been a tremendous piece of work that we're doing. >> So what can we expect? I mean, you guys are moving fast. >> Yeah. >> We've seen you go from sort of a bespoke product company division to this platform division. Injecting now machine learning into the equation. You're bringing in new technologies like block chain, which you're able to do because you have a platform. >> Right. >> What should we expect in terms of the pace and the types of innovations that we could see going forward? What could you share with us without divulging secrets? >> Right. So, from a product perspective we want to infuse cognitive machine learning into every aspect of the product. So, we don't want to, we don't want our customers calling us, telling there's a problem. We want to be able to tell our customer a day or two hours ahead that there is a problem. So that is predictability, Right? So we want not just in the product, even in the services side, we want to infuse total machine learning into the product. From a platform perspective we want to make it completely open, extensible. So our partners can come and build on top of it. So every customer can take advantage of vertical and other solutions that they build. >> You get a platform, you get this fly-wheel effect, inject machine learning everywhere open API so you can bring in new technologies like block chain as they evolve. Dinesh, thank you very much for coming on the Cube. >> Oh, thank you so much. >> Always great to have you. >> It's a pleasure, thank you. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be right back with our next guest. This is the Cube live from IBM Think 2018. We'll be right back. (techno music)

>> Live from San Jose, it's theCUBE! Presenting Big Data Silicon Valley, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Our continuing coverage of our event, Big data SV. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host George Gilbert. We're down the street from the Strata Data Conference, hearing a lot of interesting insights on big data. Peeling back the layers, looking at opportunities, some of the challenges, barriers to overcome but also the plethora of opportunities that enterprises alike have that they can take advantage of. Our next guest is no stranger to theCUBE, she was just on with me a couple days ago at the Women in Data Science Conference. Please welcome back to theCUBE, Ziya Ma. Vice President of Software and Services Group and the Director of Big Data Technologies from Intel. Hi Ziya! >> Hi Lisa. >> Long time, no see. >> I know, it was just really two to three days ago. >> It was, well and now I can say happy International Women's Day. >> The same to you, Lisa. >> Thank you, it's great to have you here. So as I mentioned, we are down the street from the Strata Data Conference. You've been up there over the last couple days. What are some of the things that you're hearing with respect to big data? Trends, barriers, opportunities? >> Yeah, so first it's very exciting to be back at the conference again. The one biggest trend, or one topic that's hit really hard by many presenters, is the power of bringing the big data system and data science solutions together. You know, we're definitely seeing in the last few years the advancement of big data and advancement of data science or you know, machine learning, deep learning truly pushing forward business differentiation and improve our life quality. So that's definitely one of the biggest trends. Another thing I noticed is there was a lot of discussion on big data and data science getting deployed into the cloud. What are the learnings, what are the use cases? So I think that's another noticeable trend. And also, there were some presentations on doing the data science or having the business intelligence on the edge devices. That's another noticeable trend. And of course, there were discussion on security, privacy for data science and big data so that continued to be one of the topics. >> So we were talking earlier, 'cause there's so many concepts and products to get your arms around. If someone is looking at AI and machine learning on the back end, you know, we'll worry about edge intelligence some other time, but we know that Intel has the CPU with the Xeon and then this lower power one with Atom. There's the GPU, there's ASICs, FPGAS, and then there are these software layers you know, with higher abstraction layer, higher abstraction level. Help us put some of those pieces together for people who are like saying, okay, I know I've got a lot of data, I've got to train these sophisticated models, you know, explain this to me. >> Right, so Intel is a real solution provider for data science and big data. So at the hardware level, and George, as you mentioned, we offer a wide range of products from general purpose like Xeon to targeted silicon such as FPGA, Nervana, and other ASICs chips like Nervana. And also we provide adjacencies like networking the hardware, non-volatile memory and mobile. You know, those are the other adjacent products that we offer. Now on top of the hardware layer, we deliver fully optimized software solutions stack from libraries, frameworks, to tools and solutions. So that we can help engineers or developers to create AI solutions with greater ease and productivity. For instance, we deliver Intel optimized math kernel library. That leverage of the latest instruction set gives us significant performance boosts when you are running your software on Intel hardware. We also deliver framework like BigDL and for Spark and big data type of customers if they are looking for deep learning capabilities. We also optimize some popular open source deep learning frameworks like Caffe, like TensorFlow, MXNet, and a few others. So our goal is to provide all the necessary solutions so that at the end our customers can create the applications, the solutions that they really need to address their biggest pinpoints. >> Help us think about the maturity level now. Like, we know that the very most sophisticated internet service providers who are sort of all over this machine learning now for quite a few years. Banks, insurance companies, people who've had this. Statisticians and actuaries who have that sort of skillset are beginning to deploy some of these early production apps. Where are we in terms of getting this out to the mainstream? What are some of the things that have to happen? >> To get it to mainstream, there are so many things we could do. First I think we will continue to see the wide range of silicon products but then there are a few things Intel is pushing. For example, we're developing this in Nervana, graph compiler that will encapsulate the hardware integration details and present a consistent API for developers to work with. And this is one thing that we hope that we can eventually help the developer community with. And also, we are collaborating with the end user. Like, from the enterprise segment. For example, we're working with the financial services industry, we're working with a manufacturing sector and also customers from the medical field. And online retailers, trying to help them to deliver or create the data science and analytics solutions on Intel-based hardware or Intel optimized software. So that's another thing that we do. And we're seeing actually very good progress in this area. Now we're also collaborating with many cloud service providers. For instance, we work with some of the top seven cloud service providers, both in the U.S. and also in China to democratize the, not only our hardware, but also our libraries and tools, BigDL, MKL, and other frameworks and libraries so that our customers, including individuals and businesses, can easily access to those building blocks from the cloud. So definitely we're working from different factors. >> So last question in the last couple of minutes. Let's kind of vibe on this collaboration theme. Tell us a little bit about the collaboration that you're having with, you mentioned customers in some highly regulated industries, for as an example. But a little bit to understand what's that symbiosis? What is Intel learning from your customers that's driving Intel's innovation of your technologies and big data? >> That's an excellent question. So Lisa, maybe I can start my sharing a couple of customer use cases. What kind of a solution that we help our customer to address. I think it's always wise not to start a conversation with the customer on technology that you deliver. You want to understand the customer's needs first. And then so that you can provide a solution that really address their biggest pinpoint rather than simply selling technology. So for example, we have worked with an online retailer to better understand their customers' shopping behavior and to assess their customers' preferences and interests. And based upon that analysis, the online retailer made different product recommendations and maximized its customers' purchase potential. And it drove up the retailer's sales. You know, that's one type of use case that we have worked. We also have partnered with the customers from the medical field. Actually, today at the Strata Conference we actually had somebody highlighting, we had a joint presentation with UCSF where we helped the medical center to automate the diagnosis and grading of meniscus lesions. And so today actually, that's all done manually by the radiologist but now that entire process is automated. The result is much more accurate, much more consistent, and much more timely. Because you don't have to wait for the availability of a radiologist to read all the 3D MRI images. And that can all be done by machines. You know, so those are the areas that we work with our customers, understand their business need, and give them the solution they are looking for. >> Wow, the impact there. I wish we had more time to dive into some of those examples. But we thank you so much, Ziya, for stopping by twice in one week to theCUBE and sharing your insights. And we look forward to having you back on the show in the near future. >> Thanks, so thanks Lisa, thanks George for having me. >> And for my co-host George Gilbert, I'm Lisa Martin. We are live at Big Data SV in San Jose. Come down, join us for the rest of the afternoon. We're at this cool place called Forager Tasting and Eatery. We will be right back with our next guest after a short break. (electronic outro music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Jose, it's theCUBE. Presenting data, Silicon Valley brought to you by Silicon Angle Media and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live in San Jose at our event, Big Data SV. I'm Lisa Martin, my co-host is George Gilbert and we are down the street from the Strata Data Conference. We are at a really cool venue: Forager Eatery Tasting Room. Come down and join us, hang out with us, we've got a cocktail par-tay tonight. We also have an interesting briefing from our analysts on big data trends tomorrow morning. I want to welcome back to theCUBE now one of our CUBE VIP's and alumna Tendu Yogurtcu, the CTO at Syncsort, welcome back. >> Thank you. Hello Lisa, hi George, pleasure to be here. >> Yeah, it's our pleasure to have you back. So, what's going on at Syncsort, what are some of the big trends as CTO that you're seeing? >> In terms of the big trends that we are seeing, and Syncsort has grown a lot in the last 12 months, we actually doubled our revenue, it has been really an successful and organic growth path, and we have more than 7,000 customers now, so it's a great pool of customers that we are able to talk and see the trends and how they are trying to adapt to the digital disruption and make data as part of their core strategy. So data is no longer an enabler, and in all of the enterprise we are seeing data becoming the core strategy. This reflects in the four mega trends, they are all connected to enable business as well as operational analytics. Cloud is one, definitely. We are seeing more and more cloud adoption, even our financial services healthcare and banking customers are now, they have a couple of clusters running in the cloud, in public cloud, multiple workloads, hybrid seems to be the new standard, and it comes with also challenges. IT governance as well as date governance is a major challenge, and also scoping and planning for the workloads in the cloud continues to be a challenge, as well. Our general strategy for all of the product portfolio is to have our products following design wants and deploy any of our strategy. So whether it's a standalone environment on Linux or running on Hadoop or Spark, or running on Premise or in the Cloud, regardless of the Cloud provider, we are enabling the same education with no changes to run all of these environments, including hybrid. Then we are seeing the streaming trend, with the connected devices with the digital disruption and so much data being generated, being able to stream and process data on the age, with the Internet of things, and in order to address the use cases that Syncsort is focused on, we are really providing more on the Change Data Capture and near real-time and real-time data replication to the next generation analytics environments and big data environments. We launched last year our Change Data Capture, CDC, product offering with data integration, and we continue to strengthen that vision merger we had data replication, real-time data replication capabilities, and we are now seeing even Kafka database becoming a consumer of this data. Not just keeping the data lane fresh, but really publishing the changes from multiple, diverse set of sources and publishing into a Kafka database and making it available for applications and analytics in the data pipeline. So the third trend we are seeing is around data science, and if you noticed this morning's keynote was all about machine learning, artificial intelligence, deep learning, how to we make use of data science. And it was very interesting for me because we see everyone talking about the challenge of how do you prepare the data and how do you deliver the the trusted data for machine learning and artificial intelligence use and deep learning. Because if you are using bad data, and creating your models based on bad data, then the insights you get are also impacted. We definitely offer our products, both on the data integration and data quality side, to prepare the data, cleanse, match, and deliver the trusted data set for data scientists and make their life easier. Another area of focus for 2018 is can we also add supervised learning to this, because with the premium quality domain experts that we have now in Syncsort, we have a lot of domain experts in the field, we can infuse the machine learning algorithms and connect data profiling capabilities we have with the data quality capabilities recommending business rules for data scientists and helping them automate the mandate tasks with recommendations. And the last but not least trend is data governance, and data governance is almost a umbrella focus for everything we are doing at Syncsort because everything about the Cloud trend, the streaming, and the data science, and developing that next generation analytics environment for our customers depends on the data governance. It is, in fact, a business imperative, and the regulatory compliance use cases drives more importance today than governance. For example, General Data Protection Regulation in Europe, GDPR. >> Lisa: Just a few months away. >> Just a few months, May 2018, it is in the mind of every C-level executive. It's not just for European companies, but every enterprise has European data sourced in their environments. So compliance is a big driver of governance, and we look at governance in multiple aspects. Security and issuing data is available in a secure way is one aspect, and delivering the high quality data, cleansing, matching, the example Hilary Mason this morning gave in the keynote about half of what the context matters in terms of searches of her name was very interesting because you really want to deliver that high quality data in the enterprise, trust of data set, preparing that. Our Trillium Quality for big data, we launched Q4, that product is generally available now, and actually we are in production with very large deployment. So that's one area of focus. And the third area is how do you create visibility, the farm-to-table view of your data? >> Lisa: Yeah, that's the name of your talk! I love that. >> Yes, yes, thank you. So tomorrow I have a talk at 2:40, March 8th also, I'm so happy it's on the Women's Day that I'm talking-- >> Lisa: That's right, that's right! Get a farm-to-table view of your data is the name of your talk, track data lineage from source to analytics. Tell us a little bit more about that. >> It's all about creating more visibility, because for audit reasons, for understanding how many copies of my data is created, valued my data had been, and who accessed it, creating that visibility is very important. And the last couple of years, we saw everyone was focused on how do I create a data lake and make my data accessible, break the data silos, and liberate my data from multiple platforms, legacy platforms that the enterprise might have. Once that happened, everybody started worrying about how do I create consumable data set and how do I manage this data because data has been on the legacy platforms like Mainframe, IMBI series has been on relational data stores, it is in the Cloud, gravity of data originating in the Cloud is increasing, it's originating from mobile. Hadoop vendors like Hortonworks and Cloudera, they are creating visibility to what happens within the Hadoop framework. So we are deepening our integration with the Cloud Navigator, that was our announcement last week. We already have integration both with Hortonworks and Cloudera Navigator, this is one step further where we actually publish what happened to every single granular level of data at the field level with all of the transformations that data have been through outside of the cluster. So that visibility is now published to Navigator itself, we also publish it through the RESTful API, so governance is a very strong and critical initiative for all of the businesses. And we are playing into security aspect as well as data lineage and tracking aspect and the quality aspect. >> So this sounds like an extremely capable infrastructure service, so that it's trusted data. But can you sell that to an economic buyer alone, or do you go in in conjunction with anther solution like anti-money laundering for banks or, you know, what are the key things that they place enough value on that they would spend, you know, budget on it? >> Yes, absolutely. Usually the use cases might originate like anti-money laundering, which is very common, fraud detection, and it ties to getting a single view of an entity. Because in anti-money laundering, you want to understand the single view of your customer ultimately. So there is usually another solution that might be in the picture. We are providing the visibility of the data, as well as that single view of the entity, whether it's the customer view in this case or the product view in some of the use cases by delivering the matching capabilities and the cleansing capabilities, the duplication capabilities in addition to the accessing and integrating the data. >> When you go into a customer and, you know, recognizing that we still have tons of silos and we're realizing it's a lot harder to put everything in one repository, how do customers tell you they want to prioritize what they're bringing into the repository or even what do they want to work on that's continuously flowing in? >> So it depends on the business use case. And usually at the time that we are working with the customer, they selected that top priority use case. The risk here, and the anti-money laundering, or for insurance companies, we are seeing a trend, for example, building the data marketplace, as that tantalize data marketplace concept. So depending on the business case, many of our insurance customers in US, for example, they are creating the data marketplace and they are working with near real-time and microbatches. In Europe, Europe seems to be a bit ahead of the game in some cases, like Hadoop production was slow but certainly they went right into the streaming use cases. We are seeing more directly streaming and keeping it fresh and more utilization of the Kafka and messaging frameworks and database. >> And in that case, where they're sort of skipping the batch-oriented approach, how do they keep track of history? >> It's still, in most of the cases, microbatches, and the metadata is still associated with the data. So there is an analysis of the historical what happened to that data. The tools, like ours and the vendors coming to picture, to keep track, of that basically. >> So, in other words, by knowing what happened operationally to the data, that paints a picture of a history. >> Exactly, exactly. >> Interesting. >> And for the governance we usually also partner, for example, we partner with Collibra data platform, we partnered with ASG for creating that business rules and technical metadata and providing to the business users, not just to the IT data infrastructure, and on the Hadoop side we partner with Cloudera and Hortonworks very closely to complete that picture for the customer, because nobody is just interested in what happened to the data in Hadoop or in Mainframe or in my relational data warehouse, they are really trying to see what's happening on Premise, in the Cloud, multiple clusters, traditional environments, legacy systems, and trying to get that big picture view. >> So on that, enabling a business to have that, we'll say in marketing, 360 degree view of data, knowing that there's so much potential for data to be analyzed to drive business decisions that might open up new business models, new revenue streams, increase profit, what are you seeing as a CTO of Syncsort when you go in to meet with a customer, data silos, when you're talking to a Chief Data Officer, what's the cultural, I guess, not shift but really journey that they have to go on to start opening up other organizations of the business, to have access to data so they really have that broader, 360 degree view? What's that cultural challenge that they have to, journey that they have to go on? >> Yes, Chief Data Officers are actually very good partners for us, because usually Chief Data Officers are trying to break the silos of data and make sure that the data is liberated for the business use cases. Still most of the time the infrastructure and the cluster, whether it's the deployment in the Cloud versus on Premise, it's owned by the IT infrastructure. And the lines of business are really the consumers and the clients of that. CDO, in that sense, almost mitigates and connects to those line of businesses with the IT infrastructure with the same goals for the business, right? They have to worry about the compliance, they have to worry about creating multiple copies of data, they have to worry about the security of the data and availability of the data, so CDOs actually help. So we are actually very good partners with the CDOs in that sense, and we also usually have IT infrastructure owner in the room when we are talking with our customers because they have a big stake. They are like the gatekeepers of the data to make sure that it is accessed by the right... By the right folks in the business. >> Sounds like maybe they're in the role of like, good cop bad cop or maybe mediator. Well Tendu, I wish we had more time. Thanks so much for coming back to theCUBE and, like you said, you're speaking tomorrow at Strata Conference on International Women's Day: Get a farm-to-table view of your data. Love the title. >> Thank you. >> Good luck tomorrow, and we look forward to seeing you back on theCUBE. >> Thank you, I look forward to coming back and letting you know about more exciting both organic innovations and acquisitions. >> Alright, we look forward to that. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host George Gilbert. We are live at our event Big Data SV in San Jose. Come down and visit us, stick around, and we will be right back with our next guest after a short break. >> Tendu: Thank you. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Jose, it's theCUBE. Presenting big data silicon valley, brought to you be Siliconangle Media and its ecosystem partner. >> Welcome back to theCUBE we are live in San Jose, at Forger Eatery, super cool place. Our first day of our two days of coverage at our event called Big Data SV. Down the street is the Strata Data Conference, and we've got some great guests today that are going to share a lot insight and different perspectives on Big Data. This is our 10th big data event on theCUBE, our fifth in San Jose. We invite you to come on down to Forger Eatery and we also invite you to come down this evening. We've got a party going on and we've got a really cool breakfast presentation on the analysis site in the morning. Our first guest is, needs no introduction to theCUBE, he's a Cube Alumni, Murthy Mathiprakasam, did I get that right? >> Murthy: Absolutely. >> Murthy, awesome, as we're going to call him. The director of product marketing for Informatica, welcome back to theCUBE, it's great to have you back. >> Thanks for having me back, and congratulations on the 10 year anniversary. >> Yeah! So, interesting, exciting news from Informatica in the last two days, tell us about a couple of those big announcements that you guys just released. >> Absolutely, yes. So this has been very exciting year for us lots of, you know product, innovations and announcements, so just this week alone, actually there's one announcement that's probably going out right now as we speak, around API management, so one of the things, probably taking about before we started interviews you know around the trend toward cloud, lots of people doing a lot more data integration and application integration in the cloud space. But they face all the challenges that we've always seen in the data management space. Around developer productivity, and hand coding, just a lot of complexity that organizations have around maintenance. So one of the things at Informatica always brought to every domain that we cover is this ability to kind of abstract the underlying complexity, use a graphical user interface, make things at the logical level instead of the physical level. So we're bringing that entire kind of paradigm to the API management space. That's going to be very exciting, very game changing on the kind of app-to-app integration side of things. Back on the data world of course, which is what we're, you know, mainly talking about here today. We're doing a lot there as well. So we announced kind of a next generation of our data management platforms for the big data world, part of that is also a lot of cloud capabilities. 'Cause again, one of the bigger trends. >> Peter: Have you made a big bet there? >> Absolutely, and I mean this is the investment, return on investments over like 10 years, right? We were started in a kind of cloud game about 10 years ago with our platform as a service offering. So that has been continuously innovated on and we've been engineering, re-imagining that, to now include more of the big data stuff in it too, because more and more people are building data lakes in the cloud. So it's actually quite surprising, you know the rate at which the data lake kind of projects are now either migrating or just starting in the cloud environments. So given that being the trend, we were kind of innovating against that as well. So now our platform is service offerings supports the ability to connect to data sources in the cloud natively. You can do processing and gestion in the cloud. So there's a lot of really cool capabilities, again it's kind of bringing the Informatica ease of use, and kind of acceleration that comes to platform approach to the cloud environment. And there's a whole bunch of other announcements too, I mean I could spend 20 minutes, just on different innovations, but you know bringing artificial intelligence into the platform so we can talk more about that. >> Well I want to connect what you just announced with the whole notion of the data lake, 'cause it's really Informatica strength has always been in between. And it turns out that where a lot the enterprise problems have been. So the data lake has been there, but it's been big, it's been large, it was big data and the whole notion is make this as big as you can and we'll figure out what to do with it later. >> Murthy: Right. >> And now you're doing the API which is just a indication that we're seeing further segmentation and a specificity, a targeting of how we're going to use data, the value that we create out of data and apply it to business problems. But really Informatica strength is been in between. >> Murthy: Absolutely. >> It's been in, knowing where you data is, it's been in helping to build those pipelines and managing those pipelines. How have the investments that you've made over the last few years, made it possible for you to actually deliver an API orientation, that will actually work for Enterprises? >> Yeah, absolutely, and I would actually phrase it as sort of platform orientation, but you're exactly right. So what's happening is, I view this as sort of maturation of a lot of these new technologies. You know Hadoop was a very very, as you were saying kind of experimental technology four or five years ago. And we had customers too who were kind of in that experimental phase. But what's happening now is, big data isn't just a conversation with data engineers and developers, we're talking to CDO's, and Chief Data Officers, and VP's of data infrastructures about using Hadoop for Enterprise scale projects, now the minute you start having a conversation with a Chief Data Officer, you're not just talking about simple tools for ingestion and stuff like that. You're talking about security, you're talking about compliance, you're talking about GDPR if you're in Europe. So there's a whole host of sort of data management challenges, that are now relevant for the big data world, just because the big data world has become main stream. And so this is exactly to your point, where the investments that I think Informatica has been making and bringing our kind of comprehensive platform oriented approach to this space are paying off. Because for Chief Data Officer, they can't really do big data without those features. They can't not deal with security and compliance, they can't not deal with not knowing what the data is. 'Cause they're accountable for knowing what the data is, right? And so, there's a number of things that by virtue of the maturation of the industry, I think that trends are pointing toward, the enterprises kind of going more toward that platform approach. >> On that platform approach Informatica's really one of the only vendors that's talking about that, and delivering it. So that clearly is an area of differentiation. Why do you think that's nascent. This platform approach verses a kind of fit-for-purpose approach. >> Yeah, absolutely. And we should be careful with even the phrase fit-for-purpose too, 'cause I think that word gets thrown around a lot as it's one of those buzz words in the industry. Because it's sort of the positive way of saying incomplete, you know? And so, I think there are vendors who have tried to kind of address, know you one aspect of sort of one feature of the entire problem, that a Chief Data Officer would care about. They might call it fit-for-purpose, but you have to actually solve a problem at the end of the day. The Chief Data Officer's are trying to build enterprise data pipelines. You know you've got raw information from all sorts of data sources, on premise, in the cloud. You need to push that through a process, like at manufacturing process of being able to ingest it, repair it, cleanse it, govern it, secure it, master it, all the stuff has to happen in order to serve all the various communities that a Chief Data Officer has to serve. And so you're either doing all that or you're not. You know, that's the problem, that way we see the problem. And so the platform approach is a way of addressing the comprehensive set of problems that a Chief Data Officer, or these kind of of Data Executives care about, but also do it in a way, that fosters productivity and re-usability. Because the more you sort of build things in a kind of infrastructure level way, as soon as the infrastructure changes you're hosed, right? So you're seeing a lot of this in the industry now too, where somebody built something in Mapreduce three years ago, as soon as Spark came out, they're throwing all that stuff away. And it's not just, you know, major changes like that, even versions of Spark, or versions of Hadoop, can sometimes trigger a need to recode and throw away stuff. And organization can't afford this. When you're talking about 40 to 50% growth in the data overall. The last thing you want to do is make an investment that you're going to end up throwing away. And so, the platform approach to go back to your question, is the sort of most efficient pathway from an investment stand point, that an enterprise can take, to build something now that they can actually reuse and maintain and kind of scale in a very very pragmatic way. >> Well, let me push you on that a little bit. >> Murthy: Yeah. >> 'Cause what we would say is that, the fit-to-purpose is okay so long as you're true about the purpose, and you understand what it means to fit. What a lot of the open source, a lot of companies have done, is they've got a fit-to-purpose but then they do make promises that they say, oh this is fit-to-purpose, but it's really a platform. And as a consequence you get a whole bunch of, you know, duck-like solutions, (laughing) That are, you know, are they swimming, or are they flying, kind of problems. So, I think that what we see clients asking for, and this is one of my questions, what we see clients asking for is, I want to invest in technologies that allow me to sustain my investments, including perhaps some of my mistakes, if they are generating business value. >> Murthy: Right. >> So it's not a rip and replace, that's not what you're suggesting, what you're suggesting I think is, you know, use what you got, if it's creating value continue to use it, and then over time, invest the platform approach that's able to generate additional returns on top of it. Have I got that right? >> Absolutely. So it goes back to flexibility, that's the key word, I think that's kind of on the minds of a lot of Chief Data Officers. I don't want to build something today, that I know I'm going to throw away a year from now. >> Peter: I want to create options for the future. >> Create options. >> When I build them today. >> Exactly. So even the cloud, you're bringing up earlier on, right? Not everybody knows exactly what their cloud strategy is. And it's changing extremely rapidly, right? We had almost, we were seeing very few big data customers in the cloud maybe even a year or two ago? Now we're close to almost 50% of our big data business is people deploying off premise, I mean that's amazing, you know in a period of just a year or two. So Chief Data Officers are having to operate in these extreme kind of high velocity environments. The last thing you want to do is make a bet today, with the knowledge that you're going to end up having to throw away that bet in six months or a year. So the platform approach is sort of like your insurance policy because it enables you to design for today's requirements, but then very very quickly migrate or modify for new requirements that maybe be six months, a year or two down the line. >> On that front, I'd love for you to give us an example of a customer that has maybe in the last year, since you've seen so much velocity, come to you. But also had other technologies and their environment that from a cost perspective, I mean but at Peter's point there's still generating value, business value. How do you help customers that have multiple different products maybe exploring different multi-calibers, how to they come and start working with Informatica and not have to rip out other stuff, but be able to move forward and achieve ROI? >> So, it's really interesting kind of how people think about the whole rip and replace concept. So we actually had a customer dinner last night and I'm sitting next to a guy, and I was kind of asking very similar question. Tell me about your technology landscape, you know where are things going, where have things gone in the past, and he basically said there's a whole portfolio of technologies that they plan to obsolete. 'Cause they just know that, like they're probably, they don't even bother thinking about sustainability, to your point. They just want to use something just to kind of try it out. It's basically like a series of like three month trails of different technologies. And that's probably why we such proliferation of different technologies, 'cause people are just kind of trying stuff out, but it's like, I know I'm going to throw this stuff out. >> Yeah but that's, I mean, let me make sure I got that. 'Cause I want to reconcile a point. That's if they're in pilot and the pilot doesn't work. But the minute it goes into production and values being created they want to be able to sustain that stream of value. >> This is production environment. I'm glad you asked that question. So this is a customer that, and I'll tell you where I'm going to the point. So they've been using Informatica for over four years, for big data which is essentially almost the entire time big data's been around. So the reason this customers making the point is, Informatica's the only technology that is actually sustained precisely for the point that you're bringing up, because their requirements have changed wildly during this time. Even the internal politics of who needs access to data, all of that has changed radically over these four years. But the platform has enabled them to actually make those changes, and it's you know, been able to give them that flexibly. Everything else as far as, you know, developer tools, you know, visualization tools, like every year there's some kind of new thing that sort of comes out. And I don't want to be terribly harsh, there's probably one or two kind of vendors that have also persisted in those other areas. But, the point that they were trying to make to your original point is, is the point about sustainability. Like, at some point to avoid complete and utter chaos, you got to have like some foundation in the data environment. Something actually has to be something you can invest in today, knowing that as these changes internally externally are happening, you can kind of count on it and you can go to cloud you can be on Premise, you can have structured data, unstructured data, you know, for any type of data, any type of user, any type of deployment environment. I need something that I can count on, that's actually existing for four or more years. And that's where Informatica fits in. And meanwhile there's going to be a lot of other tools that, like this guy was saying, they're going to try out for three month or six months and that's great, but they're almost using it with the idea that they're going to throw it away. >> Couple questions here; What are some of the business values that you were, stating like this gentlemen, that you ere talking to last night. What's the industry that's he in and also, are there any like stats or ranges you can give us. Like, reduction in TCO, or new business models opening up. What's the business impact that Informatica is helping these customers achieve. >> Yeah, absolutely, I'll use this example, he's, I can't mention the name of the company but it's an insurance company. >> Lisa: Lot's of data. >> Lots of data, right. Not only do they have a lot of data, but there's a lot of sensitivity around the data. Because basically the only way they grow is by identifying patterns in consumers and they want to look at it if somebody's using car insurance in, maybe it for so long they're ready to get married, they need home insurance, they have these like really really sophisticated models around human behavior. So they know when to go and position new forms of insurance. There's also obviously security government types of issues that are at play as well. So the sensitivity around data is very very important. So for them, the business value is increased revenue, and you know ability to meet kind of regulatory pressure. I think that's generally, I mean every industry has some variant of that. >> Right. >> Cost production, increase revenue, you know meeting regulatory pressures. And so Informatica facilitates that, because instead of having to hire armies of people, and having to change them out maybe every three months or six months 'cause the underlying infrastructures changing, there's this one team, the Informatica team that's actually existed for this entire journey. They just keep changing, used cases, and projects, and new data sets, new deployment models, but the platform is sort of fixed and it's something that they can count on it's robust, it enables that kind of. >> Peter: It's an asset. >> It's an asset that delivers that sustainable value that you were taking about. >> Last question, we've got about a minute left, in terms of delivering value, Informatica not the only game in town, your competitors are kind of going with this MNA partnership approach. What makes Informatica stand out, why should companies consider Informatica? >> So they say like, what there's a quote about it. Imitation is the most sincere from of flattery. Yeah! (laughing) I guess we should feel as a little bit flattered, you know, by what we're seeing in the industry, but why from a customers stand point should they, you know continue to rely on Informatica. I mean we keep pushing the envelope on innovations, right? So, one the other areas that we innovated on is machine learning within the platform, because ultimately if one of the goals of the platform is to eliminate manual labor, a great way to do that is to just not have people doing it in the first place. Have machines doing it. So we can automatically understand the structure of data without any human intervention, right? We can understand if there's a file and it's got costumer names and you know, cost and skews, it must be an order. You don't actually have to say that it's an order. We can infer all this, because of the machine learning them we have. We can give recommendations to people as they're using our platform, if you're using a data set and you work with another person, we can go to you and say hey, maybe this is a data set that you would be interesting in. So those types of recommendations, predictions, discovery, totally changes the economic game for an organization. 'Cause the last thing you want is to have 40 to 50% growth in data translate into 40 to 50% of labor. Like you just can't afford it. It's not sustainable, again, to go back to your original point. The only sustainable approach to managing data for the future, is to have a machine learning based approach and so that's why, to your question, I think just gluing a bunch of stuff together still doesn't actually get to nut of sustainability. You actually have to have, the glue has to have something in it, you know? And in our case it's the machine learning approach that ties everything together that brings a data organization together, so they can actually deliver the maximum business value. >> Literally creates a network of data that delivers business value. >> You got it. >> Well Murthy, Murthy Awesome, thank you so much for coming back to theCUBE. >> Thank you! >> And sharing what's going on the Informatica and what's differentiating you guys. We wish you a great rest of the Strata Conference. >> Awesome, you as well. Thank you. >> Absolutely, we want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Peter Burris, we are live in San Jose at the Forger Eatery, come down here and join us, we've got a really cool space, we've got a part-tay tonight, so come join us. And we've got a really interesting breakfast presentation tomorrow morning, stick around and we'll be right back, with our next guest for this short break. (fun upbeat music)

>> Hi, I'm Peter Burris, and welcome to Wikibon Action Item Quick Take. Big Data SV is one of our important shows where we bring thought leadership around big data to the Cube and have great conversations about what's happening in the Big Data universe. John Furrier, what are we looking for in the next couple of weeks? >> Big Data Silicon Valley known as Big Data SV as we have NYC for New York City, two events that we co-produce in conjunction with Strata Conference going on side-by-side where we do the following. We have three days: Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, the sixth, seventh, and eighth. We're going to be in San Jose. And we have a great lineup. And it's pretty much sold out, but we added Thursday for more live interviews, where we extract the signal from the noise. So we have more opportunities to interview more people, and also, we're opening up more sponsorship slots. So if you want to get your company's name out there, get above the noise, and get those thought leadership interviews out, we have just released extra sponsorship opportunities for Thursday for live interviews and conversations on the Cube, a new format. As you know, it's proven as a conversational great way to get the word out in an informative, inspirational way. Of course, that's the Cube mission, Peter, as you know. And we love doing what we do. We love the support of our sponsors. So if you want to be a sponsor and have that conversation with us, we'd love to entertain that opportunity on Thursday, March 8th. >> Alright, John Furrier, your Cube host, who actually is going to be hosting Big Data SV. This has been a Wikibon Action Item Quick Take.

(electronic music) >> Host: Live from Midtown Manhattan it's The Cube! Covering Big Data New York City 2017, brought to you by Silicon Angle Media, and its Ecosystem sponsors. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live, The Cube in New York City for Big Data NYC, this is our fifth year, doing our own event, not with O'Reilly or Cloud Era at Strata Data, which as Hadoop World, Strata Conference, Strata Hadoop, now called Strata Data, probably called Strata AI next year, we're The Cube every year, bringing you all the great data, and what's going on. Entrepreneurs, VCs, thought leaders, we interview them and bring that to you. I'm John Furrier with our next guest, Greg Sands, who's the managing director and founder of Costa Nova ventures in Palo Alto, started out as an entrepreneur himself, then single shingle out there, now he's a big VC firm on a third fund. >> On the third fund. >> Third fund. How much in that fund? >> 175 million dollar fund. >> So now you're a big firm now, congratulations, and really great to see your success. >> Thanks very much. I mean, we're still very much an early stage boutique focused on companies that change the way the world does business, but it is the case that we have a bigger team and a bigger fund, to go do the same thing. >> Well you've been great to work with, I've been following you, we've known each other for a while, watched you left Sir Hill and start Costanova, but what's interesting is that, I can kind of joke and kid you, the VC inside joke about being a big firm, because I know you want to be small, and like to be small, help entrepreneurs, that's your thing. But it's really not a big firm, it's a few partners, but a lot of people helping companies, that's your ethos, that's what you're all about at your firm. Take a minute to just share with the folks the kinds of things you do and how you get involved in companies, you're hands on, you roll up your sleeves. You get out of the way at the right time, you help when you can, share your ethos. >> Yeah, absolutely so the way we think of it is, combining the craft of old school venture capital, with a modern operating team, and so since most founder these days are product-oriented, our job is to think like product people, not think like investors. So we think like product people, we do product level analysis, we do customer discovery, we do, we go ride along on sales calls when we're making investment decisions. And then we do the things that great venture capitalists have done for years, and so for example, at Alatian, who I know has been on the show today, we were able to incubate them in our office for a year, I had many conversations with Sathien after he'd sold the first two or three customers. Okay, who's the next person we hire? Who isn't a founder? Who's going to go out and sell? What does that person look like? Do you go straight to a VP? Or do you hire an individual contributor? Do you hire someone for domain, or do you hire someone for talent? And that's the thing that we love doing. Now we've actually built out an operating team so marketing partner, Martino Alcenco, and Jim Wilson as a sales partner, to really help turn that into a program, so that they can, we can take these founders who find product market fit, and say, how do we help you build the right sales process and marketing process, sales team and marketing team, for your company, your customer, your product? >> Well it's interesting since you mention old school venture capital, I'll get into some of the dynamics that are going on in Silicon valley, but it's important to bring that forward, because now with cloud you can get to critical mass on the fly wheel, on economics, you can see the visibility faster now. >> Greg: Absolutely. >> So the game of the old school venture capitalist is all the same, how do you get to cruising altitude, whatever metaphor you want to use, the key was getting there, and sometimes it took a couple of rounds, but now you can get these companies with five million, maybe $10 million funding, they can have unit economics visibility, scales insight, then the scale game comes in, so that seems to be the secret trick right now in venture is, don't overspend, keep the valuation in range and allows you to look for multiple exits potentially, or growth. Talk about that dynamic, because this is like, I call it the hour glass. You get through the hour glass, everyone's down here, but if you can sneak through and get the visibility on the economics, then you grow quickly. >> Absolutely. I mean, it's exactly right an I haven't heard the hour glass metaphor before but I like it. You want to basically get through the narrows of product market fit and the beginnings of scalable sales and marketing. You don't need to know all the answers, but you can do that in a capital-efficient way, building really solid foundations for future explosive growth, look, everybody loves fast growth and big markets, and being grown into. But the number of people who basically don't build those foundations and then say, go big or go home! And they take a ton of money, and they go spend all the money, doing things that just fundamentally don't work, and they blow themselves up. >> Well this is the hourglass problem. You have, once you get through that unique economics, then you have true scale, and value will increase. Everybody wins there so it's about getting through that, and you can get through it fast with good mentoring, but here's the challenge that entrepreneurs fall into the trap. I call it the, I think I made it trap. And what happens is they think they're on the other side of the hourglass, but they still haven't even gone through the straight and narrow yet, and they don't know it. And what they do is they over fund and implode. That seems to be a major trap I see a lot of entrepreneurs fall into, while I got a 50 million pre on my B round, or some monster valuation, and they get way too much cash, and they're behaving as if they're scaling, and they haven't even nailed it yet. >> Well, I think that's right. So there's certainly, there are stages of product market fit, and so I think people hit that first stage, and they say, oh I've got it. And they try to explode out of the gates. And we, in fact I know one good example of somebody saying, hey, by the way, we're doing great in field sales, and our investors want us to go really fast, so we are going to go inside and we, my job was to hire 50 inside people, without ever having tried it. And so we always preach crawl, walk, run, right? Hire a couple, see how it works. Right, in a new channel. Or a new category, or an adjacent space, and I think that it's helpful to have an investor who has seen the whole picture to say, yeah, I know it looks like light at the end of the tunnel, but see how it's a relatively small dot? You still got to go a little farther, and then the other thing I say is, look, don't build your company to feed your venture capitalist ego. Right? People do these big rounds of big valuations, and the big dog investors say, go, go, go! But, you're the CEO. Your job is analyze the data. >> John: You can find during the day (laughs). >> And say, you know, given what we know, how fast should we go? Which investments should we make? And you've got to own that. And I think sometimes our job is just to be the pulling guard and clear space for the CEO to make good decisions. >> So you know I'm a big fan, so my bias is pretty much out there, love what you guys are doing. Tim Carr is a Pivot North doing the same thing. Really adding value, getting down and dirty, but the question that entrepreneurs always ask me and talk privately, not about you, but in general, I don't want the VC to get in the way. I want them, I don't want them to preach to me, I don't want too many know-it-alls on my board, I want added value, but again, I don't want the preaching, I don't want them to get in the way, 'cause that's the fear. I'm not saying the same about VCs in general, but that's kind of the mentality of an entrepreneur. I want someone who's going to help me, be in the boat with me, but not be in my way. How do you address that concern to the founders who think, not think like that, but might have a fear. >> Well, by the way, I think it's a legitimate fear, and I think it actually is uncorrelated with added value, right? I think the idea that the board has certain responsibilities, and management has certain responsibilities, is incredibly important. And I think, I can speak for myself in saying, I'm quite conscious of not crossing that line, I think you talk. >> John: You got to build a return, that's the thing. >> But ultimately I would say to an entrepreneur, I'd just say, hey look, call references. And by the way, here are 30 names and phone numbers, and call any one of them, because I think that people who are, so a venture capital know-it-all, in the board room, telling CEOs what to do, destroys value. It's sand in the gears, and it's bad for the company. >> Absolutely, I agree 100% >> And some of my, when I talk about being a pulling guard for the CEO, that's what I'm talking about, which is blocking people who are destructive. >> And rolling the block for a touchdown, kind of use the metaphor. Adding value, that's the key, and that's why I wanted to get that out there because most guys don't get that nuance, and entrepreneurs, especially the younger ones. So it's good and important. Okay, let's talk about culture, obviously in Silicon Valley, I get, reading this morning in the Wymo guy, and they're writing it, that's the Silicon Valley, that's not crazy, there's a lot of great people in Silicon Valley, you're one of them. The culture's certainly an innovative culture, there's been some things in the press, inclusion and diversity, obviously is super important. This whole brogrammer thing that's been kind of kicked around. How are you dealing with all that? Because, you know, this is a cultural shift, but I think it's being made out more than it really is, but there's still our core issues, your thoughts on the whole inclusion and diversity, and this whole brogrammer blowback thing. >> Yeah, well so I think, so first of all, really important issues, glad we're talking about them, and we all need to get better. And to me the question for us has been, what role do we play? And because I would say it is a relatively small subset of the tech industry, and the venture capital industry. At the same time the behavior of that has become public is appalling. It's appalling and totally unacceptable, and so the question is, okay, how can we be a part of the stand-up part of the ecosystem, and some of which is calling things out when we see them. Though frankly we work with and hang out with people and we don't see them that often, and then part of which is, how do we find a couple of ways to contribute meaningfully? So for example this summer we ran what we called the Costanova Access Fellowship, intentionally, trying to provide first opportunity and venture capital for people who traditionally haven't had as much access. We created an event in the spring called, Seat at the Table, really, particularly around women in the tech industry, and it went so well that we're running it in New York on October 19th, so if you're a woman in tech in New York, we'd love to see you then. And we're just trying to figure-- >> You're doing it in an authentic way though, you're not really doing it from a promotional standpoint. It's legit. >> Yeah, we're just trying to do, you know, pick off a couple of things that we can do, so that we can be on the side of the good guys. >> So I guess what you're saying is just have high integrity, and be part of the solution not part of the problem. >> That's right, and by the way, both of these initiatives were ones that were kicked off in late 2016, so it's not a reaction to things like binary capital, and the problems at uper, both of which are appalling. >> Self-awareness is critical. Let's get back to the nuts and bolts of the real reason why I wanted you to come on, one was to find out how much money you have to spend for the entrepreneurs that are watching. Give us the update on the last fund, so you got a new fund that you just closed, the new fund, fund three. You have your other funds that are still out there, and some funds reserved, which, what's the number amount, how much are you writing checks for? Give the whole thesis. >> Absoluteley. So we're an early stage investor, so we lead series A and seed financing companies that change the way the world does business, so up and down the stack, a business-facing software, data-driven applications. Machine-learning and AI driven applications. >> John: But the filter is changing the way the world works? >> The way, yes, but in particularly the way the world does business. You can think of it as a business-facing software stack. We're not social media investors, it's not what we know, it's not what we're good at. And it includes security and management, and the data stack and-- >> Joe: Enterprise and emerging tech. >> That's right. And the-- >> And every crazy idea in between. >> That's right. (laughs) Absolutely, and so we're participate in or leave seed financings as most typically are half a million to maybe one and a quarter, and we'll lead series A financing, small ones might be two or two and a half million dollars at the outer edge is probably a six million dollar check. We were just opening up in the next couple of days, a thousand square feet of incubation space at world headquarters at Palo Alto. >> John: Nice. >> So Alation, Acme Ticketing and Zen IQ are companies that we invested in. >> Joe: What location is this going to be at? >> That's, near the Fills in downtown Palo Alto, 164 staff, and those three companies are ones where we effectively invested at formation and incubated it for a year, we love doing that. >> At the hangout at Philsmore and get the data. And so you got some funds, what else do you have going on? 175 million? >> So one was a $100 million fund, and then fund two was $135 million fund, and the last investment of fund two which we announced about three weeks ago was called Roadster, so it's ecommerce enablement for the modern dealerships. So Omnichannel and Mobile First infrastructure for auto-dealers. We have already closed, and had the first board meeting for the first new investment of fund three, which isn't yet announced, but in the land of computer vision and deep learning, so a couple of the subjects that we care deeply about, and spend a lot of time thinking about. >> And the average check size for the A round again, seed and A, what do you know about the? The lowest and highest? >> The average for the seed is half a million to one and a quarter, and probably average for a series A is four or five. >> And you'll lead As. >> And we will lead As. >> Okay great. What's the coolest thing you're working on right now that gets you excited? It doesn't have to be a portfolio company, but the research you're doing, thing, tires you're kicking, in subjects, or domains? >> You know, so honestly, one of the great benefits of the venture capital business is that I get up and my neurons are firing right away every day. And I do think that for example, one of the things that we love is is all of the adulant infrastructure and so we've got our friends at Victor Ops that are in the middle of that space, and the thinking about how the modern programmer works, how everybody-- >> Joe: Is security on your radar? >> Security is very much on our radar, in fact, someone who you should have on your show is Asheesh Guptar, and Casey Ella, so she's just joined Bug Crowd as the CEO and Casey moves over to CTO, and the word Bug Bounty was just entered into the Oxford Dictionary for the first time last week, so that to me is the ultimate in category creation. So security and dev ops tools are among the things that we really like. >> And bounties will become the norm as more and more decentralized apps hit the scene. Are you doing anything on decentralized applications? I'm not saying Blockchain in particular, but Blockchain like apps, distributing computing you're well versed on. >> That's right, well we-- >> Blockchain will have an impact in your area. >> Blockchain will have an impact, we just spent an hour talking about it in the context our off site in Decosona Lodge in Pascadero, it felt like it was important that we go there. And digging into it. I think actually the edge computing is actually more actionable for us right now, given the things that we're, given the things that we're interested in, and we're doing and they, it is just fascinating how compute centralizes and then decentralizes, centralizes and then decentralizes again, and I do think that there are a set of things that are fascinating about what your process at the edge, and what you send back to the core. >> As Pet Gelson here said in the QU, if you're not out in front of that next wave, you're driftwood, a lot of big waves coming in, you've seen a lot of waves, you were part of one that changed the world, Netscape browser, or the business plan for that first project manager, congratulations. Now you're at a whole nother generation. You ready? (laughs) >> Absolutely, I'm totally ready, I'm ready to go. >> Greg Sands here in The Cube in New York City, part of Big Data NYC, more live coverage with The Cube after this short break, thanks for watching. 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>> Announcer: Live from Midtown Manhattan. It's the CUBE. Covering Big Data New York City 2017. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media and its ecosystem sponsor. (electronic music) >> Hey, welcome back everyone, live here in New York. This is the CUBE here in Manhattan for Big Data NYC's three days of coverage. We're one day three, things are starting to settle in, starting to see the patterns out there. I'll say it's Big Data week here, in conjunction with Hadoop World, formerly known as Strata Conference, Strata-Hadoop, Strata-Data, soon to be Strata-AI, soon to be Strata-IOT. Big Data, Mike Maccaux who's the Global Big Data Practice Lead at Dell EMC. We've been in this world now for multiple years and, well, what a riot it's been. >> Yeah, it has. It's been really interesting as the organizations have gone from their legacy systems, they have been modernizing. And we've sort of seen Big Data 1.0 a couple years ago. Big Data 2.0 and now we're moving on sort of the what's next? >> Yeah. >> And it's interesting because the Big Data space has really lagged the application space. You talk about microservices-based applications, and deploying in the cloud and stateless things. The data technologies and the data space has not quite caught up. The technology's there, but the thinking around it, and the deployment of those, it seems to be a slower, more methodical process. And so what we're seeing in a lot of enterprises is that the ones that got in early, have built out capabilities, are now looking for that, how do we get to the next level? How do we provide self-service? How do we enable our data scientists to be more productive within the enterprise, right? If you're a startup, it's easy, right? You're somewhere in the public cloud, you're using cloud based API, it's all fine. But if you're an enterprise, with the inertia of those legacy systems and governance and controls, it's a different problem to solve for. >> Let's just face it. We'll just call a spade a spade. Total cost of ownership was out of control. Hadoop was great, but it was built for something that tried to be something else as it evolved. And that's good also, because we need to decentralize and democratize the incumbent big data warehouse stuff. But let's face it, Hadoop is not the game anymore, it's everything else. >> Right, yep. >> Around it so, we've seen that, that's a couple years old. It's about business value right now. That seems to be the big thing. The separation between the players that can deliver value for the customers. >> Matt: Yep. >> And show a little bit of headroom for future AI things, they've seen that. And have the cloud on premise play. >> Yep. >> Right now, to me, that's the call here. What do you, do you agree? >> I absolutely see it. It's funny, you talk to organizations and they say, "We're going cloud, we're doing cloud." Well what does that mean? Can you even put your data in the cloud? Are you allowed to? How are you going to manage that? How are you going to govern that? How are you going to secure that? So many organizations, once they've asked those questions, they've realized, maybe we should start with the model of cloud on premise. And figure out what works and what doesn't. How do users actually want to self serve? What do we templatize for them? And what do we give them the freedom to do themselves? >> Yeah. >> And they sort of get their sea legs with that, and then we look at sort of a hybrid cloud model. How do we be able to span on premise, off premise, whatever your public cloud is, in a seamless way? Because we don't want to end up with the same thing that we had with mainframes decades ago, where it was, IBM had the best, it was the fastest, it was the most efficient, it was the new paradigm. And then 10 years later, organizations realized they were locked in, there was different technology. The same thing's true if you go cloud native. You're sort of locked in. So how do you be cloud agnostic? >> How do you get locked in a cloud native? You mean with Amazon? >> Or any of them, right? >> Okay. >> So they all have their own APIs that are really good for doing certain things. So Google's TensorFlow happens to be very good. >> Yeah. Amazon EMR. >> But you build applications that are using those native APIS, you're sort of locked. And maybe you want to switch to something else. How do you do that? So the idea is to-- >> That's why Kubernetes is so important, right now. That's a very key workload and orchestration container-based system. >> That's right, so we believe that containerization of workloads that you can define in one place, and deploy anywhere is the path forward, right? Deploy 'em on prem, deploy 'em in a private cloud, public cloud, it doesn't matter the infrastructure. Infrastructure's irrelevant. Just like Hadoop is sort of not that important anymore. >> So let me get your reaction on this. >> Yeah. So Dell EMC, so you guys have actually been a supplier. They've been the leading supplier, and now with Dell EMC across the portfolio of everything. From Dell computers, servers and what not, to storage, EMC's run the table on that for many generations. Yeah, there's people nippin' at your heels like Pure, okay that's fine. >> Sure. It's still storage is storage. You got to store the data somewhere, so storage will always be around. Here's what I heard from a CXO. This is the pattern I hear, but I'll just summarize it in one conversation. And then you can give a reaction to it. John, my life is hell. I have application development investment plan, it's just boot up all these new developers. New dev ops guys. We're going to do open source, I got to build that out. I got that, trying to get dev ops going on. >> Yep. >> That's a huge initiative. I got the security team. I'm unbundling from my IT department, into a new, difference in a reporting to the board. And then I got all this data governance crap underneath here, and then I got IOT over the top, and I still don't know where my security holes are. >> Yep. And you want to sell me what? (Matt laughs) So that's the fear. >> That's right. >> Their plates are full. How do you guys help that scenario? You walk in, actually security's pretty much, important obviously you can see that. But how do you walk into that conversation? >> Yeah, it's sort of stop the madness, right? >> (laughs) That's right. >> And all of that matters-- >> No, but this is all critical. Every room in the house is on fire. >> It is. >> And I got to get my house in order, so your comment to me better not be hype. TensorFlow, don't give me this TensorFlow stuff. >> That's right. >> I want real deal. >> Right, I need, my guys are-- >> I love TensorFlow but, doesn't put the fire out. >> They just want spark, right? I need to speed up my-- >> John: All right, so how do you help me? >> So, what we'd do is, we want to complement and augment their existing capabilities with better ways of scaling their architecture. So let's help them containerize their big data workload so that they can deploy them anywhere. Let's help them define centralized security policies that can be defined once and enforced everywhere, so that now we have a way to automate the deployment of environments. And users can bring their own tools. They can bring their data from outside, but because we have intelligent centralized policies, we can enforce that. And so with our elastic data platform, we are doing that with partners in the industry, Blue Talent and Blue Data, they provide that capability on top of whatever the customer's infrastructure is. >> How important is it to you guys that Dell EMC are partnering. I know Michael Dell talks about it all the time, so I know it's important. But I want to hear your reaction. Down in the trenches, you're in the front lines, providing the value, pulling things together. Partnerships seem to be really important. Explain how you look at that, how you guys do your partners. You mentioned Blue Talent and Blue Data. >> That's right, well I'm in the consulting organization. So we are on the front lines. We are dealing with customers day in and day out. And they want us to help them solve their problems, not put more of our kit in their data centers, on their desktops. And so partnering is really key, and our job is to find where the problems are with our customers, and find the best tool for the best job. The right thing for the right workload. And you know what? If the customer says, "We're moving to Amazon," then Dell EMC might not sell any more compute infrastructure to that customer. They might, we might not, right? But it's our job to help them get there, and by partnering with organizations, we can help that seamless. And that strengthens the relationship, and they're going to purchase-- >> So you're saying that you will put the customer over Dell EMC? >> Well, the customer is number one to Dell EMC. Net promoter score is one of the most important metrics that we have-- >> Just want to make sure get on the record, and that's important, 'cause Amazon, and you know, we saw it in Net App. I've got to say, give Net App credit. They heard from customers early on that Amazon was important. They started building into Amazon support. So people saying, "Are you crazy?" VMware, everyone's saying, "Hey you capitulated "by going to Amazon." Turns out that that was a damn good move. >> That's right. >> For Kelsinger. >> Yep. >> Look at VM World. They're going to own the cloud service provider market as an arms dealer. >> Yep. >> I mean, you would have thought that a year ago, no way. And then when they did the deal, they said, >> We have really smart leadership in the organization. Obviously Michael is a brilliant man. And it sort of trickles on down. It's customer first, solve the customer's problems, build the relationship with them, and there will be other things that come, right? There will be other needs, other workloads. We do happen to have a private cloud solution with Virtustream. Some of these customers need that intermediary step, before they go full public, with a hosted private solution using a Virtustream. >> All right, so what's the, final question, so what's the number one thing you're working on right now with customers? What's the pattern? You got the stack rank, you're requests, your deliverables, where you spend your time. What's the top things you're working on? >> The top thing right now is scaling architectures. So getting organizations past, they've already got their first 20 use cases. They've already got lakes, they got pedabytes in there. How do we enable self service so that we can actually bring that business value back, as you mentioned. Bring that business value back by making those data scientists productive. That's number one. Number two is aligning that to overall strategy. So organizations want to monetize their data, but they don't really know what that means. And so, within a consulting practice, we help our customers define, and put a road map in place, to align that strategy to their goals, the policies, the security, the GDP, or the regulations. You have to marry the business and the technology together. You can't do either one in isolation. Or ultimately, you're not going to be efficient. >> All right, and just your take on Big Data NYC this year. What's going on in Manhattan this year? What's the big trend from your standpoint? That you could take away from this show besides it becoming a sprawl of you know, everyone just promoting their wares. I mean it's a big, hyped show that O'Reilly does, >> It is. >> But in general, what's the takeaway from the signal? >> It was good hearing from customers this year. Customer segments, I hope to see more of that in the future. Not all just vendors showing their wares. Hearing customers actually talk about the pain and the success that they've had. So the Barclay session where they went up and they talked about their entire journey. It was a packed room, standing room only. They described their journey. And I saw other banks walk up to them and say, "We're feeling the same thing." And this is a highly competitive financial services space. >> Yeah, we had Packsotta's customer on Standard Bank. They came off about their journey, and how they're wrangling automating. Automating's the big thing. Machine learning, automation, no doubt. If people aren't looking at that, they're dead in my mind. I mean, that's what I'm seeing. >> That's right. And you have to get your house in order before you can start doing the fancy gardening. >> John: Yeah. >> And organizations aspire to do the gardening, right? >> I couldn't agree more. You got to be able to drive the car, you got to know how to drive the car if you want to actually play in this game. But it's a good example, the house. Got to get the house in order. Rooms are on fire (laughs) right? Put the fires out, retrench. That's why private cloud's kicking ass right now. I'm telling you right now. Wikibon nailed it in their true private cloud survey. No other firm nailed this. They nailed it, and it went viral. And that is, private cloud is working and growing faster than some areas because the fact of the matter is, there's some bursting through the clouds, and great use cases in the cloud. But, >> Yep. >> People have to get the ops right on premise. >> Matt: That's right, yep. >> I'm not saying on premise is going to be the future. >> Not forever. >> I'm just saying that the stack and rack operational model is going cloud model. >> Yes. >> John: That's absolutely happening, that's growing. You agree? >> Absolutely, we completely, we see that pattern over and over and over again. And it's the Goldilocks problem. There's the organizations that say, "We're never going to go cloud." There's the organizations that say, "We're going to go full cloud." For big data workloads, I think there's an intermediary for the next couple years, while we figure out operating pulse. >> This evolution, what's fun about the market right now, and it's clear to me that, people who try to get a spot too early, there's too many diseconomies of scale. >> Yep. >> Let the evolution, Kubernetes looking good off the tee right now. Docker containers and containerization in general's happened. >> Yep. >> Happening, dev ops is going mainstream. >> Yep. >> So that's going to develop. While that's developing, you get your house in order, and certainly go to the cloud for bursting, and other green field opportunities. >> Sure. >> No doubt. >> But wait until everything's teed up. >> That's right, the right workload in the right place. >> I mean Amazon's got thousands of enterprises using the cloud. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> It's not like people aren't using the cloud. >> No, they're, yeah. >> It's not 100% yet. (laughs) >> And what's the workload, right? What data can you put there? Do you know what data you're putting there? How do you secure that? And how do you do that in a repeatable way. Yeah, and you think cloud's driving the big data market right now. That's what I was saying earlier. I was saying, I think that the cloud is the unsubtext of this show. >> It's enabling. I don't know if it's driving, but it's the enabling factor. It allows for that scale and speed. >> It accelerates. >> Yeah. >> It accelerates... >> That's a better word, accelerates. >> Accelerates that horizontally scalable. Mike, thanks for coming on the CUBE. Really appreciate it. More live action we're going to have some partners on with you guys. Next, stay with us. Live in Manhattan, this is the CUBE. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from midtown Manhattan, it's theCUBE. Covering BigData, New York City, 2017. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem sponsors. >> Welcome back everyone, we're here live in New York City for theCUBE's coverage of BigData NYC, our event we've been running for five years, been covering BigData space for eight years, since 2010 when it was Hadoop World, Strata Conference, Strata Hadoop, Strata Data, soon to be called Strata AI, just a few. We've been theCUBE for all eight years. Here, live in New York, I'm John Furrier. Our next guest is Murthy Mathiprakasam, who is the Director of Product Marketing at Informatica. Cube alumni has been on many times, we cover Informatica World, every year. Great to see you, thanks for coming by and coming in. >> Great to see you. >> You guys do data, so there's not a lot of recycling going on in the data because we've been talking about it all week, total transformation, but the undercurrent has been a lot of AI, AI this, and you guys have the CLAIRE product, doing a lot of things there. But outside of the AI, the undertone is cloud, cloud, cloud. Governance, governance, governance. There's two kind of the drivers I'm seeing as the force of this week is, a lot of people trying to get their act together on those two fronts and you can kind of see the scabs on the industry, people, some people haven't been paying attention. And they're weak in the area. Cloud is absolutely going to be driving the BigData world, 'cause data is horizontal. Cloud's the power source that you guys have been on that. What's your thoughts, what other drivers encourage you? (mumbles) what I'm saying and what else did I miss? Security is obviously in there, but-- >> Absolutely, no, so I think you're exactly right on. So obviously governments security is a big deal. Largely being driven by the GDPR regulation, it's happening in Europe. But, I mean every company today is global, so. Everybody's essentially affected by it. So, I think data until now has always been a kind of opportunistic thing, that there's a couple guys and their organizations were looking at it as oh, let's do some experimentation. Let's do something interesting here. Now, it's becoming government managed so I think there's a lot of organizations who are, like, to your point, getting their act together, and that's driving a lot of demand for data management projects. So now, people say, well, if I got to get my act together, I don't have to hire armies of people to do it, let me look for automated machine learning based ways of doing it. So that they can actually deliver on their audit reports that they need to deliver on, and ensure the compliance that they need to ensure, but do it in a very scalable way. >> I've been kind of joking all week, and I kind of had this meme in my head, so I've been pounding on it all week, calling it the tool shed problem. The tool shed problem is, everyone's got these tools. They throw them into the tool shed. They bought a hammer and the company that sells them the hammer is trying to turn it to a lawnmower, right? You can't mow your lawn with a hammer, it's not going to work, and so this, these tools are great but it defines work. What you do, but, the platforming issue is a huge one. And you start to see people who took that view. You guys were one of them because in a platform centric view with tools that are enabled, to be highly productive. You don't have to worry about new things like a government's policy, the GDPR that might pop up, or the next Equifax that's around the corner. There's probably two or three of them going on right now. So, that's an impact, the data, who uses it, how it's used, and who's at fault or whatever. So, how does a company deal with that? And machine learning has proven to be a great horse that a lot of people are riding right now. You guys are doing it, how does a customer deal with that tsunami of potential threats? Architecture challenges, what is your solution, how do you talk about that? >> Well, I think machine learning, you know, up until now has been seen as the kind of, nice to have, and I think that very quickly, it's going to become a must have. Because, exactly like you're saying, it really is a tsunami. I mean, you could see people who are nervous about the fact that I mean, there's different estimates. It's like 40% growth in data assets from most organizations every year. So, you can try to get around this somehow with one of these (mumbles) tools or something. But at some point, something is going to break, either you just don't, run out of manpower, you can't train the manpower, people start leaving. whatever the operational challenges are, it just isn't going to scale. Machine learning is the only approach. It is absolutely the only approach that actually ensures that you can maintain data for these kind of defensive reasons like you're saying. The structure and compliance, but also the kind of offensive opportunistic reasons, and do it scalably, 'cause there's just no other way mathematically speaking, that when the data is growing 40% a year, just throwing a bunch of tools at it just doesn't work. >> Yeah, I would just amplify and look right in the camera, say, if you're not on machine learning, you're out of business. That's a straight up obvious trend, 'cause that's a precursor to AI, real AI. Alright, let's get down to data management, so when people throw around data management, it's like, oh yeah we've got some data management. There are challenges with that. You guys have been there from day one. But now if you take it out in the future, how do you guys provide the data management in a totally cloud world where now the customer certainly has public and private, or on premise but theirs might have multi cloud? So now, comes a land grab for the data layer, how do you guys play in that? >> Well, I think it's a great opportunity for these kind of middle work platforms that actually do span multiple clouds, that can span the internal environments. So, I'll give you an example. Yesterday we actually had a customer speaking at Astrada here, and he was talking about from him, the cloud is really just a natural extension of what they're already doing, because they already have a sophisticated data practice. This is a large financial services organization, and he's saying well now the data isn't all inside, some of it's outside, you've got partners, who've got data outside. How do we get to that data? Clearly, the cloud is the path for doing that. So, the fact that the cloud is a national extension a lot of organizations were already doing internally means they don't want to have a completely different approach to the data management. They want to have a consistent, simple, systematic repeatable approach to the data management that spans, as you said, on premise in the cloud. That's why I think the opportunity of a very mature and sophisticated platform because you're not rewriting and re-platforming for every new, is it AWS, is it Azure? Is it something on premise? You just want something that works, that shields you from the underlying infrastructure. >> So I put my skeptic hat on for a second and challenge you on this, because this I think is fundamental. Whether it's real or not, it's perceived, maybe in the back of the mind of the CXO or the CDO, whoever is enabled to make these big calls. If they have the keys to the kingdom in Informatica, I'm going to get locked in. So, this is a deep fear. People wake up with nightmares in the enterprise, they've seen locked in before. How do you explain that to a customer that you're going to be an enabling opportunity for them, not a lock in and foreclosing future benefits. Especially if I have an unknown scenario called multi-cloud. I mean, no one's really doing multi-cloud let's face it. I mean, I have multiple clouds with stuff on it, >> At least not intentionally. Sometimes you got a line of businesses and doing things, but absolutely I get it. >> No one's really moving workloads dynamically between clouds in real time. Maybe a few people doing some hacks, but for the most part of course, not a standard practice. >> Right. >> But they want it to be. >> Absolutely. >> So that's the future. From today, how do you preserve that position with the customer where you say hey we're going to add value, but we're not going to lock you in? >> So the whole premise again of, I mean, this goes back to classic three tier models of how you think about technology stacks, right? There's an infrastructure layer, there's a platform layer, there's an analytics layer and the whole premise of the middle of the layer, the platform layer, is that it enables flexibility in the other two layers. It's precisely when you don't have something that's kind of intermediating the data and the use of the data, that's when you run into challenges with flexibility and with data being locked in the data store. But you're absolutely right. We had dinner with a bunch of our customers last night. They were talking about they'd essentially evaluated every version of sort of BigData platform and data infrastructure platform right? And why? It was because they were a large organization and your different teams start stuff and they had to compute them out and stuff. And I was like that must have been pretty hard for you guys. Now what we were using Informatica, so it didn't really matter where the data was, we were still doing everything as far as the data management goes from a consistent layer and we integrate with all those different platforms. >> John: So you didn't get in the way? >> We didn't get in the way. >> You've actually facilitated. >> We are facilitating increased flexibility. Because without a layer like that, a fabric, or whatever you want to call it a data platform that's facilitating this the complexity's going to get very, very crazy very soon. If it hasn't already. The number of infrastructure platforms that are available like you said, on premise and on the cloud now, keeps growing. The number of analytical tools that are available is also growing. And all this is amazing innovation by the way. This is all great stuff, but to your point about it if your the chief officer of an organization going, I got to get this thing figured out somehow. I need some sanity, that's really the purpose of-- >> They just don't want to know the tool for tool's sake, they need to have it be purposeful. >> And that's why this machine learning aspect is very, very critical because I was thinking about an analogy just like you were and I was thinking, in a way you can think of data managing as sort of cleaning stuff up and there are people that have brooms and mops and all these different tools. Well, we are bringing a Roomba to market, right? Because you don't want to just create tools that transfer the laborer around, which is a little bit of what's going on. You want to actually get the laborer out of the equation, so that the people are focused on the context, business strategy and the data management is sort of cleaning itself. It's doing the work for you. That's really what Informatica's vision is. It's about being a kind of enterprise cloud data management vendor that is leveraging AI under the hood so that you can sort of set it and forget it. A lot of this ingestion and the cleansing, telling annals what data they should be looking for. All the stuff is just happening in an automated way and you're not in this total chaos. >> And that can be some tools will be sitting in the back for a long time. In my tool shed, when I had one back in a big enough property back east. No one has tool sheds by the way. No one does any gardening. The issue is in the day, I need to have a reliable partner. So I want you to take a minute and explain to the folks who aren't yet Informatica customers why they should be and the Informatica customers why they should stay with Informatica. >> Absolutely, so certainly the ones we have, a very loyal customer base. In fact the guy who was presenting with us yesterday, he said he's been with Informatica since 1999, going through various versions of our products and adopting new innovations. So we have a very loyal customer base, so I think that loyalty itself speaks for itself as well. As far as net new customers, I think that in a world of this increasing data complexity, it's exactly what you were saying, you need to find an approach that is going to scale. I keep hearing this word from the chief data officer, I kind of got something some going on today, I don't know how I scale it. How is this going to work in 2018 and 2019, in 2025? And it's just daunting for some of these guys. Especially going back to your point about compliance, right? So it's one thing if you have data sitting around, data so to speak, that you're not using it. But god forbid now, you got legal and regulatory concerns around it as well. So you have to get your arms around the data and that's precisely where Informatica can help because we've actually thought through these problems and we've talked about them. >> Most of them were a problem you solved because at the end of the day, we were talking about problems that have massive importance, big time consequences people can actually quantify. >> That's right. >> So what specific problem highest level do you solve is the most important, has the most consequences? >> Everything from ingestion of raw data sets from wherever like you said, in the cloud on premise, all the way through all the processes you need to make it fully usable. And we view that as one problem. There's other vendors who think that one aspect of that is a problem and it is worth solving. We really think, look at the end of the day, you got raw stuff and you have to turn it into useful stuff. Everything in there has to happen, so we might as well just give you everything and be very, very good at doing all those things. And so that's what we call enterprise cloud data management. It's everything from raw material to finished goods of insights. We want to be able to provide that in a consistent integrated and machine learning integrate it. >> Well you guys have a loyal customer base but to be fair and you kind of have to acknowledge that there is a point in time and not throw Informatica's away the big customers, big engagements. But there was a time in Informatica's history where you went private. There was some new management came in. There was a moment where the boat was taking on water, right? And you could almost look at it and say, hmm, you know, we're in this space. You guys retooled around that. Success to the team. Took it to another dimension. So that's the key thing. You know a lot of the companies become big and it's hard to get rid of. So the question is that's a statement. I think you guys done a great job. Yet, the boat might have taken on water, that's my opinion, but you can probably debate that. But I think as you get mature and you're in public, you just went private. But here's the thing, you guys have had a good product chop in Informatica, so I got to ask you the question. What cool things are you doing? Because remember, cool shiny new toys help put a little flash and glam on the nuts and bolts that scales. What are you guys doing? I know you just announced claire, some AI stuff. What's the hot stuff you're doing that's adding value? >> Yeah, absolutely, first of all, this kind of addresses your water comment as well. So we are probably one of the few vendors that spends almost about $200 million in R and D. And that hasn't changed through the acquisition. If anything, I think it actually increased a little bit because now our investors are even more committed to innovation. >> Well you're more nimble in private. A lot more nimble. >> Absolutely, a lot more ideas that are coming to the forefront. So there's never been any water just to be clear. But to answer your follow on question about some examples of this innovation. So I think Ahmed yesterday talked about some of our recent release as well but we really just keep pushing on this idea of, I know I keep saying this but it's this whole machine learning approach here of how can we learn more about the data? So one of the features, I'll give you an example, is if we can actually go look at a file and if we spot like a name and an address and some order information, that probably is a customer, right? And we know that right, because we've seen past data sets. So, there's examples of this pattern matching where you don't even have to have data that's filled out. And this is increasingly the way the data looks we are not dealing with relational tables anymore it's JSON files, it's web blogs, XML files, all of that data that you had to have that data scientists go through and parse and sift through, we just automatically recognize it now. If we can look for the data and understand it, we can match it. >> Put that in context in the order of benefits that, from the old way versus the current way, what's the pain levels? One versus the other, can you put context around that? In terms of, it's pretty significant. >> It's huge because again, back to this sort of volume and variety of data that people are trying to get into systems and do it very rapidly. I'll give you a really tangible customer case. So, this is a customer that presented at Informatica World a couple months ago. It's Jewelry TV, I can actually tell you the name. So there are one of these online kind of shopping sites and they've got a TV program that goes with the online site. So what they do is obviously when you promote something on TV, your orders go up online, right? They wanted to flip it around and they said, look, let's look at the web logs of the traffic that's on the website and then go promote that on the TV program. Because then you get a closed loop and start to have this explosion of sales. So they used Informatica, didn't have to do any of this hand coding. They just build this very quickly and with the graphical user interface that we provide, it leverages sparks streaming under the hood. So they are using all these technologies under the hood, they just didn't have to do any of the manual coding. Got this thing out in a couple days and it works. And they have been able to measure it and they're actually driving increased sales by taking the data and just getting it out to the people that need to see the data very, very quickly. So that's an example of a use case where this isn't just to your point about is this a small, incremental type of thing. No, there is a lot of money behind data if you can actually put it to good use. >> The consequences are grave and I think you've seen more and more, I mean the hacks just amplify it over and over again. It's not a cost center when you think about it. It has to be somehow configured differently as a profit center, even though it might not drive top line revenue directly like an app or anything else. It's not a cost center. If anything it will be treated as a profit center because you get hacked or someone's data is misused, you can be out of business. There is no profit. Look at the results of these hacks. >> The defensive argument is going to become very, very strong as these regulations come out. But, let's be clear, we work with a lot of the most advanced customers. There are people making money off of this. It can be a top line driver-- >> No it should be, it should be. That's exactly the mindset. So the final question for you before we break. I know we're out of time here. There are some chief data officers that are enabled, some aren't and that's just my observation. I don't want to pidgeonhole anyone, but some are enable to really drive change, some are just figureheads that are just managing the compliance risk and work for the CFO and say no to everything. I'm over-generalizing. But that's essentially how I see it. What's the problem with that? Because the cost center issue has, we've seen this moving before in the security business. Security should not be part of IT. That's it's own deal. >> Exactly. >> So we're kind of, this is kind of smoke, but we're coming out of the jungle here. Your thoughts on that. >> Yeah, you're absolutely right. We see a variety of models. We can see the evolution of those models and it's also very contextual to different industries. There are industries that are inherently more regulated, so that's why you're seeing the data people maybe more in those cost center areas that are focused on regulations and things like that. There's other industries that are a lot more consumer oriented. So for them, it makes more sense to have the data people be in a department that seems more revenue basing. So it's not entirely random. There are some reasons, that's not to say that's not the right model moving forward, but someday, you never know. There is a reason why this role became a CXO in the first place. Maybe it is somebody who reports to the CEO and they really view the data department as a strategic function. And it might take a while to get there, but I don't think it's going to take a long time. Again, we're talking about 40% growth in the data and these guys are realizing that now and I think we're going to see very quickly people moving out of the whole tool shed model, and moving to very systematic, repeatable practices. Sophisticated middleware platforms and-- >> As we say don't be a tool, be a platform. Murphy thanks so much for coming on to theCUBE, we really appreciate it. What's going on in Informatica real quick. Things good? >> Things are great. >> Good, awesome. Live from New York, this is theCUBE here at BigData NYC more live coverage continuing day three after this short break. (digital music)

>> Announcer: Live from midtown Manhattan, it's the Cube. Covering Big Data New York City 2017. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem sponsors. >> Welcome back everyone, we are here live in New York City, in Manhattan for BigData NYC, our event we've been doing for five years in conjunction with Strata Data which is formerly Strata Hadoop, which was formerly Strata Conference, formerly Hadoop World. We've been covering the big data space going on ten years now. This is the Cube. I'm here with Aaron Kalb, whose Head of Product and co-founder at Alation. Welcome to the cube. >> Aaron Kalb: Thank you so much for having me. >> Great to have you on, so co-founder head of product, love these conversations because you're also co-founder, so it's your company, you got a lot of equity interest in that, but also head of product you get to have the 20 mile stare, on what the future looks, while inventing it today, bringing it to market. So you guys have an interesting take on the collaboration of data. Talk about what the means, what's the motivation behind that positioning, what's the core thesis around Alation? >> Totally so the thing we've observed is a lot of people working in the data space, are concerned about the data itself. How can we make it cheaper to store, faster to process. And we're really concerned with the human side of it. Data's only valuable if it's used by people, how do we help people find the data, understand the data, trust in the data, and that involves a mix of algorithmic approaches and also human collaboration, both human to human and human to computer to get that all organized. >> John Furrier: It's interesting you have a symbolics background from Stanford, worked at Apple, involved in Siri, all this kind of futuristic stuff. You can't go a day without hearing about Alexia is going to have voice-activated, you've got Siri. AI is taking a really big part of this. Obviously all of the hype right now, but what it means is the software is going to play a key role as an interface. And this symbolic systems almost brings on this neural network kind of vibe, where objects, data, plays a critical role. >> Oh, absolutely, yeah, and in the early days when we were co-founding the company, we talked about what is Siri for the enterprise? Right, I was you know very excited to work on Siri, and it's really a kind of fun gimmick, and it's really useful when you're in the car, your hands are covered in cookie dough, but if you could answer questions like what was revenue last quarter in the UK and get the right answer fast, and have that dialogue, oh do you mean fiscal quarter or calendar quarter. Do you mean UK including Ireland, or whatever it is. That would really enable better decisions and a better outcome. >> I was worried that Siri might do something here. Hey Siri, oh there it is, okay be careful, I don't want it to answer and take over my job. >> (laughs) >> Automation will take away the job, maybe Siri will be doing interviews. Okay let's take a step back. You guys are doing well as a start up, you've got some great funding, great investors. How are you guys doing on the product? Give us a quick highlight on where you guys are, obviously this is BigData NYC a lot going on, it's Manhattan, you've got financial services, big industry here. You've got the Strata Data event which is the classic Hadoop industry that's morphed into data. Which really is overlapping with cloud, IoTs application developments all kind of coming together. How do you guys fit into that world? >> Yeah, absolutely, so the idea of the data lake is kind of interesting. Psychologically it's sort of a hoarder mentality, oh everything I've ever had I want to keep in the attic, because I might need it one day. Great opportunity to evolve these new streams of data, with IoT and what not, but just cause you can get to it physically doesn't mean it's easy to find the thing you want, the needle in all that big haystack and to distinguish from among all the different assets that are available, which is the one that is actually trustworthy for your need. So we find that all these trends make the need for a catalog to kind of organize that information and get what you want all the more valuable. >> This has come up a lot, I want to get into the integration piece and how you're dealing with your partnerships, but the data lake integration has been huge, and having the catalog has come up with, has been the buzz. Foundationally if you will saying catalog is important. Why is it important to do the catalog work up front, with a lot of the data strategies? >> It's a great question, so, we see data cataloging as step zero. Before you can prep the data in a tool like Trifacta, PACSAT, or Kylo. Before you can visualize it in a tool like Tableau, or MicroStrategy. Before you can do some sort of cool prediction of what's going to happen in the future, with a data science engine, before any of that. These are all garbage in garbage out processes. The step zero is find the relevant data. Understand it so you can get it in the right format. Trust that it's good and then you can do whatever comes next >> And governance has become a key thing here, we've heard of the regulations, GDPR outside of the United States, but also that's going to have an arms length reach over into the United States impact. So these little decisions, and there's going to be an Equifax someday out there. Another one's probably going to come around the corner. How does the policy injection change the catalog equation? A lot of people are building machine learning algorithms on top of catalogs, and they're worried they might have to rewrite everything. How do you balance the trade off between good catalog design and flexibility on the algorithm side? >> Totally yes it's a complicated thing with governance and consumption right. There's people who are concerned with keeping the data safe, and there are people concerned with turning that data into real value, and these can seem to be at odds. What we find is actually a catalog as a foundation for both, and they are not as opposed as they seem. What Alation fundamentally does is we make a map of where the data is, who's using what data, when, how. And that can actually be helpful if your goal is to say let's follow in the footsteps of the best analyst and make more insights generated or if you want to say, hey this data is being used a lot, let's make sure it's being used correctly. >> And by the right people. >> And by the right people exactly >> Equifax they were fishing that pond dry months, months before it actually happened. With good tools like this they might have seen this right? Am I getting it right? >> That's exactly right, how can you observe what's going on to make sure it's compliant and that the answers are correct and that it's happening quickly and driving results. >> So in a way you're taking the collective intelligence of the user behavior and using that into understanding what to do with the data modeling? >> That's exactly right. We want to make each person in your organization as knowledgeable as all of their peers combined. >> So the benefit then for the customer would be if you see something that's developing you can double down on it. And if the users are using a lot of data, then you can provision more technology, more software. >> Absolutely, absolutely. It's sort of like when I was going to Stanford, there was a place where the grass was all dead, because people were riding their bikes diagonally across it. And then somebody smart was like, we're going to put a real gravel path there. So the infrastructure should follow the usage, instead of being something you try to enforce on people. >> It's a classic design meme that goes around. Good design is here, the more effective design is the path. >> Exactly. >> So let's get into the integration. So one of the hot topics here this year obviously besides cloud and AI, with cloud really being more the driver, the tailwind for the growth, AI being more the futuristic head room, is integration. You guys have some partnerships that you announced with integration, what are some of the key ones, and why are they important? >> Absolutely, so, there have been attempts in the past to centralize all the data in one place have one warehouse or one lake have one BI tool. And those generally fail, for different reasons, different teams pick different stacks that work for them. What we think is important is the single source of reference One hub with spokes out to all those different points. If you think about it it's like Google, it's one index of the whole web even though the web is distributed all over the place. To make that happen it's very important that we have partnerships to get data in from various sources. So we have partnerships with database vendors, with Cloudera and Hortonworks, with different BI tools. What's new are a few things. One is with Cloudera Navigator, they have great technical metadata around security and lineage over HGFS, and that's a way to bolster our catalog to go even deeper into what's happening in the files before things get surfaced and higher for places where we have a deeper offering today. >> So it's almost a connector to them in a way, you kind of share data. >> That's exactly right, we've a lot of different connectors, this is one new one that we have. Another, go ahead. >> I was going to go ahead continue. >> I was just going to say another place that is exciting is data prep tools, so Trifacta and Paxata are both places where you can find and understand an alation and then begin to manipulate in those tools. We announced with Paxata yesterday, the ability to click to profile, so if you want to actually see what's in some raw compressed avro file, you can see that in one click. >> It's interesting, Paxata has really been almost lapping, Trifacta because they were the leader in my mind, but now you've got like a Nascar race going on between the two firms, because data wrangling is a huge issue. Data prep is where everyone is stuck right now, they just want to do the data science, it's interesting. >> They are both amazing companies and I'm happy to partner with both. And actually Trifacta and Alation have a lot of joint customers we're psyched to work with as well. I think what's interesting is that data prep, and this is beginning to happen with analyst definitions of that field. It isn't just preparing the data to be used, getting it cleaned and shaped, it's also preparing the humans to use the data giving them the confidence, the tools, the knowledge to know how to manipulate it. >> And it's great progress. So the question I wanted to ask is now the other big trend here is, I mean it's kind of a subtext in this show, it's not really front and center but we've been seeing it kind of emerge as a concept, we see in the cloud world, on premise vs cloud. On premise a lot of people bring in the dev ops model in, and saying I may move to the cloud for bursting and some native applications, but at the end of the day there is a lot of work going on on premise. A lot of companies are kind of cleaning house, retooling, replatforming, whatever you want to do resetting. They are kind of getting their house in order to do on prem cloud ops, meaning a business model of cloud operations on site. A lot of people doing that, that will impact the story, it's going to impact some of the server modeling, that's a hot trend. How do you guys deal with the on premise cloud dynamic? >> Totally, so we just want to do what's right for the customer, so we deploy both on prem and in the cloud and then from wherever the Alation server is it will point to usually a mix of sources, some that are in the cloud like vetshifter S3 often with Amazon today, and also sources that are on prem. I do think I'm seeing a trend more and more toward the cloud and we have people that are migrating from HGFS to S3 is one thing we hear a lot about it. Strata with sort of dupe interest. But I think what's happening is people are realizing as each Equifax in turn happens, that this old wild west model of oh you surround your bank with people on horseback and it's physically in one place. With data it isn't like that, most people are saying I'd rather have the A+ teams at Salesforce or Amazon or Google be responsible for my security, then the people I can get over in the midwest. >> And the Paxata guys have loved the term Data Democracy, because that is really democratization, making the data free but also having the governance thing. So tell me about the Data Lake governance, because I've never loved the term Data Lake, I think it's more of a data ocean, but now you see data lake, data lake, data lake. Are they just silos of data lakes happening now? Are people trying to connect them? That's key, so that's been a key trend here. How do you handle the governance across multiple data lakes? >> That's right so the key is to have that single source of reference, so that regardless of which lake or warehouse, or little siloed Sequel server somewhere, that you can search in a single portal and find that thing no matter where it is. >> John: Can you guys do that? >> We can do that, yeah, I think the metaphor for people who haven't seen it really is Google, if you think about it, you don't even know what physical server a webpage is hosted from. >> Data lakes should just be invisible >> Exactly. >> So your interfacing with multiple data lakes, that's a value proposition for you. >> That's right so it could be on prem or in the cloud, multi-cloud. >> Can you share an example of a customer that uses that and kind of how it's laid out? >> Absolutely, so one great example of an interesting data environment is eBay. They have the biggest teradata warehouse in the world. They also have I believe two huge data lakes, they have hive on top of that, and Presto is used to sort of virtualize it across a mixture of teradata, and hive and then direct Presto query It gets very complicated, and they have, they are a very data driven organization, so they have people who are product owners who are in jobs where data isn't in their job title and they know how to look at excel and look at numbers and make choices, but they aren't real data people. Alation provides that accessibility so that they can understand it. >> We used to call the Hadoop world the car show for the data world, where for a long time it was about the engine what was doing what, and then it became, what's the car, and now how's it drive. Seeing that same evolution now where all that stuff has to get done under the hood. >> Aaron: Exactly. >> But there are still people who care about that, right. They are the mechanics, they are the plumbers, whatever you want to call them, but then the data science are the guys really driving things and now end users potentially, and even applications bots or what nots. It seems to evolve, that's where we're kind of seeing the show change a little bit, and that's kind of where you see some of the AI things. I want to get your thoughts on how you or your guys are using AI, how you see AI, if it's AI at all if it's just machine learning as a baby step into AI, we all know what AI could be, but it's really just machine learning now. How do you guys use quote AI and how has it evolved? >> It's a really insightful question and a great metaphor that I love. If you think about it, it used to be how do you build the car, and now I can drive the car even though I couldn't build it or even fix it, and soon I don't even have to drive the car, the car will just drive me, all I have to know is where I want to go. That's sortof the progression that we see as well. There's a lot of talk about deep learning, all these different approaches, and it's super interesting and exciting. But I think even more interesting than the algorithms are the applications. And so for us it's like today how do we get that turn by turn directions where we say turn left at the light if you want to get there And eventually you know maybe the computer can do it for you The thing that is also interesting is to make these algorithms work no matter how good your algorithm is it's all based on the quality of your training data. >> John: Which is a historical data. Historical data in essence the more historical data you have you need that to train the data. >> Exactly right, and we call this behavior IO how do we look at all the prior human behavior to drive better behavior in the future. And I think the key for us is we don't want to have a bunch of unpaid >> John: You can actually get that URL behavioral IO. >> We should do it before it's too late (Both laugh) >> We're live right now, go register that Patrick. >> Yeah so the goal is we don't want to have a bunch of unpaid interns trying to manually attack things, that's error prone and that's slow. I look at things like Luis von Ahn over at CMU, he does a thing where as you're writing in a CAPTCHA to get an email account you're also helping Google recognize a hard to read address or a piece of text from books. >> John: If you shoot the arrow forward, you just take this kind of forward, you almost think augmented reality is a pretext to what we might see for what you're talking about and ultimately VR are you seeing some of the use cases for virtual reality be very enterprise oriented or even end consumer. I mean Tom Brady the best quarterback of all time, he uses virtual reality to play the offense virtually before every game, he's a power user, in pharma you see them using virtual reality to do data mining without being in the lab, so lab tests. So you're seeing augmentation coming in to this turn by turn direction analogy. >> It's exactly, I think it's the other half of it. So we use AI, we use techniques to get great data from people and then we do extra work watching their behavior to learn what's right. And to figure out if there are recommendations, but then you serve those recommendations, either it's Google glasses it appears right there in your field of view. We just have to figure out how do we make sure, that in a moment of you're making a dashboard, or you're making a choice that you have that information right on hand. >> So since you're a technical geek, and a lot of folks would love to talk about this, so I'll ask you a tough question cause this is something everyone is trying to chase for the holy grail. How do you get the right piece of data at the right place at the right time, given that you have all these legacy silos, latencies and network issues as well, so you've got a data warehouse, you've got stuff in cold storage, and I've got an app and I'm doing something, there could be any points of data in the world that could be in milliseconds potentially on my phone or in my device my internet of thing wearable. How do you make that happen? Because that's the struggle, at the same time keep all the compliance and all the overhead involved, is it more compute, is it an architectural challenge how do you view that because this is the big challenge of our time. >> Yeah again I actually think it's the human challenge more than the technology challenge. It is true that there is data all over the place kind of gathering dust, but again if you think about Google, billions of web pages, I only care about the one I'm about to use. So for us it's really about being in that moment of writing a query, building a chart, how do we say in that moment, hey you're using an out of date definition of profit. Or hey the database you chose to use, the one thing you chose out of the millions that is actually is broken and stale. And we have interventions to do that with our partners and through our own first party apps that actually change how decisions get made at companies. >> So to make that happen, if I imagine it, you'd have to need access to the data, and then write software that is contextually aware to then run, compute, in context to the user interaction. >> It's exactly right, back to the turn by turn directions concept you have to know both where you're trying to go and where you are. And so for us that can be the from where I'm writing a Sequel statement after join we can suggest the table most commonly joined with that, but also overlay onto that the fact that the most commonly joined table was deprecated by a data steward data curator. So that's the moment that we can change the behavior from bad to good. >> So a chief data officer out there, we've got to wrap up, but I wanted to ask one final question, There's a chief data officer out there they might be empowered or they might be just a CFO assistant that's managing compliance, either way, someone's going to be empowered in an organization to drive data science and data value forward because there is so much proof that data science works. From military to play you're seeing examples where being data driven actually has benefits. So everyone is trying to get there. How do you explain the vision of Alation to that prospect? Because they have so much to select from, there's so much noise, there's like, we call it the tool shed out there, there's like a zillion tools out there there's like a zillion platforms, some tools are trying to turn into something else, a hammer is trying to be a lawnmower. So they've got to be careful on who the select, so what's the vision of Alation to that chief data officer, or that person in charge of analytics to scale operational analytics. >> Absolutely so we say to the CDO we have a shared vision for this place where your company is making decisions based on data, instead of based on gut, or expensive consultants months too late. And the way we get there, the reason Alation adds value is, we're sort of the last tool you have to buy, because with this lake mentality, you've got your tool shed with all the tools, you've got your library with all the books, but they're just in a pile on the floor, if you had a tool that had everything organized, so you just said hey robot, I need an hammer and this size nail and this text book on this set of information and it could just come to you, and it would be correct and it would be quick, then you could actually get value out of all the expense you've already put in this infrastructure, that's especially true on the lake. >> And also tools describe the way the works done so in that model tools can be in the tool shed no one needs to know it's in there. >> Aaron: Exactly. >> You guys can help scale that. Well congratulations and just how far along are you guys in terms of number of employees, how many customers do you have? If you can share that, I don't know if that's confidential or what not >> Absolutely, so we're small but growing very fast planning to double in the next year, and in terms of customers, we've got 85 customers including some really big names. I mentioned eBay, Pfizer, Safeway Albertsons, Tesco, Meijer. >> And what are they saying to you guys, why are they buying, why are they happy? >> They share that same vision of a more data driven enterprise, where humans are empowered to find out, understand, and trust data to make more informed choices for the business, and that's why they come and come back. >> And that's the product roadmap, ethos, for you guys that's the guiding principle? >> Yeah the ultimate goal is to empower humans with information. >> Alright Aaron thanks for coming on the Cube. Aaron Kalb, co-founder head of product for Alation here in New York City for BigData NYC and also Strata Data I'm John Furrier thanks for watching. We'll be right back with more after this short break.