>> From Cambridge, Massachusetts
it's theCUBE, covering
MIT Chief Data Officer
and Information Quality Symposium 2019.
Brought to you by, SiliconANGLE Media.
>> Welcome back to Cambridge,
Massachusetts, everybody.
You're watching theCUBE, the
leader in live tech coverage.
I'm Dave Vellante with
my co-host, Paul Gillan.
Chris Lynch, good friend is here
CEO, newly minted CEO
and AtScale and legend.
Good to see you.
>> In my own mind.
>> In mine too.
>> It's great to be here.
>> It's awesome, thank
you for taking time.
I know how busy you are, you're
running around like crazy
your next big thing.
I was excited to hear
that you got back into it.
I predicted it a while ago
you were a very successful
venture capitalists
but at heart, you're
startup guy, aren't ya?
>> Yeah 100%, 100%.
I couldn't be more thrilled,
I feel invigorated.
I think I've told you many
times, when you've interviewed me
and asked me about the transition
from being an entrepreneur to being a VC
and since it's a PG show,
I've got a different analog
than the one I usually give you.
I used to be a movie star
and now I'm an executive
producer of movies.
Now am back to being a
movie star, hopefully.
>> yeah well, so you told me
when you first became a VC
you said, I look for startups
that have a 10X impact
either 10X value, 10X cost reduction.
What was it that attracted you to AtScale?
What's the 10X?
>> AtScale, addresses $150
billion market problem
which is basically bringing
traditional BI to the cloud.
>> That's the other thing
you told me, big markets.
>> Yeah, so that's the first thing
massive market opportunity.
The second is, the innovation component
and where the 10X comes
we're uniquely qualified
to virtualize data
into the pipeline and out.
So I like to say that we're the bridge
between BI and AI and back.
We make every BI user,
a citizen data scientist
and that's a game changer.
And that's sort of the new
futuristic component of what we do.
So one part is steeped in, that
$150 billion BI marketplace
in a traditional analytics platforms
and then the second piece is into you
delivering the data, into these BI
excuse me, these AI
machine learning platforms.
>> Do you see that
ultimately getting integrated
into some kind of larger,
data pipeline framework.
I mean, maybe it lives in the cloud
or maybe on prem, how do you
see that evolving over time?
>> So I believe that, with AtScale
as one single pane of glass,
we basically are providing
an API, to the data and to
the user, one single API.
The reason that today
we haven't seen the delivery
of the promise of big data
is because we don't have big data.
Fortunate 2000 companies
don't have big data.
They have lots of data
but to me big data means
you can have one logical view of that data
and get the best data
pumped into these models
in these tools, and today
that's not the case.
They're constricted by location
they're constricted by vendor
they're constricted by
whether it's in the cloud or on prem.
We eliminate those restrictions.
>> The single API, I think
is important actually.
Because when you look
at some of these guys
what they're doing with
their data pipeline
they might have 10 or 15 unique API's
that they're trying to manage.
So there's a simplification
aspect to, I suppose.
>> One of the knocks on traditional BI
has always been the need
for extract databases
and all the ETL that goes
that's involved in that.
Do you guys avoid that stage?
You go to the production data directly
or what's the--
>> It's a great question.
The way I put it is, we
bring Moses to the mountain
the mountain being the
data, Moses being the user.
Traditionally, what people
have been trying to do
is bring the mountain
to Moses, doesn't scale.
At AtScale, we provide an abstraction
a logical distraction between
the data and the BI user.
>> You don't touch, you
don't move the data.
>> We don't move the data.
Which is what's unique and
that's what's delivering
I think, way more than
a 10X delivery in value.
>> Because you leave the data in place
you bring that value to
wherever the data is.
Which is the original concept
of Hadoop, by the way.
That was what was profound about Hadoop
everybody craps on it now,
but that was the game changer
and if you could take advantage of that
that's how you tap your 10X.
>> To the difference is,
we're not, to your point
we're not moving the data.
Hadoop, in my humble
opinion why it plateaued
is because to get the value,
you had to ask the user
to bring and put data
in yet another platform.
And the reason that we're
not delivering on big data
as an industry, I believe is because
we've too many data
sources, too many platforms
too many consumers of data
and too many producers.
As we build all these islands
of data, with no connectivity.
The idea is, we'll
create this big data lake
and we're going to physically
put everything in there.
Guess what?
Someday turned out to be never.
Because people aren't going to deal
with the business disruption.
We move thousands of users
from a platform like Teradata
to a platform like Snowflake
or Google BigQuery, we don't care.
We're a multi-cloud and
we're a hybrid cloud.
But we do it without any disruption.
You're using Excel, you
just continue and use it.
You just see the results are faster.
You use Tableau, same difference.
>> So we had all the
vertical rock stars in here.
So we had Colin in yesterday,
we had Stonebraker around earlier.
Andy Palmer just came on
and Chris here with the CEO
who ultimately sold the company to HP.
That really didn't do anything with it
and then spun it off and now it's back.
Aaron was, he had a spring
in his step yesterday.
So when you think about, Vertica.
The technology behind Vertica
go back 10 years and where we come now
give us a little journey
of, your data journey.
>> So I think it plays into
the, the original assertion
is that, vertical is a
best-in-class platform for analytics
but it was yet another platform.
The analog I give now,
is now we have Snowflake
and six months, 12 months from now
we're going to have another one.
And that creates a set of problems
if you have to live in the physical world.
Because you've all these islands of data
and I believe, it's about the data
not about the models, it's about the data.
You can't get optimal results
if you don't have an optimal
access to the pertinent data.
I believe that having that Universal API
is going to make the next platform
that more valuable.
You're not going to be
making the trade-off is, okay
we have this platform that
has some neat capability
but the trade-off is
from an enterprise
architecture perspective
we're never going to be able
to connect all this stuff.
That's how all of these
things proliferated.
My view is, in a world where you have that
single pane of glass,
that abstraction layer
between the user and the data.
Then innovation can be spawned quicker
and you can use these tools effectively
'cause you're not
compromising being able to get
a logical view of the data and
get access to it as a user.
>> What's your issue with Snowflake
you mentioned them, Mugli's company--
>> No issue, they're a
great partner of ours.
We eliminate the friction between the user
going from an on-prem
solution to the cloud.
>> Slootman just took over there.
So you know where that's going.
>> Yep
(laughing)
>> Frank's got the magic touch.
Okay good, you say they're a partner yours
how are you guys partnering?
>> They refer us into customers
that, if you want to buy Snowflake
now the next issue is, how do i migrate?
You don't.
You put our virtualization layer in
and then we allow you access to Snowflake
in a non-disruptive way,
versus having to move data
into their system or
into a particular cloud
which creates sales friction.
>> Moving data is just,
you want to avoid it
at all cost.
>> I do want to ask you
because I met with your
predecessors, Dave Mariani last year
and I know he was kind of a reluctant CEO
he didn't really want to be CEO
but wanted to be CTO,
which is what he is now.
How did that come about,
that they found you
that you connected with them
and decided this was
the right opportunity.
>> That's a great question.
I actually looked at the
company at the seed stage
when I was in venture,
but I had this thing
as you know that, I wanted
to move companies to Boston
and they're about my vintage age-wise
and he's married with four kids
so that wasn't in the cards.
I said look, it doesn't make sense
for me to seed this company
'cause I can't give you the time
you're out in California
everything I'm instrumenting
is around Boston.
We parted friends.
And I was skeptical
whether he could build this
'cause people have been talking about
building a heterogeneous universal
semantic layer, for years
and it's never come to fruition.
And then he read in Fortune or Forbes
that I was leaving Accomplice
and that I was looking for
one more company to operate.
He reached out and he told
me what they were doing
that hey, we really built it
but we need help and I
don't want to run this.
It's not right for the
company and the opportunity
So he said, "I'll come
and I'll consult to you."
I put together a plan and I had my Vertica
and data robot.
NekTony guys do the technical diligence
to make sure that the architecture
wasn't wedded to the dupe,
like all the other ones were
and when I saw it wasn't
then I knew the market opportunity was
to take that, rifle and point it at
that legacy $150 billion BI market
not at the billion
dollar market of Hadoop.
And when we did that, we've been growing
at 162% quarter-over-quarter.
We've built development
centers in Bulgaria.
We've moved all operations,
non-technical to Boston here
down in our South Station.
We've been on fire and we
are the partner of choice
of every cloud manner,
because we eliminate
the sales friction, for
customers being able to
take advantage of movement to the cloud
and we're able through our
intelligent pipeline and capability.
We're able to reduce the
cost significantly of queries
because we understand and we were able
to intelligently cash those queries.
>> Sales ops is here, all--
>> Sales marketing, customer
support, customer success
and we're building a
machine learning team here
at Dev team here.
>> Where are you in that
sort of Boston build-out?
>> We have an office on 711 Atlantic
that we opened in the fall.
We're actually moving
from 4,000 square feet
to 10,000 this month.
In less than six months and we'll house
by the first year, 100 employees in Boston
100 in Bulgaria and about that
same hundred in San Mateo.
>> Are you going after
net new business mainly?
Or there's a lot of legacy BI out there
are you more displacing those products?
>> A couple of things.
What we find is that,
customers want to evolve
into the cloud, they
don't want a revolution
they want a evolution.
So we allow them, because
we support hybrid cloud
to keep some data behind the firewall
and then experiment with moving other data
to the cloud platform of choice
but we're still providing
that one logical view.
I would say most of our customers
are looking to reap platform,
off of Teradata or something
onto a, another platform like Snowflake.
And then we have a set of customers
that see that as part of the solution
but not the whole solution.
They're more true hybrids
but I would say that
80% of our customers are
traditional BI customers
that are trying to
contemporize their environments
and be able to take
advantage of tabular support
and multidimensional,
the things that we do
in addition to the cube world.
>> They can keep whatever they're using.
>> Correct, that's the key.
>> Did you do the series
D, you did, right?
>> Yes, Morgan Stanely led.
>> So you're not actively
but you're good for now,
It was like $50 million
>> Yeah we raised $50 million.
>> You're good for a bit.
Who's in the Chris Lynch target? (laughs)
Who's the enemy?
Vertica, I could say it was
the traditional database guys.
Who's the?
>> We're in a unique position,
we're almost Switzerland
so we could be friend to foe,
of anybody in that ecosystem
because we can, non-disruptively
re-platform customers
between legacy platforms
or from legacy platforms
to the cloud.
We're an interesting position.
>> So similar to the file sharing.
File virtualization company
>> The Copier.
>> Copier yeah.
>> It puts us in an interesting position.
They need to be friends
with us and at the same time
I'm sure that they're concerned
about the capabilities we have
but we have a number of
retail customers for instance
that have asked us to move down
from Amazon to Google
BigQuery, which we accommodate
and because we can do
that non-disruptively.
The cost and the ability
to move is eliminated.
It gives customers true freedom of choice.
>> How worried are you, that AWS
tries to replicate what you guys do.
You're in their sights.
>> I think there are technical, legal
and structural barriers
to them doing that.
The technical is, this team has been at it
for six and a half years.
So to do what we do, they'll
have to do what we've done.
Structurally from a business perspective
if they could, I'm not sure they want to.
The way to think about Amazon
is, they're no different
than Teradata, except for
they want the same vendor lock-in
except they want it to be the Amazon Cloud
when Teradata wanted it to
be, their data warehouse.
>> They don't promote multi-cloud versus--
>> Yeah, they don't want multi-cloud
they don't want
>> On Prem
>> Customers to have a freedom of choice.
Would they really enable a heterogeneous
abstraction layer, I
don't think they would
nor do I think any of the big guys would.
They all claim to have this
capability for their system.
It's like the old IBM adage
I'm in prison but the food's
going to get three squares
a day, I get cable TV
but I'm in prison.
(laughing)
>> Awesome, all right, parting thoughts.
>> Parting thoughts, oh geez
you got to give me a question
I'm not that creative.
>> What's next, for you guys?
What should we be paying attention to?
>> I think you're going to see
some significant announcements
in September regarding the
company and relationships
that I think will validate
the impact we're having in the market.
>> Give you some leverage
>> Yeah, will give us,
better channel leverage.
We have a major technical announcement
that I think will be
significant to the marketplace
and what will be highly disruptive
to some of the people you just mentioned.
In terms of really raising the bar
for customers to be able to
have the freedom of choice
without any sort of vendor lock-in.
And I think that that will
create some counter strike
which we'll be ready for.
(laughing)
>> If you've never heard of AtScale before
trust me you're going to
in the next 18 months.
Chris Lynch, thanks so
much for coming on theCUBE.
>> It's my pleasure.
>> Great to see you.
All right, keep it right there everybody
we're back with our next guest,
right after this short break
you're watching theCUBE
from MIT, right back.
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