(upbeat music)
>> Hello. Welcome to this CUBE Conversation
here in Palo Alto.
I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE.
I'm here with Aaron Kalb
who's the co-founder and VP of design at Alation.
Great to see them on some fresh funding news.
Aaron, thanks for coming in and spending the time.
Good to see you again.
>> Good to see you, John.
Thanks for having me.
>> So, big news.
You guys got a very big round of financing.
You guys are going to the next level as a start-up,
certainly coming out of that start-up phase
and growth phase.
Super exciting news.
You guys doing some innovative things around
community, around people, and really kind of
cracking the code on this humanization, the democratization
of data, but actually helping businesses.
I want to talk about it with you.
First, give us the update on the financing.
The amount, what it means to the company.
It's a lot of cash.
>> Yeah, so we're very excited to have raised
a $50 million round.
Sapphire lead the round, then we also had re-ups
from all of our existing investors.
You know as a co-founder, you always
have big dreams for growth,
and it's always validating to have a community of investors
who can see that future too.
As well as our great community of over 100 customers now
who want to build this data democratized future with us.
>> We've been following you guys since the founding.
Obviously, watching you guys.
Great use of capital.
50 million is a lot of capital,
so obviously, validation, check.
Good job.
But now, you go to a whole nother level, growth.
What's the capital going to be deployed for?
What's going on with the company?
What are you guys eyeing in terms of innovation?
What's the key focus?
>> Yeah, it's a great question.
So, obviously we have revenue from our customers,
but getting extra infusion from VC lets us
just supercharge our development.
It's growth.
It's going to more customers both domestically and abroad.
Going to a broader user base,
more enterprise-wide adoption within those customers.
As well as innovation in the core product.
New technology, a great design and features
that are really going to change the organizations
accessing use data to make better decisions.
>> What was the key learning as you guys went
into this round of funding?
Obviously the validation to go through,
due diligence, and all that good stuff,
but you guys have made some successful milestones.
What was the key notable accomplishments
that Alation hit to kind of hit this trigger point
here for the 50 million.
>> I'm glad you asked about that.
I think the key thing that's changed
that's enabled this next phase
is that the data catalog market
has really came into it's own.
Right?
In the beginning, in the early days,
we were knocking on doors trying to say--
We didn't even know it was going
to be called data catalog in our first few months.
Even though we had the technology.
We said, "Hey, we got this thing
"and we know it's useful.
"Please buy it.
"Please want it."
and the question was,
"What's a data catalog?
"Why would I ever even look at that?"
It's just turned a corner.
Now, thanks in part to things like Gartner
telling companies,
in the next year, by 2020,
if you have a data catalog,
you're going to see twice the ROI
from your existing data investments than if you don't.
Stories like that are making companies say,
"Of course you want a data catalog."
It just turned on a dime.
Now they're asking,
"Which data catalog should we get?
"why is yours the best?"
This change of the market maturing,
I think is the biggest change we've seen.
>> One thing we've observed,
and I want to get your reaction to this,
is that safe cloud computing.
The economics are phenomenal.
You see scale, obviously data science work in the cloud.
We see great success there.
Now, there's multiple clouds.
Multi clouds a big trend,
but also the validation that it's not just
all cloud anymore.
The on premises activity still is relevant,
although it may have a cloud operations.
It really kind of changes the role of data.
You mentioned the data catalogs having
a common mainstream visibility from the analyst,
like Gartner and others.
Wikibon as well.
It makes data the center of the innovation.
Now you have data challenges around,
okay, where's the data deployed?
Where am I using the data?
Because data scientist want ease of data.
They want quality data.
They want to make sure their algorithm,
whether it's machine learning component or software.
Actually is running on good data.
Data effectiveness is now part of the operations
of most businesses.
What's your reaction to that?
What's your thoughts?
Is that how you see it?
Is there something different there?
What's going on with the whole data at the center?
>> Absolutely.
You hit on two key themes for us.
One is that idea of the center
and the other is your point
about data quality and data trust.
Centrality we thing is really essential.
We're seeing cataloging technology crop up more and more.
A lot of people are coming out with catalogs
or catalog add-ons to their products.
What our customers really tell us is,
they want the data catalog to be the hub.
The one stop shop where they go to to access
any data wherever it lives.
Whether it's in the cloud or on PRAM.
Whether it's in a relational database
or a file system.
It's one of Alation key differentiators early on
was being that central index.
Much like Google is the front page for the Internet ,
even though it's linking to webpages all over the place.
The other thing in terms of that data quality
and data trustworthiness has been a differentiator.
This is something that was part of our technology
when we launched that we didn't
put the label on it til later,
was the idea of Behavior I/O.
That's kind of looking at previous human behavior
to influence future human behavior to be better.
This is another place where we really took
some inspiration from Google
and Terry Winograd at Stanford before that.
He observed,
if you remember back before Google,
search sucked, frankly.
Right?
The results on top were not the most relevant.
Were not the most trustworthy.
The reason was,
those algorithms were based on saying,
how often does your keyword appear in that website.
They're all hooked to other words,
so you would get results on top
that might just not be very good,
or even that were created by spammers
who put in a lot of words to get SEO
and that isn't the best result for you.
What Google did was turn that around with page rank
and say let's use the signals
that other people are leaving behind
about the pages they find valuable
to get the best result on top.
Alation does the exact same thing.
Our patinated, proprietary, behavioral technology
let's us say,
who's using this data?
How are they using it?
Is it reputable?
And that enables is to get the right data
and the trustworthy data in front of decision makers.
>> And you call that Behavioral I/O?
>> Behavioral I/O, that's right.
>> Certainly, I remember Google algorithmic search
was poo pooed at first.
You had the be a protal.
Everyone my age kind of remembers those days.
The results were keyword stuff by spammers,
but arrhythmical search accelerated the quality.
I got to ask you the Behavioral I/O,
to kind of unpack that a little bit.
Go a little deeper.
What does that mean for customers?
Because now I see,
as people start thinking,
okay, I need to catalog my data
because no I need to have replication,
all kinds of all these technical things
that are going on around integrity of the data.
Why Behavior I/O?
What's the angle on that?
What's the impact of the customer?
Why is this important?
>> Absolutely.
So, I might have to work through an example.
You know, we joke about you might be looking around
in your SharePoint drive
and find an Excel file called Q, three numbers, final_final
and your like "Okay that seems like the final numbers."
Then you see next to it one that says _final_final_final
and say, "Okay is that one final?"
It turns out what data says about itself
is less reliable than what other people say about the data.
Same thing with Google.
If everyone's linking to Wikipedia page,
that's a more reliable page
than one that just has paid for a higher placement.
Right?
What it means in an organization is,
with Alation we'll tell you,
this is the data table that was refreshed yesterday
and that the CFO and everybody in this department
is using every day.
That's a really strong signal.
That's trustworthy data,
as opposed to something that was only used once a year ago.
>> So relevance is key there.
>> ion Absolutely.
It's relevance and trustworthiness.
We find both are indicated more strongly by who's using it
and how than by the data itself.
>> Are you seeing adoption with data scientist
and people who are wrangling data or data analysts,
that if the date is not high quality,
they abandon the usage?
Is there any kind of stats around that?
We're hearing a lot of people say,
"Hey you know, I'm not really work on the data.
"I'm not going to do all this heavy lifting on the front end
"if data quality is not there".
>> Absolutely.
We see a really cool upward spiral.
In Alation, we have a mix of manual human curated metadata.
You have data stewards that are curators
saying, "This is endorsed data.
"This certified data.
"This is applicable for this context."
We also do this automatic Behavior I/O
where we parse the query logs.
These logs were put there for audit and debugging purposes,
but we were mining that for behavioral insight
and we'll show them side-by-side.
What we see is over time,
on day one, there's no manual curation,
but as that curation gets added in,
we see a strong correlation
between the best highest quality data
and the most used data.
We also see an upward spiral
where if on day one,
people are using data that isn't trustworthy,
that's stale or miscalculated,
as soon as an Alation steward slaps a deprecation
or a warning on the data asset,
because of technology like TrustCheck,
we talked about last time I was here,
that technology, that's the O part of Behavior I/O.
We then stop the future behavior from being on bad data
and we see an upward spiral
were suddenly the bad data's no longer being used
and everyone's guided to the right path.
>> One thing I'm really impressed with you guys on
is you have a great management team
and an overall team with mixed disciplines.
Okay, I think last time we talked
about your role at Stanford
in the human side of the world but,
you bring up the search analogy,
which is interesting,
because you have search folks,
you got hardcore data geeks all working together
and if you think about discovery and navigation,
which is the Google paradigm.
I need to find a web page and go to it.
You guys are in that same business
of helping people discover data and act on it
or take action.
Same kind of paradigm.
Explain some customer impact antidotes.
People who bought Alation,
bought your service and offering.
What happened after
and what was it like before?
Talk about some of that antidote.
Because I think you're on to something pretty big here
with this discovery actionable data prospective.
>> Yeah.
One of our values at Alation is that we measure our success
through customer impact.
Not through financing or other other milestones,
though we are excited about them.
I would love to talk about our customers.
One example is of a business impact,
is an example that our champion
at Safeway Albertsons describes,
where after Safeway was acquired by Albertsons,
they'd been sort of pioneers
of digital loyalty and engagement
and there was a move to kind of stop that in its tracks
and switch to just mailing people big books a coupons
that have customizing deals
for you based on your buying behavior.
They talk about getting a 30x ROI
on the dollars they spent on Alation
by basically proving the value of their program
and maximizing their relationship with their customers.
But the stories that are even more exciting to me
then just business impacts in dollars and cents,
when we can leave a positive impact
on people's lives with data.
There's a few examples of that.
Munich Reinsurance, the biggest venture
and also Prime Ventures in Europe
had some coverage in Forbes
about the way that they used Alation,
and other data tools to be able to help people
get back on their feet more quickly after earthquakes
and other natural disasters.
Similarly there was a piece in the Wall Street Journal
about how Pfizer is able to create diagnostics
and treatments for rare diseases
where it wouldn't have been a good ROI
to even invest in those if they didn't get
that increased efficiency and analytics
from Alation and other data tools.
>> So it's not just one little vertical.
it's kind of--
I mean, data is horizontally scalable.
It's not like one industry's going to leverage Alation.
>> Absolutely.
So, I mentioned just now
insurance, and healthcare, and retail.
We're also in tech.
We're in basically every vertical you can imagine
and even multiple sectors.
I've been focusing on industry,
but there's another case study
you can read about at the city of San Diego
were they're doing an open data initiative,
enabling people to figure out everything
from where parking is easiest or hardiest,
to anything else.
>> So, Behavioral I/O and it's all about context
and behavior role of data
and all this is kind of fundamental to businesses.
>> That's right.
It's all about taking everything
about how people are using data today
and driving people to be even more data driven,
more accurate, better able to satisfy their curiosity,
and be more rational in the future.
>> So, if I'm a potential customer
and I've heard of Alation,
got the buzz out there.
Why would I need you?
What is some signals that would indicate
that I should call Alation?
What's some of that core--
What's the pitch?
>> Yeah, it's a great question.
I sometimes joke with the team
that every five minutes another enterprise reaches
that point where they can't do it the old way anymore
and they need Alation.
The reason for that
is that data is growing exponentially
and people can only grow,
at most linearly.
So, I compare it a bit,
again to the days of Yahoo,
when the Internet was small
that you could make a table of contents for it,
but as they came to be trillions of webpages,
you needed an automatic index with page rank
to make sense of it.
I would say once you find that
your analytics team is spread out
and they're spending 80% of their time calling up
other people to find where the relevant data or asked,
to your point,
is this data high quality?
Should I even spend my time on it?
That's probably not money as well spent
with these highly paid people spending
all of their time scrounging.
If you can get them to switch from scrounging
to finding, understanding and trusting their data
for quick and accurate annalists, give us a call.
>> Basically, the pitch is if you want to be like Yahoo,
do it the old way.
We know what happened Yahoo.
If you want to be like Google,
do through algorithmic and have data,
go Alation you'll be around for a while.
>> very well said.
We do think that.
>> Maybe you wouldn't say that.
That's my words.
>> That's part of turning that corner.
I think in the beginning we were telling people
this would be nice to have
and now customers are coming
to us saying it's a must have to stay relevant.
If you've made all these investments
in data infrastructure and data people,
but you can't connect the dots,
as you said between the human side and the Tech side,
that money is all wasted
and you're going to not be able to compete against
your competitors and impact your customers
the way want.
>> Well, congratulations.
Certainly as the co-founder,
its great success.
I know how hard it is to do startups.
You guys have worked hard.
Again while following you guys been interesting
to see that growth and there's innovation involved.
Creative, a lot energy.
You guys do a good job.
So, final question.
Talk about the secret sauce of Alation.
What's the key innovation formula
and now that you got the funding,
where are you going to double-down on?
Where's the innovation going to come next?
Innovation formula and where is the innovation the future?
>> Absolutely.
Innovation has been critical for us to get here
and our customers didn't just buy
the exciting features with Behavioral I/O and TrustCheck
that we had, but also are buying into the idea
that we're going to continue to be the leaders
and to innovate
and we're going to do that.
I think the secret sauce,
which we've had in the past and we're going to continue
to innovate in this vein is to be really conscious
of what are computers great at
and what are humans uniquely good at
and what do humans like doing.
Trying to have the human and computers work together
to really help the human achieve their goals.
Right?
So, back to the Google example,
there's a bunch of systems
for collaboratively ranking things,
but it takes work to write a review on Yelp or Amazon.
Google had the insight that we could leverage
what people are already doing
and make value out of that.
We're going to continue to do that.
The other kind of innovation you'll see
is bringing Alation to a wider and wider audience
with less and less technical skill needed.
I came from Siri at Apple
and the idea is you didn't
have to learn a programming language
to query database
you can just speak in English.
That helps you answer questions like
What's the weather today?
Imagine taking that same kind of experience
of seamless integration to
the more important questions enterprises are asking.
>> We'll have to tap your expertise as we want
to have an app called theCUBE Siri,
which is "Hey CUBE.
"What's the innovation in Silicone Valley?"
and have it just spit out a video.
I'm only kidding.
Final question, just to double-down on that piece.
I think that human interaction is a big part
of what you're saying.
I've always loved that about what your vision is,
but this points to a-
maybe it's a problems you've seen
whether it's media, the new cycle these days,
people are challenging the efficacy of finding the research.
There's real deep research on the media side.
We're seeing scale on data.
Scale is a huge challenge.
You mention the growth of data.
Computers can scale things,
but the knowledge and the curation kind of dynamic
of packaging it, finding it, acting on it,
is kind of where you guys are hitting.
Talk about that dynamic.
Am I getting that right?
Is that important?
Because, certainly scale is table stakes these days.
>> That is super insightful, John,
because I think human cognition and human thought--
Excuse me.
Is the bottleneck for being data driven.
Right?
We have on the Internet , trillions of web pages.
More than the library at Alexandria 100 times over.
We have in databases, millions of columns
and trillions of rows,
but for that to actually impact the business
and impact the world in a positive way,
it's got to go through a person who can understand it.
So, in the same way that Google became the mechanism
by which the Internet becomes accessible,
we think that Alation for organizations
is becoming in the way that data can come actionable.
The other thing I would say
is in this age of alternative facts
and mistrust of data,
we've sort of realizing that just having
more information out there
doesn't actually make people wiser
and better able to reason,
it can actually be a lot of noise that muddies the signal
and confuses people.
We think Alation by also using human computer interaction
to help separate the signal from the noise
and the quality from the garbage
can help stop the garbage in and garbage out
make people more rational and more curious
and have more trust in what they're hearing
and understanding.
>> Building that page rank metaphor is interesting
because the human gestures
whether it's work or engaging on the data
is a signal too,
not just algorithmic metadata extraction.
>> Absolutely.
Anything you do with data in any tool
even outside of Alation,
Alation will capture that
and use it to guide future behavior
for you and your peers to be better and smarter.
>> $50 million, where's this all going to lead to?
When's the next innovation?
What do you guys see the future for Alation?
>> Well you know,
I was just thinking before the show,
I used to be at Apple kind of in the Golden Age
when Apple was really innovative
and there was the joke
where they would release something new
and say Redmond start your photocopier.
In this interview I'm going to be a little close
to the chest about the specifics we're releasing,
but I will tell you,
that we're really excited about
to go to a broader and broader audience
that impact our customers more fully.
>> Feel free to say one more thing.
>> And one more thing. >> One more thing.
>> And the secret to the future is--
>> Aaron, thanks for coming on.
I really appreciate it.
Congratulates on the funding.
You guys have got a very innovative formula.
Good luck and we will be following you guys.
Thanks for coming on this CUBE Conversation.
Appreciate it. >> John, thanks so much.
>> Aaron Kalb, Co-Founder and VP of design at Alation.
Interesting formula, great successful formula.
Great innovation, Alation.
Check them out.
I'm John Furrier in Palo Alto for CUDE Conversation.
Thanks for watching.