>> 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.