(bright upbeat music)
>> Welcome back to Boston, everybody.
This is the birthplace of "theCUBE" in 2010.
>> May of 2010 at EMC world right in this very venue.
John Ferraro called it
"the chowder and lobster post".
I'm Dave Vellante. We're here at re:Inforce 2022.
Ed Walsh, CEO of Chaos Search.
Doing a drive by, Ed. Thanks so much for stopping in.
You're going to help me wrap up
in our final editorial segment.
We appreciate it.
>> Oh, looking forward to it. Thank you for including me.
>> How about that? 2010.
>> That's amazing. It was really in this-
>> Really in the building, yeah.
We had a sort of bury our way in.
Tunnel our way into the Blogger Lounge. We did four days.
>> Break in, yeah?
>> It was epic. It was really epic.
(Ed laughing)
But I'm glad they're back in Boston.
AWS was going to do June in Houston,
which would've been awful.
>> Yeah, yeah. No, this is perfect.
>> Yeah, thank God they came back.
You saw, Boston in summer is great.
I know it's been hot.
But of course, you and I are from this area.
>> Yeah.
>> So, how you been? What's going on?
I mean, it's a little crazy out there.
The stock market's going crazy.
Having the Techlash. What are you seeing?
>> So it's an interesting time.
So I ran a company in 2000-2008.
So we've been through this before.
(Dave laughing)
By the way, the world's not ending. We'll get through this.
But it is an interesting conversation.
Investors, but also even the customers,
there's some hesitation.
But you have to basically have the right value prop;
otherwise, things are going to get stalled.
So we are seeing longer sales cycles.
But it's nothing that you can't overcome.
But it has to be something that's a nice-to-have asset,
to be a need-to-have.
But I think we all get through it.
And then there is some on the VC side,
it's now buckle down, let's figure out what to do,
which is always a challenge for start-up plans.
>> In pre-2000, you maybe weren't a CEO,
but you were definitely an executive.
>> Yeah.
>> And so now it's different.
And a lot of people, younger people, haven't seen this.
You've got interest rates now rising.
Okay, we've seen that before,
but it looks like you've got inflation.
You got interest rates rising.
And the consumer spending patterns are changing.
You got five, you had six, $7 gas at one point.
So you have these weird cross-currents.
And people are thinking, "Okay, post September now.
Maybe because of the recession
the Fed won't have to keep raising interest rates
and tightening."
But I don't know what to root for.
It's like half full, half empty.
(Ed laughing)
>> But we haven't been in an environment
with high inflation, at least not in my career.
>> Right.
>> I mean, I got into in '92, like that was long gone, right?
So it is a interesting regime change
that we're going to have to deal with.
But there's a lot of analogies between 2008 and now
that you still have to work through too, right?
So anyway, I don't think the world's ending.
I do think you have to run a tight shop.
So I think the grow all costs is gone.
I do think it's going to-
Disciplines back in,
which for most of us discipline never left, right?
So to me, that's the name of the game.
>> What do you tell just generally-
You've been the CEO of a lot of private companies.
And of course one of the things
that you do to retain people and attract people
is you give them stock.
And it's great. And everybody's excited.
I'm sure they're excited
because you guys are a rocket ship.
But what's the message now? That, okay, the market's down.
Valuations are down. The trees don't grow to the moon.
We all know that. But what are you telling your people?
What's their reaction? How do you keep them motivated?
>> So like anything is,
you want to over-communicate during these times.
So I actually over-communicate.
You get all these- the Sequoia decks.
You know, 2008 and the recent one.
(Dave laughing)
>> Rest in peace, good times. That one right?
>> I literally share it. Why?
It's like, "Hey, this is what's going on in the real world.
It's going to affect us.
It has almost nothing to do with us specifically,
but it will affect us."
Now we can't not pay attention to it.
It does change how you're going to raise money.
So you got to make sure you have
the right runway to be there.
So it does change what you do.
But I think you over-communicate.
So that's why I've been doing.
And I think it's more like a student of the game.
So I try to share it.
And I say some appreciate it and others,
I'm just say, this is normal.
We'll get through this.
And this is what happened in 2008,
and trust me, once the market hits bottom,
give it another month afterwards.
Then everyone says, "Oh, the bottom's in."
And we're back to business.
Evaluations don't go immediately back up.
But right now, no one knows where the bottom is.
And that's where "the world's ending" type-of things.
>> Well, it's interesting because you talked about,
what I call- said rest in peace, good times.
That was the Sequoia Deck.
And the message was, tighten up, you know?
And I'm not saying you shouldn't tighten up now.
But the difference is,
there was this period of two years of easy money.
And even before that, it was pretty easy money.
And so companies are well capitalized.
They have a runway. So it's like, okay-
I was talking to Frank Slootman about this,
now of course they're a public company.
He's like, "We're not taking the foot off the gas.
We're inherently profitable.
We're growing like crazy. We're going for it."
So that's a little bit of a different dynamic.
There's a lot of good runway out there, isn't there?
>> But also you look at the different companies,
that were either born,
or were able to power those environments,
are actually better off.
You come out stronger in a more dominant position.
So, Frank-
Listen, if you're watching to see what Frank's done,
it's been unbelievable to watch his career, right?
In fact, he was at Data Domain, I was at Avamar.
But look at what he's done since.
He's crushed it, right?
>> Yeah.
>> So for him to say, "Hey, I'm going to literally
hit the gas and keep going."
I think that's the right thing for Snowflake,
and a right thing for a lot of people.
But for people in different roles,
I literally say, that you have to take it seriously.
What you can't be is-
Well, Frank's in a different situation.
What is it? How many billion does he have in the bank?
So it's a little bit different.
>> He's over a billion. Over a billion.
>> So wow.
>> You're on your way, Ed. Come on.
>> No, no, no. It's good.
(Dave laughing)
>> So, okay, I want to ask you about this concept
that we've sort of-
we've coined this term called Supercloud.
>> Sure.
>> You could think of it as the next
generation of Multi-Cloud.
The basic premise is that Multi-Cloud
was largely a symptom of Multi-Vendor.
Okay, I've done some M&A. I've got some Shadow IT.
Spinning up, you know, Shadow-Clouds.
You know, projects.
But it really wasn't a strategy
to have a continuum across clouds.
And now we're starting to see ecosystems really build.
You know, you've used the term before,
"standing on the shoulders of giants".
You've used that a lot. And so we're seeing that.
You know, Jerry Chen, wrote a seminal piece
on Castles in the Cloud.
So we coined this term Supercloud,
to connote this abstraction layer
that hides the underlying complexities
and primitives of the individual clouds.
And then adds value on top of it.
And can adjudicate and manage,
irrespective of physical location.
Supercloud. Okay.
What do you think about that concept?
How does it maybe relate to some of the
things that you're seeing in the industry?
>> So standing on shoulders of giants, right?
So I always like to do hard tech,
either at big company, small companies.
So we're probably your definition of a Supercloud.
We had a big vision.
How to literally solve the core challenge
of analytics at scale.
How are you going to do that?
You're not going to build on your own.
So literally we're leveraging the primitives.
Everything you can get out of the Amazon Cloud.
Everything get out of Google Cloud.
In fact, we're able to look at,
what it can get out of this Snowflake Cloud.
And how do we abstract that out, add value to it?
That's where all our patents are.
But it becomes a simplified approach.
The customers don't care.
Well, they care where their data is.
But they don't care how you got there.
They just want to know the end result.
So you simplify, but you gain the advantages.
What thing's interesting is,
in this particular company, Chaos Search,
people try to always say at some point the sales cycle,
they say "No way, hold on.
No way that can be fast. No way."
Or whatever the different issue.
And initially, we used to try to explain our technology.
And I would say 60% was explained
the Public Cloud capabilities.
And then how we harvest those I guess.
Make them better, add value on top,
and what you're able to get is something
you couldn't get for the Public Clouds themselves.
And then how we did that across Public Clouds
and extracted it.
So if you think about that,
like it's the shoulders of giants.
But what we now do is literally to avoid that conversation,
because it became a lengthy conversation.
So how do you have a platform for analytics
that you can't possibly overwhelm for ingest?
All your messy data. No pipelines.
Well, you leverage things like S3 and EC2,
and you do the different security things.
You can go to environments,
say "You can't possibly overrun me."
I could not say that if I didn't literally
build on the shoulders giants of all these public clouds.
So if you're going to do hard tech as a startup,
you're going to build.
You're going to beat the principles of Supercloud.
Maybe they're not the same size of Supercloud,
as Slootman at Snowflake,
but basically, you're going to leverage all that.
You abstract it out.
And that's where you're able to
have a lot of values at that.
>> So let me ask you.
So I don't know if there's a
strict definition of Supercloud.
We sort of put it out to the community and said,
"Help us define it."
So it was, you know, you got to span multiple clouds.
It's not just running in each cloud.
There's a metadata layer that kind of understands,
like where you're pulling data from.
Like you said, you can pull data from Snowflake
it sounds like,
but you're not running on Snowflake, correct?
>> No, correct.
We are complimentary to them,
in their different customers, right?
>> Yeah. Okay.
>> They want to build on top of a data platform,
data apps.
>> Right. And of course they're going across clouds.
>> Right.
>> You know, is there a PaaS layer in there?
We've said there's probably a super PaaS layer.
You're probably not doing that,
but you're allowing people to
bring your own PaaS sort of thing, maybe?
>> So we're a little bit different.
But basically we publish open APIs.
We don't have a user interface.
We say, "keep the user interface."
Again we're solving the challenge of analytics at scale.
We're not trying to retrain your analytics.
Either analysts or your DevOps,
or your SOps, or your SecOps team.
They use the tools they already use:
Elastic Search APIs, Sequel APIs.
So really they program,
they build applications on top of us.
Like Equifax is a good example.
Case said coming out later on this week,
after 18 months in production.
But basically they're building-
We provide the abstraction layer.
The quote, I'm going to kill it,
Jeff Chincher, who owns all of SREs worldwide,
and said to the effect of,
"Hey, I'm able to rethink
what I do for my data pipelines."
But then he also talked about how that he really doesn't
have to worry about the data he puts in it,
we deal with that.
And he just has to just query on the other side.
That simplicity. We couldn't have done that without that.
So anyway, what I like about the definition is,
if you were going to do something hard in the world,
why would you try to rebuild what Amazon, Google,
and Azure or Snowflake did?
You're going to add things on top.
We can still do intellectual property.
We're still doing patents.
So five grand patents, all in this.
But literally the abstraction layer is the simplification
that the end users do not want to know that complexity,
even though they ask the questions.
>> And I think too,
the other attribute is it's ecosystem enablement.
Whereas I think, in general, in the Multi-Cloud 1.0 era,
the ecosystem wasn't thinking about,
"Okay, how do I build on top and abstract that."
So maybe it is Multi-Cloud 2.0.
We chose to use Supercloud.
So I'm wondering,
we're at the security conference, you know, re:Inforce.
Is there a security Supercloud?
Maybe Snyk has the developer Supercloud
or maybe Okta, has the identity Supercloud.
I think Crowd-Strike, maybe not,
because Crowd-Strike competes with Microsoft.
So maybe because Microsoft- it was interesting.
Merritt, which Merritt Baer, was just saying,
"Look, we don't show up in the spending data for security,
because we're not charging for most of our security."
>> It's amazing.
>> "We're not trying to make a big business."
So that's kind of interesting.
But is there a potential for the security Supercloud?
>> So, I think so. But also I'll give you one thing.
I talked to, just today,
at least three different conversations,
where everyone wants to log data.
It's a little bit specific to us, but basically,
they want to do the security data lake.
The idea of- and Snowflake talks about this too,
but the idea of putting all the data in one repository
and then how do you abstract out and get value from it?
Maybe not that perfect.
But it becomes simple to do, but hard to get value out.
So the different players are going to do that.
That's what we do. We're able to-
Once you land it in your S3,
or it doesn't matter, cloud of choice, simple storage,
we allow you to get after that data.
But we take the primitives and hide them from you.
And all you do is query the data.
And we're spinning up stateless compute to go after it.
So then if I look around the floor,
there's going to be a bunch of these players.
I don't think- Why would someone in this floor
try to recreate what Amazon or Google or Azure had?
They're going to build on top of it.
And now the key thing is, do you leave it in standard?
And now we're open APIs?
People are building on top of my open APIs.
Or do you try to put them in a walled garden?
And they're in now your Supercloud.
Our belief is, part of it is,
it needs to be open access and let you go after it,
and build your applications on top of it openly.
>> They come back to Snowflake.
That's what Snowflake's doing.
And they're basically saying,
"Hey, come into our proprietary environment."
And the benefit is- and I think both can win.
There's a big market.
>> I agree.
>> But I think the benefit of Snowflake says,
"Okay, we're going to have federated governance.
We're going to have data sharing.
You're going to have access to all the ecosystem players.
And everything's going to be controlled.
And you what you're getting."
The flip side of that is-
Databricks is the other end of that spectrum.
Which is, "No, no, you got to be open."
So what's going to happen?
What's happening clearly is Snowflake saying,
"Okay, we've got Snowpark. We're going to allow Python.
We're going have Apache Iceberg.
We're going to have open source tooling that you can access.
By the way, it's not going to be as good
as our walled garden."
With the flip side of that is you get Databricks
coming at it from a data science
and data engineering perspective.
And there's a lot of gaps in between, aren't there?
>> And I think they both win.
Like for instance, so we didn't do Snowpark integration,
but we work with people building data apps
on top of Snowflake or Databricks.
And what we do is we can add value to that.
Of what we've done,
again, using all the Supercloud stuff we've done,
but we deal with the unstructured data.
The Four V's coming at you.
You can't pipeline that to save.
So we actually could be additive,
as they're trying to do like a security data cloud,
inside of Snowflake, or do the same thing in Databricks,
that's where we can play.
Now, we play with them at the application level,
that they get some data from them,
and some data for us.
But I believe there's a partnership there
that we'll figure out,
that we'll do inside their environment.
To us, they're just another large-scaler environment
that my customers want to get after data.
And they want me to abstract it out and give value.
>> So it's another repository to you.
>> Yeah.
>> Okay. So, I think Snowflake recently added support
for unstructured data.
You chose not to do Snowpark because why?
>> Well, so the way they're doing
the unstructured data is not bad.
It's JSON data. Basically, this is the dilemma:
Everyone wants their application developers to be flexible,
move fast, securely, but just productivity.
So you got to give them flexibility.
The problem with that is,
analytics on the end want to be structured, to be performed.
And this is where Snowflake-
they have to somehow get that raw data,
and it's changing every day because you just
let the developers do what they want.
Now in some structured base,
but do what you need to do your business fast and securely.
So it completely destroys.
So they have large customers trying to do
big integrations for this messy data
and it doesn't quite work.
Because you literally just can't make the pipelines work.
So that's where we're complimentary to it.
Now the particular integration wasn't-
we need a little bit deeper integration to do that.
So we're integrating actually at the data app layer.
But I could see us, and I don't-
Listen, I think Snowflake's a good actor.
They're trying to figure out what's best for the customers.
And I think we just participate in that.
>> Yeah. And I think they're trying to figure out
how to grow their ecosystem,
because they know they can't do it all.
In fact-
>> And we solve a key thing.
They just can't do certain things.
And we do that well, you know.
Yeah, I have Sequel, but that's where it ends.
I do the messy data and how to play with them.
>> And when you talk to like them,
one of their founders Benoit,
he comes on "theCUBE" and he's like,
"We start with simple."
>> Yeah.
>> It reminds me of the guys from Pure Storage,
like that guy Coz.
He's always like,
"No, if it starts to get too complicated-"
So that's why they said,
"All right, we're not going to start out
trying to figure out how to do complex joins
and workload management."
And they turn that into a feature.
So, like you say, I think both can win. It's a big market.
>> I think it's a good model.
And I love to see Frank move.
>> Yeah. I forgot.
You're from Avamar. It did amazing.
>> In the day. I mean-
>> You guys used to hate each other, right?
>> No, no, no.
>> No. I mean, it's all good.
>> But the thing is, you look at what he's done.
I wouldn't bet against Frank. I think it's a good message.
You can see clients trying to do it.
Same thing with Databricks.
Same thing with BigQuery.
We get a lot of same dynamic in BigQuery.
It's good for a lot of things,
but it's not everything you need to do.
And there's ways for the ecosystem to play together.
>> Well, what's interesting about BigQuery,
is it is truly cloud native, as is Snowflake,
whereas Amazon Redshift, was sort of Parexel.
It's cobbled together now.
It's great engineering,
but BigQuery gets a lot of high marks.
But again, there's limitations to everything.
That's why companies like yours can exist.
>> And that's why- So back to the Supercloud.
It allows me as a company to participate in that,
because I'm leveraging all the underlying pieces.
Which I couldn't have done-
We couldn't be doing what we're doing now,
without leveraging the Supercloud concepts, right?
>> Ed, I really appreciate you coming by
and helping me wrap up today re:Inforce.
>> Yeah.
>> Always a pleasure seeing you, my friend.
>> Thank you.
>> Alright. Okay, this is a wrap on day one.
We'll be back tomorrow.
I'll be solo. John Ferraro had to fly out.
But we'll be following what he's doing.
This is re:Inforce 2022. You're watching "theCube".
We'll see you tomorrow.
(bright upbeat music)