(upbeat music)
>> Hey, guys and girls, welcome back to New York City.
Lisa Martin and John Furrier
are live with theCUBE at AWS Summit 22,
here in The Big Apple.
We're excited to be talking about security next.
James Arlen joins us, the CISO at Aiven.
James, thanks so much for joining us on theCUBE today.
>> Absolutely, it's good to be here.
>> Tell the audience a little bit about Aiven,
what you guys do, what you deliver,
and what some of those differentiators are.
>> Oh, Aiven.
Aiven is a fantastic organization.
I'm actually really lucky to work there.
It's a database as a service,
managed databases, all open source.
And we're capital S, serious about open source.
So 10 different open source database products
delivered as a platform, all managed services,
and the game is really about being the most
performant, secure, and compliant
database as a service on the market,
friction free for your developers.
You don't need people worrying about how to run databases.
You just want to be able to say,
here, take care of my data for me.
And that's what we do.
And that's actually the differentiator.
We just take care of it for you.
>> Take care of it for you, I like that.
>> So they download the open source.
They could do it on their own.
So all the different projects are out there.
>> Yeah, absolutely. >> What do you guys
bringing to the table?
You said the managed service, can you explain that.
>> Yeah, the managed service aspect of it
is, really, you could install the software yourself.
You can use Postgres or Apache Kafka
or any one of the products that we support.
Absolutely you can do it yourself.
But is that really what you do for a living,
or do you develop software, or do you sell a product?
So we take and do the hard work of running the systems,
running the equipment.
We take care of backups, high availability,
all the security and compliance things
around access and certifications,
all of those things that are logging,
all of that stuff that's actually difficult to do,
well and consistently, that's all we do.
>> Talk about the momentum, I see you guys
were founded in what? 2016? >> Yes.
>> Just in May of '22, raised $210 million
in series D funding.
>> Yes. >> Talk about the momentum
and also from your perspective,
all of the massive changes in security.
>> It's very interesting to work for a company
where you're building more than 100% growth year over year.
It's a powers of two thing.
Going from one to two, not so scary,
two to four, not so scary.
512 to 1024, it's getting scary.
(Lisa chuckles)
1024 to 2048, oh crap!
I've been with Aiven for just almost two years now,
and we are less than 70 when I started,
and we're near 500 now.
So, explosive growth is very interesting,
but it's also that,
you're growing within a reasonable
burn rate boundary as well.
And what that does from a security perspective,
is it leaves you in the position that I had.
I walked in and I was the first actual CISO.
I had a team of four, I now have a team of 40.
Because it turns out that like a lot of things in life,
as you start unpacking problems, they're kind of fractal.
You unpack the problem,
you're like oh, well I did deal with that problem,
but now I got another problem that I got to deal with.
And so there's, it's not turtles all the way down.
>> There's a lot of things going on and other authors,
survive change. >> And there's
fundamental problems that are still not fixed.
And yet we treat them like they're fixed.
And so we're doing a lot of hard work
to make it so that we don't have to do hard work ongoing.
>> And that's the value
of the managed service.
>> Yes. >> Okay,
so talk about competition.
Obviously, we had ETR on which is
Enterprise Research Firm that we trust, we like.
And we were looking at the data
with the headwinds in the market,
looking at the different players
like got Amazon has Redshift, Snowflake,
and you got Azure Sequence.
I think it's called one of those products.
The money that's being shifted from
on premise data where the old school data warehouse
like terra data and whatnot,
is going first to Snowflake, then to Azure, then to AWS.
Yes, so that points to snowflake
being kind of like the bell of the ball if you will,
in terms of
from a data cloud. >> Absolutely.
>> How do you compete with them?
What's the pitch
'Cause that seemed to be a knee-jerk reaction
from the industry.
'Cause snowflake is hot.
They have a good value product.
They have a smart team,
Databrick is out there too.
>> Yeah I mean... >> how do you guys compete
against all that.
>> So this is that point
where you're balancing
the value of a specific technology,
or a specific technology vendor.
And am I going to be stuck with them?
So I'm tying my future to their future.
With open source,
I'm tying my future to the common good right.
The internet runs on open source.
It doesn't run on anything closed.
And so I'm not hitching my wagon
to something that I don't control.
I'm hitching it to something where,
any one of our customers could decide.
I'm not getting the value I need from Aiven anymore.
I need to go.
And we provide you with the tools necessary,
to move from our open source managed service to your own.
Whether you go on-prem or you run it yourself,
on a cloud service provider, move your data to you
because it's your data.
It's not ours.
How can I hold your data?
It's like weird extortion
ransoming thing. >> Actually speaking,
I mean enterprise, it's a big land grab
'cause with cloud you're horizontally scalable.
It's a beautiful thing, open source is booming.
It's going in Aiven,
every day it's just escalating higher and higher.
>> Absolutely. >> It is the software business.
So open is open.
Integration and scale seems to be the competitive advantage.
>> Yeah. >> Right.
So, how do you guys compete with that?
Because now you got open source.
How do you offer the same benefits
without the lock in, or what's the switching costs?
How do you guys maintain that position
of not saying the same thing in Snowflake?
>> Because all of the biggest data users and consumers
tend to give away their data products.
LinkedIn gave away their data product.
Uber gave away their data product,
Facebook gave away their data product.
And we now use those as community solutions.
So, if the product works
for something the scale of LinkedIn,
or something the scale of Uber.
It will probably work for you too.
And scale is just... >> Well Facebook and LinkedIn,
they gave away the product to own the data
to use against you.
>> But it's the product that counts because you need
to be able to manipulate data the way they manipulate data,
but with yours.
>> So low latency needs to work.
So horizontally, scalable, fees, machine learning.
That's what we're seeing.
How do you make that available?
Customers want on architecture?
What do you recommend?
Control plane, data plane, how do you think about that?
>> It's interesting.
There's architectural reasons
to think about it in terms like that.
And there's other good architectural reasons
to not think about it.
There's sort of this dividing line in the cloud,
where your cloud service provider,
takes over and provides you with the opportunity to say,
I don't know.
And I don't care
>> As long as it's secure
>> As long as it's secure absolutely.
But there's sort of that water line idea,
where if it's below the water line,
let somebody else deal.
>> What is in the table stakes?
'Cause I like that approach.
I think that's a good value proposition.
Store it, what boxes have to be checked?
Compliance, secure, what are some of the boxes?
>> You need to make sure that you've taken care of
all of the same basics if you are still running it.
Remember you can't absolve yourself
of your duty to your customer.
You're still on the hook.
So, you have to have backups.
You have to have access control.
You have to understand who's administering it,
and how and what they're doing.
Good logging, good comprehension there.
You have to have anomaly detection, secure operations.
You have to have all those compliance check boxes.
Especially if you're dealing with regulated data type
like PCI data or HIPAA health data
or you know what there's other countries
besides the United States,
there's other kinds of of compliance obligations there.
So you have to make sure
that you've got all that taken into account.
And remember that, like I said,
you can't absolve yourself with those things.
You can share responsibilities.
But you can't walk away from that responsibility.
So you still have to make sure
that you validate that your vendor knows
what they're talking about.
>> I wanted to ask you about the cybersecurity skills gap.
So I'm kind of giving a little segue here,
because you mentioned you've been with Aiven
for about two years.
>> Almost.
>> Almost two years.
You've started with a team of four.
You've grown at 10X in less than two years.
How have you accomplished that, considering we're seeing
one of the biggest skills shortages in cyber in history.
>> It's amazing, you see this show up in
a lot of job Ads,
where they ask for 10 years of experience
in something that's existed for three years.
(John Furrier laughs)
And it's like okay, well if I just be logical about this
I can hire somebody
at less than the skill level that I need today,
and bring them up to that skill level.
Or I can spend the same amount of time,
hoping that I'll find the magical person
that has that set of skills that I need.
So I can solve the problem of the skills gap
by up-skilling the people that I hire.
Which is strangely contrary
to how this thing works. >> The other thing too,
is the market's evolving so fast
that, that carry up and pulling someone along,
or building and growing your own so to speak is workable.
>> It also really helps us with
a bunch of sustainability goals.
It really helps with anything
that has to do with diversity and inclusion,
because I can bring forward
people who are never given a chance.
And say, you know what?
You don't have that magical ticket in life,
but damn you know what you're talking about?
>> It's a classic pedigree.
I went to this school, I studied this degree.
There's no degree if have to stop a hacker
using state of the art malware.
(John Furrier laughs) >> Exactly.
What I do today as a job,
didn't exist when I was in post-secondary at all.
>> So when you hire, what do you look for?
I mean obviously problem solving.
What's your kind of algorithm for hiring?
>> Oh, that's a really interesting question.
The quickest sort of summary of it is,
I'm looking for not a jerk.
>> Not a jerk.
>> Yeah. >> Okay.
>> Because it turns out that
the quality that I can't fix in a candidate,
is I can't fix whether or not they're a jerk,
but I can up-skill them, I can educate them.
I can teach them of a part of the world
that they've not had any interaction with.
But if they're not going to work with the team,
if they're going to be, look at me, look at me.
If they're going to not have that moment of,
I have this great job, and I get to work today.
And that's awesome.
(Lisa Martin laughs)
That's what I'm trying to hire for.
>> The essence of this teamwork
is fundamental. >> Collaboration.
>> Cooperation. >> Curiosity.
>> That's the thing yeah, absolutely.
>> And everybody?
>> Those things, oh absolutely.
Those things are really, really hard to interview for.
And they're impossible to fix after the fact.
So that's where you really want to put the effort.
'Cause I can teach you how to use a computer.
I mean it's hard, but it's not that hard.
>> Yeah, yeah, yeah.
>> Well I love the current state of data management.
Good overview, you guys are in the good position.
We love open source.
Been covering it for, since theCUBE started.
It continues to redefine more and more the industry.
It is the software industry.
Now there's no debate about that.
If people want to have that debate,
that's kind of waste of time,
but there are other ways that are happening.
So I have to ask you.
As things are going forward with innovation.
Okay, if opensource is going to be the software industry.
Where's the value?
>> That's a fun question wow?
>> Is it going to be in the community?
Is it the integration? Is it the scale?
If you're open and you have low switching costs...
>> Yeah so, when you look at
Aiven's commitment to open source,
a huge part of that is our open source project office,
where we contribute back to those core products,
whether it's parts of the Apache Foundation,
or Postgres, or whatever.
We contribute to those,
because we have staff who work on those products.
They don't work on our stuff.
They work on those.
And it's like the opposite of a zero sum game.
It's more like Nash equilibrium.
If you ever watch that movie, "A beautiful mind."
That great idea of,
you don't have to have winners and losers.
You can have everybody loses a little bit
but everybody wins a little bit.
>> Yeah and that's the open the ethos.
>> And that's where it gets tied up.
>> Another follow up on that.
The other thing I want to get your reaction on is that,
now in this modern era of open source,
almost all corporations are part of projects.
I mean if you're an entrepreneur and you want to get funding
it's pretty simple.
You start open source project.
How many stars you get on GitHub guarantees
it's a series C round, pretty much.
So open source now has got this new thing going on,
where it's not just open source folks who believe in it
It's an operating model.
What's the dynamic of corporations being part of the system.
It used to be, oh what's the balance between
corporate and influence, now it's standard.
What's your reaction?
>> They can do good and they can do harm.
And it really comes down to why are you in it?
So if you look at the example of open search,
which is one of the data products
that we operate in the Aiven system.
That's a collaboration between Aiven.
Hey we're an awesome company,
but we're nowhere near the size of AWS.
And AWS where we're working together on it.
And I just had this conversation
with one of the attendees here,
where he said, "Well AWS is going to eat your story there.
"You're contributing all of this
"to the open search platform.
"And then AWS is going to go and sell it
"and they're going to make more money."
And I'm like yep, they are.
And I've got staff who work for the organization,
who are more fulfilled
because they got to deliver something
that's used by millions of people.
And you think about your jobs.
That moment of, (sighs) I did a cool thing today.
That's got a lot of
value in it. >> And part of something.
>> Exactly. >> As a group.
>> 100%. >> Exactly.
>> And we end up with a product that's used by millions.
Some of it we'll capture,
because we do a better job running than the AWS does,
but everybody ends up winning out of the backend.
Again, everybody lost a little,
but everybody also won.
And that's better than that whole,
you have to lose so that I can win.
At zero something, that doesn't work.
>> I think the silo conversations are coming,
what's the balance between siloing something
and why that happens.
And then what's going to be freely accessible for data.
Because the real time information
is based upon what you can access.
"Hey Siri, what's the weather.
"We had a guest on earlier."
It says, oh that's a data query.
Well, if the weather is,
the data weathers stored in a database
that's out here and it can't get to the response on the app.
Yeah, that's not good, but the data is available.
It just didn't get delivered.
>> Yeah >> Exactly.
>> This is an example of what people are realizing now
the consequences of this data,
collateral damage or economy value.
>> Yeah, and it's understanding
how data fits in your environment.
And I don't want to get on the accountants too hard,
but the accounting organizations,
AICPA and ISAE and others,
they haven't really done a good job
of helping you understand data as an asset,
or data as a liability.
I hold a lot of customer data.
That's a liability to me.
It's going to blow up in my face.
We don't talk about the income
that we get from data, Google.
We don't talk about the expense of regenerating that data.
We talk about, well what happens if you lose it?
I don't know.
And we're circling the drain
around fiduciary responsibility,
and we know how to do this.
If you own a manufacturing plant,
or if you own a fleet of vehicles
you understand the fiduciary duty of managing your asset.
But because we can't touch it,
we don't do a good job of it.
>> How far do you think
are people getting into the point where
they actually see that asset?
Because I think it's out of sight out of mind.
Now there's consequences,
there's now it's public companies might have to do filings.
It's not like sustainability and data.
Like, wait a minute, I got to deal with these things.
>> It's interesting, we got this great benefit
of the move to cloud computing,
and the move to utility style computing.
But we took away that.
I got to walk around and pet my computers.
Like oh! This is my good database.
I'm very proud of you.
Like we're missing that piece now.
And when you think about the size of data centers,
we become detached from that,
you don't really think about,
Aiven operates tens of thousands of machines.
It would take entire buildings to hold them all.
You don't think about it.
So how do you recreate that
visceral connection to your data?
Well, you need to start actually thinking about it.
And you need to do some of that tokenization.
When was the last time you printed something out,
like you get a report and happens to me all the time
with security reports.
Look at a security report and it's like 150 page PDF.
Scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll.
Print it out, stump it on the table in front of you.
Oh, there's gravitas here.
There's something here.
Start thinking about those records, count them up,
and then try to compare that to something in the real world.
My wife is a school teacher,
kindergarten to grade three,
and tokenizing math is how they teach math to little kids.
You want to count something?
Here's 10 things, count them.
Well, you've got 60,000 customer records,
or you have 2 billion data points in your IOT database,
tokenize that, what does 2 billion look like?
What does $1 million look like
in the form of $100 dollars bills on a pallet?
>> Wow. >> Right.
Tokenize that data,
create that visceral connection with it,
and then talk about it.
>> So when you say tokenized,
you mean like token as in decentralization token?
>> No, I mean create like a totem
or an icon of it. >> Okay, got it.
>> A thing you can hold holy.
If you're a token company. >> Not token as in
Token economics and Crypto.
>> If you're a mortgage company,
take that customer record for one of your customers,
print it out and hold the file.
Like in a Manila folder, like it's 1963.
Hold that file, and then say yes.
And you're explaining to somebody and say yes,
and we have 3 million of these.
If we printed them all out,
it would take up a room this size.
>> It shows the scale.
>> Right. >> Right.
>> Exactly, create that connection
back to the human level of interaction with data.
How do you interact with a terabyte of data,
but you do.
>> Right.
>> But once she hits upgrade from Google drive.
(team laughs)
>> What's a terabyte right?
We don't hold that anymore.
>> Right, right.
>> Great conversation. >> Recreate that connection.
Talk about data that way.
>> The visceral connection
with data. >> Follow up after this event.
We'd love to dig more and love the approach.
Love open source, love what you're doing there.
That's a very unique approach.
And it's also an alternative
to some of the other vast growing
plus your valuations are very high too.
So you're not like a...
You're not too far away from these big valuations.
So congratulations.
>> Absolutely.
>> Yeah excellent, I'm sure there's lots of work to do,
lots of strategic work to do
with that round of funding.
But also lots of opportunity,
that it's going to open up, and we know you don't hire jerks.
>> I don't
>> You have a whole team of non jerks.
That's pretty awesome.
Especially 40 of 'em.
That's impressive James.| >> It is.
>> Congratulations to you on what you've accomplished
in the course of the team.
And thank you for sharing your insights
with John and me today,
we appreciate it. >> Awesome.
>> Thanks very much, it's been great.
>> Awesome, for John furrier, I'm Lisa Martin
and you're watching theCube, live in New York city
at AWS Summit NYC 22, John and I will be right back
with our next segment, stick around.
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