>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE.
Covering AWS Reinvent 2017,
presented by AWS,
intel,
and our ecosystem of partners.
>> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage
of AWS Reinvent 2017.
This is day two for us.
Incredible day one.
We had great buzz on day two.
Great announcements coming out from AWS today.
I'm Lisa Martin with my cohost Keith Townsend,
and we're excited to be joined by CUBE alumni,
Aaron Kalb, the head of product and a founder of Alation.
Welcome back to the show.
>> Thanks so much for having me.
I'm excited to be here.
>> So speaking of excitement,
you can hear the buzz behind us.
Interesting about Alation,
the first data catalog designed for human collaboration.
What gap did Alation see in the market five years ago
when you started?
>> That's a great question, Lisa.
So, yeah, we're the first data catalog, period,
and we're excited to see a lot of other people
kind of using that label,
I believe it validates this as a space,
and I think that everybody needs,
and I think our approach, as you said,
was to really to approach it from the human side,
to say the data might be generated by machines
or stored on machines,
but it's not meant to ultimately be consumed by machines.
Even if there's algorithms that's pulling it in,
it's to ultimately serve human interests.
So the goal was to design from the human back
and really think, what does this data mean?
Can I trust it?
Is it gonna drive the processes correctly?
>> So Aaron, I have seen that term quite a bit,
and data catalog, for me, means one specific thing.
Can you kind of wrap that up for us?
>> What is a data catalog?
>> That's a really great question, Keith,
and I think what's interesting is
we took a lot of inspiration in the early days
actually from Amazon.com, right?
So Amazon is an amazing modern product catalog.
You can go in, type in English
and see a variety of products that match that keyword.
And for each one you can see whose bought it before,
how many stars did they give it?
Is it good?
So it helps you find, understand, and trust,
and get the right product for your need.
We want to do that same thing for data.
How do you found a trustworthy data asset,
understand what it is, and put it to use?
So that's exactly the goal.
>> So, a simple problem is I've worked
with a ton of researchers in the Big Pharma industry,
data across the world basically.
And a lot of data sets, repetitive.
A team in Germany is working with one set of data,
team in New Jersey working with another one,
how does your solution help those researchers
find the data that they're looking for?
>> Exactly right.
So the problem is many different data sets,
many different things claiming to be true.
Some of them are just plain wrong.
Sometimes the answer might be one thing in Germany
but something else elsewhere, and they're both valid.
And so you've hit the nail on the head.
The way people use data contains a lot of hints
about the way you should use data.
So just like Amazon, again, because we're here.
And it'll say, oh, customers who bought
what you're about to buy also bought this,
and that can help you discover something useful.
We try to expose we call behavior IO.
Let the past behavior of the most knowledgeable people
in the organization drive the future behavior.
That's a big part of what we do.
So one of the things I was reading about you guys
on your website and some editorials is,
a lot of data lakes fail.
Why is that?
How is Alation different?
>> That's a great question.
So I think what's interesting about a data lake
is it's kind of like having a huge basement, right?
And it can make you adopt a hoarder mentality,
you say, oh it's so cheap to store everything,
we'll just store it,
and then when we need it we'll figure it out then.
Well, the truth is, it's not always how it goes.
Often you store so many things,
it's cheap to store it,
but when that actual human
who has an actual analytical question they want to answer
or an actual business process they want to improve,
goes looking for the data,
all they see are all these unlabeled boxes.
Right?
So I think the key is to think about
how do you make information searchable,
discoverable, understandable, trustworthy?
And what's great is a lot of people are migrating
from their on-premise data lakes to the Clouds,
and obviously (mumbles) a big leader in where that's going.
It gives you an opportunity to ask,
just like when you move houses to say,
let me look at what I've got,
and can I adopt an approach?
You know, what do I actually need?
You might keep it all,
but what's gonna be in the top shelf?
What's gonna be in the basement?
And how do you make everything accessible?
>> So Aaron, can you talk a little bit about
today's announcements?
A lot of machine learning, analytics announcements from AWS.
However, I don't know what I already have.
So how can I make use of that data?
Can you help talk about how Alation helps
to leverage some of these new tools from AWS?
>> Absolutely.
So, we've had a bunch of customers on AWS Stack already,
and increasingly so.
Fundamentally our customers are people who do analysis.
A lot of them are using S3, Redshift, the like.
And people are hosting on the Cloud increasingly.
And it's exactly the problem you described.
It's I know I have it somewhere,
but I can't get my head around what I already have.
What region is it in?
>> Aaron: Exactly.
>> Is it in a region, is it in my data center, where is it?
>> Exactly.
so whether that data is in Redshift,
in S3, or somewhere else.
Maybe it's, you know, in a Postgres
or SQL Server or Oracle Server.
(mumbles) hosted one.
Whatever it is, we crawl and index everything you have,
just the way Google crawls and indexes
everything out on the web,
and we make it searchable,
and we put information about who's used it
and how good it is front and center,
just the way you can say,
oh this is a five-star clock on Amazon,
I'm gonna go click buy it now.
>> So one challenge with data lakes
is security around that data.
So data catalog, I get meta data
around the data that I have,
but some of that data is sensitive.
How do you guys handle security
around the data catalog itself?
>> Absolutely.
So we respect all the security and privacy settings
that exist that are on the data itself,
and we just sort of surface those in the catalog.
Some of our customers say, look,
we want to let people know what exists
so they can ask for permission.
Others say, even having awareness of this data
is too much for us.
And you mentioned, Pharma, that'll vary by industry.
>> Where do you guys get involved
in the customer conversation?
You said many customers of yours are already using
AWS for different things,
but where does Alation come into the conversation?
Are you brought in by AWS?
Are you brought in by customers?
Where are they on this journey towards leveraging the Cloud
for the things that they need, agility,
the speed, and the cost reduction?
>> Absolutely.
So our promise is we help you find,
understand, and trust your data
wherever it lives and whoever you are, democratizing it.
So customers choose the right infrastructure
for their needs, given cost,
given performance.
Obviously Amazon is increasingly a part of that.
But that's a choice they make,
and we resolve to handle that wherever it is.
And as of customers, our customers are so smart,
we learn so much from them.
We're meeting a bunch of CIOs,
both the prospects and also talking some current customers
like Expedia today here at AWS lunch
with our investor Costanoa and another at dinner tonight.
And folks like Chegg and Invoice2go
who've been longstanding AWS customers
using S3, using Redshift,
and actually in Chegg's case,
they have a lot of homegrown tooling
that they developed on the backend,
but they said Alation is the best place
to surface that and have it be the central portal
for business users and analysts
who might not be able to otherwise access things
that are just available via (mumbles)
>> So how are you, Alation, and AWS helping a customer
like Chegg extract ROI quickly?
>> Yeah, it's a great question,
so, AWS is really great for cost containment.
You have all this data and all this processing,
but you have peaks and you have troughs,
and how do you make sure you're not overpaying (mumbles)
so it's great for helping with storage and computation.
And Alation helps with the human side,
how do you get that upside by saying
you have this data,
that could effect the way you stock your shelves,
the way you price your products or who you hire,
what markets you go into.
And that requires that last step.
If you have the data but it isn't in the right hands
at the right time or it's interpreted incorrectly,
it has no value.
So the two of them together (mumbles) end-to-end solution.
>> So Aaron, with GDPR coming up quick,
the enforcement of that coming up May 2018,
customers have to be concerned
about having data they shouldn't have.
Does Alation help identify some of that data?
>> Absolutely.
So data catalog is fundamentally
an inventory of everything you have,
plus information about how it has been
and could be consumed.
We very much focus on the upside,
potential of using that to drive
better business choices and better analysis.
But we have customers actually saying,
oh, we can use that same information about what we have,
who's using it, what's in it,
to instead make sure that it's used compliantly
with a regulation like GDPR to make sure
that you aren't holding onto health records
longer than you should or PII.
And it's absolutely a very big use case
for many of our customers.
>> So data is touched by a lot of people in an organization.
AWS has done a great job of really developing a lot of
synergy with the developer community
for a long time now.
But we're also seeing some trends
suggesting they're going up the stack.
They want to get more enterprises,
enterprises are at the precipice,
as Andy Jassey said, of this mass migration to the Cloud.
You mentioned, all of your work with AWS
and the CIO events that you're having here.
Where are you guys in a conversation with customers?
Are you more now having to get to that C-suite
as now their business are absolutely predicated
upon the best use of data to identify
ways to monetize new revenue streams.
How influential is that C-level in this conversation.
>> It's a great question.
So I think what is interesting is,
all companies, we sort of commoditized
a basic business school, consultant,
best practice knowledge.
Everyone is kind of already doing that.
To get to the next level our customers
are recently telling us it is only by finding
key insights in data that they're
gonna beat out the competition and stay relevant.
I mean, look what Amazon and Netflix have done
to the industries that, they weren't as data driven,
and have that kind of agility around data.
So everybody wants to do the same thing.
So CIOs, CDOs, chief data officers,
we're seeing them crop up more and more
and being more and more empowered in the organization.
Because it's seen as central to hitting revenue targets
and making an impact, which is what customers want to do.
And I mentioned CISOs as well
with the question that you asked, Keith, about security.
>> The CISOs, the chief information security officers.
>> Aaron: Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely, so I think usually often a CISO
will report into a CIO,
often you see it as adjacent to them,
there's somebody who needs to have the confidence,
as they do, in Alation's process of mirroring
what's in the data source,
not introducing security holes.
Potentially even taking a step forward and saying,
as I implement GDPR and other policies,
how do I use a
comprehensive automated inventory like Alations
to make sure that process isn't just started
but actually finished and avoid the fines
and the adverse events.
We absolutely see across the C-suite a lot of interest.
>> So let's go one step below the CIO,
and I think the CIO understands this.
This data is the new oil.
Very, very straightforward.
But now you're getting into the enterprise architect,
the VP of infrastructure,
and they have to implement these technologies.
What have been some of the rewards
and challenges with those conversations?
>> That's a great question.
Right, so here at AWS Reinvent
we have a very technical audience,
very infrastructure minded.
Those are folks that we love to engage with,
but our primary audience is the business.
>> Keith: Right. >> Right.
And so I think what's interesting is,
the problem we solve for the more
infrastructure-minded executives is
how do I deal with these business users?
How do I turn this relationship that feels adversarial,
where they're putting strain on my system,
they're upset about cost overruns,
we don't speak the same language with the same values.
Alation can be a great bridge.
Because we do all of this automated extraction
and tying to the sources where they are,
and kind of meet the industry people where they live,
but then can communicate the value in a clean interface
that demonstrates real business ROI to the business.
So we can kid of be an ambassador
between those sides of the customer.
>> I love that, being an ambassador.
Aaron, your passion for Alation, what you do,
your engagement with customers is palpable.
So we thank you for joining us on theCUBE,
and wish you guys the best of luck
with what you're doing here at AWS Reinvent.
>> Lisa, thank you so much for having me.
>> Lisa: Awesome.
>> Keith: Great job, Aaron.
>> Thank you for watching.
We are live at AWS Reinvent 2017 with 42,000 other people.
I'm Lisa Martin, for my cohost Keith Townsend
and Aaron Kalb, stick around.
We'll be right back.