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>> Hey, everyone.
Welcome to this "CUBE Conversation" featuring Nexla.
I'm your host Lisa Martin.
And today we are joined by Saket Saurabh,
CEO and founder of Nexla.
Saket, great to have you on the program.
>> Lisa, thank you so much for having me here.
I'm really excited about this.
>> Tell us a little bit about Nexla.
What is it that you guys do?
>> Yeah, you know, we are in the world of data,
and one of the biggest challenges
that we face as an industry
is there is so much data, so much variety.
How do we really get it into the hands
of people who use data?
And the users of data are all across.
You know, they shouldn't have to be engineers,
they're across the board in different functions.
So, Nexla's purpose and mission has always been
ready to use data in the hands of the users.
So, what Nexla does today, is makes it possible
for users across the board,
whether those are data scientists
whether those are data analysts,
whether those are people in various business functions,
to get the data that they need
in the tools that they work with.
So, we make that possible in a very no code way
for users to get access to the data.
And very uniquely, actually do that by automating
a lot of the data engineering process.
We'll talk more about that.
It's an exciting space to be in.
>> It is an exciting space to be in.
And, of course, the volumes of data
could just continue to explode,
and that will not be slowing down anytime soon.
As we know in businesses,
one of the things we saw in the last two years
was businesses pivoting so many times,
and really needing, going from survival mode
to thriving mode with the ability to harness the power
and the insights and data is critical for businesses
to be successful these days.
As consumers we just expect
that if it's our business life or our personal life,
whoever we're interacting with is going to know
what we want and are going to be able
to display that to us quickly.
We think about Data Mesh.
It's a relatively new concept, right?
Talk to me about Data Mesh,
and what differentiates Nexla from your competition?
>> Yeah, so Data Mesh is essentially,
I would say in the lineage of the concept
of democratizing data,
the idea has always been that data should get to the users.
Now, for a long time, these users were dependent on IT
and engineering to get the data to them.
So, what the Data Mesh is doing is it's bringing a framework
by which users of data,
we call them data, you know, the domains,
the different functions that use data.
They can have the data to use themselves,
they can manage things on their own.
And I think that is allowing,
or a framework in which teams can truly scale.
I mean, that bottleneck of depending on engineering
to do everything for you, is just not going to work.
And I think in the last two years, even more so,
we saw that as companies tried to move fast,
it started to break down.
And I think there is a lot of momentum
around this concept of Data Mesh for this reason,
people are finding that this concept
is what can help them scale.
>> And how does Nexla deliver that single tool
so that you can really democratize data
and give people with varying levels of technical fluency
the access that they need?
I can imagine finance folks with ERP data,
and marketing folks with CRM data.
How do you do that with a single tool?
>> Yeah, so I think the key thing
about getting data in the hands of users
as we think about data democratization,
has been that, how does it actually happen?
How do you give people access to the data?
You know, simply giving them passwords to systems
is not enough, right?
Now, the Data Mesh concept comes with the understanding
that there should be an entity
which we call it a data product.
You know, a data product becomes that sort of common entity
that becomes something that people can get access to
or they can use, they can collaborate on.
Now, what is a data product,
becomes an important question, of course.
And how do we get a data product?
So, where Nexla comes in, in a very key way,
is we automatically generate these data products.
So, again, going back to the thinking
that, look there is not going to be enough engineers
to write code for everything.
What we are able to do is to say
that we can actually connect to data systems,
look through the data, understand it,
and package it up as a product as a data product.
And that data product is a core element of Data Mesh.
I'm happy to share
what a data product is if it helps people understand-
>> Yeah, let's double click into that a little bit.
I was noticing on your website about Nexsets?
>> Yeah.
>> And I wanted to know what that is,
and how does it reimagine data product creation?
>> So, let me just break down a little bit
about what is data product in the first place, right?
I mean, as you know, consumers we use products all the time.
You know, my laptop is here on a desk and that is a product.
It is a product made from raw materials,
like wood, and metal, and screws, right?
And somebody designed the product, somebody built it,
and I'm using it.
So, if you think of the same parallel in the world of data,
then APIs, and files, and database tables,
those are the raw materials.
If somebody takes that and packages that up
into something that other people can use easily,
that is the concept of the data product.
Now, how is it different from data?
Well, you take the core data
and you you put things around it.
Like, what is the description of data?
What is the structure of it?
You know, what are the validations that make it work?
How to error manage that?
Who has access to it?
When you take that raw material
and put all of those other structures around it,
that's when it sort of becomes a data product.
And the Nexset concept in Nexla
is essentially a manifestation of that.
It is the concept that these data products
do not need to be new copies of data,
which is a huge pain, by the way,
but instead, they can be these logical entities.
So, if I can take us back to the world of compute
where we understand the concept of containers,
you know, these containers are basically a logical entity
that gives us access to the computation resources.
Think of Nexset as a very similar thing,
a logical entity that gives us access to the data resources.
And this is something that we have been able to innovate
and automate in such a way
that today when people think of the Data Mesh
and they want to build that,
they see us as a component in that whole framework.
So, Data Mesh is a much broader framework,
but we are sort of the building block
for that through this concept
>> Building block. Got it.
Talk to me about where your customer conversations
are happening.
Are they within chief data officer,
chief information officer?
Is it within the C-Suite as data
is every company these days has to be a data company?
>> Yeah. Very much in the C-Suite, right?
So, again, this changes a little bit industry by industry
because every industry is organized differently.
For example, we have some amazing customer
in financial services.
There, the conversation often is with the chief data officer
or the chief analytics officer.
And the key thing that the C-Suite is thinking,
is how does this work in the future?
The scale of data challenges
are/is the growth of that is so fast.
How do we handle things, three years, five years from now?
And that's where the strategic conversation is,
and that's where things like Data Mesh
become extremely important for companies
where we talk to them about, you know,
how our technology sort of enables that, right?
Across other industries, the functions may vary.
And one of the things which is very interesting with data
compared to other technologies,
is that it touches almost every aspect of business.
It's not limited to engineering.
It is your person in HR who's doing HR analytics
of candidates and profiles,
they're reviewing and all that stuff,
to finance, to operations.
Every aspect of business does touch data.
So, this has to be done in a language
and a mechanism that's much more approachable.
>> It's got to be horizontal
for all of those different types of users, right?
To be able to understand so that ultimately,
not only did they get access to the data,
but they can pull out those insights
faster than their competition
whether it's to develop new revenue streams,
new products, new services.
You know, the person on the other end
or the companies on the other end
are expecting that real time interaction.
>> Yeah. Absolutely.
>> It's no longer a nice to have.
>> No longer nice to have.
And to clarify, right?
I mean, the use of data is in multiple ways, right?
So, analytics is a big use of data
which is, how is my business doing and running?
We have customers like Marchex and Poshmark,
and Bed Bath & Beyond, and so on who use us heavily
to bring data for the analytics use cases.
As our companies, for example,
for like a DoorDash or Instacart
where that data feeds operational purposes.
Operational purposes,
meaning understanding the availability of inventory
or products across different stores.
Now, that data has functioned to say,
well, if I know what products are available,
then I can list them, then I can go pick them up.
And that's not analytics use case alone,
it has an operational use case, right?
Similarly, we see that in order tracking.
We have customers, for example, like Narvar that use us
to connect to different shipping tracking systems.
So, the applications of data are in analytics.
There are certainly also in operations
which is core business.
And there also, of course, in data science.
There's no question that extension of analytics
from looking back on how business is doing to data science,
which is, you know, what should we be doing
and how should we be more intelligent?
So, it's across the board
>> Across the board, horizontal,
all industries really need to do this.
But one of the things that pop into my mind
as you were walking through that example,
was the supply chain challenges
that we're all experiencing right now.
How can Nexla help organizations
mitigate some of the challenges that are going on?
>> I think what happens is technologies like ours
which are the data layer
are at a fundamental foundational level.
One of the things about Nexla,
is that we are able to bring a data
into a much more real-time usage.
So, wherein companies were traditionally moving data
on a much more sort of periodic basis,
we are plumbing under the hood.
We are completely real-time.
Which means that we are allowing companies
to now get access to that data
in a faster way where possible.
So, again, this is not something
that can be fixed overnight.
But the role that data can play in is better visibility.
And better visibility means those business decisions
are being made earlier at the right time with more insight.
And hopefully, that eventually leads
to sort of much more efficient,
actual, on the ground some movement of products and so on.
>> Yeah, that visibility is absolutely critical
regardless of the global climate, right?
Talk to me, last question here,
since we're almost out of time.
Give me a little bit about your AWS partnership?
And then talk to me about what's next for Nexla?
Yeah, as a technology provider,
we end up running a lot of our own infrastructure on AWS
as do many of our customers.
And we have been an AWS partner for multiple years,
But very recently, we actually made our product available
on AWS marketplace,
which means that the access to our technology
has become so much easier for companies.
Now, Nexla has started its journey
focusing on mid to large enterprises,
and some of the most complex used cases out there
from some of the biggest banks
to some of the biggest companies in marketing,
to some of the core companies in retail,
logistics, and so on.
Now, what is happening,
is that the powerful nature of our product
and the ease of use that we have given,
that need is coming further and further earlier
in the life cycle of companies, right?
So, today, new companies are starting up,
which are saying that we need make
that sort of investment
in data infrastructure earlier, you know?
And that's why we have seen even some very small,
early startups starting to use Nexla,
or to come to us for our technology.
So, we are very much partnered up with AWS
because AWS covers the whole gamut
from companies that were started yesterday
to extremely large enterprises,
and bring our technology accessible to them.
>> Excellent. Well, Saket, thank you so much for joining me.
It sounds like a tremendous amount of momentum
and opportunity at Nexla.
We appreciate your insights, and best of luck to you.
We look forward to hearing more.
>> Thank you, Lisa's, it's a pleasure talking to you.
It's an exciting space, so time flies
when we talk about that, right?
>> Doesn't it? >> Yeah.
>> It really does. (laughs)
Saket Saurabh, I'm Lisa Martin,
you're watching theCUBE,
leave it here for more coverage from the leader
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