 Good evening everyone. Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante here, wrapping up an awesome day covering Click World 2023, live from Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. Dave, this has been such a great show. Talk about data explosion and data management evolution. We've had an explosion of data content on theCUBE today. We've had some amazing guests. I didn't know what to expect here. I mean, it's probably about, what, 2,000 people you'd say? Yep. Yeah, decent-sized ecosystem. You know, it's funny, Lisa, we've talked about today. I go back to the early days of theCUBE. 2010, I got a call from John Furrier, he said, we're doing Hadoop World. Get over here, I was in a show in Dallas, so I flew through an ice storm. I got in to New York at 3 a.m., and we did Hadoop World, and that started really our journey into the big data world. And we, you know, for years and years and years, I've obviously covered data. The reason I bring it up is, Click, Attunity, and Talent, were there early on with theCUBE, and they were early guests. We saw them, you know, I mean, Click, obviously, a 30-year-old company, but, you know, they were sort of reinventing themselves in the big data era, you know, really getting into visualization. So it was kind of interesting to see those three companies come together again, so that's kind of cool. And I like the consolidation play, basically saying, I call it the consolidation place, and we start out in visualization, on-prem, they went to the cloud. Now, interestingly, they did that behind the scenes, you know, as a private company. Now, I've sharpened my pencil a little bit, I was overly optimistic. Originally, I had these guys, I was guessing around 1.2 billion, and they are over a billion, I've confirmed that. I think the reason I was overly optimistic is because they had to go through a period of transition from, and they're still going through it, on-prem, perpetual license models to an ARR model, that has a negative effect on revenue. So I'm trying to do the math, they got $6 billion all in, and all the nine or 10 or 11 acquisitions, when you count talent, or tell end, that they'll be doing, six billion in enterprise value. So they got to get that out, if they're going to do an IPO, it's my thinking on this. So, you know, they're sort of break even on that, it's about five X revenue. So, you know, they got to get, they got to get higher. So the market conditions don't allow that. So I would suspect these guys aren't going public anytime soon. You know, unless I'm missing something else. So that aside, they got a good story. You know, the idea that they're going to take all this hard stuff, you know, including an up to through BI, we heard from Stuart Bond, he sort of laid out the taxonomy of data quality and data governance and metadata management and change data capture, all that sort of really boring but important stuff. They're trying to lock up that market as the independent, which I love that play. It's because you got SAP, you got IBM, you got Informatica, Informatica is independent, but you've got a lot of the legacy companies. So Informatica could be disrupted, but IBM, SAP, SAS, Oracle, they're going to do their own thing. You have, CLIC is now the independent trying to sort of lock up that industry, if you will, with best of breed capabilities and presented as a platform. And of course you got the cloud guys, as Stuart Bond was saying, picking away at it. But the market I think is actually really interesting, and it sets up what we've been talking about people, places and things, the digital representation of your business, the digital twin of your business, these guys aren't there yet. They may say they are, but they're not, because their limit is the data platform, the snowflakes, the data bricks, the redshifts, they're not there yet. So these guys aren't going to beat them there, or they might beat them there, but the customer outcome can't occur until the data platforms evolve. And they're all evolving, data bricks is evolving, snowflakes evolving, BigQuery, the cloud guys. So that's going to be interesting to watch. And with all this foundation model stuff, this GPT stuff, it could happen a lot faster than typical IT trends. Well, so our first guests this morning, first guests were Mike Capone, the CEO of Click. Yeah, let's go through those. And Crawford Delprett, the president of IDC. Mm-hmm. One of the things that you brought up with Mike is he's been at the helm for five years now, but you brought up, you guys were talking about the M&A strategy versus organic. A lot of M&A, Tel-En will be what, the 11th? I think so, I think the 11th, yes. And as you mentioned, you know, back in the OG days of theCUBE, going to Hadoop World and there was these three companies that are almost one now, Attunity, Tel-En and Click. What were some of the things that you heard from Mike from a strategic perspective that piqued your interest? Well, it's cliche, but I mean, I do think that they are listening to their customers. When you do that much M&A, and not all of them work out, it's hard to tell because private company can't wait to see the numbers, but I think it's probably at least the year away. But when you do that much M&A, and my sense is they certainly got Attunity right, and I think talent will be a good acquisition. You've got to identify that customer affinity. And they do that by going in the field, they're talking to the sales people, they're talking to customers saying, hey, why don't you work better with this company? Well, they start doing things in the field and all of a sudden they get momentum. So I sensed that they had kind of a good methodology to identify companies, to target those companies. We heard the four things that they look at. The financials was the last one, of course, but culture and obviously the technical fit, the customer driven. So, but what I heard was we're not done yet. Yeah. You know, we're going to continue. I didn't hear like a ton on, you know, we're going to go hard after organic innovation too. Right. I'm curious as to, you know, I asked that question a couple of times as you know, and I suspect the organic stuff is to stitch all of this together. Well, and that seems to be one of the things that they've done better than some of their competitors. We talk about, you know, integration, no pun intended, but they seem to have done a good job with that. You were bringing up something over the weekend to me about their historic competitor, Tableau. Salesforce acquired them, focus, not as great, opportunity for a click. Yeah. But they seem to, with the M&A strategy, have done a better job than a lot of companies I've talked to about actually integrating the technologies. So the customer experience is solid and it actually allows customers to really crank up the volume on what the technology can enable them to do. It's, I mean, it's hard to tell. I've talked to a couple of customers. In fact, there's a lot of customers who like Harman started with Viz on-prem, moved to Viz in the cloud. And it just, you could tell, they're just kind of starting to get into the whole integration play, right? So that's, you know, the marketing is always going to be ahead of the actual. And so this is still a company in transition. That's why it's kind of curious the timing of the confidential IPO filing. Which was what, January? It was January. 23, yeah. Maybe, you know, because we came into the year, there was still some decent optimism. Now the Fed was going to be tightening though, so you kind of knew, so maybe they figured, hey, why not? You know, let's sort of float it out there and just start getting ready. But as they say, I don't think that's going to happen for a while, because I think they still are transitioning from, you know, into an ARR model, more into the cloud, still doing, I mean, the talent is going to be a big acquisition for them, obviously. So I can't, I can't square that circle. It's just, I think it's going to take a while. But eventually they'll get there. But we saw companies like, you know, UiPath, you know, they filed the confidential, took them a while to get to public. There's another company, Dynatrace is a company, it's a Tomah Bravo company. They, you know, went through that process. So I think it's going to happen, but it's hard to tell when they're private company. You know, that's the advantage of being a private company. Ask Michael Dell, you can do what you want. You know, you don't have to be under the scrutiny of the public eye. So I thought, a couple other things, Lisa, I really love the Brian Clark interview. That was a lot of fun. Drew Clark was awesome too, with Jamie. You know, and then Chris from SDG, I thought that was a great conversation on the future of data. Chris Powell, CMO was awesome. And he brought on Steph. So, but yeah, but so Brian Clark and Josh, who was, had a product management. Brian Clark was awesome, I thought. He really brought, and I thought that Josh was good too. I loved how he said, whatever pricing you have, it's not going to be perfect. The pricing software is really hard. Is it user-based? Is it usage-based? Is it capacity-based? Is it consumption-based? Is it ELA? Is it unlimited? Those are really hard conversations, because it all comes down to the economics is, okay, how do I get the best deal if I'm a customer? How do I not leave a ton of money on the table if I'm the vendor? I want a long-term relationship, so I'm willing to give up some revenue or margin to have that lifetime value. And so, it's an art. It really is. That's a great way of describing, it really is an art. And you know, one of the things that Josh could articulated was, their click is jumping into capacity pricing, starting with data integration analytics later this year. Brian did a great job of kind of identifying some of the value in it, the what's in it for me as a customer. But also Josh said, this is going to be an option for customers, they don't have to change to this. So, he also talked about something we talked about a few minutes ago is, they are very much listening to their customers. You and I talked to many, many clients. Everybody's always customer obsession, customer first. We start with the customer. And it's always nice to see the actual proof in the pudding. And I think he articulated that, Josh did, in terms of listening to customers and really being flexible to really make changes or adapt to what customers and partners are going to be telling them about really diving into capacity pricing. I kind of made a joke about dipping the toe in the water. He said, oh, no, no, we're in. Yeah, yeah, they are in. And then the Pizza Express folks were, that was fun. That was a great story. The reason I liked Brendan coming on was because we got a little peek at their cloud. They really weren't talking much about a click sense, which is their cloud offering. We just kind of assumed it's there and people like it and they're going forward with it. But it was good to hear basically control plane in Amazon, maybe they'll go to other clouds at some point in time, but they can support data in other clouds because Pizza Express is an Azure shop. So that was kind of interesting whether or not it makes sense for them to be super cloud. I actually think it does from a couple of standpoints. One is just to do in deals with all three cloud vendors, adding Azure and GCP makes sense. I do think there is a cost of that abstraction, but it gives customers greater optionality and it gives them the ability to continue to do best to breed across the different clouds. I thought just kind of double clicking on the Pizza Express customer story. You know how much I love a customer story. I thought one of the things that was so great is that's a COVID success story. That is a 58 year old restaurant chain in the UK and Asia, 400 something stores that pivoted dramatically and it started at the analytics level. It didn't start at the top. They really went and they pointed that out that it really started at the analytics that are needing to give the folks in the stores much more control to really be able to understand to pivot to delivery, which is not their core competency. And now they're really elevating it up to the home office. I thought that was a really unique story that really validated what click is an able to enable businesses to do, especially during the last few years of such challenge. Yeah, I mean, you know, COVID so interesting. I call it the force march to digital. Chipotle killed it during COVID because they were ready for it. They had the digital systems in place. You know, the other aspect of it is the local, you know, restaurant chain in Boston, legal seafood had no digital capability and they really got hurt during COVID. They couldn't operate really for a while. And I think they opened on Father's Day during COVID and it was not good, right? And so they really struggled through it. They ended up selling the company. So there's going to two ends of the spectrum. I don't know, I don't order pizza from Domino's, but it seemed like they had it pretty good. But so I imagine pizza is a little easier because you got franchises and you can push that out to them and you got a limited menu, you know? So your supply chain is not that complicated. But still, it's impressive that they were able to move so fast and it sounds like they did pretty well with it. Yeah, yeah. And then Chief Product Officer, James Fisher, he's speaking tomorrow, tomorrow's product day. That's the way to do it, right? Day one is vision, day two is product. Yep. And it sounds like there's some pretty cool things that are going to be announced. He gave us some teasers. Anything, if you had a crystal ball, anything that you think they're going to be announced tomorrow? Well, I think they got to be showing something on AI and ML and foundation models. I mean, how can they not? And I think there'll be a lot of really hardcore data integration stuff that, you know, the people in the audience, the customers are going to love. Yeah. You know, I'd be like, okay, yeah, that's nice. You didn't have that already. Yeah. So, and you'll get some cheers. Yeah. But yeah, I would think the large language model, the GPT and AI, I think in particular, the data pipeline is so complicated. And, you know, we heard Stuart Bond say, look, ETL is not dead. It's not because you got to extract. You got to at least transform and load, or you can extract and load and then transform later. That is definitely something that, so ETL, maybe it's certainly not dead, but it's changing. People don't like ETL. People don't, I mean, it's just, it's a necessary evil. Why? Because you have to take the data out of the apps, of all the silos, put it into a central location, and before you do that, you got to transform it. Oh, not necessarily. You can put it into the data store and then transform it later, but that creates other problems. That's data swamp. That creates data swamp sometimes. You know, but the lake house technologies and modern data lakes are solving that with modern data tooling. So, the point is, there's still a need for that. Yeah. What informatic is stronghold? So these guys can disrupt that a little bit, especially if they have the end-to-end value proposition. So, if and when they go public, you can hear a lot about cohort selling and upselling and average contract values and how long it takes to ramp up and then how long it takes to the cohort to buy other products, and so that's the common software model. I do think that this company and all data companies are going to have to think about that mental model that I put forth working with George Gilbert of Uber, the digital twin for your business. Stuart Bond picked right up on it. People, places and things, all coherent. You got your backend systems, your SAPs and your ERPs and your Oracle systems feeding a data layer. And that data layer has data elements or data products that are all coherent and you're building on top of that data apps. Uber is a data app. And all the data elements are coherent. They have a semantic layer, they understand each other. They're not copies of copies of copies. You heard Stuart say that, they're real time. And that is the future of data. So we're shifting from a world that is application-centric where the data is locked inside the app, locked inside the business logic to one that is data-centric where the business logic and the metadata are going to reside on top of the data, not the other way around. So data becomes first, you know, data first. That's what data first means to me. And that's a brave new world. And I have no doubt that a company like this who's so good at M&A is going to get there. Some things have to be invented. Shimak Tagani started a company to sort of commercialize Datamesh. And because she saw that there were so many gaps and so she's going to go fill those gaps. You know, data fabric, Datamesh, all that stuff. It talks to the future of data. And I think again, Stuart Bond nailed it. Data is going to be distributed. Only move it to a centralized repository when you have to. And he really kind of dug in on data intelligence. And I thought that was such an interesting concept of where organizations need to be able to, where do we put data? Where does it need to be? Based on its value, its relevance, et cetera. I think we're just cracking the surface on that. I think this is an interesting space to watch. Yeah, and he's talking about, you know, whether it's metadata management. I like the term data intelligence. I mean, it is somewhat confusing because people might think, you know, machine intelligence, data intelligence, is that AI? But it does involve AI. But it's, you know, data about the data. It's lineage, who has access to it. Maybe it's not, maybe not identity, but does this individual, you know, what's the level of that data that can be accessed? What is the provenance of that data? You know, how long should we keep that data? You know, when should it be deleted? You can't keep data forever. You know, make sure it's in compliance, that it's governed, that it's private, all that stuff. And it's discoverable. Yeah. And that makes it, you know, and it's trusted. It's got high data quality, which can be automated now. And ultimately shareable, cause that's what it's all about. Absolutely. Dave, I had a great day unpacking all of this with you and I'm sure that our audience did as well. You can find a lot of great contents going to be coming out on siliconangle.com. As you know, cause you probably bookmarked it, but Dave, awesome job. Thanks Lisa. Thank you so much. Yeah, great working with you again. As always. Absolutely, as always. We want to thank you so much for watching the queue. We appreciate you, you know that. Lisa Martin for Dave Vellante, signing off from Clickworld 23. We'll see you at the next show.