 Live from San Francisco, California, The Cube, covering MarkLogic World 2015. Brought to you by MarkLogic. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Kelly. Okay, welcome back everyone. You are watching The Cube here live in Silicon Valley for MarkLogic World 2015. This is The Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events and district to signal for the noise and report on all the action, talk to the executives, talk to their customers, find out what's going on, share that with you. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Jeff Kelly, big data analyst at wikibond.org, research firm, go to wikibond.com, check out all the action. Our next guest is Chad Chatfield, national practice manager and senior architect at Avalon, welcome to The Cube. Hi, thanks for having me. So putting all this stuff to work is the hardest part of when you have an engine like MarkLogic and cloud and mobile just exploding on the landscaping, forcing people's hands to actually move faster. Right. It's like pave the roads, get them cars on. I mean, a lot of pressure. Right. So putting it into action. So got to get your thoughts. What's your current view of the marketplace right now in terms of where the pressure points are? Is it top line, consolidation, developers, all of the above? I think when you start talking about technologies like MarkLogic, there's somewhat of a fear to kind of get over to the edge and embrace new, no sequel technology. So the barrier to entry is how do we actually support it, how do we grow it, how do we limit cost of ownership? And so if you can slowly ease in clients and get some small wins and small successes and go against the legacy we have to have an Oracle or something that actually is going to come in here and solve this problem. If you can get over that, then I think it paves the way and it clears the path to actually have a much easier solution and implementation. I was gonna say, how have you seen that evolving, I guess, over the last several years? You've been a partner with MarkLogic for a number of years now. How have you seen that relationship that companies have with the old legacy systems of evolving in terms of being more open to adopting new approaches, whether it's MarkLogic or some other new big data approach? How's that evolved the last few years? It's become a lot easier. So as no sequel has risen in popularity, it's become a lot easier actually to have those initial conversations. Four years ago at MarkLogic World, we had Fortune 100 companies saying, what is no sequel, why do I need it? And now we have, we need no sequel, but we're not sure how to actually apply it. So those conversations are much easier. With the advent of semantics and the notion of that being included in MarkLogic, as well as other engines, how do you actually apply that technology in addition to a no sequel solution? That's the new challenge, but there's a huge opportunity there to leverage legacy systems and provide that with a semantic solution so you can get business value out of your existing data. Digging a little bit, what is that value that's sitting there waiting to be unlocked when you start to apply semantics to those kind of legacy systems? When you deal with Fortune 100 companies, generally they have systems throughout. So one of them that we're dealing with today has 70 different systems that are going into their supply chain. And so they're not gonna go rewrite 70 systems. They wanna leverage that existing data that's sitting there. So by taking new approaches like semantics to tie those legacy systems in to provide a unified way of looking at their business value chain across there, they're able to leverage those technologies. It's a hurdle to get to that because it's hard to describe what that technology is and how it works, but once you actually have that small success win and you show that success, it spreads like wildfire. Well, so help me understand, so how is that, so the idea of bringing data from multiple systems together to get a kind of a consistent view sounds like kind of the EDW idea that we've heard about in the past. How has Mark Logic changed that paradigm? So in the past you could take an ERP or supply chain software, something like that. You could also take a master data management approach of do a virtualization layer and have the data all flow through that. You flip that on its head a little bit instead of talking about how do we customize rows and columns to actually fit back out. You start talking about things semantically as I have a product or I have a marketing material. And then when you start dealing with items at a concept level, it gets rid of all the different table relationships and everything else associated with it. It's easier to actually describe and bring systems on board. And then what ultimately does that enable companies to do, but they couldn't do before that's going to drive even more value. So there's two things. Companies are looking for how do I become more efficient and how do I find existing revenue streams and data that I may have. Using technologies like that, you can find tons of efficiencies. Like I don't want to go order the asset that I own from another company. That's a waste of money because I could not find it. The second piece is I have all this data that I could repackage as a new product that unlocks it by using those technologies. Well that's a really interesting one. The idea that companies that maybe we're not in the quote-unquote data business can now start to be in that data business where they're packing up data solutions. And that could be across vertical industry. So it's really opening up a whole new lines of business, Joe. Exactly. Yeah, I think one of the things that we hear is applications are driving infrastructure. DevOps, we were just at Amazon show yesterday. And it's almost like a cult, right? Amazon, okay, it's so amazing. But then you bring it to the enterprise. We were speculating on theCUBE that it might not be as easy to roll to the enterprise with your tanks and your army because there's a lot of little things you got to do. So what are those things that the enterprise need to be truly like an Amazon, fully frictionless, agile, elastic, and have that kind of integrated stack. MarkLogic has a lot of that going on for it and has the enterprise goods to go with it. So what are, what is MarkLogic doing that's different than say an Amazon or public cloud or other provider? So from the perspective of MarkLogic, MarkLogic is different from a lot of the other technologies on the market as that with other, other items you have to piece together parts to make a holistic solution, which is not always a bad thing. You know, different segregations of what should be here, search, here, no SQL solution over here. What MarkLogic brings is the ability to do it all in one product. So if you want to do semantics, you want to do bi-temporal types of things, all of those kinds of things come packaged inside MarkLogic. So it allows you the ability, instead of having cost to ownership and support across multiple different platforms, that you can do it in one single one. So some people choose to do that. It's a lot easier from an enterprise support way to do that, but. So I got to ask you guys, we're getting down to the wire here, we're getting the hook. Explain to the folks out there that might not be familiar with MarkLogic. What is it about MarkLogic that they should know about that they might not be obvious? Because there's a lot of camouflage around their value proposition. And they look like a database with a lot of other stuff going on there. What would you say to that person out there in IT or in the enterprise about MarkLogic? What should they look at? What should they pay attention to? So I would not say anything about MarkLogic at that point in time. My question would be, what are your challenges you're facing? And nine times out of ten, it's we can't be flexible enough to adapt to our change your requirements. We can't pivot enough quickly in our business. And then we bring into the conversation of a tool like MarkLogic that enables that flexibility and talk about it at that level, at the business level, not necessarily at the technical level, because once you get to the technical level, you get the glazed eye look and everything else. You get the glazed eye look as in MarkLogic has got great tech or it's been shoved down from the top or a pole? I think you get the glazed eye look because you start dealing with technical concepts that don't directly relate to business value. So you keep the conversation of business value and you let the technology actually enable that through small wins, you're good to go. So they have that, are they flexible enough from a product standpoint do you think to have that broad conversation? Absolutely. Any vertical, almost any type of application that isn't pure just power aggregation, MarkLogic has a potential place or role in that area. Because one of the things that comes up in these big business use case conversations is, man the guy up at the top jamming this down my throat, another platform, I got to get training, 10 year rollout, total gravy train for the companies rolling it out. My life is, I got to work on the weekends now. That's a mindset, I'm not saying that's the case, but I mean that's a two decade mindset. What's different now? So MarkLogic did a shift in the last couple of years to enable, to kind of reduce those barriers. So it used to be Xquery based. If you know how to program an Xquery, you're great. In our conversations with our client there, we have no Xquery experience, so we're always going to be holding to you to actually supply that development. MarkLogic has introduced Node, JavaScript, SQL, that's made that barrier much easier to get across. The tooling is really good right now. I mean you mentioned Node, get Angular, get all this new stuff going on, you got API based on JSON. I mean these are tooling, this is standard stuff. So it's kind of like, not like learn COBOL or some weird language tied to some system. From the beginning to actually getting business value the time is much shorter now than it was four years ago, three years ago. That's the equalizer. Right, exactly. It's not a gravy train because now you can create checkpoints. So okay, great. Jeff, anything else? Well I mean I want to give you an opportunity to tell us a little bit more about Avalon. I'm curious from your perspective, in the consulting business, you go through waves of technologies and you've got to kind of adapt as a consultant from tell us a little bit about your company, how you go about doing that. So Avalon's been in business for 13 years. We've been a partner with MarkLogic since 2009. We focus a lot in the areas of enterprise content management, enterprise search, and big data type solutions. The thing that we found that a lot of consulting firms actually lack is the ability to listen. And so we pride ourselves on our ability to actually listen to our customers and understand and not just provide a solution but actually provide something that will solve a business challenge. So we've been pretty successful at that even through the downturn, still here. Pretty good. Well, the key I think you hit on is listening and starting with the business problem and not the technology first. Exactly. Okay, we are here live inside the Cuban Silicon Valley for MarkLogic 2014, MarkLogic World 2015. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Kelly. We'll be right back after this short break.