 Live from Seattle, Washington. It's the Cube at Tableau Conference 2014 brought to you by headline sponsor Tableau Here are your hosts John Furrier and Jeff Kelly Welcome back everybody. We are here live at the Tableau Conference 2014 in Seattle, Washington I'm Jeff Kelly with wikibon. You're watching the Cube Of course a big theme here at the Tableau conference has been the partner ecosystem that's developed around Tableau as the as Tableau has become Much more popular than enterprise, you know, they built out this partner strategy both from an OEM perspective from a database perspective Today at this in the segment. We're gonna be talking with Mark logic Joe Pascua is here He's the senior vice president of strategy and product management at Mark logic. Welcome to the Cube. Thank you So yeah, as I was just saying clearly Tableau has built out their Partner strategy their partner ecosystem. It's important to them talk a little bit about Mark logic and kind of why are you guys here? What are you doing with Tableau and kind of what's your relationship with the company? Great. Yeah Tableau is a great partner for us We are the only enterprise no sequel database out there and given that we're in with enterprise customers Tools like Tableau are extremely important to them to get the most out of their data So we've been working really hard with Tableau and they've been a great partner for us in sort of coupling together Visualization telling the story of data With the no sequel world where we come from people tend to think more of BI and visualization for the For the strictly structured world But we've been sort of going beyond that with Tableau and trying to get the value from all of our customers data Rather than just the sort of strictly rigidly structured data There was a lot in that answer that I want to get to okay Let's start with the you described Mark logic as enterprise no sequel and so no sequel people think about I think some of the things to think about as well, you know, it's good to experiment with no sequel It's doing some cutting-edge stuff, but it's not necessarily enterprise. So what do you mean by enterprise no sequel? What is that? That's a loaded term. What does that mean from our artist perspective? That's a it's a really good question because a lot of people throw that term around they do So so what it means for us particularly coming from the database space is we kind of look at the history of Databases and we look at kind of the capabilities and the characteristics that people have come to expect from their systems You know when when somebody is buying a traditional RDB a RD BMS system. They expect acid transactions. They expect high availability. They expect dr They expect point-in-time recovery There's this whole plethora of things that people have come to rely on over the past 30 years and in the database space and A lot of what happened in the no sequel world was hey We want to break with the relational world We want to do something new and different. We want to be more agile, which is wonderful But they they kind of gave up on a lot of those capabilities that people had come to expect over the years As part of getting to this more agile platform and our model has really been No, we we want that agility We want the power that comes with no sequel, but we're not willing to compromise on the capabilities that customers have come To depend on because as I said we focus on the enterprise space So there's all these great functional characteristics that people want from their database But there's all these non-functional characteristics that they want as well and those are just important to us So so that that's really where we're coming from is is Having all of the agility and power that people associate and ease that people associate with no sequel But not giving up on kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater on those other features So okay, so that sounds fantastic, but how do you go about doing that? What's your secret sauce? How do you actually how do you actually do that without all that functionality without having to sacrifice some of those enterprise great? right, right, so There's a couple of things related to that and one is we've been doing this for over a decade So so and this is true for everybody. I mean I worked at Oracle when they were a tiny company I saw what we went through from an engineering perspective to get from being the new guy and the small guy to the trusted This stuff is really baked and really works and frankly part of it is it takes time It takes time to hard it takes years to harden this stuff and really you know figure out all the edge cases and work Through them and and be able to get to the point where you can make it work at all and have those capabilities So we've had the benefit of time. That's one thing The other piece of it really has to do with The notion that we went in with that as a design point So when we started we didn't say okay We want to have all the agility and then we'll figure out how to do the other stuff We went into the picture saying okay, we have to have acid transactions for example That's not something we're going to compromise on so in building the system How can we do that knowing that we want that to be the case? So we start with technologies and say okay. Well, we we know we need to have MVCC Multiversion concurrency control built in from day one and then build the scale-out platform and the technologies Based on that decision that we've already made so it's it's possible It's not easy, but it's possible if you sort of design in advance knowing those are the characteristics that you want to Go after and building the technologies around that rather than trying to retrofit Right, I think in that stands in contrast to some of the other no sequel databases that have been built out there Which I think were more more developer focused in the sense that they were from developers who were trying to solve a specific problem And they weren't thinking about building a an enterprise product really they were thinking about you know a Solution to a specific problem and then after the fact as companies developed to commercialize those Databases well now we oh boy We need to add all these enterprise grade capabilities and that's what you see happening now in terms of all the a lot R&D going into that in the into the new crop of no sequel companies, but you mentioned you've been around for a while So you're kind of ahead ahead of the curve in a lot of ways What was really the the genesis of Mark logic was what was the? Kind of the driving factor in its founding so so Mark logic was founded by a guy who came from the search world and He was around you know in the in the 2000 time period looking at search technology and web search Technologies and asking the question that we all ask which is why is it so much easier to find stuff on the internet than it is to find in your own organization and He really said about Solving that problem and in trying to solve that problem He realized that there needed to be a different way of storing and organizing your data And as he kind of went down that path and built out that architecture realized that what you really need is a database To do that. So it came from this world that said we want to start with search We want to be able to Fundamentally we were about finding answers and giving better answers and the way to do that is with database Technology combined with search technology. So that that was really the genesis for Mark logic and and was Some of the core design decisions that went into getting us in the direction that we're on today We'll talk about that in terms of your sweet spot for the applications that you support What is really could be because we hear no sequels a broad category and there's different as I mentioned a whole different slew of Databases cropping up for specific use cases. What is Mark logic sweet spot? Yeah, I think I think there are two areas where people use us Over and over and over again and get a lot of value from us. The first is in content delivery And we've had you know very long time Customers who are in the publishing industry the media industry there are people who want to take diverse pieces of content from lots of different sources put it together and Be able to search it either have their users search it or search it dynamically to construct new content That's composed of all of these Different component content pieces that they have in their database. So content delivery publishing media Really a sweet spot spot for us historically as the company's Grown we found that There's another class of application That's very common for us in a sweet spot for us and that's in content data heterogeneous data integration and what I mean by that is You've got organizations that have tons of different data Tons of different formats in lots of different systems and now either out of necessity or out of desire they want to take all that data bring it together and Get value out of the answers that they can only get by bringing the data together and What we find is The applications and that the way people talk about them may be very very different But the underlying problem is the same So just for example, you take a company that wants to very large company Wants to have a 360 view of their employees. I just want to know about my employees But my data is in 20 30 different HR systems or other related systems and I simply can't do it I there's no way I can get a 360 view of my own employees and so Companies like that are coming in they're bringing in mark logic and saying okay, you guys are scheme agnostic You guys can pull data from all these different systems whether it's structured or unstructured or poly structured bring it together in one place And get the 360 view of the data there similar kind of thing very different application in Regulatory compliance so now you've got these large financial Institutions that need to be able to look at their risk across all of their their different systems Whereas previously they needed to have a Chinese wall between these things now It's like hey, you've got to give us kind of a view of your overall risk Status right across the bank So again same kind of thing lots of different systems lots of diverse data How do you bring it all together and the interesting thing in some of those cases is? Yes, the data is heterogeneous, but it may all be in relational database systems. They might have literally 20 different You know cybase instances that have their data. They can't integrate it They're using mark logic to take that heterogeneous data bring it together Then they might be bringing together other information that's not coming from their systems external information. What's going on in the markets? Non-structured information to give that overall risk view So so it's really about bringing together different sources of data and different types of data to give a more holistic view and Answers that they couldn't get before So it sounds a little bit like the similar to the mission or what we hear about from enterprise data warehouse vendors But they have the challenge of fitting that into a very strict model where you can't bring in these different sources Especially if it's unstructured or semi-structured data, or even if it's all structured, but different models You've got a massage do a lot of massaging to make that work That's exactly right, and that's the path a lot of these organizations go down is well We'll have an enterprise data warehouse or I have a logical data warehouse and okay step one Create a schema that describes all of the data in these 20 systems plus the one that somebody remembers next week That you need to include plus the external data sources and they give up and that's right. That's why we see so many Edw projects stall out at a certain point. They just never achieved their vision So let's talk a little bit about Tableau. We're here at the Tableau conference So I can certainly see the fit for Tableau with Mark logic visualizing some of those insights visualizing some of the content Can you talk a little bit about what some of your customers your joint customers are doing together? Yeah, great example actually that Tableau demoed at our user conference not too long ago Was founders online this is a system that It was actually a combination of Some government entities and University of Virginia put together to make available all the writings of the founding fathers Awesome website you can go there find anything you want all the writings of founding fathers and look through them It's really great. What Tableau did is they came along and they looked at that and said this is fantastic But we can actually do more with this data than just kind of allowing you to search it and read through it There's quantitative aspects of this data, too You can look at George Washington and you can not only find what he's written But you can look at what was his writing level over time. Gee, he was turning out You know these many types of writings will all of a sudden it dropped off. Well the Revolutionary War started and he was busy being a general And you you can get these insights from this system and then have Tableau Sitting side-by-side with the other system so you can do these awesome visualizations really tell the story of what was going on there But then drill down and say okay Well, let's see specifically what was going on at that time and what the writings were about and then take it directly into The founders online website So it wasn't this model where you have this visualization over here and this other data over here. It's really Very nicely integrated In a way that brought together the unstructured data with the with the sort of numerical data the scalar data And tied it together really nicely So what is your take on? Tableau in the wider BI market, so you know as a database provider You probably got customers using other BI tools. You're probably very familiar with you know oracles got their line SAP and others How does Tableau fit? I mean they when they emerged they really obviously positioned themselves as kind of a modern alternative to The legacy BI providers, but they've grown up a lot and they've had a lot of enterprise-grade capabilities themselves How do you see that market today as Tableau still disrupting? Those existing players and what's that dynamic look like? Yeah, I think if you look at the at the show floor today and and the talks and the interest level of what's going on It's sort of inescapable that Tableau is still really driving tremendous interest in this marketplace and and really You know I was sitting at lunch at a table with a bunch of people I didn't know today and just kind of listening to the conversations they that were going on and The the consistent thing amongst those people was you know This is really allowing us to tell this story with our data That that we didn't know we could do and we didn't think we could do and there's just a Tremendous amount of excitement for the notion that they can get more and more value out of their data They can make their data persuasive and and as I said just using in ways that they really hadn't thought about before and And and you know in terms of how we feel about it that really resonates with us because we're kind of about the same thing It's how do you bring this data together and use it in ways that you haven't been able to to use it before And then when you add Tableau on top of kind of the mission that we're trying to achieve It just kind of amplifies what what we're able to do and what our customers are able to do And what is your thoughts? I'm not sure if you heard the keynote yesterday, but the CEO Christian Shebo talked about they're really going to invest heavily in R&D over the next two years now You know more than they have over the last ten combined And that's saying something because they do already invest a lot in R&D Do you agree with that strategy? Do you think you know they're they're growing quickly? In terms of revenue customers employees in terms of Putting a lot of that money back in the company to answer the right approach for Tableau at this point in their growth I love that idea. I Absolutely love that idea because I I really as as big an impact as Tableau has had I think we're at the beginning of this of this journey and There's so much more that can be done and I think investing in R&D and investing in kind of understanding how to broaden out The types of data that can be accessed the ways it can be done Making it even more intuitive and and even easier for people to create these Stories around their data. I really think we're at the beginning of that journey So, you know, it's not my place to comment on Tableau's strategy, but I think it's a great idea Well great have time. We just one more question. So what's what's next for Mark logic? What's kind of on your road map for the next six twelve months was top of mind for you in terms of Me the product development or overall strategy? Yeah, so so in the next Well actually by the end of the year, we're releasing our next product Mark logic eight, which is You know super exciting for us major investment in Developers of use so we're adding lots of features to the product that will make it easier for people to use their existing Skill sets bring those to Mark logic bring all the power of Mark logic to folks who know JavaScript folks who are in the node JS world Really broadening out that that user base bringing enhancements to our semantics technology Which we introduced last year and has has been one of the most quickly adopted Technologies in our history super super important. So we're we're doubling down on semantics and we're adding technologies like by temporal Which is really cool and actually Tableau's been working with us to create Visualizations of by temporal data. I'd love to spend a whole another 20 minutes talking about just that but really exciting area So mark logic a it's the big thing on the horizon for all right Well, we'll look out for that and I'm sure we're our paths are going to cross at some other shows in the near future So Joe Pascal from Mark logic. Thanks so much for joining us on the cube appreciate it Thanks for watching. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. Thanks