 Well, welcome back here to the Venetian, we're in Las Vegas. It is Wednesday, day two of our coverage here of AWS re-invent 22. I'm your host, John Walter on theCUBE. And it's a pleasure to welcome in two more guests as part of our AWS startup showcase, which is again part of the startup program globally at AWS. I've got Anat Verma, who is the Vice President of Engineering at Alation. Not good to see you, sir. Good to see you, too. Got to be with us. And Hasi Bhutani, who is the CEO and co-founder of RAFE Systems. Good to see you, sir. Good to see you again. Thanks for having me. Yeah, a Cuba, right? You've been on theCUBE. Once or twice. Many occasions, yeah. But a first-timer here, as a matter of fact. Yes, I am. Glad to have you aboard. Tell us about Alation first, for those at home who might not be familiar with what you're up to these days, just give it a little 30,000 foot level. Sure, sure. So, yeah, Alation is a startup and a leader in the enterprise data intelligence space. That really includes a lot of different things, including data search, data discovery, metadata management, data cataloging, data governance, data policy management. A lot of different things that companies want to do with the hordes of data that they have. And Alation, our product is the answer to solve some of those problems. We've been doing pretty good. Alation is running for about 10 years now. We are a CD's-E startup now. We just raised around a couple of months ago. We are already 100 million plus in revenue. So, yeah. Hear, hear. Not shabby. Yeah. That's right, that's right. It's a big, you know, benchmark for companies to, software companies to cross that milestone. So, yeah. All right. So, and what's the relationship? I know Rafay and you have worked together. In fact, the two of you, which I find interesting, just you have a chance to be meeting on Zoom for a number of months as many of us haven't meeting here for the first time. But talk about that relationship with Rafay. Yeah. So, I actually joined Alation in January and this is part of the move of Alation to a more cloud-native solution. So, we have been running on AWS since last year. And as part of, you know, making our solution more cloud-native, we have been looking to containerize our services and run them on Kubernetes. So, yeah, so that's the reason why I joined Alation in the first place, to kind of make sure that this migration or move to a cloud-native actually works out really well for us. This is a big move for the companies. A lot of companies that have done in the past, including Confluent or MongoDB, when they did that, actually really great, great benefits are that. So, to do that, of course, you know, as we were looking at Kubernetes as a solution, I was personally more looking for a way to speed up things and get things out in production as fast as possible. And that's where, I think, you know, Genade introduced us to us. I think we share the same investor, actually. So that's how we found each other. And, yeah, it was a pretty simple decision in terms of, you know, getting the solution, figuring it out if it's useful for us, and then, of course, putting it out there. So you've hit the keyword Kubernetes, right? Yeah. And so, if you would, Haseeb, jump in here. There are challenges, right? That you're trying to help them solve when you're working on the Kubernetes platform. So, you know, just talk about that and how that's influenced the work that the two of you are doing together. Absolutely. So the business we're in is to help companies who adopt Kubernetes as an orchestration platform do it easier, faster. It's a simple story, right? Everybody's using Kubernetes, but it turns out that Kubernetes is actually not that easy to operationalize. You know, playing in a sandbox is one thing. Operationalizing this at a certain level of scale is not easy. Now, we have a lot of enterprise customers who are deploying their own applications on Kubernetes, and we have many, many of them. But when it comes to a company like Elation, it's a more complicated problem set because they're taking a very complex application, their application, but then they are providing that as a service to their customers. So then we have a chain of customers we have to make happy. Anand Steam, the platform organization, his internal customers who are the developers who are deploying applications, and then the company has customers. They also have to make, we have to make sure that they get a good experience as they consume this application that happens to be running on Kubernetes. So that presented a really interesting challenge. And how do we make this partnership successful? So I will say that we learned a lot from each other, right? And at the end of the day, the goal is my customer, Anand specifically, right, he has to feel that this investment, because he has to pay us money, we would like to get paid, of course. It reduces his internal expenditure because otherwise he'd have to do it himself. And it most importantly, it's not the money part, it's that he can get to a certain goal post significantly faster because the invention time for Kubernetes management, the platform that you have to build to run Kubernetes is a very complex exercise. It took us four and a half years to get here. You want to do that again as a company, right? Why? Why do you want to do that? We as RAFE, the way I think about what we deliver, yes we sell a product, but to what end? The product is the what. The why is that every enterprise, every ISV, is building a Kubernetes platform in-house. They shouldn't, they shouldn't need to. They should be able to consume that as a service. They consume the Kubernetes engine, the EKS is Amazon's Kubernetes, they consume that as an engine, but the management layer was a gap in the market. How do I operationalize Kubernetes? And what we are doing is we're going to, you know, the answer to the world and saying, hey, your team is technical, you understand the problem set, would you like to build it, or would you rather consume this as a service so you can go faster? And resoundingly, the answer is, I don't want to do this anymore. I wasn't allowed to buy. Yeah, well, you know, as Azit was saying, speed is the game. When we started talking, it only took us like a couple of months to figure out if RAFE is the right solution for us. And so we ended up purchasing RAFE in April. We launched our product based on RAFE and Kubernetes and EKS in August. August. So that's about four months. I've done some things like this before. It takes a couple of years just to sort of figure out how do you really work with Kubernetes in a production at a large scale. Right now we're running about a 600 node cluster on RAFE, and that's serving our customers. Like, you know, one of the biggest things that's actually happening on December 8th is we are running what we call a virtual hands-on lab. A virtual hands-on lab for relation. And they're probably going to be about 500 people who are going to be attending it. It's like a webinar style. But what we do in that hands-on lab is we will spin up an relation instance for each attendee right in the spot. Now think about this, enterprise software running and people just sign up for it and it's there for you right in the spot. And that's the beauty of the software that we've been building. That's the beauty of the work that RAFE has helped us to do over the last few months. I think we need to charge them more money. I'm getting it from this country. I'm going to go work on that. I'm going to let the two of you work that out later. I don't want to get in the way of a good deal. But you mentioned that, we heard about it earlier that it's you being able to offer to your clients these services. I assume they have their different levels of tolerance and their different challenges, right? They've got their own complexities and their own organizational barriers. And so how are you juggling that end of it? Because you're kind of learning, well not learning, but you're experiencing some of the same things. And yet you've got this other client base that has a multitude of experiences that they're going through. Right, so I think a lot of our customers, they are large enterprise companies. They got a whole bunch of data that they want to work with us. So one of the things that we have learned over the past few years is that we used to actually ship our software to the customers and then they would manage it for their privacy security reasons. But now, since we're running in the cloud, they're really happy about that. Because they don't need to juggle with the infrastructure and the software management and upgrades and things like that. We do it for them, right? And that's the speed for them because now they are only interested in solving the problems with the data that they're working with. They don't need to deal with all these software management issues, right? So that frees our customers up to do the thing that they want to do. Of course, it makes our job harder, I'm sure. In turn, it makes his job harder. If you get the short end of the stick for sure. Right, that's why he's going to get more money. Exactly. Yeah, this is a great conversation. Yeah, no, no, no. We'll talk about that. So let's talk about the cloud. I mean, in terms of being the platform where all this is happening and AWS, about your relationship with them as part of the startup program and what kind of value that brings to you. What does that do for you when you go out and are looking for work and what kind of cache that brings to you? And talk about AWS? Yes, sir. Okay. Well, so the thing is really like, of course, AWS is a lot of programs in terms of making sure that as we move our customers into AWS, they can give us some, I won't call it a discount, but there's some credits that you can get as you move your workloads onto AWS. So that's a really great program. Our customers love it. They want us to do more things with AWS. It's a pretty seamless way for us to, as we were talking about, or thinking about moving into the cloud, AWS was our number one choice and that's the only cloud that we are in today. We're not going to go to any other place today. That's it. Yeah. How would you characterize it? I mean, we've already heard from one side of the fence here, but... Absolutely. So for us, AWS is a make or break partner, frankly. As the EKS team knows very well, we support Azure's Kubernetes and Google's Kubernetes and the community Kubernetes as well. But the number of customers on our platform who are AWS native, either 100% or a large percentage, that's the majority of our customers base. And AWS has made it very easy for us in a variety of ways to make us successful and our customers successful. So Anand mentioned the credit program they have, which is very useful, because we can readily kind of bring a customer to try things out and they can do that at no cost. So they can spin up infrastructure, play with things and AWS will cover the cost as one example. That's a really good thing. But I think beyond that, there are multiple programs at AWS, so ISP, Accelerate, et cetera, that you sort of, over time, you kind of keep getting taller and taller and you keep getting on bigger and bigger rights at AWS, right? And as you make progress, what I'm finding is that there's a great ecosystem of support that they provide us. They introduce us to customers. They help us think through architecture issues. We get access to the roadmap. We work very, very closely with the guest team, for example, the GM for Kubernetes at AWS is a gentleman named Barry Cooks who's my sponsor. So we spend a lot of time together. In fact, right after this, I'm going to be spending time with them because look, they take us seriously as a partner. They spend time with us because at the end of the day, they understand that they make their partners, in this case, Rafi, successful. At the end of the day, helps the customer, right? Anand's customer, my customer. They're AWS customers also, so they benefit because we are collectively helping them solve a problem faster. The goal of the cloud is to help people modernize, reduce operational costs because data centers are expensive. But then if these complex solutions, this is an enterprise product, Kubernetes at the enterprise level is a complex problem. If we don't collectively work together to save the customer effort, essentially, right? Reduce their TCO for whatever it is they're doing, right? Then the cost of the cloud is too high and AWS clearly understands and appreciates that and that's why they are going out of their way, frankly, to make us successful and make other companies successful in the startup program. Well, I will just add a couple of things there. Yeah, so cloud is not new. It's been there for a while. People used to build things on their own. And so what AWS has really done is they have advanced technology enough where everything is really simple as just turning on a switch and using it, right? So just a recent example, and by the way, I love managed services, right? So the reason is really because I don't need to put my own people to build and manage those things, right? So if you want to use a search, they got the open search. If you want to use caching, they got elastic caching and stuff like that. It's really simple and easy to just pick and choose which services you want to use and they are ready to be consumed right away. And that's the beauty of it and that's how we can move really fast and get things done. Easy to use, right? Efficiency, saving money, it's the one in combination. Thanks for sharing this story. Yeah, appreciate it. Not, I see. Thank you for being with us. Yeah, thank you so much for having us. We appreciate it. You've been part of the global startup program at AWS and startup showcase. Proud to feature this great collaboration. I'm John Walls. You're watching theCUBE, which is of course the leader in high tech coverage.