 Hello, fantastic cloud community, and welcome back to Las Vegas, where we are live from the show floor at AWS re-invent. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined for the first time. Yeah, doobie. VIP, I know. All right, let's do this. Thanks for having me, Dave, I really appreciate it. I appreciate you doing all the hard work, you know? I don't know about that, we wouldn't be here without you and all these wonderful stories that all the businesses have. Well, when I host with John, it's hard for me to get a word in edgewise, I'm just kidding, John. I'm just kidding. I remember that experience. We're like knocking each other, trying to elbow in. No, it's my turn to speak, you know? So I'm sure we're going to work great together. I'm really looking forward to it. Me too, Dave. I feel very lucky to be here and I feel very lucky to introduce our guest this afternoon, Clint Sharp. Welcome to the show, you are with Cribble. Yeah, how does it feel to be on the show floor today? It's amazing to be back at any conference in person. And this one is just electric. I mean, there's like a ton of people here, love the booth, we're having like a lot of activity. It's been really, really exciting to be here. So you're a re-invent alumni. Have you been here before? You're a CUBE alumni. We're going to have an OG conversation about observability, I'm looking forward to it. Just in case folks haven't been watching the CUBE for the last nine years that you've been on it. I know you've been with a few different companies during that time period. Love that you've been with us since 2013. Give us the elevator pitch for Cribble. Yeah, so Cribble is an observability company which we're going to talk about today. Our flagship product is a telemetry router. So it just really helps you get data into the right places. We're very specifically in the observability and security markets, so we sell to those buyers and we help them work with logs and metrics and open telemetry, lots of different types of data to get it into the right systems. Why did observability all of a sudden become such a hot thing? Such a hot topic. Right, I mean it just came on the scene so quickly and now it's obviously very crowded space. So why now and how do you guys differentiate from the crowd? Yeah, sure, so I think it's really a post-digital transformation thing, Dave. When I think about how I interact with organizations, you know, 20 years ago when I started in this business, I called up American Airlines when things weren't working and now everything's all done digitally, right? Rarely ever interact with a human being. And yet if I go on one of these apps and I get a bad experience, switching is just as easy as booking another airline or changing banks or changing telecommunications providers. So companies really need an ability to dive into this data at very high fidelity to understand what Dave's experience with their service or their applications are. And for the same reasons on the security side, we need very, very high fidelity data in order to understand whether malicious actors are working their way around inside of the enterprise. And so that's really changed the tooling that we had, which in prior years, it was really hard to ask arbitrary questions of that data. You really had to deal with whatever the vendor gave you or, you know, whatever the tool came with. And observability is really an evolution allowing people to ask and answer questions of their data that they really weren't planning in advance. Like what kind of questions are people asking? Yeah, sure, so what is Dave's performance with this application? I see that a malicious actor has made their way on the inside of my network, where did they go? What did they do? What files did they access? What network connections did they open? And the scale of machine data, of this machine to machine communication is so much larger than what you tend to see with human-generated data, transactional data, that we really need different systems to deal with that type of data. And what would you say is your secret sauce? Like, some people come at it from some search, some come at it from security. What's your sort of superpower, as Lisa likes to say? Yeah, so we're a customer's first company and so one of the things I think that we've done incredibly well is go look at the market and look for problems that are not being solved by other vendors. And so when we created this category of an observability pipeline, nobody was really marketing an observability pipeline at that time. And really the problem that customers had is they have data from a lot of different sources and they need to get it to a lot of different destinations and a lot of that data is not particularly valuable. And in fact, one of the things that we like to say about this class of data is that it's really not valuable until it is, right? And so if I have a security breach, if I have an outage and I need to start pouring through this data, suddenly the data is very, very valuable. And so customers need a lot of different places to store this data. I might want that data in a logging system. I might want that data in a metric system. I might want that data in a distributed tracing system. I might want that data in a data lake. In fact, AWS just announced their security data lake product today. Big topic all day. Yeah, I mean, like you can see that the industry is going in this way. People want to be able to store massively greater quantities of data than they can cost effectively do today. Let's talk about that just a little bit. The tension between data growth, like you said, it's not valuable until it is or until it's provided context, whether that be good or bad. Let's talk about the tension between data growth and budget growth. How are you seeing that translate in your customers? Yeah, well, so data's growing into 25% Kager per IDC, which means we're going to have two and a half times the data in five years. And when you talk to CISOs and CIOs and you ask them, is your budget growing into 25% Kager? Absolutely not. Under no circumstances am I going to have that much more money. So what got us to 2022 is not going to get us to 2032. And so we really need different approaches for managing this data at scale. And that's where you're starting to see things like the AWS security data lake, Snowflake is moving into this space. You're seeing a lot of different people kind of moving into the database for security and observability type of data. You also have lots of other companies that are competing in broad spectrum observability. Companies like Splunk or companies like Datadog and these guys are all doing it from a data first approach. I'm going to bring a lot of data into these platforms and give users the ability to work with that data to understand the performance and security of their applications. Okay, so carry that through and you guys are different how? Yeah, so we are this pipeline that's sitting in the middle of all these solutions. We don't care whether your data was originally intended for some other tool. We're going to help you in a vendor neutral way, get that data wherever you need to get it. And that gives them the ability to control costs because they can put the right data in the right place. If it's data that's not going to be frequently accessed, let's put it in a data lake, the cheapest place we can possibly put that data to rest. Or if I want to put it into my security tool, maybe not all of the data that's coming from my vendor, my vendor has to put all the data in their records because who knows what it's going to be used for. But I only use half or a quarter of that information for security. And so what if I just put the pared down results in my more expensive storage, but I kept full fidelity data somewhere else. Okay, so you're observing the observability platforms. Absolutely. Basically, okay. We're routing that data. And then creating this. It's meta-observability at this point. Yeah, observability pipeline. When I think a data pipeline, I think a highly specialized individuals, there's a data analyst, there's a data scientist, there's a quality engineer, et cetera, et cetera. Do you have specific roles in your customer base that look at different parts of that pipeline? Could you describe that? Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things I think that we do different is we sell very specifically to the security tooling vendors. And so in that case, we are, we are not to the vendors, but to the customers themselves. So generally they have a team inside of that organization which is managing their security tooling and their operational tooling. And so we're building tooling very specifically for them, for the types of data they work with, for the volumes and scale of data that they work with. And that is giving, and no other vendor is really focusing on them. There's a lot of general purpose data people in the world. And we're really the only ones that are focusing very specifically on observability and security data. So the announcement today, the security data lake that you were talking about, it's based on the open cybersecurity framework, which I think AWS put forth and said, okay, everybody come on in. Yeah, yeah, they did. All right, so what are your thoughts on that? How does it fit with your strategy? Yeah, so we are again, a customer's first neutral company. So if OCSF gains traction, which we hope it does, then we'll absolutely help customers get data into that format. But we're kind of this universal adapter. So we can take data from other vendors proprietary schemas. Maybe you're coming from one of the other SEM vendors and you want to translate that to OCSF to use it with the security data lake. We can provide customers the ability to change and reshape that data to fit into any schema from any vendor. So that we're really giving security data lake customers the ability to adapt the legacy, the stuff that they have that they can't get rid of because they've had it for 10 years, 20 years, and nothing inside of an enterprise ever goes away. That stuff stays forever. Legacy. Well legacy means working, right? It means somebody's actually making money on top of this thing. We never get rid of stuff. No. Absolutely not. We just added the toolkit. It's like all the old cell phones we have, it's everything. I mean we even do it as individual users and consumers. It's all a part of our little personal library. So what's happening in the field? Company momentum. Yeah, let's talk trends too. Yeah, so the company's growing crazily fast. We're north of 400 employees and we were only 100 in something a year ago. So you can kind of see we're tripling year over year. Casual, especially right now when a lot of companies are failing that scale back. Yeah, so obviously we're keeping our eye closely on the macro conditions, but we see such a huge opportunity because we're a value player in this space that there's a real flight to value in enterprises right now. They're looking for projects that are going to pay themselves back. And we've always had this value prop. We're going to come give you a lot of capabilities, but we're probably going to save you money at the same time. And so that's just really resonating incredibly well with enterprises today and giving us an opportunity to continue to grow in the face of some challenging headwinds from a macro perspective. Well, so okay. So people think, okay, security is immune from the macro. It's not. I mean, no. Nothing. No segment is immune. Like I announced today, the CrowdStrike rocket ship, still growing AR 50%, but you know, stocks down, I don't know, 20% right now after hours. Logically it doesn't mean. Okay. Stuff happens, but still, you know, it's interesting to macro because it was like, to me it's like a slingshot, right? Everybody was like, wow, pandemic shut down. All of a sudden. Oh, wow, need tech. Boom. Yeah. Digitally transform today. I was like, okay, tap the brakes. You know when you're driving down the highway and you get that slingshotting effect and I feel like that's what's going on now. So the premise is that the real leaders, those guys with the best tech that really understand the customers are going to get through this. What are your customers telling you in terms of their spending patterns, how they're trying to maybe consolidate vendors and how does that affect you guys? Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think obviously back to that flight to value, they're looking for vendors who are aligned with their interests. So, you know, as their budgets are getting pressure on what vendors are helping them provide the same capabilities they had to provide to the business before, especially from a security perspective, because they're going to get cut along with everybody else. If a larger organization is trimming budgets across, like security is going to get cut along with everybody else, so is IT operations. And so since they're being asked to do more with less, that's really where we're coming in and trying to provide them value. But certainly we're seeing a lot of pressure from IT departments, security departments all over in terms of being able to live and do more with less. Yeah, I mean, Solips got a great quote today. If you're looking to tighten your belt, the cloud is the place to do it. I mean, this is probably true. Absolutely. Elastic scalability in this, you know, our new search product is based off of AWS Lambda and it gives you truly elastic scalability. These changes in architectures are what's going to allow. It's not that cloud is cheaper. It's that cloud gives you on-demand scalability that allows you to truly control the compute that you're spending. And so as a customer of AWS, this is giving us capabilities to offer products that are scalable and cost-effective in ways that we just have not been able to do in a cloud way. So what does that mean for the customer that you use in serverless, that you use in Lambda? Yeah. What does that mean for them in terms of what they don't have to do that they maybe had to previously? It offers us the ability to charge them like a truly cloud-native vendor. So in our cloud product, we sell a credit model whereby which you deduct credits for usage. So if you're streaming data, you pay for gigabytes. If you're searching data, then you're paying for CPU consumption. And so it allows us to charge them only for what they're consuming, which means we don't have to manage a whole fleet of servers under, and eventually will we go to managing our own compute? Quite possibly as we start to get to scale at certain customers, but Lambda allowed us to not have to launch that way, to not have to run a bunch of infrastructure. And we've been able to align our charging model with something that we think is the most customer-friendly, which is true consumption, what pay for what you consume. So for example, you're saying you don't have to configure the EC2 instance or figure out the memory size, and you don't have to worry about any of that. You just basically say, go, it figures that out, and you can focus on upstream, is that right? And we're able to, not only from a cost perspective, also from a people perspective, it's allowed us velocity that we did not have before, which is we can go and prototype and build significantly faster because we're not having to worry, in our mature products, we use EC2 like everybody else does, right? And so as we're launching new products, it's allowed us to iterate much faster, and will we eventually go back to running our own compute? Who knows, maybe, but it's allowed us a lot faster velocity than we were able to get before. I like what I've heard you discuss a lot is the agility and adaptability. We're going to be moving and evolving, choosing different providers. You're very outspoken about being vendor agnostic, and I think that's actually a really unique and interesting play because we don't know what the future holds. So we're doing a new game on that note here on theCUBE, new game, new challenge, I suppose I would call it, to think of this as your 32nd thought leadership, highlight reel, a sizzle of the most important topic, or conversation that's happening, theme here at the show this year. Yeah, I mean, for me as I think, is we're looking especially like security data lake, et cetera, it's giving customers ownership of their data. And I think that once you, and I'm a big fan of this concept of open observability, and security should be the same way, which is I should not be locking you in as a vendor into my platform. Data should be stored in open formats that can be analyzed by multiple places. And you've seen this with AWS's announcement, data stored in open formats, the same way other vendors store that. And so if you want to plug out AWS and you want to bring somebody else in to analyze your security lake, then great. And as we move into our analysis product, our search product, we'll be able to search data in the security data lake or data that's raw in S3. And we're really just trying to give customers back control over their future so that they don't have to maintain a relationship with a particular vendor. They're always getting the best. And that competition fuels really great product. And I'm really excited for the next 10 years of our industry, as we're able to start competing on experiences and giving customers the best products, the customer wins. And I'm really excited about the customer winning. So customer focused. I love it. What a great note to end on. That was very exciting, very customer focused. CEO, Clint, I have really enjoyed talking to you. Thanks. Thanks Clint. Thanks for enhancing our servability over here. Feel like I'll be looking at things a little bit differently after this conversation. And thank all of you for tuning in to our wonderful afternoon of continuous live coverage here at AWS re-invent in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada with Dave Vellante. I'm Savannah Peterson. We're theCUBE. The leading source for high tech coverage.