 From Cambridge, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium 2019, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Welcome back to Cambridge, Massachusetts, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante, my co-host. Paul Gillan, Chris Lynch, good friend is here. CEO, newly minted CEO at AtScale, and legend. Great to see you, man. In my own mind. In my too. It's great to be here. It's awesome, thank you for taking time. I know how busy you are. You're running around like crazy. Your next big thing. I was excited to hear that you got back into it. I predicted it a while ago. You're a very successful venture capitalist, but at heart, you're a startup guy, aren't you? Yeah, 100%, 100%. I couldn't be more thrilled. I feel invigorated. I think I've told you many times when you've interviewed me and asked me about the transition from being an entrepreneur to being a VC. Since it's a PG show, I've got a different analog than the one I usually give you. Okay, hit me. So this is, I used to be a movie star and now I'm an executive producer of movies. Oh, okay. And now I'm back to being a movie star, hopefully. Yeah, well, so you told me when you first became a VC, you said I look for startups that have a 10x impact, either 10x value, 10x cost reduction. So what was it that attracted you to AtScale? What's the 10x? So AtScale addresses $150 billion market problem, which is basically bringing traditional BI to the cloud. That's the other thing you told me, big markets. Yeah, so that's the first thing, massive market opportunity. The second is the innovation component and when the 10x comes, we're uniquely qualified to virtualize data into the pipeline and out. So I like to say that we're the bridge between BI and AI and back. We make every BI user a citizen data scientist and that's a game changer and that's sort of the new futuristic component of what we do. So one part is steeped in that $150 billion BI marketplace and the traditional analytics platforms and then the second piece is into delivering the data into these AI machine learning platforms. And do you see that ultimately getting integrated into some kind of larger data pipeline framework? I mean, maybe it lives in the cloud or maybe on-prem. Well, how do you see that evolving? So I believe that with AtScale as one single pane of glass, we basically are providing an API to the data and to the user, one single API. The reason that today we haven't seen the delivery of the promise of big data is because we don't have big data. Fortune 2000 companies don't have big data. They have lots of data, but to me big data means you can have one logical view of that data and get the best data pumped into these models and these tools and today that's not the case. They're constricted by location, they're constricted by vendor, they're constricted by whether it's in the cloud or on-prem. We eliminate those restrictions. And the single API I think is important actually because when you look at some of these guys, what they're doing with their data pipeline, they might have 10 or 15 unique APIs that they're trying to manage. So there's a simplification aspect too, I suppose. One of the knocks on traditional BI has always been the need for extract databases and all the ETL that's involved in that. Do you guys avoid that stage? You go to the production data directly or what's the architecture? It's a great question. So the way I put it is we bring Moses to the mountain. The mountain being the data, Moses being the user. Traditionally, what people have been trying to do is bring the mountain to Moses, doesn't scale. So at that scale, we provide an abstraction, a logical abstraction between the data and the BI user. So you don't move the data? We don't move the data, which is what's unique and that's what's delivering, I think, way more than a 10x delivery and value. Yeah, because you move the data in place, you bring that value to wherever the data is, which was the original concept of Hadoop, by the way. That was what was profound about Hadoop. Everybody craps on it now, but that was the game changer and if you could take advantage of that, that's how you tap your 10x. Correct, so the difference is we're not, to your point, we're not moving the data. Hadoop, in my humble opinion, why it plateaued, is because to get the value, you had to ask the user to bring and put data in yet another platform, right? And the reason that we're not delivering on big data as an industry, I believe, is because we have too many data sources, too many platforms, too many consumers of data and too many producers. And as we build all these islands of data with no connectivity, right, the idea is, well, you know what, we'll create this big data lake and we're going to physically put everything in there. Well, guess what, someday turned out to be never because people aren't going to deal with the business disruption. We move thousands of users from a platform like Teradata to a platform like Snowflake or Google BigQuery, we don't care, we're multi-cloud and we're hybrid cloud, but we do it without any disruption. You're using Excel, you just continue to use it. You just see the results are faster. You use Tableau, same difference. So we had all the Vertica rock stars in here, we had Colin yesterday, we had Stonebreaker on earlier, Andy Palmer just came on and of course, Chris, you were the CEO who ultimately sold the company to HP that really didn't do anything with it and then spun it off and now it's back. I mean, Colin was, he had a spring and a step yesterday. So when you think about Vertica, the technology behind Vertica, go back 10 years and where have we come now? Give us a little journey of sort of your data journey. Yeah, so I think it plays into the original assertion is that Vertica was the best in class platform for analytics, but it was yet another platform. The analog I give now is now we have Snowflake and six months, 12 months from now, we're going to have another one and that creates a set of problems if you used to live in the physical world, right? Because you've all these islands of data and I believe it's about the data, not about the models, it's about the data. You can't get optimal results if you don't have an optimal access to the pertinent data. So I believe that having that universal API is going to make the next platform that more valuable, you're not going to be making the trade-off is, okay, we have this platform that has some unique capability, but the trade-off is, from an enterprise architecture perspective, we're never going to be able to connect all this stuff, right, and that's how all of these things proliferate it. So my view is in a world where you have that single pane of glass, that abstraction layer between the user and the data, then innovation can be spawned quicker and you can use these tools effectively because you're not compromising being able to get a logical view of the data and get access to it as a user. But today, that, you know, that's the... What's your issue with Snowflake? You mentioned Moogli's company. No issue, they're a great partner of ours, right? We only make the friction between a user going from an on-prem solution to the cloud. So Slutman just took over there, right? So you know where that's going. Frank's got the magic touch and, okay, good. So you said they're a partner of yours, how are you guys partnering? They're a partner, they refer us into customers that if you want to buy Snowflake, now the next issue is, well, how do I migrate? Well, you don't, right? And you put our virtualization layer in and then we allow you access to Snowflake, right, in a non-disruptive way, versus having to move data into their system or into a particular cloud, which creates sales friction. Yeah, I mean, moving data is just, you want to avoid it at all costs. And that's... I do want to ask you about at-scale because I met with your predecessor, Dave Mariani last year, and I know he was kind of a reluctant CEO. He didn't really want to be CEO, he wanted to be CTO, which is what he is now. How did that come about that they found you, that you connected with them and decided this was the right opportunity? Sure, that's a great question. So I actually looked at the company at the seed stage when I was in venture, but I had this thing, as you know, that I wanted to move companies to Boston. And they're about my vintage, age-wise. So, and he's married with four kids, so that wasn't in the cards. So I said, look, it doesn't make sense for me to seed this company because I can't give you the time you're out in California. Everything I'm instrumenting is around Boston. So we parted friends, and I was skeptical whether he could build this because people had been talking about building, you know, a heterogeneous, universal semantic layer for years, and it's never come to fruition. And then he read in Fortune or Forbes that I was leaving Accomplice and that I was looking for one more company to operate. And he reached out and he told me what they were doing that, hey, we really built it, you know, but we need help and I don't want to run this, and I don't, you know, it's not right for the company and the opportunity. So I said, I'll come in, I'll consult to you. And I put together a plan, and I had my Vertica and Data Robot and Tony guys do the technical diligence to make sure that the architecture wasn't wedded to the dupe like all the other ones were. And when I saw it wasn't, then I knew the market opportunity was to take that rifle and point it at that legacy $150 billion BI market, not at the billion dollar market of Hadoop. And when we did that, we've been growing at 162% quarter over quarter. We've built development centers in Bulgaria. We've moved all operations non-technical to Boston here down in South Station, and we've been on fire. And we are the partner of choice of every cloud vendor because we eliminate the sales friction for customers being able to take advantage of movement to the cloud. And we're able, through our intelligent pipeline and capability, we're able to reduce the cost significantly of queries because we understand and we're able to intelligently cash those queries. So sales ops is here? All sales, marketing, customer support, customer success, and we're building a machine learning team here, a dev team here. Where are you in that sort of Boston build out? We have an office on 7-Eleven Atlantic that we opened in the fall. We're actually moving from 4,000 square feet to 10,000 this month. So in less than six months. And we'll house, by the first year, 100 employees in Boston, 100 in Bulgaria, and about that same 100 in San Mateo. Are you going after net new business mainly or there's a lot of legacy BI out there? Are you more displacing those products? So a couple of things. What we find is that customers want to evolve into the cloud, they don't want a revolution, they want an evolution. So we allow them, because we support hybrid cloud, to keep some data behind the firewall and then experiment with moving other data to the cloud platform of choice, but we're still providing that one logical view. So I would say most of our customers are looking to replatform off of Teradata or something onto another platform like Snowflake. And then we have a set of customers that see that as part of the solution, but not the whole solution. So they're more true hybrids. But I would say that 80% of our customers are traditional BI customers that are trying to contemporize their environments and be able to take advantage of tabular support and multi-dimensional, the things that we do in addition to the cube world. So they can keep whatever they're using. Correct, that's the key. Yeah, same process. So did you do the series D? You did, right? Yes. Yeah, Morgan Stanley led it. So you're not actively, well, I don't know, but you're good for now, it was like 50 million. Yeah, we raised 50 million. So you're good for a bit. Who's in the Chris Lynch target? Like, who's the enemy? Vertical, I could say it was the traditional database guys, right? Yeah. So we're in a unique position. We're almost Switzerland. So we could be friend to foe of anybody in that ecosystem because we can non-disruptively re-platform customers between legacy platforms or from legacy platforms to the cloud. So we're an interesting position. So similar to the file sharing, file virtualization company. Copia, that's correct. Copia, yeah, so. So puts us, yeah, it puts us in an interesting position. So they need to be friends with us. And at the same time, I'm sure that they're concerned about the capabilities we have, but we have a number of retail customers, for instance, that have asked us to move them from Amazon to Google BigQuery, which we accommodate. And because we can do that non-disruptively, the cost and the ability to move is eliminated. So it gives customers true freedom of choice. How worried are you that AWS tries to replicate what you guys do, you know, you're in their sights? Yep. So I think there are technical, legal, and structural barriers to them doing that, right? So the technical is, this team has been at it for six and a half years, so to do what we do, they'll have to do what we've done. Structurally from a business perspective, if they could, I'm not sure they want to. Because the way to think about Amazon is, they're no different than TerraData, except for, right, they want the same vendor lock-in, except they want it to be the Amazon Cloud, and TerraData wanted it to be their data warehouse. Yeah, they don't want to promote multi-cloud, for instance. Yeah, they don't want multi-cloud, they don't want customers to have a freedom of choice. So would they really enable a heterogeneous abstraction layer? I don't think they would, nor do I think any of the big guys would, right? They all claim to have this capability for their system. Right, so it's like the old IBM adage, right? I'm in prison, but the food's got to get three squares a day. I get cable TV, but I'm in prison. Awesome. All right, parting thoughts. Parting thoughts? Yeah. Oh geez, you got to give me a question. I'm not that creative. All right, what's next for you guys? I mean, what should we be paying attention to? I think you're going to see some significant announcements in September regarding the company and relationships that I think will validate sort of the impact we're having in the market. Give you some leverage. Yeah, it will give us better channel leverage. We have a major technical announcement that I think will be significant to the marketplace, and will be highly disruptive to some of the people you just mentioned, in terms of really raising the bar for customers to be able to have the freedom of choice without any sort of vendor lock-in. And I think that that will create some sort of counter-strike, which we'll be ready for. Well, if you've never heard of AtScale before, trust me, you're going to in the next 18 months. Chris Lynch, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It's my pleasure. Great to see you. Great to see you. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We're back with our next guest. Right after this short break, you're watching theCUBE from MIT. Right back.