 from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2018, brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. And welcome back here on theCUBE, along with Justin Warren, I'm John Walls, and now we're joined by Peter Nicol, who's the CEO of Instacluster. Peter, good to see you this morning, sir. Thank you very much, John. It's me, too. And Todd Green, CEO of PubNup. Good to see you. Good morning, Todd. Good morning. First off, let's just talk about what the two of you guys do, or specifically what Instacluster does in PubNup. Peter, if you would. Yeah, so basically at a high level, what Instacluster does is we help customers to build applications that have to scale massively in a reliable way. Massive scale means terabytes, or petabytes of data, or even more. Reliability means the application has got to be up and running all of the time. And the way we do that is we focus on technologies in the data layer, and we allow companies to essentially outsource the management of those technologies to us. So they can focus on building their application, which is what they do best, and we focus on taking a lot of the complexity away, which is helping to manage the technologies in the data layer. And the technologies that we focus on are basically in the area of storage, search, messaging, and analytics. And those technologies are Cassandra for storage, Kafka for messaging, Spark for analytics, and Elasticsearch for search. And we can manage all of those technologies in any of the cloud providers, including AWS. And essentially this allows customers to outsource that and focus on their core business. And we've got some great customers, PubNup being one of our best customers, a hot startup in Silicon Valley, and we're really proud to have them here with us today. So Todd, if you will, give us the PubNup story. Yeah, so PubNup is a company that provides a global network, which is infrastructure for real-time applications. So what's a real-time application? When we started the company six, seven years ago, we made this realization that the world was moving from applications that sort of requested data when they needed to. You know, you pulled up social information, you wanted to see where something was, you asked a question. Two ones where things were constantly moving and changing. So devices were emitting data and consuming data all the time. Uber was launching and everyone wanted to see where their taxi was now. Chat applications were getting big inside dating apps and B2B apps and B2C apps. And on top of that, IoT was exploding and people needed a way to control devices and turn lights on and off. And all the infrastructure that existed at the time didn't really address these real-time use cases. And so these companies were building that stuff themselves. So PubNup launched this thing, we call a data stream network, but it effectively does three things. It allows you to connect to devices and leave an always-on connection over the internet to deliver data bi-directionally to those devices, real-time message signaling in under a quarter of a second, and then control the data going back and forth, so being able to provide logic. And so that core infrastructure, that sort of connect, deliver, control, powers everything from peloton exercise bikes to symphony investor chat applications, Athena Health, Doctor of Patient, nurse kinds of collaboration, and lots of IoT companies from Logitech Harmony to Samsung smart refrigerators. Across the board, it turns out our infrastructure has been the key to making these real-time experiences come alive. Right. So you had this moment, when startups usually do, they have, you hope you do, they reach a tipping point, right, of success. Yeah. And things work great. And you hit a boiling point, in a way, a few years back, to where things were working almost too well. Right. And that's how you got into Instacluster. Tell us, give me that story, if you would, or share that with our folks watching. Absolutely. You know, it's funny. I was talking to someone recently at Amazon at AWS, who said, we rarely talk to a company, your size that actually is doing more traffic than AWS is. And we discovered we were doing more than twice as many messages, these control signals we talked about around our network, more than twice as many as the world's global SMS traffic. So, you know, we were doing like post a 50 billion of these messages per day. So as you can imagine, that's not a simple infrastructure. We store that data. We process it, we route it, we do all these things. And in one of our storage layers built on Cassandra, we were really struggling with the expertise needed to scale this thing at the size that we needed to scale it. And we hit a tipping point about two years ago, when we realized we really needed to help and we needed to help immediately. And we had a lot of outreach to a lot of companies, including the company themselves that had created Cassandra. But once we stumbled on Instacluster, it was like the clouds parting, right? All of a sudden we had folks from Instacluster on with us 24 by seven, helping us migrate, helping us move to a more stable and scale infrastructure. And we've had this ongoing relationship ever since, where we now have them managing a lot of different uses of Cassandra within PubNub. Yeah, so infrastructure is, sorry, Instacluster is built on all of these open source technologies you mentioned like Cassandra and Spark and Kafka. But what made you choose those technologies? What was it that was attractive about them? It said, you know what? This is what we want to base our company on. Yeah, so customers are always basically looking for three things. And I think Todd summed it up very well in his business. It's basically all about scalability. If your business is successful, you want to be able to scale massively as you get more and more customers. The second thing is reliability, which means the applications have got to be always on, always up and running. And the third thing is performance, which is all about latency and speed and feed and all that type of thing. We chose Cassandra because it is one of the most popular, highly scalable databases. It's used by Apple and Netflix and big companies that have got millions of customers. So we generally pick technologies based on those three criteria, but we also focus on open source only for two reasons. Number one, open source doesn't involve expensive license fees. So customers don't get locked in with expensive license fees. And number two, open source provides a degree of flexibility, cloud independence. So if you don't want to be locked into a specific cloud provider and you want to keep your options open in the future, choose open source. Okay, that's a pretty compelling sort of argument there. And certainly I think the world has discovered that open source is totally a thing that we should all be using. I'm old enough to remember when open source was verboten and you shouldn't be using it. And now it just seems to be everywhere. So what is it about Instacluster that makes you special though? Because open source, anyone could use it. I could go and download it for free tomorrow. So maybe I could attempt to steal PubNub's customers or steal your customers away. So clearly that's not going to be possible for me to be able to do tomorrow. What is it about Instacluster that you've invested in this company that makes you so special that that means that PubNub was able to rely on you? Right, so I think the main thing is we have 100% of our focus on operations, not on developing proprietary IP which we sell, which is the typical software model. We take the open source software and we actually manage it for our customers. So basically what that means is if they want to use Cassandra, they go to our website, they go to the customer portal, they choose the cloud provider they want to use, they choose the technology they want to use, what regions do they want to run in, what size is their cluster, they press a button and everything else is done behind the scenes by us. We do the provisioning, we install the software and from that point on, we're managing it 24 by seven. So instead of, for example, PubNub having to build their own team for each one of these technologies, they can outsource it to us, we can do it much cheaper and we can get them to market much faster if we're doing our job right. And it's all about the operation. So we can do it much cheaper and faster. And that's our main advantage. The other advantage is we manage all of these different technologies in the data layer, which means that customers have one vendor they can go to to manage several different technologies. And it's all heavily, highly integrated from one vendor. That's a big, rather than having five different vendors to manage five different technologies, we provide the complete platform. So, Todd, what does this mean for you that now that you have this partner that you can rely on and that you can trust? What does that change for the business? What does that enable you to be able to do now that you can look forward to say, you know what, we can do this to grow our business? That's a good question. Like Instacluster, we operate PubNub. I mean, customers pay us not for our technology but for our ability to operate our technology at massive scale. And we provide five nines SLAs, which is a fancy way for saying if we have an outage for more than 26 seconds in a month, we provide credits back to our customers. So that's a really high bar to fill. And so philosophically, we see ourselves as an operations company ourselves, right? And so we're very careful about who we would bring into the fold as part of operations, right? And so it has to be an organization that has the same security levels that we do, SOC2 type 2 compliance, has the same understandings and philosophy around operating things at high availability and can do it in a way that we feel like, in many ways is a part of our team and not some vendor that we don't know how to get on the phone, not some vendor that we don't really trust, right? It has to feel like it's part of our company. And so really it's only been Instacluster that we've been able to develop that trust around. And so it has absolutely allowed us to sort of focus on areas where we can do more innovation, right? While keeping the five nines SLAs, the 26 seconds minimum, maximum of issues any month, but allow us to focus a lot more on innovation and not on the things that, frankly, Instacluster as far as we can tell is best in the world at, which is really operating this infrastructure, the Cassandra piece. And what do you want to take on then? You talk about innovation, if there's an area of your business, you say, all right, this is where 2019, where I want it to take us, what would that be? It's a great question. So one of the big changes for PubNub was that we built our initial business on the backs of other startups. And it was great. I mean, we got to some level of scale by powering a lot of innovative, interesting applications that were themselves trying to be the first real-time this and the first real-time that and the first real-time the other thing. And then about two years ago, something happened a year and a half ago that need for real-time, for having things update in real-time, inventory prices, chat applications, moving things on a map, seeing where your trucks were, that went mainstream. And now even the largest companies in the world, if they release any kind of application, whether it's a business application or a consumer app, if it doesn't have that same real-time experience like an Uber or like a Snapchat, people kind of look at it and say, well, this feels like it was built 20 years ago, right? And so what's happened to our industry has been the moving of the need for this real-time experience into the mainstream. And that's been great for us. But it also means as we are selling to a larger and larger group of, we call mainstream, larger enterprise customers, the way we package our product, the way we make it consumable by larger companies, make it easier to deploy our product, make it easier to understand and adding features that round that out, is really the core of our focus right now, is really being able to appeal to those larger companies. We already have the scale. In fact, we recently participated in an event which was the Guinness Book of World Records, Guinness Book of Records largest online event in history. And we powered the social, India for cricket. We powered the largest social interaction, over 10 million people synchronously going through our network, all in one virtual environment. So we know we can scale this thing beyond any existing sort of human need. And now it's really about making sure it's accessible to the world's largest companies. So it was cricket in India. Yes, yes. I would have thought it was the Justin Warren fan club, but I guess not, second online, right? Yeah, there's a lot of people in India who love cricket. Yeah, I know. And they all have mobile phones. Yes, well gentlemen, thanks for being with us, Peter, Todd, continued success and thanks for being here on theCUBE. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you so much. We continue live coverage here from Las Vegas. We're in the sands. We're here all week at AWS re-invent.