 All right, everybody, welcome back to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS 2021. This is the biggest hybrid event of the year, theCUBE's ninth year covering AWS re-invent. My name is Dave Vellante. Arwar Kedura is here. CUBE alum, Chief Revenue Officer now of Influx Data and Brian Mullen is the Chief Marketing Officer. Folks, good to see you. Arwar, great to see you face to face. It's great to meet you in person, finally. So, Brian, tell us about Influx Data. People might not be familiar with the company. Sure, yes, Influx Data. We're the company behind a pretty well-known project called InfluxDB, and we're a platform for handling time series data. And so, what time series data is, is really, it's any, we think of it as any data that's stamped in time in some way. That could be every second, every two minutes, every five minutes, every nanosecond, whatever it might be. And typically, that data comes from, you know, of course, sources, and the sources are, you know, they could be things in the physical world, like devices and sensors, you know, temperature gauges, batteries. Also, things in the virtual world, and, you know, software that you're building and running in the cloud. You know, containers, microservices, virtual machines. So, all of these, whether in the physical world or the virtual world, are kind of generating a lot of time series data. And our platform's designed specifically to handle that. Yeah, so a lot to unpack here, Arwar, I mean, I've kind of followed your, since we met on, virtually, kind of followed your career, and I know when you choose to come to a company, you start with a customer. That's what you're, that's what you're, those are your peeps. So, what was it that drew you to influx data that customers were telling you? Yeah, I think what I saw happening from a marketplace is a few paradigm shifts, right? And the first paradigm shift is obviously what the cloud is enabling, right? So, everything that we used to take for granted when, you know, Andres and Horowitz said, you know, software was eating the world, right? And then we moved into apps are eating the world. And now you look at the cloud infrastructure that, you know, folks like AWS have empowered, they've allowed services like ours and databases and sort of querying capabilities like inflex DB to basically run at a scale that we never would have been able to do, just sort of with, you know, you host it yourself type of a situation. And then the other thing that it's enabled is again, if you go back to sort of database history, relational, right, was humongous, totally transformed what we could do in terms of transactional systems, then you moved into sort of the big data, the Hadoops, the search, right, the elastic. And now what we're seeing is time series is becoming the new paradigm that's enabling a whole set of new use cases that have never been enabled before, right? So people that are generating these large volumes of data like Brian talked about and meeting a platform that can ingest millions of points per second and then the ability to query that in real time in order to take that action and in order to power things like ML and things like sort of, you know, autonomous type capabilities now need this type of capability. So that's ultimately what we're looking for. Okay, so it's the real timeness, right? Is the use cases, maybe you could talk a little bit more about those use cases and take a picture. Yeah, so we have kind of thinking about things both the kind of virtual world where people are pulling data off of sources that are in infrastructure, software infrastructure. We have a number, like PayPal is a customer of ours and they pull time series data from the infrastructure that runs their payments platform. So you can imagine the volume that they're dealing with. Think about how much data you might have in like a regular relational scenario. Now multiply every piece of data times however often you're looking at it, every one second, every 10 minutes, whatever it might be. You're talking about an order of magnitude larger volume, higher volume of data and so the tools that people were using were just not really equipped to handle that kind of volume which is unique to time series. So we have customers like PayPal in kind of the software infrastructure side. We also have quite a bit of activity among customers on the IoT side. So Tesla is a customer, they're pulling telematics and battery data off of the vehicle pulling that back into their cloud platform. Nest is also a customer. So you're pretty used to seeing, you know, connected thermostats and homes. Think of all the data that's coming from those individual units and it's all time series data and they're pulling it into their platform using influx. So that's interesting. So Tesla, take that example, they will maybe persist some of the data, maybe not all of it, it's ephemeral. And then they'll push some of it back to the cloud. Probably a small portion percentage wise, but it's a huge amount of data, right? So if they might want to track some anomaly and say, okay, capture every time a animal runs across and put that back into the cloud. So where do you guys fit in that analysis and what makes you sort of the best platform for time series database? Yeah, it's interesting to see that because it is ephemeral and there are really two parts of it. This is one of the reasons that time series is such a challenge to handle with something that's not really designed to handle it. In the moment, in that minute, in the last hour, you really want to see all the data. You want all of what's happening and have full context for what's going on and seeing these fluctuations. But then maybe a day later or a week later, you may not care about that level of fidelity and so you down sample it. You have kind of more of a summarized view of what happened in that moment. So being able to kind of toggle between high fidelity and low fidelity, it's a super hard problem to solve. It's our platform. Inflex DB really allows you to do that. And that is different from relational databases which are graded ingesting but not great at kicking data out. And I think what you're pointing to is in order to optimize these platforms, you have to ingest and get rid of data as quickly as you can. And that is not something that a traditional database can do. So who do you sell to? Who's your ideal customer profile? I mean, pretty diverse. So it tends to focus on builders. And builders is now obviously a much wider audience. We used to say developers, highly technical folks that are building applications. And part of what we love about Inflex data is we're not necessarily trying to only make it for the most sophisticated builders. We are trying to allow you to build an application with the minimum amount of code and the greatest amount of integrations. So really power you to do more with less and get rid of unnecessary code or give you that simplicity because for us it's all about speed to market. You want an application, you have an idea of what it is that you're trying to measure or monitor or instrument. We give you the tools, we give you the integrations, we allow you to work in the IDE that you prefer. We just launched VS Code integration, for example. And that then allows these technical audiences that are solving really hard problems with today's technologies to really take our product to market very quickly. So I want to follow up on that. So I like the term builder. It's an AWS kind of popularized that term. But there's sort of two vectors of that. There's the hardcore developers, but there's also increasingly domain experts that are building data products. And they're more generalists. And I think you're saying you serve both of those but you do integrations that maybe make it easier for the latter. And of course, if the former wants to go crazy, they can. Is that a right understanding? Yes, absolutely. It is about accessibility and meeting developers where they are. For example, you probably still need a solid technical foundation to use a product like ours. But increasingly we're also investing in education, in videos, in templates. Again, integrations that make it easier for people to maybe just bring a visualization layer that they themselves don't have to build. So it is about accessibility. But yes, obviously with builders, their technical foundation is pretty important. But right now we're at almost 500,000 active instances of inflex DB sort of being out there in the wild. So that to me shows that it's a pretty wide variety of audiences that are using us. So you're obviously part of the AWS ecosystem. Help us understand that partnership they announced today. Serverless for Kinesis. Like what does that mean to you? As you compliment that, is that competitive? Maybe you can address that. Yep, so we're a long-time partner of AWS. We've been in the partner network for several years now. And we think about it in a couple of ways. First, it's an important go-to-market channel for us with our customers. So as you know, AWS is an ecosystem unto itself. And so many developers, many of these builders are building their applications for their own end users on AWS in that ecosystem. And so it's important for us to, number one, have an offering that allows them to put influx on that bill. So we're offered in the marketplace. You can sign up for and purchase and pay for influx DB cloud using, or via AWS marketplace. And then as Arro mentioned, we have a number of integrations with all the kind of adjacent products and services from Amazon that many of our developers are using. And so when we think about kind of quote-unquote going to where the developed meeting developers where they are, that's an important part of it. If you're an AWS focused developer, then we want to give you not only an easy way to pay for and use our product, but also an easy way to integrate it into all the other things that you're using. In, I think it was 2012, might've been 11 on theCUBE, Jerry Chen of Greylock, we were asking him, do you think AWS is going to move up the stack and develop applications? He said, no, I don't think so. I think they're going to enable developers and builders to do that. And then they'll compete with the traditional SaaS vendors. And that's proved to be true, at least thus far. You never say never with AWS. But then recently he wrote a piece called Castles on the Cloud. And the premise was essentially that ISVs will build on top of clouds. And that seems to be what you're doing with influx DB. Maybe you could tell us a little bit more about that. We call it super clouds. You know, leveraging the $100 billion a year that the hyperscalers spend to develop an abstraction layer that solves a particular problem. But maybe you could describe what that is, from your perspective, influx DB. Yeah, well, increasingly, we grew up originally as an open source software company. People downloaded the download influx DB, ran it locally on a laptop, put it up on the server. And that's our kind of origin as a company. But increasingly what we recognize is our customers, our developers, we're building in and on the cloud. And so it was really important for us to kind of meet them there. And so we think about, first of all, offering a product that is easily consumed in the cloud and really just allows them to essentially hit an endpoint. So with influx DB cloud, they really don't have to worry about any of the kind of deployment and operation of a cluster or anything like that. Really, they just, from a usage perspective, just pay for three things. The first is data in, how much data are you putting in? Second is query count, how many queries are you making against? And then third is storage. How much data do you have and how long are you storing it? And really it's a pretty simple, it's a pretty simple proposition for the developer to kind of see and understand what their costs are going to be as they grow their workload. So it's a managed service, is that right? It is a managed service. Okay, and how do you guys price? Is it kind of usage-based? Total usage-based, yeah. Again, data ingestion, we've got the query count and the storage that Brian talked about. But to your point, back to the sort of, what the hyperscalers are doing in terms of creating this global infrastructure that can easily be tapped into, we then extend above that. We effectively become a platform as a service builder tool. Many of our customers actually use Inflex data to then power their own product, which they then commercialize into a SaaS application. We've got customers that are doing Kubernetes monitoring or DevOps monitoring solutions that monitor people's infrastructure or web applications or any of those things. We've got people building us into industrial IoT such as PTC's ThingWorks, right? Where they've developed their own platform completely backed by our time series database. Rather than them having to build everything, we become that key ingredient. And then of course, the fully cloud managed service means that they can go to market that much quicker. Nobody's for curing servers, nobody's managing security patches, any of that. It's all fully done for you. And it scales up beautifully, which is the key. And to some of our customers, they also want to scale up or down, right? They know when their peak hours are or peak times. They need something that can handle that load. So looking ahead to next year, so I'm glad AWS decided to do re-invent live. That's weird, right? We thought in June at Mobile World Congress, we were going to be the gateway to returning, but who knows? It's like two steps forward, one step back, one step forward, two steps back, but we're at least moving in the right direction. So what about for you guys, influx data? Looking ahead for the coming year, Brian, what could we expect? Give us a little... Sure. Well, kind of keeping the theme of meeting developers where they are. We want to build out more in the Amazon ecosystem. So more integrations, more kind of ease of use for kind of adjacent products. Another is just availability. So we've been, we're now on actually three clouds in addition to AWS. We're on Azure and Google Cloud, but now expanding horizontally and showing up so we can meet our customers that are working in Europe, expanding into Asia Pacific, which we did earlier this year. And so I think we'll continue to expand the platform globally to bring it closer to where our customers are. Can I? All right, go ahead, please. And I would say also the hybrid capabilities probably will also be important, right? Some of our customers run certain workloads locally and then other workloads in the cloud, that ability to have that seamless experience, regardless, I think is another really critical advancement that we're continuing to invest in so that as far as the customer is concerned, it's just an API endpoint and it doesn't matter where they're deploying. So where do they go? Can they download a freebie version? Give us the last... They go to inflexdata.com. We do have a free account that anyone can sign up for. It's again, fully cloud hosted and managed. It's a great place to get started, just learn more about our capabilities. And if you're here at AWS re-invent, we'd love to see you as well. Check it out. All right guys, thanks for coming to the cubes. Thank you. Great to see you. All right, thank you. All right, and thank you for watching. Keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante for the cubes coverage of AWS re-invent 2021. You're watching the leader in high tech coverage.