 It's theCUBE. Here is your host, Jeff Crick. Hi, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're on the ground at San Mateo, California, really getting out into the neighborhood and exploring the internet of things, going out to, you know, there's a lot of talk about internet of things, but who's actually doing it, who's been doing it, and what are some of the specific challenges. So we're really excited to come out to Spacetime Insight and talk to CEO Rob Schilling. Rob, thanks for taking a few minutes. Thanks, Jeff. Great to be here. So for the people that aren't familiar with Spacetime Insight, give us a little background, how long have you been around? How many people do you guys have? Kind of what are the markets that you serve? Sure, we're an enterprise software company. We've been around since 2008, and shipping products since that date. We have over 30 major customers globally that are using our solutions. We have over 180 employees in five continents across the world, and we're growing rapidly. So we're really excited in terms of solving problems for our customers. So as I look at the back wall here behind us, I see a lot of energy companies, and I know you guys talk about doing the research before we came up about asset intensive industries or the people that are using your solutions, and you're helping them manage those assets. So talk about some of those services you provide in your solutions that the customers use you for. Yeah, absolutely, and we kind of started in one of the most complex industries that you could pick, and that's the energy business, especially utilities, transmission, and distribution companies. One of our key flagship customers is California ISO. They're the balancing authority for all of California. They service 30 million customers daily, and their whole role is to keep the lights on 24 by seven. And we're in their control room, we're one third of their control room at any given time, and we're adding insight into their data. So we can show fires in real time how close they're getting to assets, critical infrastructure assets, what's the propensity for failure that's going out there on the grid, and we help them manage and monitor the entire grid for California. And that's interesting, it wasn't that long ago that we're having issues with power in California, right? We're having those brownouts and blackouts, so it's not an insignificant thing to keep that balance, keep the lights on, and really keep things rolling. You help them with their assets, and you've been doing it before there was the Internet of Things, so how are you doing that before you had connected sensors all over the place? Yeah, and if you think about the Internet of Things, it's just now at a different level than it ever was before, right? We've always had silo data systems, we've always had sensors on different parts of OT or IT systems, now how do you bring those together? And the Internet of Things is really just bringing a proliferation of that, right? To the infinite scale. And how do you bring all that data in, make sense of that data, and do it in near real time or real time? And that's what we do extremely well. And you've also got all these legacy systems, right? I mean, if you go into a big energy company, they got a whole lot of assets already in place, not only with trucks and generating devices and transmission devices, but also in the software and systems, and I'm sure there's a lot of old stuff that's been written in COBOL and nobody knows where the source code is. So you've got to work within that environment as well as bring your solution and now add in this whole another layer of data coming in from these sensors. So how do you guys address that? What are you doing to help people out? Sure, and we kind of do that in three different ways. So you really have to have it in context. So what is the meaning at any given time of the relevant data that you're looking at, right? And that becomes more challenging as more data sets become into the mix. The other one is in motion and then in real time, right? So we bring those together in what we call real-time visual analytics and what we term situational intelligence. So that no matter what the context is, customers can look at the relevant data at the right time and make sense of that data. So let's dig down a little bit into the contextual relevance because obviously resources are not infinite, right? I can't just automatically fix everything all the time. I've got to make trade-offs. I've got to make intelligent decisions. I have limited resources. So how are you helping me figure out amongst all the vast places I can spend that next dollar where to put it, how to prioritize and really to put that contextual layer over the sea of data that's flown in? Now that's a great question. Let me give you one relevant example with one of our key customers and that's Hydra One, who's one of the major utilities up in Toronto. They have over four and a half million assets out on the grid, in this case, poles and feeders. And they really needed the ability to one, work with the regulators, show the health of their assets and look at a planning system over 30 years so that they can show what's the risk level. If I change five assets, key assets, every year or every month, what does that do to my risk failure profile over a 30-year period? And then how do you do analytics against that so you can look at the aging infrastructure, looking at the relevant age, the effective age of those assets and the health of each asset at any given time? And we provide that for them and we integrate multiple, multiple data systems. We work with a key partner, in this case, SAP, and really help them solve some key problems that they're facing. So that's interesting. So you're integrating with SAP, which I'm sure is kind of an asset management system as part of their ERP that they've had forever. At the same time, you gotta pay attention. We have a ton of wildfires obviously out in the West. I'm sure that's a big concern of getting the energy out. So you're spanning both of those systems, the SAP ERP, ancient stuff, as well as getting out on the pole, getting the data from the fire people in terms of what's going on. That's right. And really, we don't have any, I mean, limitation in terms of which system we can pull data from. So it can be your core ERP, it can be your legacy custom applications, or it can be new technologies where you're putting sensors out on every device. Yeah, so let's drill down into visualization, right? A lot of buzz and visualization tableau is in the marketplace click, they get a lot of activity in the stock market, so we hear about them a lot. But the trick with visualization to me is always, how do you actually make it meaningful? So what is the secret to making visualization actually meaningful, especially as you talk about the context, the situational awareness? Because what's meaningful now, say with the fires in the West, is not necessarily the same information I need to worry about at maybe year in planning cycle or bringing a new something online or connecting with a new source. So how does your systems kind of help people sort through that so that they're looking at the right data at the right time to make the right decision? Well, and that's your exactly right, Jeff, and it is a daunting task for these customers, especially energy space, but also in logistics, water and gas, they all have the same issue. They have aging infrastructure, they have millions of assets, and how do you bring insight into what's relevant at any given time? And that's our ability to look at things contextually, based on any situation, and our innate ability based on our patents to really look at data in a very smart way. And do you build pre-canned scenarios that kind of drive that situational awareness? Do you work with the clients to build scenario planning? Do you work with, I don't know, Accenture or system integrators to build that? How do you kind of build a library of scenarios or situations so that the right filters and the right kind of data information is served up? Really all of the above. So where there's a solution that we can repeat and there's enough value to a customer, we will go and build that ourselves and then we'll resell that solution. There's also times where it might be a new environment, a new type of solution that a customer wants to go tackle. One case is Oculus, right? We've taken the Oculus system, the RIF system that Facebook bought. We've taken that, built that into a demo system that's extremely powerful. It's immersive technology, we also have a patent on how you can integrate that data and customers are coming to us and saying, okay, we wanna look at one from a safety perspective, I wanna go down into a substation and I wanna look at areas of, one, my data tied to, hey, there might be a leak, a gas leak, how do I look at that in a meaningful way? So we can help them from a safety perspective. The other one is if you think of all the LiDAR data and now we have drones, all that data that's gonna be pulled out, how do I look at that in a real-time view? So I don't have to send a truck to go fix something. I don't have to send a plane to go over, now we have these major fires here in California and it's a lot of territory. So how can I take an image, bring that back, bring it to the right expert so that they can look at that image in real-time and come back based off of the quality of that immersive technology and then say, this is what you should go do to solve that problem. So that's actually, that's a whole different kind of angle on visualization. That's not a billion data points to make a pretty picture and try to see some actionable insight but you're really combining things you can see, real things with the data that feed it. It almost sounds more like a heads-up display that you would see kind of in a classic cockpit scenario where you're seeing through the data but you're also seeing the data that impacts what you're seeing at the same time. No, you're absolutely right. And from day one, we've always believed that the power is in not only visualization but analytics and bringing those together in a very meaningful way and that's where situational intelligence is extremely powerful. So let's shift gears a little bit and talk about regulation. How only did you pick a complicated industry to serve in terms of the complexity of delivery but also heavily regulated and I know you do a lot of international travel, you guys are all over the place. So talk about the role of regulation and specifically how's regulation in the government keeping up with these crazy changes in speed and the way things are moving in terms of the technology? Can they keep up? Are they changing the regulations? How's that all kind of working out? You know, there's always a place for regulation. The question is over time, what is the purpose or the meaningful value add to regulation? As we're seeing now in the markets, deregulation is coming. There's a lot of new technology that's coming out that's really displacing the need to go to your utility provider for energy, right? You saw Tesla's announcement, you can go off grid with Solar City and Tesla and other systems and not have to rely on your utility but the utility plays a critical role. They know what they're doing. This is very complex. So there's areas of regulation I think are very critical for them and that they need but also they're starting to invest in new technologies and that's where we come in. And we have over 30 major utilities globally that are using our solutions because they wanna innovate. They understand the problems and they understand how to get there. It's just complex so it can't happen overnight. Okay, so before we wrap and again, I appreciate you taking the time. Let's kinda look down the road because all we hear about from Cisco is the internet of things on great TV commercials all the time and GE is really pushing hard for what they call the industrial internet. So a lot more sensors, a lot more connectivity. You talked about drones, you talked about this expansion of really the internet layer. How is that gonna change things for you? What are the specific challenges? Because you've got a lot of experience in these big data sets. How, what's the good side, what's the bad side of not having this deluge of new additional data into that system? Well the good side and you mentioned both GE and Cisco, we love both of those companies, they're world-class organizations and the beauty is they're making all these devices smarter. GE's making the devices smarter, Cisco's making the network smarter. We come on top of that in a holistic way and take advantage of their great work to even make it more powerful for our customers. Awesome, so future looks bright? Future looks bright. All right, awesome. Well, Rob, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your busy day. Rob Schilling, the CEO of Spacetime Insight. I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching The Key. We'll see you next time.