 And welcome to theCUBE's coverage of CouchBaseConnect Online. Mary Roth, VP of Engineering Operations with CouchBase is here for CouchBaseConnect Online. Mary, great to see you. Thanks for coming on remotely for this segment. Thank you very much. It's great to be here. Love the fire in the background. Little fireside chat here kind of happening, but I want to get into it because, you know, engineering and operations with the pandemic has really kind of shown that, you know, engineers and developers have been good working remotely for a while, but for the most part it's impacted companies in general across the organizations. How did the CouchBase engineering team adapt to the remote work? Great question. And I actually think the CouchBase team responded very well to this new model of working imposed by the pandemic. And I have a unique perspective on the CouchBase journey. I joined in February, 2020, after 20 plus years at IBM, which had embraced a hybrid in-office remote work model many years earlier. So in my IBM career, I live four minutes away from my research lab in Almedin Valley, but IBM is a global company with headquarters on the East Coast. And so throughout my career, I often found myself on phone calls with people around the globe at 5 a.m. in the morning. I quickly learned and quickly adapted to a hybrid model. I'd go into the office to collaborate and have in-person meetings when needed. But if I was on the phone at 5 a.m. in the morning, I didn't feel the need to get up at 4, 3 a.m. to go in. I just worked from home and I discovered I could be more productive there doing think-time work. And I really only needed the in-person time for collaboration. This hybrid model allowed me to have a great career at IBM and raise my two daughters at the same time. So when I joined CouchBase, I joined a company that was all about being in-person. And instead of a four-minute commute, it was going to be an hour or more commute for me each way. This was gonna be a really big transition for me. But I was excited enough by CouchBase and what it offered that I decided to give it a try. Well, that was February 2020. I showed up early in the morning on March 10th, 2020 for an early morning meeting in-person, only to learn that I was one of the only few people that didn't get the memo. We were switching to a remote working model. And so over the last year, I have had the ability to watch CouchBase and other companies pivot to make this remote working model possible and not only possible, but effective. And I'm really happy to see the results. A remote work model does have its challenges, that's for sure, but it also has its benefits, better work-life balance and more time to interact with family members during the day and more quiet time just to think. We just did a retrospective on a major product release, CouchBase Server 7.0, that we did over the past 18 months. And one of the major insights by the leadership team is that working from home actually made people more effective. I don't think a full remote model is the right approach going forward, but a hybrid model that IBM adopted many years ago and that I was able to participate in for most of my career, I believe is a healthier and more productive approach. Well, great story. I love the, you come back and now you take the leverage of all the best practice from the IBM days, but how did your team and the CouchBase engineering team react? And were there any best practices or key learnings that you guys pulled out of that? The initial reaction was not good. I mean, as I mentioned, it was a culture based on in-person. People had to be in-person, not in-person meetings. So it took a while to get used to it, but there was a forcing function, right? We had to work remotely. That was the only option. And so people made it work. I think the advancement of virtual meeting technology really helps a lot over earlier days in my career where I had just bad phone connections. That was very difficult, but with the virtual meetings that you have, where you can actually see people and interact, I think is really quite helpful. What's the DNA of the culture there? What's the DNA? Every company's got the DNA. Intel's Moore's Law. What's the engineering culture at CouchBase? Like if you could describe it. The engineering culture at CouchBase is very familiar to me. We are at our heart, a database company, and I grew up in the database world, which has a very unique culture based on two values, merit and mentorship. And we also focus on something that I like to call growing the next generation. Now database technology started in the late 60s, early 70s with a few key players and institutions. These key players were extremely bright and they tackled and solved really hard problems with elegant solutions long before anybody knew they were gonna be necessary. Now those original key players, people like Jim Gray, Bruce Lindsay, Don Chamberlain, Pat Selinger, David DeWitt, Michael Stonebreaker, they just love solving hard problems and they wanted to share that elegance with a new generation. And so they really focused on growing the next generation of leaders, which became the Mike Carey's and the Mohans and the lower houses of the world. And that culture grew over multiple generations with the previous generation cultivating, challenging and advocating for the next. I was really lucky to grow up in that culture and I've advanced my career as a result as being part of it. The reason I joined Couchbase is because I see that culture alive and well here. Our two fundamental values on the engineering side are merit and mentorship. One of the things I want to get your thoughts on on the database questions. I remember, you know, back in the old glory days you mentioned some of those luminaries. You know, there wasn't many database geeks out there. There's very kind of small community now as databases are everywhere. So you're seeing, there's no one database that's ruled in the world, you're starting to see a pattern of database kinds of things emerging more databases than ever before. They're on the internet, they're on the cloud, they're on the edge. It's essentially we're living in a large distributed computing environment. So now it's cool to be in databases because they're everywhere. So, I mean, this is kind of, we were right. What's your reaction to that? You're absolutely right. There used to be a few small vendors and a few key technologies and it's grown over the years but the fundamental problems are the same. Data integrity, performance and scalability in the face of distributed systems. Those were all the hard problems that those key leaders solved back in the 60s and 70s. They're not new problems, they're still there and they did a lot of the fundamental work that you can apply and reapply in different scenarios and situations. It's pretty exciting. I love the different architectures that are emerging and allows for more creativity for application developers and this becomes like the key thing we're seeing right now, driving the business and the big conversation here at the event is the power in these modern applications that need low latency. There's no more, not many spinning disks anymore. It's all in RAM, all these kinds of different memory. You got decentralization, all kinds of new constructs. How do you make sense of it all? How do you talk to customers? What's the main core thing happening right now if you had to describe it? Yeah, it depends on the type of customer you're talking to. We have focused primarily on the enterprise market and in that market, there are really fundamental issues. Information for these enterprises is key. It's their core asset that they have and they understand very well that they need to protect it and make it available more quickly. I started as a DBA at Morgan Stanley back right out of college and at the time, I think it probably still is but at the time it was the best run IT shop that I'd ever seen in my life. The fundamental problems that we had to solve to get information from one stock exchange to another to get it to the SEC are the same problems that we're solving today. Back then we were working on mainframes and over high speed data com links. Today it's the same kind of problem. It's just the underlying infrastructure has changed. You know, the key has been a big supporter of women in tech. We've done thousands of interviews on why I got you. I want to ask you, if you don't mind, career advice that you'd give women who are starting out in the field of engineering, computer science. What do you wish you knew when you started your career and you could be that person now, what would you say? Yeah, well, there are a lot of things I wish I knew then that I know now but I think there are two key aspects to a successful career in engineering. I actually got started as a math major and the reason I became a math major is a little convoluted is it as a girl I was told we were bad at math. And so for some reason I decided that I had a major in it. That's actually how I got my start but I've had a great career and I think there are really two key aspects. First, and is that it is a discipline in which respect is gained through merit as I had mentioned earlier. Engineers are notoriously detail oriented and most of are perfectionists. They love elegant, well-thoued out solutions and give respect when they see one. So understanding this can be a very important advantage. If you're always prepared and you always bring your A game to every debate, every presentation, every conversation, you will build up respect among your team simply through merit. Well, that may mean that you need to be prepared to defend every point early on say in your graduate career or when you're starting. Over time, others will learn to trust your judgment and begin to intuitively follow your lead just by reputation. The reverse is also true. If you don't bring your A game and you don't come prepared to debate, you will quickly lose respect and that's particularly true if you're a woman. So if you don't know your stuff, don't engage in the debate until you do. That's awesome. Go ahead, continue. Thank you. Now, so my second piece of advice that I wish I could have give my younger self is to understand the roles of leaders and influencers in your career and the importance of choosing and purposefully working with each. I like it to break it down into three types of influencers. Managers, mentors and advocates. So that first group are the people in your management chain. It's your first line manager, your director, your VP, et cetera. Their role in your career is to help you measure short-term success and particularly with how that success aligns with their goals and the company's goals. But it's important to understand that they are not your mentors and they may not have a direct interest in your long-term career success. I like to think of them as say your sixth grade math teacher. You know, you getting an A in the class and advancing to seventh grade, they own you for that. But whether you get that basketball scholarship to college or get into Harvard or become a CEO, they have very little influence over that. So a mentor is someone who does have a shared interest in your long-term success. Maybe by your relationship with him or her or because by helping you shape your career and achieve your own success, you help advance their goals, whether it be the company's success or helping more women achieve leadership positions or getting more kids into college on a basketball scholarship, whatever it is, they have some long-term goal that aligns with helping you with your career and they give great advice. But that mentor is not enough because they're often outside the sphere of influence in your current position and while they can offer great advice and coaching, they may not be able to help you directly advance. That's the role of the third type of influencer, somebody that I call an advocate. An advocate is someone that's in a position to directly influence your advancement and champion you and your capabilities to others. They are in influential positions and others place great value in their opinions. Advocates stay with you throughout your career and they'll continue to support you and promote you wherever you are and wherever they are, whether that's the same organization or not. They're the ones who when a leadership position opens up will say, I think Mary's the right person to take on that challenge or we need to move in a new direction. I think Mary's the right person to lead that effort. Now, advocates are the most important people to identify early on and often in your career and they're often the most overlooked. People early on often pay too much attention and rely on their management chain for advancement. Managers change on a dime but mentors and advocates are there for you for the long haul and that's one of the unique things about the database culture. Those set of advocates were just there already because they had focused on building the next generation. So I consider, Mike Kerry is my father and Mike Stonebreaker is my grandfather and Jim Gray is my great grandfather and they're always there to advocate for me. That's like a schema and a database. You got to have it all right there kind of teed up. Beautiful, great advice. Exactly, thank you for that. That was really a masterclass and that's going to be great advice for folks. Really trying to figure out how to play the cards they have and the situation and to double down or move and find other opportunities. So great stuff there. I do have to ask you, Mayor, thanks for coming on the technical side and the product side. Couch-based Capella was launched in conjunction with the event. What is the bottom line for that as in operations and engineering, built the products and rolled it out? What's the main top line message for about that product? Yeah, well, we're very excited about the release of Capella and what it brings to the table is that it's a fully managed and automated database cloud offering so that customers can focus on development and building and improving their applications and reducing the time to market without having to worry about the hard problems underneath and the operational database management efforts that come with it. As I mentioned earlier, I started my career as a UVA and it's one of the most sought after and highly paid positions in IT because operating a database required so much work. So with Capella, what we're seeing is, taking that job away from you. I'm not going to be able to apply for a DBA tomorrow. That's great stuff. Well, great, thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it. Congratulations on the company and public offering this past summer in July and thanks for that great commentary and insight on the CUBE here. Thank you. Thank you very much. Mary Roth, VP of engineering operations at CouchBase, part of CouchBase Connect Online. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.