 Hey everyone, welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS startup showcase. This is Data as Code, the future of enterprise data and analytics. This is also season two, episode two of our ongoing series with exciting partners from the AWS ecosystem who are here to talk with us about data and analytics. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Two guests join me, one, a CUBE alumni, Venkat Venkatiramani is here, CEO and co-founder of Rockset. Good to see you again. And Doug Moore, VP of cloud platforms at Command Alcon. They're here to talk to me about how Command Alcon implemented real-time analytics in just days with Rockset. Guys, welcome to the program. Thanks for having us. Yeah, great to be here. Doug, give us a little bit of a overview of Command Alcon, what type of business you are, what your mission is, that good stuff. Yeah, great. I'll preface it by saying, I've been in this industry for only three years, so 30 years prior I was in financial services. So this was really exciting and eye-opening. It actually plays into the story of how we met Rockset. So that's why I wanted to preface that. But Command Alcon is in the business, it's in the what's called the heavy building materials industry. And I had never heard of it until I got here, but if you think about large projects like buildings, cities, roads, anything that requires concrete, asphalt, or just really big trucks full of bulky materials, that's the heavy building materials industry. So for over 40 years Command Alcon has been the North American leader in providing software to quarries and production facilities to help mine and load these materials and to produce them and then get them to the job site. So that's what our supply chain is, is from the quarry through the development of these materials and then out to a heavy building materials job site. Got it. Now, how historically in the past has the movement of construction materials been coordinated? What was that like before you guys came on the scene? You'll love this answer. So again, it's like a step back in time. When I got here, the people told me that we're trying to come up with the platform that there are 27 industry study globally and our industry is second to last in terms of automation, which meant that literally everything is still being done with paper and a lot of paper. So one of the, let's say material has developed concrete asphalt is produced and then needs to get to the job site. They start by creating a five-part printed ticket or delivery description that then goes to multiple parties and ends up getting touched physically over 50 times for every delivery. And to give you some idea of what kind of scale it is there are over 330 million of these type deliveries in North America every year. So it's really a lot of favor and a lot of manual work. So that was the state of really where we were and obviously they're compelling reasons, certainly today, but even three, four, five years ago to automate that and digitize it. Wow, tremendous potential to go nowhere, but up with the amount of paper, the lack of automation. So you guys, Command and Alcon built a platform, a cloud software construction software platform. Talk to me about that, why you built it, what was the compelling event? I mean, I think you've kind of already explained the compelling event of all the paper but give us a little bit more context. Yeah, that was the original and then we'll get into what happened two years ago which made it even more compelling. But essentially with everything on premises, there's really a huge amount of inefficiency. So people have heard the enormous numbers that it takes to build up a highway or really large construction project. And a lot of that is tied up in these inefficiencies. So we felt like with our significant presence in this market that if we could figure out how to automate getting this data into the cloud, so that at least the partners in the supply chain could begin sharing information that's not on paper, a little bit closer to real-time that we could make a significant impact on everything from the time it takes to do a project to even the amount of carbon dioxide that's emitted, for example, from trucks running around and being delayed and not being coordinated well. So you built the Connects platform, you started on Amazon, DynamoDB and ran into some performance challenges. Talk to us about some of those performance bottlenecks and how you found Venkat and Rockset. So from the beginning, we were fortunate, if you start building in cloud three years ago, you have a lot of opportunity to use some of the, what we call more fully managed or serverless offerings from Amazon and all the cloud vendors happen, but Amazon is the one we're most familiar with throughout the past 10 years. So we went headfirst into saying, we're going to do everything we can to not manage infrastructure ourselves so that we can really focus on solving this problem efficiently. And it paid off great. And so we chose Dynamo as our primary database and it still was a great decision. We have obviously hundreds of millions of billions of these data points in Dynamo and it's great from a transactional perspective. But at some point you need to get the data back out and what plays into the story of the beginning when I came here with no background basically in this industry is that, and as did most of the other people on my team, we weren't really sure what questions we're going to be asked of the data. And that's super, super important with a no SQL database like Dynamo. You sort of have to know in advance what those usage patterns are going to be and what people are going to want to get back out of it. And that's what really began to strain on both performance and just availability of information. Got it. Bencat, let's bring you into the conversation. Talk to me about some of the challenges that Doug articulated, the, you know, his industry with such little automation, so much paper. Are you finding that still out there for in quite a few industries that really have nowhere to go but up? I think that's a very good point. You know, we talk about digital transformation, 2.OS like this abstract thing. And then, and then you meet like disruptors and innovators like Doug and you realize how much impact, you know, it has on the real world. But now it's not just about disrupting, you know, and digitizing all of these records, but doing it at a faster pace than ever before. Right. I think this is really what digital transformation in the cloud really enables you to do that, you know, a small team, you know, with a very, very big mission and responsibility like what Doug and team have been, you know, shepherding here, they're able to move very, very, very fast, you know, to be able to kind of accelerate this. And they're not only on the forefront of digitizing and transforming a very, very big, you know, paper heavy kind of process, but real-time analytics and real-time reporting is a requirement, right? Nobody's wondering, what is my supply chain three days ago? You know, are my, you know, one of the most important thing in heavy construction is to keep running on a schedule. If you fall behind, there's no way to catch up because there's so many things that falls apart. Now, how do you make sure you don't fall behind, you know, real-time analytics and real-time reporting on how many trucks are supposed to be delivered today? You know, halfway through the day, are they on track? Are they getting behind? And all of those things is not just able to manage the data, but also be able to get reporting and analytics on that is an extremely important aspect of this. So this is like a combination of digital transformation happening in the cloud in real-time and real-time analytics being at the forefront of it. And so we're very, very happy to partner with, you know, digital disruptors like Doug and Esteem to be part of this movement. Doug, as Venkat mentioned, access to real-time data is a requirement. That is just a simple truth these days. I'm just curious, compelling event-wise, was COVID an accelerator? Because we all know of the supply chain challenges that we're all facing in one way or the other. Was that part of the compelling event that had you guys go and say, we want to do DynamoDB plus Rockset? Yeah, that is a fantastic question. In fact, more so than you can imagine. So anytime you come into an industry and you're going to try to completely change or revolutionize the way it operates, it takes a long time to get the message out. Sometimes years. I remember in insurance, it took almost 10 years really to get that message out and get great adoption. And then COVID came along. And when COVID came along, we all of a sudden had a situation where drivers and the foreman on the job site didn't want to exchange the paperwork. I heard one story of a driver taping the ticket for signature to the foreman on a broomstick and putting it out his window so that he didn't get too close. It really was that dramatic. And again, this is the early days and no one really has any idea what's happening. And we're all working from home. So we launched, we saw that as an opportunity to really help people solve that problem and understand more what this transformation would mean in the long term. So we launched internally what we called Project Lemonade, obviously from, you know, make lemonade out of lemons. Is that situation that we ran? And we immediately made some enhancements to a mobile app and then launched that to the field so that basically there's now a digital acceptance capability where the driver can just stay in the vehicle and the foreman can be anywhere. Look at the materials, say susceptible to delivery can go from there. So yeah, it actually immediately caused many of our customers hundreds to begin to want to push their data to the cloud for that reason just to take advantage of that one capability. Project Lemonade sounds like it's made a lot of lemonade out of a lot of lemons. Can you comment, Doug, on kind of the larger trend of real-time analytics and logistics? Yeah, obviously, and this is something I didn't think about much either, not knowing anything about concrete other than it was in my driveway before I got here. And that it's a perishable product. And you've got that basically no more than about an hour and a half from the time you mix it, put it in the drum and get it to the job site and pour it. And then the next one has to come behind it. Now, remember the trend is that we can't really do that on paper anymore and stay on top of what has to be done and we'll get into the field. So a foreman, I recall saying that when you're in the field waiting on delivery, you have people standing around and preparing the site ready to make a pour that two minutes is an eternity. And so real-time is always a controversial word because it means something different to anyone, but that gave it real clarity to me what it really meant to have real-time analytics and how are we doing and where are my vehicles and how is this job performing today? And I think that a lot of people are still trying to figure out how to do that. And fortunately, we found a great tool set that's allowing us to do that at scale. Thankfully, you know, for a rock set, primarily. Benkit, talk about it from your perspective, the larger trend of real-time analytics, not just in logistics, but in other key industries. Yeah, I think we're seeing this across the board. I think, you know, even we see a huge trend even within an enterprise, different teams from the marketing team, the support teams to more and more business operations team to the security team, you know, really moving more and more of their use cases from batch to real-time. So we see this, you know, the industries that are, the innovators and the pioneers here are the ones for whom real-time is a requirement, like Daga and Esteem here, where, you know, if it is old news, it's no news. It's not useless, right? But I think even within, you know, across all industries, whether it is, you know, gaming, whether it is, you know, fintech, you know, binopulator companies, e-learning platforms. So across, you know, edtech and, you know, so many different platforms, there is always this need for business operations. Some, you know, certain aspects, certain teams within large organizations to, you know, have to, you know, tell me how to win the game and not like, you know, play Monday morning quarterback after the game is over. Right. Deb, let's go back a view. I'm curious with Kinects, have you been able to scale the platform since you integrated with Rockset? Talk to us about some of the outcomes that you've achieved so far. Yeah, we have, and of course we knew when we made our database selection with Dynamo that it really doesn't have a top-in in terms of how much information that we can throw at it. But that's very, very challenging when it comes to using that information for reporting. But we found the same thing as we've scaled the analytics side with our Rockset indexing and searching of that database. So the scale in terms of the number of customers and the amount of data we've been able to take on has not been a problem. And honestly, for the first time in my career, I can say that we've always had to add people every time we add a certain number of customers and that has absolutely not been the case with this platform. And I imagine the team that you do have is far more, sorry, Venkat, far more strategic and able to focus on bigger projects. It is, and you'd be amazed that, I mean, Venkat hit on a couple of points that in terms of the adoption of analytics, what we found is that we're as big a customer of this analytic engine as our customers are because our marketing team and our sales team are always coming to us. Well, how many customers are doing this? How many partners are connected in this way? Which feature flags are turned on the platform? And the way this works is all data that we push into the platform is automatically just indexed and ready for reporting analytics. So we really, it's no additional ad of work to answer these questions, which has really been phenomenal. I think the thing I want to add here is the speed at which they were able to build a scalable solution and also how little operational and administrative overhead that it has cost to their teams, right? I think, this is again, real-time analytics, if you go and ask under people, do you want fast analytics on real-time data or slow analytics on stale data? People, no one would say, give me slow and stale. So I think it goes back to again, our fundamental thesis that you have to remove all the cost and complexity barriers for real-time analytics to be the new default, right? Today, companies try to get away with batch and the pioneers and the innovators are forced to solve, I know kind of like address some of these real-time analytics challenges. I think with the platform like, the real-time analytics platform like Rockset, we want to completely flip it on its head. You can do everything in real-time and there may be some extreme situations where you're dealing with like, hundreds of petabytes of data and you just need an analyst to generate like quarterly reports, all of that. Go ahead and use some really, really good batch-based system, but you should be able to get anything and everything you want without additional cost or complexity in real-time. That is really the vision that is what we are really enabling here. Thank you, I want to also get your perspective and Doug, I'd like your perspective on this as well, but that is the role of cloud-native and server-less technologies in digital disruption. Thank you, what do you see there? Yeah, I think it's huge. I think, again and again, every customer and we meet, you know, Command Alcon and Doug and his team is a great example of this where they really want to spend as much time and energies and calories that they have to help their business, right? Like what are we accomplishing, trying to accomplish as a business? How do we enable, how do we build better products? How do we grow revenue? How do we eliminate risk that is inherent in the business? And that is really where they want to spend all of their energies not trying to like, you know, install some backend software, administer it, build ideal pipelines and so on and so forth. And so, you know, doing server-less on the compute side of the things like AWS lambdas and what have you and you know, it's a very important innovation, but that isn't complete the story or your data stack also have to become server-less. And that is really the vision with Rockset that your entire real-time analytics stack can be operating and managing. It could be as simple as managing a server-less stack for your compute environments like your APS servers and what have you. And so I think that is going to be a, that is for here to stay. This is a path towards simplicity and simplicity scales really, really well, right? Complexity will always be the killer that will limit how far, you know, you can use this solution and how many problems can you solve with that solution? So simplicity is a very, very important aspect here and server-less helps you, you know, deliver that. And Doug, your thoughts on cloud native and server-less in terms of digital disruption. Great point. And there are two parts to the scalability part. The second one is the one that's more subtle unless you're in charge of the budget. And that is that we go with enough effort and enough money that you can make almost any technology scale, whether it's multiple copies of it, you know, it may take a long time to get there but you can get there with most technologies. But what is least scalable, at least as I see it in this industry is the people. Everybody knows we have a talent shortage and these other ways of getting the real-time analytics and scaling infrastructure for compute and database storage, it really takes a highly skilled set of resources and the more your company grows, the more of those you need. And that is what we really can't find. And that's actually what drove our team and in our last industry to even go this way. We reached a point where our growth was limited by the people we could find. And so we really wanted to break out of that. So now we have the best of both scalable people because we don't have to scale them as scalable technology. Excellent, the best of both worlds. Isn't that great when those two things come together? Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me on theCUBE today talking about what Rockset and Command Alcon are doing together, better together what you're enabling from a supply chain digitization perspective. We appreciate your insights. Great, thank you. Thank you for having us. My pleasure. For Doug Moore and then Kat Mankata Ramani, I'm Lisa Martin. Keep it right here for more coverage of theCUBE, your leader in high tech event coverage.