 If the pandemic taught us anything, it's that if you're not a digital business, you're out of business. But in so many respects, the digital mandate that was thrust upon us was really reactive and often not as well thought out as many clients and customers would have liked. Sure, there were lots of digital initiatives underway prior to the pandemic, but there was a general sense at the time of complacency pre-COVID for a lot of companies. You know, there was a sentiment of, ah, yeah, we'll get to that, put it on the back burner. Well, we got plenty of time to figure that out. Or even worse, I'll be retired before digital transformation really becomes a thing. Someone else will have to deal with that. That all changed in March of 2020. The reality is more plain than ever. We need to move faster to build new capabilities and the cost and risk of modernizing legacy systems keeps going up and up. Hello, my name is Dave Vellante and thank you for tuning in to the Application Modernization Summit made possible by Couchbase. In a moment, a terrific panel of leading industry analysts will join me to discuss what they think enterprises need to know about application modernization. We'll also tap into fresh survey data to get interviews with more than 600 CIOs, CTOs and technology practitioners from all over the world, what they're saying about application modernization and digital transformation. After the panel discussion, we'll talk to Ravi Mayaram, who's the chief technical officer at Couchbase to get his take on the specific and tangible steps we're going to push him that you can take to modernize your application portfolio. And then finally, we'll get the customer viewpoint on this topic with Amdox, a leading software and services provider to telcos, media and financial services firms. Amdox is a decades old company that has had to modernize its application portfolio for the digital age and we'll speak to their head of technical product management to find out what they've done to modernize and where they are in their journey. So keep it right there as we dig in where do modern apps go from here? We're going to answer that. What does modernization look like in the 2020s and what insights can help reduce the friction to your cloud application modernization projects? You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech. Welcome to this CUBE power panel where we're going to talk about application modernization, also success templates and take a look at some new survey data to see how CIOs are thinking about digital transformation as we get deeper into the post isolation economy. And with me are three familiar VIP guests to CUBE audiences. Tony Baer is the principal at DB Insight. Doug Henshin VP and principal analyst at Constellation Research and Sanjeev Mohan, principal at Sanjimoh. Guys, good to see you again. Welcome back. Thank you. I think I see here. All right, Doug, let's get started with you. You know, this recent survey which was commissioned by couch base 650 CIOs and CTOs and IT practitioners. So obviously very IT heavy. They responded to the following question. In response to the pandemic, my organization accelerated our application modernization strategy. And of course an overwhelming majority, 94% agreed or strongly agreed. So I'm sure Doug that you're not shocked by that. But in the same survey, modernizing existing technologies was second only behind cybersecurity as the top investment priority this year. Doug, bring us into your world and tell us the trends that you're seeing with the clients and customers you work with and their modernization initiatives. Well, the survey is of course is spot on. You know, any Constellation Research analyst, any systems integrator will tell you that we saw more transformation work in the last two years than in the prior six to eight years. A lot of it was forced, you know, a lot of movement to the cloud, a lot of process improvement, a lot of automation work. But transformational is aspirational and not every company can be a leader. You know, at Constellation, we focus our research on those market leaders and that's only, you know, the top 5% of companies that are really innovating, that are really disrupting their markets. And we try to share that with companies that wanna be fast followers, that these are the next 20 to 25% of companies that don't wanna get left behind but don't wanna hit some of the same roadblocks and, you know, pioneering pitfalls that the real leaders are encountering when they're harnessing new technologies. So the rest of the companies, you know, the cautious adopters, the laggards, many of them fall by the wayside. That's certainly what we saw during the pandemic. Who are these leaders? You know, the old saw examples that people cite, the Amazons, the Teslas, the Airbnbs, the Ubers and the Lifts. But new examples are emerging every year. And as a consumer, you immediately recognize these transformed experiences. One of my favorite examples from the pandemic is rocket mortgage. No disclaimer required, I don't own stock and they're not a client. But when I wanted to take advantage of those record low mortgage interest rates, I called my current bank and some, you know, stalwart, very established conventional banks. I'm talking to you, Bank of America, City Bank and they were taking days and weeks to get back to me. Rocket mortgage had the locked in commitment that day. A very proactive, consistent communications across web, mobile, email, all customer touch points. I closed in a matter of weeks an entirely digital seamless process. You know, this is back in the gloves and masks days and the loan officer came parked in our driveway, wiped down an iPad, handed us that iPad. We signed all those documents digitally, completely electronic workflow. The only wet signatures required were those demanded by the state. So it's easy to spot these transformed experiences. You know, Rocket had most of that in place before the pandemic. And that's why they captured 8% of the national mortgage market by 2020 and they're on track to hit 10% here in 2022. And those are great examples. I mean, I'm not a shareholder either, but I am a customer. I went through the same thing in the pandemic. It was all done in digital, it was a piece of cake. And I happened to have to do another one with a different firm and stuck with that firm for a variety of reasons. And it was night and day. So to your point, it was a forced march to digital. If you were there beforehand, you had real advantage and could accelerate your lead during the pandemic. Okay, now Tony Bear, Mr. Bear, I understand you're skeptical about all this buzz around digital transformation. So in that same survey, the data shows that the majority of respondents said that their digital initiatives were largely reactive to outside forces, the pandemic compliance changes, et cetera. But at the same time, they indicated that the results while somewhat mixed were generally positive. So why are you skeptical? The reason being, and by the way, I have nothing against application monetization. I think the problem I have is that it often gets conflated with digital transformation. And digital transformation itself has become such a buzzword and so overused that it's really hard, if not impossible to pin down what digital transformation actually means. And very often what you'll hear from, let's say, a C-level person is, well, we wanna run like Google regardless of whether or not that goal is realistic for that organization. The thing is that we've been using, businesses have been using digital data since the taste of the main thing, since that data's been digital. What really has changed though is just the degree of how businesses interact with their customers, their partners with the whole rest of the ecosystem and how in many cases you can take a look at the auto industry, that the nature of the business is changing. So there is real change of foot. The question is, I think we need to get more specific in our goals. And when you look at it, if we can boil it down to a couple, maybe boil it down really over simplistically, it's really all about connectedness. No, I'm not saying connectivity because that's more of a physical thing, but connectedness being connected to your customer, being connected to your supplier, being connected to the whole landscape that you operate in. And of course today, we have many more channels with which we operate with customers. And in fact, also, if you take a look at what's happening in the automotive industry, for instance, so it's just reading an interview with Bill Ford, their Ford is now rapidly ramping up their electric vehicle strategy and what they realize is it's not just a change of technology, it's a change in their business. It's a change in terms of the relationship they have with their customer. Their customers have traditionally been automotive dealers and the automotive dealers have traditionally in many cases by state law, now have been the ones who own the relationship with the end customer. But when you go to an electric vehicle, the product becomes a lot more of a software product and in turn, that means that Ford would have much more direct interaction with its end customers. So that's really what it's all about. It's about connectedness. It's also about the ability to act. We'll say agility is about the ability, not just to react, but to anticipate and act. And of course, with all the proliferation, the explosion of data sources and connectivity out there and the cloud which allows much more access to compute, it changes the whole nature of the ball game. The fact is that we have to avoid being overwhelmed by this and make our goals more, I guess, tangible, more strictly defined. Yeah, now so great points there and I want to just bring in some survey data again. Two thirds of the respondents said their digital strategies were set by IT and only 26% by the C-suite, 8% by the line of business. Now this was largely a survey of CIOs and CTOs, but wow, doesn't seem like the right mix. It's a Doug's point about leaders and laggers. My guess is that Rocket Mortgage, their digital strategy was led by the chief digital officer potentially, but at the same time, you would think, Tony, that application modernization is a prerequisite for digital transformation. But I want to go to Sanjeev more in the survey and respondents said that on average, they want 58% of their IT spend to be in the public cloud three years down the road. Now again, this is CIOs and CTOs, but this is IS, PASS and SAS, but that's a big number and there was no ambiguity because the question wasn't worded as cloud, it was worded as public cloud. So Sanjeev, what do you make of that? What's your feeling on cloud as flexible architecture? What does this all mean to you? Dave, 58% of IT spent in the cloud is a huge change from today. Today, most estimates peg cloud IT spend to be somewhere around five to 15%. So what this number tells us is that the cloud journey is still in its early days. So we should buckle up. We ain't seen nothing yet, but let me add some color to this. CIOs and CTOs may be ramping up their cloud deployments, but they still have a lot of problems to solve. I can tell you from my previous experience, for example, when I was in Gartner, I used to talk to a lot of customers who were in a rush to move into the cloud. So if we were to plot, let's say a maturity model, typically a maturity model in any discipline in IT would have something like crawl, walk, run. So what I was noticing was that these organizations were jumping straight to run, because in the pandemic, they were under the gun to quickly deploy into the cloud. So now they're kind of coming back down to crawl, walk, run. So basically they did what they had to do under the circumstances, but now they're starting to resolve some of the very, very important issues. For example, security, data privacy, governance, observability, these are all very big ticket items. Another huge problem that now we are noticing more than we've ever seen are the rising costs. Cloud makes it so easy to onboard new cases, new use cases, but it leads to all kinds of unexpected increasing spikes in your operating expenses. So what we have seen is that organizations are now getting smarter about where the workloads should be deployed. And sometimes it may be in more than one cloud. Multi-cloud is no longer an aspirational thing. So that is a huge trend that we are seeing, and that's why you see there's so much increased planning to spend money in public cloud. We do have some issues that we still need to resolve. For example, multi-cloud sounds great, but we still need some sort of single pane of glass control plane so we can have some fungibility and move workloads around. And some of this may also not be in public cloud. Some workloads may actually be done in a more hybrid environment. Yeah, definitely. I call it super cloud and people win sometimes at that term, but it's above multi-cloud. It floats, you know, top it. But so can you clearly identify some potholes? So I want to talk about the evolution of the application experience because there's some potholes there too. 81% of the respondents in that survey said, quote, our development teams are embracing the cloud and other technologies faster than the rest of the organization can adopt and manage them. And that was an interesting finding to me because you'd think that infrastructure is code and designing insecurity and containers and Kubernetes would be a great thing for organizations. And it is, I'm sure, in terms of developer productivity, but what do you make of this? Does the modernization path also have some potholes, Sanjeev? What are those? So first of all, Dave, you mentioned in your previous question, there's no ambiguity, it's a public cloud. This one, I feel it has quite a bit of ambiguity because it talks about cloud and other technologies. That sort of opens up the kimono. It's like, that's everything. Also, it says that the rest of the organization is not able to adopt and manage. Adoption is a business function. Management isn't IT function. So I feel this question is a bit loaded. We know that app modernization is here to stay. Developing in the cloud removes a lot of traditional barriers of procuring, instantiating infrastructure. In addition, developers today have so many more advanced tools. So they're able to develop the application faster because they have like local, no code options. They have notebooks to write the machine learning code. They have the entire DevOps CICD tool chain that makes it easy to version control and push changes. But there are potholes. For example, are developers really interested in fixing data quality problems? All data privacy, data access, data governance, how about monitoring? I doubt developers want to get encumbered with all of these operationalization management pieces. Developers are very keen to deliver new functionality. So what we are now seeing is that it is left to the data team to figure out all of these operationalization, productionization, the things that the developers are not truly interested in that. So which actually takes me to this topic that Dave, you've been quite actively covering we've been talking about, which is the whole data mesh. Yeah, I was going to say, it's going to solve all those data quality problems, Sanjeev. You know I'm a sucker for data mesh, but yeah. I know, but see what's going to happen with data mesh is that developers are now going to have more domain resident power to develop these applications. What happens to all of the data curation, governance quality that a central team used to do. So there's a lot of open-ended questions that still need to be answered. Yeah, that gets automated Tony, right? With computational governance. So not trivial, it's not trivial, but I'm still an optimist by the end of the decade we'll start to get there. Doug, I want to go to you again and talk about the business case. We all remember the business case for modernization that is remember the Y2K, there was a big IT spending binge and this was before the classification of the enterprise, right, CIOs, they'd be asked to develop new applications and the business baby helps pay for it or offset the cost for the initial work and deployment then IT got stuck managing the sprawling portfolio for years. And a lot of the apps had limited adoption or only served a few users. So there were big pushes toward rationalizing the portfolio at that time. So do I modernize, they had to make a decision, consolidate, do I sunset, that was all based on value. So what's happening today and how are businesses making the case to modernize? Are they going through a similar rationalization exercise, Doug? Well, the Y2K era experience that you talked about was back in the days of throw the requirements over the wall and then we had waterfall development that lasted months in some cases years. We see today's most successful companies building cross-functional teams, the C-suite, the line of business, the operations, the data analytics teams, the IT, everybody has a seat at the table to lead innovation and modernization initiatives and they don't start, the most successful companies don't start by talking about technology. They start by envisioning a business outcome by envisioning a transformed customer experience. You hear the example of Amazon writing the press release for the product or service it wants to deliver and then it works backwards to create it. You got to work backwards to determine the tech that will get you there. What's very clear though is that you can't transform or modernize by lifting and shifting the legacy mess into the cloud that doesn't give you the seamless processes, that doesn't give you data-driven personalization, that doesn't give you a connected and consistent customer experience, whether it's online or mobile, bots, chat, phone, everything that we have today, that requires a modern, scalable, cloud-native approach and agile, iterative experience where you're collaborating with this cross-functional team and of course, correct, again, making sure you're on track to what's needed. Yeah, now, Tony, both Doug and Sanjeev have been talking about what I'm going to call this IT and business schism. We've all done surveys. One of the things I'd love to see couch-based do in future surveys is not only survey the IT heavy, but also survey the business heavy and see what they say about who's leading the digital transformation and who's in charge of the customer experience. Do you have any thoughts on that, Tony? Well, this is no question. I mean, it's kind of like the more things change. We've been talking about that IT and the business has to get together. We talked about this back during, and Doug, you probably remember this, back during the Y2K ERP days, is that you need these cross-functional teams. We've been seeing this, I think what's happening today, though, is that, you know, back in the Y2K era, we were basically going into like our bedrock systems and having to totally re-engineer them. And today, what we're looking at is that, okay, those bedrock systems, the ones that basically are keeping the lights on, okay, those are there we're not going to mess with that, but on top of that, that's what we're going to innovate. And that gives us a chance to be more, you know, more directed, you know, and therefore we can bring these related domains together. I mean, that's why I just kind of, you know, talking where Sanjeev brought up the term of data mesh. I've been a bit of a cynic about data mesh, but I do think that work and work is where we bring a bunch of these connected teams together, teams that have some sort of shared context. You know, it's everybody that's, every team that's working, let's say, around the customer, for instance, which could be, you know, in marketing, it could be in sales, order processing, in some cases, you know, in logistics and in delivery. So I think that's where I think we, you know, there's some hope. And the fact is that with all the advanced, you know, basically low code, no code tools, there are ways to bring some of these other players, you know, into the process to, you know, previously had to, you know, were sort of, you know, more at the end of like a, you know, kind of, I sort of like to throw it over the wall type process. So I do believe, despite all my cynicism, I do believe there's some hope. Thank you. Okay. Last question. And maybe all of you could answer this. Maybe Sanjeev, you could start it off and Doug and Tony can chime in. The survey, in the survey, about half, nearly half of the 650 respondents said they could tangibly show their organizations and improve customer experiences that were realized from digital projects in the last 12 months. Now, again, not surprising, but we've been talking about digital experiences. But there's a long way to go judging from our pandemic customer experiences. And we, again, you know, some were great, some were terrible. And so, you know, some actually got worse, right? Will that improve? When and how will it improve? Where's 5G and things like that fit in in terms of improving customer outcomes? Maybe Sanjeev, you could start us off here. And by the way, plug any research that you're working on in this sort of area, please do. Thank you, Dave. As a resident optimist on this call, I'll get us started and I'm sure Doug and Tony will have interesting counterpoints. So I'm a technology fanboy. I have to admit I am in awe of all these new companies and how they have been able to rise up and handle extreme scale. In this time that we are speaking on this show, these food delivery companies will have probably handled tens of thousands of orders in minutes, you know. So these concurrent orders, delivery, customer support, geospatial location, intelligence, all of this has really become commonplace now. It used to be that large companies like Apple would be able to handle all of these supply chain issues, disruptions that we've been facing. But now, in my opinion, I think we are seeing this in Doug mentioned, rocket mortgage, so we're seeing it in FinTech and shopping apps. So we've seen the same scale and it's more than 5G. It includes things like even in the public cloud, we have much more efficient, better hardware which can do like deep learning networks much more efficiently. So machine learning, natural language programming, being able to handle unstructured data. So in my opinion, it's quite phenomenal to see how technology has actually come to rescue and as billions of us have gone online over the last two years. Yeah, so Doug, to Sanjeev's point, he's saying basically you ain't seen nothing yet. What are your thoughts here at Final Pay? Well, yeah, I mean, there's some incredible technologies coming, including 5G, but you know, it's only going to pave the cow path if the underlying app, if the underlying process is clunky, you have to modernize, take advantage of serverless scalability, autonomous optimization, advanced data science. There's lots of cutting edge capabilities out there today, but lifting and shifting, you got to get your hands dirty and actually modernize. On that data front I mentioned my research this year, I'm doing a lot of in-depth looks at some of the analytical data platforms. These lake houses, we've had some conversations about that and helping companies to harness their data to have a more personalized and predictive and proactive experience. So we're talking about the snowflakes and Databricks and Googles and Teradata's and Vertica's and Yellowbricks and that's a research I'm focusing on this year. Yeah, you know, your point about paving the cow path is right on, especially with the pandemic, a lot of the processes were unknown, but you saw this with RPA paving the cow path only got you so far. And so, you know, great points there, Tony, you get the last word, bring us home. Well, put it this way, I think there's a lot of hope in terms of that the new generation of developers that are coming in are a lot more savvy about things like data. And I think also the new generation of people in the business are realizing that we need to have data as a core competence. So I do have optimism there that the fact is that I think there is, I think there's a much greater consciousness within both the business side and the technicals in the technology side of the organization of the importance of data and how to approach that. And so I'd like to just end on that note. Yeah, excellent. And I think you're right, putting data at the core is critical data mesh. I think very well describes the problem and to Jim Ox credit lays out a solution to technology is not there yet nor the standards. Anyway, I want to thank the panelists here, amazing. You guys are always so much fun to work with and love to have you back in the future. And thank you for joining today's broadcast brought to you by CouchBase. By the way, check out CouchBase on the road this summer at their application modernization summits. They're making up for two years of shut in and coming to you. So you got to go to couchbase.com slash road show to find a city near you where you can meet face to face. In a moment, Ravi Mayaram, the chief technology officer of CouchBase will join me. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. CouchBase is developer friendly. If you haven't used the relational database in the past, you will find it quite easy to get started. One of the main difference of course is that we store data as Jason and there are many good reasons for that. But here are two of them. It is flexible and widely supported by languages and frameworks and has the same structure as the data in your code. And it helps you to avoid unnecessary joins which improves performance at scale. But storing data as Jason raises another issue. How do you query it? In the past, many nosico databases decided to create their own query languages. And a few of them are pretty awesome. But what we realized after all this time is that developers like SQL. This is why CouchBase created Niko, an implementation of a spec called SQL++ which is not just a SQL like, it is SQL92 compatible. You can grab the same queries running in your application right now and run them against CouchBase with no changes. For instance, here's how a select looks like. And here's how an update looks like. Don't chumbling, the father of SQL is a big supporter of this language as well. He even wrote a short book about it and you can download the book with the link in the description. But what about asset? Well, CouchBase also supports two types of asset transactions, Niko and Qiverron. The Niko one is very similar to transactions in relation of databases where you specify start transaction, execute some operations and then commit it at the end. Key value transactions use a special implementation with no center coordination and no single pointer failure which makes it a better fit when, yeah, you guess it, when you need to execute transactions at scale. Modernizing applications can be a complicated situation for many folks. It's useful to have some best practices and tangible steps that can remove friction and yield some quick wins. We're now joined by CouchBase CTO Ravi Mayaram who will cover how organizations can approach application modernization, what role the cloud plays and what you need to know about building a business case. Ravi, welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you again. Very good to see you. Thanks for having me, Dave. Yes, our pleasure. According to a recent CouchBase digital transformation survey that you guys ran, about 650 respondents, CIOs, CTOs, et cetera, the inertia of legacy technology held back according to the respondents, 82% of enterprises from modernizing their portfolios in 2021. So I want to talk about the what and the why of modernization. Ravi, what does application modernization mean to you and why is it top of mind for organizations? Yeah, I think there have been multiple forces at work here for a while and they all come to a tipping point with the pandemic and it's a combination of factors and the legacy technologies were built for a different generation of applications. So it's a generational shift that we're undergoing. Part of it is the consumption model, which is all cloud-based and pay-as-you-go kind of stuff. The other is edge is in the middle of a lot of these conversations together with the velocity variety of data that you have to actually sort of consume and results that you need to produce. These were all not what the sort of the infrastructure of old on which the applications were built on stand for. So the infrastructure of the substrate requires modernization in order for the businesses to transform themselves, that's what's going on. We call it digital transformation from a technology perspective, but it's businesses that are transforming the business models in front of our eyes. We've seen the media go from set-top boxes to streaming everywhere. Like that, every business e-commerce has changed the way we sort of do any business. Gaming has changed, the banking industry, the healthcare, everything is changing in terms of the fundamental movement if you could sort of say that is to reach the consumer directly and sort of disintermediate the intermediaries. And in that process, the technologies that we had used to build the last previous generation of applications no longer scale, no longer nimble enough, no longer cater to the modern, the needs of the modern data and infrastructure on which we are standing up these applications. So that's what's driving the modernization effort. And in that, we have always started say that few years ago that data is the new oil. So that plays a very critical role in how the data silos and infrastructure that enterprises have is what's holding them back. And this whole effort is in terms of modernizing that infrastructure through the modern means of the cloud computing, the modern serverless architectures and microservices and the edge and AI play an important role in this. So we're going to hear later from Amdox about their modernization and where couch base helps and fits, but I'd love to hear your perspective as to how couch base helps organizations modernize. Right, I think one of the fundamental things that has happened is that in the last 30, 40 years the data infrastructure has sort of become a sprawl. We had built multiple systems, relational databases, caches, search systems, analytical systems, all requiring for us to move the data from one system to the other in order for you to get the value from those. And this is basically what we call as a data sprawl or database sprawl. And this leads to so many sort of downstream effects all the way from data not being available at the time when the customer is engaged to data governance, security and all those issues because the threat surface area is wide. And now you're putting all this infrastructure on the modern sort of cloud computing paradigm and the costs are sort of ballooning. And because those older infrastructures that were built when you deploy them on the cloud it creates its ads to the complexity of the sprawl on top of the cost of this. So a system like couch base is what simplifies this sprawl for our customers. And it is built for the modern sort of requirements of scale and performance, low latency and the flexibility of being able to sort of not have to go through this whole cycle of whenever you have to have a change in your application that touches your data that it actually creates a huge tumult and those upgrades and all those lifecycle having to carry pagers. I mean, that doesn't work anymore in these days of five, nine uptimes and 24, seven, three, 65 availability of your services. So in that area is where couch base sort of helps our customers to modernize their sort of data infrastructure. It fuses the multiple technologies that were spread across into one platform. So it gives a simpler programming paradigm. There is one way to scale, manage, administer, patch, upgrade all that mechanism is sort of not just thought through and automated, but it also sort of centralized. This whole thing simplifies at the end of the day, the total task of managing because the volume of data that you have to manage now is orders of magnitude, three to four orders of magnitude more than what it was just a few years ago. And so in that, containing the sprawl, agility of development are sort of and the simplicity of deployment and management are some of the key capabilities that enterprises look to us to solve. And in that, bringing in all the way from cloud to multi-cloud edge is how this sort of strategy evolves for enterprises. So square this circle for me, because in the panel we just had a lot of agreement with what you just said, lift and shift of legacy platforms doesn't work. It might work for the cloud vendor to get the data in the cloud, but it generally doesn't work for the customer. And you mentioned sprawl. We talked about this in the panel about data by its very nature is distributed. We talked about data mesh. There's a lot of skepticism around data mesh, but that's cool. And you mentioned edge. So I'm interested in the cloud's role here is the idea that you're actually putting all this stuff in one place. How does that fit with the edge? Maybe you could help us understand what you're thinking of that and where the cloud fits. Yes, it's about centralizing the data to a point and decentralizing. It's in the magic of how you actually enable that. For example, just your traffic signal, your car, or if you're on a cruise ship, each one is an edge. They all generate petabytes of data and then you basically, you can consume that. But if you're going to stream all this data to a centralized place like a cloud, that's, you know, most of the data actually is not something that you're going to store forever. Those are, you know, topical and that information is required at the edge. You should synthesize that information and take the noise from it and discard the signal. So that's where the edge, typically the edge is not some, you know, personal device alone or a IoT sensor sending data. That is also a sort of one element of the edge, but the edge is about decentralizing the cloud. So to say, so you can have your topologies of not having all your data sit in the cloud, centralize someplace behind five firewalls. So when your application tries to reach that, all the latency comes into play. So that's what you want to decentralize and have the data available as close to the engagement of the data with the consumer of it. So in that is the decentralization strategy where you can have multiple topologies, a tree, a mesh, however you choose to, so that you get to get the data closest. It could be a mobile device. It could be a smaller deployment of a server. It could be a personal electronic device like a watch or it could be all the way in an IoT gateway. These are the various sort of decentralization of the data that has to happen. So it's about moving the data fastest. It's almost like CDN-ing of the data is what, sorry, for those, it's a content delivery network, just what CDN stands for, where we used to actually move static content in the good old days, that's what made our web pages faster. Now we can actually move live data that much faster by using replication technology. So when you move the data towards the edge, what you're trying to do is bring the data closer to the compute where it's actually happening, as opposed to keeping the data centralized someplace back in the cloud and server, and all your application logic is actually sitting on the device or on the edge. So you're constantly shoveling the data from the cloud to the edge, from edge to the cloud at the time of compute, as opposed to having it available at the time of the consumption of the data. That's where the paradigm shift is actually happening. And this basically is not about better user experience. It's also about backend networking and other costs that you can actually gain from by not having to sort of repeatedly sort of shovel data back and forth. So that's the strategy that enterprises that are adopting. Now this has become so to say, core part of the architecture of modernization in terms of where everybody can see this has to move to and our edge and mobile product also plays a role. And that's one of the other elements, aspects of it that customers to look to us for. So it's a balance and couch base can play in both places. A lot of the data, if I heard you correctly at the edge is ephemeral. But if I want to do AI inferencing in real time, I got to do it at the edge. I can't send it back to the cloud and do the modeling post-process. That's not going to work. All right, let's talk about the business case. You know, we've hit on the what and the why, but how does it get paid for? Companies sometimes struggle to plan for and budget appropriately for their outcomes. What do customers need to know about how do they get this past the CFO's office for in the other business decision makers? I think there is an opportunity cost with the sort of lack of modernization. If people are doing their classic sort of, so to say, IT style budgeting, then it will just look like we have to modernize, you know, some older infrastructure. It's not about that. It's about modernizing or making your business relevant to the consumers, because the way consumers go about consuming your services now is very different from the way you had originally imagined and built for. And in that lies the transformation, not to see this as a IT, just as an IT infrastructure modernization, but more from the standpoint of business transformation. And the tooling that is required for this business transformation to be successful. So it requires the involvement of not leaving it to just, you know, IT oriented sort of thinking of modernizing, but from the standpoint of looking at the business and what are the transformations that they need to, if they don't keep up with the Joneses, they in this digital divide, they may find themselves in the sort of either the wrong side or in the chasm. So I think that mindset that I was sort of in addition to sort of IT pushing for this, it's got to have a C-suite sponsorship, understanding and sort of championing of this. Then those initiatives will succeed because it's not just the technology transformation, it is accompanied by business and sort of sort of a cultural transformation inside the enterprise. Yeah, and it's interesting in the survey, it was very much IT survey, I get that. And the IT pros, the CIOs, et cetera, felt that the IT organization was largely responsible for the digital strategy. And I think that was largely a function of, we just came out of the pandemic or coming out of the pandemic. And so they had these tactical needs, but now you're saying, step back, align with the business, make sure the C-suite's involved, and that's going to reduce the friction of getting this stuff paid for. Correct, and this observation was also there, if you must have noticed that, many of these sort of transformative strategies, if you just leave it to like an IT thing, they end up being reactive. But the proactive strategies are the one that actually succeed because they understand that this is a sort of enterprise transformation, it could be disruptive, it is what is required for the enterprise to get to the next level or to be relevant in this sort of modern economy, if you would. So I think that is what people are reacting to is the fact that this pandemic has pushed people to modernize quickly, and that may have happened as a reaction to the reality of the situation. But more and more, even among these strategies and more and more initiatives that people are taking, they may have sort of a longer term sort of thinking in this, that requires the, definitely without out it's not gonna succeed and they are gonna be in the middle and they will be in the forefront of many technology decisions that they have to make. But having a C-suite level sponsorship in addition to that, with the impetus of what is the business transformation this is actually going to achieve, those you will see will succeed a lot more because otherwise we see that good number of about 80% of these projects fail or they suffer delays or scale back or never get started because the understanding of what is the business value of it is perhaps not clearly articulated instead it just becomes a technology modernization conversation without accompanying benefit. Yeah, got it. Okay, you guys recently announced some updates to your platform, can you run us through the highlights? You know what the customers get and how it relates to this conversation modernizing application strategies? Yes, so we will be releasing our couch base server 7.1 and that is what will be the sort of underneath platform for the couch base Capella, which is our D-Bass. Both have exciting innovations that we would be putting out. Let me just run through a few things on the couch base server 7.1 because there are some amazing capabilities we have introduced there. We are really excited about the opportunities this brings couch base into play. First is we have a brand new storage engine that we put in there which significantly reduces the cost of running couch base with this capability, we can actually consume a lot less memory and that is like a 10x improvement on this one. So from that standpoint, we are 10x more efficient in terms of resource consumption, the expensive memory oriented resource consumption. This now allows couch base to sort of not just cater to those high performance, you know, hyperscale scenarios that we are known for but also the classic disk oriented applications which are not that performance sensitive but they're more cost sensitive. So that's a huge step forward for couch base because there are a lot more opportunities where sort of we become that much more cost efficient for enterprises to run. And this is something that many enterprises have asked for and we know many more use cases where we would be more relevant with that innovation. And this has been a sort of a long journey building storage engines is a very difficult endeavor and we took that on knowing that what we can achieve here would be a game changer for couch base and in terms of how the consolidation of multiple things that you can do in our platform just got this sort of boost of being able to do a lot more with a lot less resources. In addition to that, we have done enhancements to our analytic service with the work that we have done there. It can sort of do a lot more availability of the analytic service which strengthens the analytics side of the product which now allows you to run analysis on JSON straight up without requiring the operational side of the database. So you can just simply do straight off analytic stuff because it can now give you the higher availability and disaster recovery that you would want if you're gonna depend on these systems. With that we are done with some real good work with Tableau integration which makes it easy to visualize this. And one of the important capability we introduced here is the on the entire platform is what we call as user defined functions. This now allows us to write custom logic in JavaScript in the server couch base server. This helps you write procedural logic in the middle of SQL queries which is a humongous capability that the classical systems process now with that we have closed the gap. If you know how to program to sort of classical relational systems pretty much you have one-to-one equivalence of that in couch base. So if you come from the good relational world it will be very easy for you to understand how to program in this modern no SQL systems which both supports SQL as well as the classic asset transaction capabilities. And last we expanded the support to ARM processors and typically ARM processors at least save you quarter of your budget because of it being that much more cost efficient in terms of its operational and power capabilities. So with that net net couch base server becomes a lot more cost efficient at the same time. It also in once falls who becomes that database server which can both handle your in memory capabilities that speed and a hyperscale as well as the classical use cases of being disc-oriented classical relational database the use cases. Nice. So that rounds out our offering. It's been a long journey for us to get here from being the high performance low latency system to the classical database use cases. Yeah, I mean, that's great. You got memory optimization. You mentioned the ARM base. Now you're on that curve which is great software companies love when you get cheaper, faster hardware. You're making it easy to speak the language of traditional stuff. So that's awesome. You and I, you mentioned Capella. You and I talked about at couch base connects Capella. You've been moving hard with your DBAS strategy. How's it going? And then beyond these announcements what should we look for from couch base? You know, our fundamental mission is to make the developer experience that much more easier, that much remove all the frictions that has existed for developers to adopt couch base. And the Capella strategy is to leverage the cloud. So you have number one, the ease of development just bring your browser start to learn and develop even simple sample applications and deploy them from there you can scale and you can have production level deployments that whole journey of a developer along with the ability to sort of have your, you know, metered billing and pay as you go pricing so that it becomes easier for developers to sort of consume this and show the value of what they can build here. That is our sort of journey of bringing it closer to our developers and make it simpler for them to sort of get started and build the mission critical applications that they have trusted to build on couch base to become that much more simpler, faster and easier for them. So that's the journey. So that's the kind of announcements you will see coming out in Capella. And for that, this 7-1 server is the platform on which we are sort of adding those capabilities to make a Capella that much easier for developers to adopt. Outstanding, you've been busy and it looks like you got a lot to tell you. All right, we're going to have to leave it there, Ravi. Up next we bring on the customer perspective with Amdox. They've got a real world example of a modernization journey that they go through. They had to modernize legacy Oracle WebLogic infrastructure with a microservices architecture and of course couch base. Keep it right there. You're watching theCUBE. Well, we're a unique sort of database system because we help customers, you know, create modern applications. And if you really look at both the drivers for needing to modernize your applications, our customers find situations where they need to deliver these great kind of user experiences but they lack the flexibility to do so. And they can't adapt their application very effectively or in a timely manner because their older applications are built on relational technology. And, you know, that's very, very structured and oftentimes very difficult to change. But we've certainly found that they need this new kind of adaptability and flexibility to enhance their user experiences, to help match personalized preferences to let's say big dynamic catalogs of products or services. And the main underpinning of this that CouchBase assists with is we offer the JSON document format as our foundation which is very easy to change and modify and add structure to the data itself while the application is running itself. So there's no deployment lag or permission you have to ask for to a DBA. So that's one of the core reasons. The next one, a requirement that we're seeing is really on the developer side. So the implementers have a couple of challenges that they're facing and one is, can I keep using my existing skill set even though I need that flexibility or I need performance at scale as another requirement? But I know SQL, but don't force me to learn something brand new in order to take advantage of these newer capabilities. Give me all the things that I expect out of a database that are born from my experience with relational technologies. So CouchBase supports that with our support for SQL++ as our core query language and the fact that we've got lots of those capabilities built into the database itself. Amdox is a leader in providing software and services to some key industries like telecommunications, media and financial services. In our next session, we welcome Cedric Jaigu who's the head of technical product at Amdox and we'll learn about Amdox modernization journey and how it added value for their end customers. Cedric, welcome. Welcome, how are you? Good, thank you. So describe your modern application, your portfolio and what you're delivering for customers. So Amdox is a BSS OSS player, so we are providing a full digital suite for customers. Our customers are communication service providers which are half to deploy a full digital suite customer experience for the full BSS OSS stacks. So actually Amdox is one of the leaders in this kind of digital transformation. Yeah, so of course you talk about OSS and BSS. I mean, you're talking about some really hardened stacks, right, the telco industry. Say what you want about it, but boy the phone works when you dial it. So you've got sort of a decades old platform that you guys have been evolving over the years. Describe this modernization journey and the role that CouchBase played. What value does this offer, this modernization offer to your organization and where does CouchBase fit? Yeah, exactly, it's the same so that, so basically what is, all solution is, a portfolio of a large number of components which are to deal with from the experience of the user and from, and then dealing all the activation of the services in the network in order to deliver a solution, a pure service like a mobile services or communication services to the end users. So we have a full suite which was previously based on technologies based on the Oracle with WebLogic and things like that. And what we did is that we do a modernization of this something like six years ago, a bit more than six years ago, we start the modernization and transformation of our product into a cloud native solution, cloud native solution. So, and when we did that, we start with CouchBase as a partner to provide the cloud native database. So we are actually delivering, we have an R&D of more than 8,000 people developing this product, it's a product which is used by more than 300 customers. So it's really a product that needs to be very flexible that needs to address many kinds of use cases from our telco or customers, which are CSPs usually tier zero, tier one telcos. So what we wanted to build is a full cloud native solution that can work on any cloud that can scale very easily and can address multiple use cases, okay? And that's why CouchBase, when we selected CouchBase, it matched a lot of requirements and criterias we had. And then when we decided to modernize our product, we decided to work with CouchBase. Yeah, so you had a lot of experience and legacy with Oracle and WebLogic. I'm curious to sort of follow up. Why didn't you stay with Oracle? You mentioned, got to run on any cloud, got to be flexible, but could you double click on what CouchBase delivered from a requirement standpoint that was such a good fit? Well, the good fit with technology which has CouchBase is first, it's a NoSQL database, right? So it's in terms of performance for some of the use case that we have, it's very important to have technology which are ardent and optimized for the NoSQL use cases, that's the first thing. The second thing, as I mentioned, the scalability. The fact that you can almost infinitely, you can increase the size of your cluster. You can have the more servers and this will scale very rapidly. And also what were very interesting to have from CouchBase is the ability to have something which can be replicated across multiple sites. So with the XDCR technology from CouchBase, which enabled to build very modern architecture with deployment on multiple regions to have disaster recovery, active sites, things like that, which are becoming like the main requirement for more customers now. Okay, so I'm presuming there were parts of your application portfolio that you weren't going to touch and throw away. You had to collect or connect the new with the old. That's always a challenge. I'm wondering what advice you'd give to an organization that's kind of investing in a similar path, trying to deliver the best digital experiences to customers. You know, what would you say are the modernization you got to have, must-haves, whether it's architecture, internal culture, what are some of those items? So, David, you're right. I think the integration with the legacy systems is actually a very, very important topic in our domain, in the telco domain. But we made a very, I would say, drastic choice or brave choice when in six years from now, when we decided to reformat, to replatform, sorry, completely our portfolio. Okay, so we changed more than 95% of our portfolio and 95% of our portfolio today are cloud native, which means that they can be deployed on any cloud that actually they are fully scannable and still, we did this transformation now when we do the digital transformation of our telco, of the customer system, then we need to integrate with legacy systems and we need to help our customers to migrate from their legacy systems to cloud native solutions. And doing so, it's important to have, in the database domain, it's very important to have a solution which is very flexible in terms of what kind of data it can manage. And I can, as I said, scale easily for sure, but also it's secure, okay, because when you are moving the data from a legacy system, or a code base or whatever, to another type of database, you want to be sure that you can do it securely and you are not compromising in any sense in terms of security, scalability, et cetera. So in this case, I mean, I will say, in this approach, in this journey, code base was a very, very, very, very important component in our strategy. For all the reasons I mentioned, right? It's very cloud native, it's scalable, it's secure. It's another product, 10 co-grade. So that's why it really is the key aspect here. You know, this notion that 90, you really replatformed 90% of your portfolio and made a cloud native, that's a brave move because a lot of companies do that I've talked to, they'll build an abstraction layer in microservices and make that piece cloud native and then have that kind of overlay. You decided not to do that. Why? Was that for performance reasons? You were worried about bringing along technical debt? I mean, that really must have been an interesting discussion internally in your company. Yeah, Dave, it's true. I mean, the main motivation, the main driver was business flexibility because now we live in a world where our customers, what they need is to be able to test a new feature quickly. They need to be able to scale their system in a matter of hours, okay? So we are not in a domain anymore where when you have to upgrade something, you need to take a few days. It needs to be done very quickly. And the only way to achieve those requirements, these business requirements is to be cloud native. It's to build microservices and to really rely 100% of microservices architectures because this is the only way you will have the business flexibility you will be able to have a resilient architecture. You can deploy this with a full high availability across multiple zones, multiple regions and things like that. So any modern architecture today that is competing with us are actually a microservices-based architecture. There is no other way to achieve, to meet the requirement of the market today. And especially when 5G is coming, things will become much more complex, will become much more distributed. You cannot work anymore with a modern architecture. And again, I think the database is no way different. Needs to follow the same kind of architecture. Needs to follow the same principles. So that's why I mean, another point about Roger. Yeah, so if I had to summarize, it sounds like your top three requirements would be flexibility, which you're getting from the cloud native and microservices piece, the scale and the security. Is that right? Did I get that right? The three top requirements? That's right. On the resiliency as well. I mean, the fact that now with microservices architecture, if one of the system is done, he knows how to restart itself, right? Itself, sorry. So that's this kind of architecture that we built. It's an architecture which can be resilient in a sense that it can sense itself and it can ensure full availability. And if something is going down or it's not working properly, then all sorts of mechanisms will happen in order to go back to a stable state. Yeah, so you've got that automation in there so you don't, doesn't require the labor that it might have 10 years ago. So you're obviously embracing cloud native, microservices. So you're on that journey. I'm curious, what are you doing with that? You're free, you're freeing up. You guys used to bring in lab coats and dig in and figure out what's wrong or restart the system. Where are you in your journey and how are you sort of reallocating those resources and where do you see that going? Yeah, okay. So that's a very good point because actually when we build this new system which is unable to self heal himself, right? Actually the question was more about how we can improve the system even more. How we can be sure that issues that any issues which we are facing will not happen again, will not occur again, okay? And this is an SRE principle, okay? Practice that we have, now people are working on automation. They are building automation around all of these recovery procedures or about fixing. So they are not actually digging into the application now anymore into the system. They learn how the system is working and building all the right automation task to ensure that the system is constantly resilient, right? So that's the SRE practices. Our organization is now built around this kind of approach, devops, pure devops, being fully agile obviously, having a SRE organization or SRE oriented organization. And that's the only way you can reach very high SLA in terms of availability. So the big problem that your traditional telco customers have is the amount of data that they're servicing going through the roof and the cost per bit is sinking like that. And you have all the over the top providers coming in creating these customer experiences with modern applications and they've owned the customer data. You mentioned 5G. So I'm interested what the future of modern apps looks like for Amdox and your customers because 5G gives your traditional telco customers the ability, if they can have these flexible systems that you're providing to now have better relationships with customers and actually kind of reclaim some of that value that they've lost to a lot of competitors. Your thoughts on the future. So first, technically speaking, we will have two challenges. One is about data and the other one is about distribution of the workload. Because when we are speaking about 5G, we are speaking about the age, we are speaking about the fact that an application may be located very closely to the network because it needs to achieve, to deliver a very short latency. And this application can move. So you will have to be able to distribute completely your solutions. And that's why we're working closely with the cloud providers at AWS, Azure or Google. And because we need to be sure that the applications or the systems that we are building will be able to distribute the application as close as possible to the own users. So that's one of the key challenges which means that the application needs to be very portable, needs to be very scalable. And then it needs to be able to move very quickly from one place to another. That's really what is happening now and what will become the norm with 5G. The other challenge is behind the communication of all these components is the release of data because now we will capture more and more data coming from the different systems. And I'm not speaking only about the customer data, who they are, what they like and what they want to do, et cetera. I'm speaking also about the monitoring data of the systems, okay? So we will generate a lot of information and this information needs to be treated very quickly, needs to be stored in very large data lake and we will need to have extraction and manipulation of the data very quickly to give the right informations to the applications. In this case, it's very important to have application to have databases that can, as I said, scale very quickly but also will be able to have very high density node, sense that with a certain amount of memory or sentiment of storage, you can store a lot of data. And this is where we are always checking what is the best technologies and so far, coach-based is the technologies that we're using for storing all those data. Because it's the ratio in terms of performance on the number of data you can store is very high, okay? So that's another challenge that we're addressing. Of course, coach-based is not the only solution but it's another one. Excellent, okay, we're gonna leave it there Cedric. Thanks so much, a great story and really appreciate your insights. You're welcome, Dave. Hi, if you are getting started with the coach-based SDK, you are in the right place. Today, I would like to talk about a few things that will help you to extract the most out of the database and also make your experience smoother. When you install coach-based, the web console is also installed by default and you can access it at the port 89.1 in your browser. However, the SDK does not use this port to connect to coach-based. In fact, it might use a number of ports depending on the protocol and services that you are running. The SDK also needs to access all nodes of the cluster. If for some reason you cannot connect successfully, double check if you have the right credentials and try using the coach-based SDK doctor to check which ports are open in your server. The SDK automatically manages the connection internally so you don't need to do any type of connection pooling or change the defaults unless you have some corner use case. Just use the same reference throughout your application and your code. There are also some time-outs for key value operations and equal. Both of them are aggressive because we expect that the network latency between your application and the database to be minimal. Another reason why we have those time-outs is that at scale it is preferable to fail fast than leaving application threads waiting for a result from the database for too long. As over time, those blocking threads might accumulate and consume all your application threads and consequently is slowing down your throughput. Okay, that's it for today. I hope you've enjoyed the application modernization summit made possible by Couchbase. We shared some fresh survey data and got the perspectives of three expert analysts. We got an outstanding roadmap from Ravi Mayaram who's the CTO of Couchbase. And of course, we got the customer angle from Cedric. So, look, maybe you're an organization going through a modernization initiative. And if you're thinking about what the future of applications looks like, check out Couchbase on the Road this summer. The application modernization summit, it's hitting the road, traversing North America and Europe. Find out where there'll be near you by visiting couchbase.com slash roadshow. Ravi is going to be there along with other thought leaders and peers who will be sharing learnings and best practices on how to modernize now and for the future. And you'll get a chance to interact when some of those peers, something that everyone I know is looking forward to. This is Dave Vellante. Thanks for joining us today. And thanks for watching theCUBE.