 Live from San Jose, it's theCUBE. Presenting Big Data Silicon Valley. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE. Our continuing coverage of our event Big Data SV continues, I'm Lisa Martin joined by Peter Burris. We're in downtown San Jose at a really cool place called Forger Tasting in Eatery. Come down, hang out with us today as we have continued conversations around all things Big Data, everything in between. This is our second day here and we're excited to welcome to theCUBE the CMO of Vantik, Blaine Matthew. Blaine, great to meet you, great to have you on the program. Great to be here, thanks for inviting me. So Vantik, you guys are up the street in Walnut Creek. What do you guys do? What are you about? What makes Vantik different? Well, in a nutshell, Vantik is a so-called high productivity application development platform to allow developers to build, deploy, and manage so-called event-driven real-time applications, the kind of applications that are critical for driving many of the digital transformation initiatives that enterprises are trying to get on top of these days. Digital transformation, it's a term that can mean so many different things but today it's essential for companies to be able to compete, especially enterprise companies with newer companies that are more agile, more modern. But if we peel apart digital transformation, there's so many elements that are essential. How do you guys help companies, enterprises, say, evolve their application architectures that might currently not be able to support an actual transformation to a digital business? Well, I think that's a great question, thank you. I think the key to digital transformation is really a lot around the concept of real time, okay? The reason Uber is disrupting or has disrupted the taxi industry is the old way of doing it was somebody called the taxi and then they waited 30 minutes for a taxi to show up and then they told the taxi where to go and hopefully they got there, whereas Uber turned that into a real time business, right? You ping something on your phone, they knew your location, they knew the location of a driver, they matched those up, brought them together in real time, already knew where to bring you to and ensured you had the right route in that location. All of this data flowing, all of these actions have been taken in real time. The same thing applies to a disruptor like Netflix, okay? In the old days, Blockbuster used to send you a leaflet in the mail telling you what the new movies are, maybe it was personalized for you, probably not. Now Netflix knows who you are instantly, gives you that information again in real time based on what you've done in the past and is able to deliver the movie also in real time. Pretty well, every disruptor you look at around digital transformation is bringing a business or a process that was done slowly and impersonally to make it happen in real time. Unfortunately, enterprise applications and the architectures, as you said a second ago, that are being used in most applications today weren't designed to enable these real time use cases. A great example is Salesforce. So a Salesforce is a pretty standard, what you'd call a request response application. So you make a request, a person generally makes a request of the system, system goes into a database, queries that database, finds information and then returns it back to the user. And that whole process could take and could take significant amounts of time, especially if the right data isn't in the database at the time and you have to go request it or find it or create it. A new type of application needs to be created that's not fundamentally database centric, but it's able to take these real time data streams coming in from devices, from people, from enterprise systems, process them in real time and then take an action. So let's pretend I'm a CEO. Yeah. One of the key things you said, and I want you to explain it better, is event. Is what? What is an event? What is an event and how does that translate into a digital business decision? Yeah. This notion of complex event processing, CEP has been around in technology for a long time and yet it surprises me, still a lot of folks we talked to, CEOs have never heard of the concept and it's very simple really. An event is just something that happens in the context of business. That's as complex and as simple as it is. An event could be a machine increases in temperature by one degree. A car moves from one location to another location. It could be an enterprise system, like an ERP system approves a PO. It could be a person pressing a button on a mobile device. All of those, or it could be an IoT device putting off a signal about the state of a machine. Increasingly we're getting a lot of events coming from IoT devices. So really any particular interesting business situation or a change in a situation that happens is an event. And increasingly driven as you know by IoT, by augmented reality, by AI and machine learning, by autonomous vehicles, by all these new real-time technologies are spinning off more and more events, streams of these events coming off in rapid fashion and we have to be able to do something about them. Let me take a crack at it and you tell me if I've got this right. That historically applications have been defined in terms of processes and so in many respects there was a very concrete, discreet, well-established and programmed set of steps that were performed and then the transactions took place. An event, it seems to me as, yeah, we generally described it, but it changes in response to the data. So an event is kind of like an outside in driven by data. System response, whereas traditional transaction processing is an inside-out driven by a sequence of programmed steps and that decision might have been made six years ago. So the event is what's happening right now formed by data versus a traditional transaction is much more, what do we decide to do six years ago and it just gets sustained, is that right? Absolutely right, or six hours ago or even six minutes ago, which might seem, wow, six minutes, that's pretty good, but take a use case for a field service agent trying to fix a machine or an air conditioner on top of a building. In today's world now, that air conditioner has hundreds of sensors that are putting off data about the state of the air conditioner in real time. The service tech has the ability to, while the machine is still putting off that data, be able to make repairs and changes and fixes, again in the moment, see how that is changing the data coming off the machine and then continue to make the appropriate repairs in collaboration with a smart system or an application that's helping them. That's identifying patterns about what the problem is. Exactly. Versus some of the old ways was, well we had a recipe of steps that you went through in the call center and the customer's getting more and more frustrated. They got their clipboard out and had the 52 steps they followed to see, oh that didn't work, now the next step, no, data can help us do that much more efficiently and effectively if we're able to process it in real time. So in many respects, what we're really talking about is an application world or a world looking forward where the applications which historically have been very siloed, process driven, to a world where the application function is much more networked together and the output of one application is having a significant impact through data on the performance of an application somewhere else. That seems like it's got the potential to be an extremely complex fabric. So do I wait until I figure all that out and then I start building it or do I, I mean how do I do it? Do I start small and accrete and grow into it? What's the best way for people to start working on this? Well you're absolutely right. Building these complex, geeking out a little bit, asynchronous, non-blocking, so-called reactive applications, that's the concept that we've been using in computer science for some time, is very hard, frankly, okay? It's much easier to build computing systems that process things step one, step two, step three in order, but if you have to build a system that is able to take real time inputs or changes at any point in the process at any time and go in a different direction, it's very complex. And computer scientists have been writing applications like this for decades, it's possible to do, but that isn't possible to do at the speed that companies now want to transform themselves, right? By the time you spec out an application and spend two years writing it, your business, your competitors have already disrupted you, your requirements have already changed, you need to be much more rapid and agile. And so the secret sauce to this whole thing is to be able to write these transformative applications or create them, not even write is actually the wrong word to use, to be able to create them. Generate them. Yeah, generate them in a way which is very fast, does not require a guru level developer in reactive Java or some super low level code that you'd have to use to otherwise do it so that you can literally have business people help design the applications conceptually, build them almost in real time, get them out into the market and then be able to modify them as you need to, you know, on the fly. If I can build on that just for one second, so it used to be we had this thing called computer assisted software engineer. Right, right. We were gonna operate this very, very high level language kind of, but then we would use code and build the code and the two of them were separated. And so the minute that we deployed, somebody would go off and maintain and the whole thing would break. Right, right, right. Do you have that problem? No, well, that's exactly right. So the old, you know, the previous way of doing it was about really modeling an application, maybe visually, drag and drop, but then fundamentally you created a bunch of code and then your job, as you said after, was to maintain and deploy and manage. You tried to sustain some connection back up to that beautiful visual model. And you probably didn't, because that was too much work, so forget about the model after that. Instead, what we're able to do these days is to build the applications visually, you know, really for the most part, with either super low code or in many cases no code, because we have the ability to abstract away a lot of the complexity, a lot of the complex code that you'd have to write, we can represent that, okay, with these logical abstractions, create the applications themselves and then continue to maintain, add to modify the application using the exact same structure. You're not now stuck on, now you're stuck with 20,000 lines of code that you have to add it. You're continuing to run and maintain the application just the way you built it, okay. We've now got to the place in, you know, computer science where we can actually do these things, we couldn't do them, you know, 20 years ago with case, but we can absolutely do them now. So I'm hearing from a customer internal perspective a lot of operational efficiencies that Vantik can drive. Let's look now at, from a customer's perspective, what are the business impacts they're able to make? You mentioned the word reactive a minute ago and you were talking about applications, but do you have an example where you've, Vantik has enabled a customer, a business to be more, to be proactive and be able to identify through, you know, complex event processing what their customers are doing to be able to deliver relevant messages and really drive revenue, drive profit. So many, you know, so many great examples. And I mentioned field service a few minutes ago. We've got a lot of clients in that, doing this real-time field service using these event processing applications. One that I want to bring up right now is one of the largest global shoe manufacturers. Actually that's a client of Vantik. I unfortunately can't say the name right now because they want to keep what they're doing under wraps, but we all definitely know the company and they're using this to manage their, the security primarily around their real-time global supply chain. So they've got a big challenge with companies and in different countries, redirecting shipments of their shoes, selling them on the gray market at different prices than what are allowed in particular different regions of the world. And so through both sensorizing the packages, the barcode scanning, the enterprise systems bringing all that data together in real time, they can literally tell in the moment if a package is redirected to the wrong region or if literally a shoe or a box of shoes is being sold where it shouldn't be sold at the wrong price. They used to get a monthly report on the activities and then they would go and investigate what happened last month. Now their fraud detection manager is literally sitting there getting this in real time saying, oh, Singapore sold a pallet of shoes that they should not have been able to sell five minutes ago. Call up the guy in Singapore and have him go down and see what's going on and fix that issue. That's pretty powerful. Definitely, so like reduction in fraud or increase in fraud detection. Sounds like too, there's a potential for a significant amount of cost savings to the business. Not just meeting the external customer needs but from a cost perspective reduction, not just in probably TCO, but in operational expenses. For sure, although I would say most of the digital transformation initiatives, when we talk to CEOs and CIOs, they're not focused as much on cost savings as they're focused on, A, avoiding being disrupted by the next interesting startup, B, creating new lines of business, new revenue streams, finding out a way to do something differently or dramatically better than they're currently doing it. It's not only about optimizing or squeezing some cost out of their current application, this thing that we are talking about, I guess you could say it's an improvement on their current process, but really it's actually something they just weren't even really doing before. Just a total different way of doing fraud detection and managing their global supply chain that they just fundamentally weren't even doing. And now of course they're looking at many other use cases across the company, not just in supply chain, but smart manufacturing, so many use cases. To your point about savings though, there's what value does the application itself bring? Then there's the question of what does it cost to build and maintain and deploy the application itself. And again with these new visual development tools, they're not modeling tools, you're literally developing the application visually. I've been in so many scenarios where we talk to large enterprises, we talk about what we're doing like we talk about right now and they say, okay, we'd love to do a POC, proof of concept, we want to allocate six months for this POC, like normally you would probably do for building most enterprise applications. And we inevitably say, well, how about Friday? How about we have the POC done by Friday? And we get the Germans laugh uncomfortably and we go away and deliver the POC by Friday because of how much different it is to build applications this way versus writing low level Java or C-sharp code and sticking together a bunch of technologies and tools because we abstract all that away. And the eyes drop open and the mouth drops open and it's incredible what modern technology can do to radically change how software is being developed. Wow, big impact in a short period of time, but that's always a nice thing to be able to deliver. It is, it's great to be able to surprise people. Exactly, exactly, Blaine thank you so much for stopping by sharing what Vantik is doing to help companies be disruptive and for sharing those great customer examples, we appreciate your time. Welcome, appreciate the time. And for my co-host Peter Burris, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's continuing coverage of our event, Big Data SB Live from San Jose down the street from the Strata Data Conference. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest after a short break.