 Good afternoon everyone, welcome back. It's theCUBE live at Snowflake Summit 2023, coming to you from Caesars Forum in toasty, warm, sunny Las Vegas. I'm guessing I've been inside for about 24 hours now. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. Dave, we've been talking a lot about cloud cost optimization the last month or so on theCUBE. It's an incredibly important balance for customers to get optimization performance. We're going to be talking about that with one of our alumni next. Yeah, I mean other than AI, it's sort of the topic of du jour, right? Companies facing headwinds, they're a little bit careful, they got cloud they can optimize, that's the beauty of cloud, right? It's not a feature, I mean it's not a bug, it's a feature. It is a feature. Please welcome back. One of our alumni, Patrick Bartsch is here, Senior Director of Product Management at Capital One Software. Patrick, it's great to see you, welcome back. Thank you very much, good to be back with y'all. So give the audience just a quick refresher, Capital One Software, this is the software business of Capital One. Everyone knows Capital One, what's in your wallet. Talk to us a little bit about that. Why did Capital One launch this last year? Capital One Software is the enterprise B2B division of Capital One that's focused on bringing our cloud and data management products to market. Over the last several years, we've had to build a number of products and platforms to enable us to operate as a regulated entity at scale in the cloud. And so it was a natural evolution for us to start bringing some of these tools to market. Talk a little bit about cloud cost optimization. As Dave and I were bantering, we've been talking about it a lot in the cloud. It is a hot topic besides AI. What's your advice on how companies should be thinking about cloud cost optimization, balancing cost, and performance so that they can really drive competitive differentiation? And so the key challenge here is that the cloud is a story of more. More power, more flexibility, more speed of adoption, more data into the hands of more people to create more and better business insights. But if you lean too heavily into that story of more, you open yourself up to risk on two fronts. Data security risk and cost overruns. But if you focus too much on governance, then you slow your teams down, you become a bottleneck and you don't achieve the benefits that the cloud ostensibly provides. And so we think about this as optimizing price performance and striking that perfect balance between efficiency and enablement and governance. I think your timing a year could have been more perfect because we entered this year, practitioners were expecting IT decision makers to spend probably a five to 6% increase in their budget. That's down now, that's down to mid twos. Okay, so everybody what they did is they said, all right, let's do what we can, consolidate, redundant vendors, and one of the things they obviously did is get a lot of data in the cloud. Let's dial that down, maybe store less data. We actually, I wrote a piece in May and one of our ETR, our survey partner, which of the metrics is most prone to surprise cloud bill overages? I thought it was going to be compute. Database came up, number one. And I was like, hmm, I wonder if there's a lot of snowflake accounts in there because it's all embedded, it's all in there. And so your tooling can help with that problem. I said the timing has been perfect. What's the reception been like? So to address your first point, everybody goes to the cloud, they think, oh, the unit cost of storage is zero. Well, it's approaching zero, but it's not zero. And so you kind of have to keep an eye on it. You have to have visibility on how much you're spending on all of your cost drivers across all of your accounts because you don't want to wake up one day and say, oops, what'd we miss? The reception so far has been really positive. We're really happy with the feedback that we've gotten from customers. We had one company tell us it was like having an extra data engineer on staff at the fraction of the cost. One company told us that they were really excited because we've automated a number of tasks that they used to perform manually. We actually are partnering with Pitney Bose on a theater session tomorrow at 2.30 where they're going to talk about how Slingshot fits into their overall data mesh construct. And so we're really excited about what the feedback we've gotten from customers. And I think historically about how pre-cloud, how organizations would save money, it was like cleaning the attic. You never wanted to do it, but if you had to, if things were tight, you had to go reclaim wasted storage and things like that that was just a heinous exercise. The cloud obviously different. It's easier if you have the tooling to figure it out. My premise here, Patrick, and I wonder if you could comment is I think a lot of this is going to be permanent. I think people are going to say, well, I learned the muscle memory of how to cloud optimize during this, let's say 2022 to 2023. And I don't have to give that up now, even in good times. I'm going to keep doing that and then invest elsewhere. Do you buy that premise? So I think the overall objective is to ring every last ounce of efficiency out of every dollar of spend. And so as long as you're doing that, and you're monitoring that, then you're free to invest more in additional use cases and additional value for your customers. And you can trust that if you're spending more, it's because you're doing more and you're driving more business value, not because you're, there's wastage in the system. Absolutely, yeah. So okay, so what specifically can I do with Slingshot? So some of the new features that we're really excited to have launched last week, one is offer more customization. And so let's say you're a retailer and you have multiple accounts for each one of your brands, and you want to track something like shrinkage across each one of those brands. You could go into each account individually and tag the infrastructure and workloads with a common set of values and then build a custom process to extract that data to a central location and then build another custom process to visualize it. Or you could use Slingshot, do that all in one step through automation. So we're excited about that. Second is we've broadened the scope of our recommendations to not just focus on cost savings, but to focus on efficiency and optimization as well. Because there are times when maybe you have a really important job that's running and you don't mind spending a bit more. It's not always about saving money. And then third is one of the challenges of the cloud is that for the first time bad queries cost money because they don't let your warehouse sleep. And so we launched a intelligent query advisor tool that analyzes your queries and optimizes them and helps your analysts be more efficient with how they're using SQL. So this puts money right to the bottom line. I want you to explain shrinkage because Target earlier this year announced they projected they lost $800 million last year. I mean, huge numbers and a half a billion dollars in projected for an upcoming quarter. There's a giant impact on retail organizations. Explain specifically how you might help. The point that I'm making is really about being able to track a common set of use cases or a common function across multiple accounts. That's one example. Example of Capital One might be something like fraud where you want to track it across retail bank, commercial bank, credit card. But the point is we make it much easier to identify those horizontals and tag those horizontal pieces of infrastructure with common values that let you extract relevant information so that you can make decisions that are right for your business. Talk a little bit about the retailer example. Retailer example is interesting. We've seen so much change. You mentioned Target, lots of stuff going on recently. But talk about some of the key benefits that an organization, whether it's a retailer or a life sciences organization, is going to achieve obviously cost optimization efficiency. And some of the other things, visibility sounds like you mentioned governance. So visibility for sure. We make it really easy to understand where you're spending money on all of your snowflake cost drivers, not just storage and compute. We make it really easy for you to identify and optimize the poorly written queries that are driving kind of the wasted spend. And that's really common across any industry. I mean, you look at some of the customers in our press release. They're not just other financial institutions. They're not just other regulated entities. Some are, but we've got retailers. We've got CPG companies. And we do have a couple financial companies as well. That's the interesting thing about this is it's very Amazon EWS-like where you guys develop this internally, sort of I guess perfected it, or prove the product market fit internally and then pointed it to the external world. But it's not just confined to financial services. It's a classic horizontal play. That's right. And we've been really excited about the feedback we've gotten from companies and other industries. We spent the last year making sure that we're building the right product for the right set of customers. And so we're, we've been pleased that it's applicability across industries. Are you, oh, sorry, Dave. Please go ahead. I was going to say, are you kind of mirroring from a partnership perspective with SNF? Like I know you guys are a large user mirroring how their data clouds are kind of being aligned to vertical industries and then the latest is public sector. Is that something that's going on with Capital One software as well? Snowflake's been a great partner for us. I mean, we were one of their biggest users. We were one of their earliest investors. We have a great relationship with them. And, you know, we look at the services that they offer almost like building blocks that we can build experiences on top of. And so, you know, whether it's budgets, whether it's utilization, whether it's the ability to spin up a warehouse, Snowflake creates sort of the basic building blocks and we create experiences that let you add custom governance, empower your analysts, empower your data teams to operate via self-service. So when they talk about Snowflake talks about, you know, their cost optimization capabilities, those are tools essentially or Lego blocks that you then leverage in your products. That's right, that's right. And so we can put several of those things together to create end-to-end use cases for our customers. So how is Capital One and Slingshot, how is it different from sort of competitive products? Couple different ways. So this is the only product that I know that allows companies to roll out really the new way of operating in the cloud, which is federation and self-service. To strike that right balance of governance and enablement that I was talking about before, you have to enable your teams through a central platform that's tooled with central policies. Kind of a data meshy principle. We're the only product I've seen that does that. Second, the breadth of our recommendation engine is pretty significant. And third, I mean, it's battle tested. Like we've used this internally. We're using the exact same product to operate at scale in the cloud. And so we're excited about the differentiation we bring. Are there any particular announcements that you heard this morning? But maybe you didn't hear them. You might have been busy. Were you in the keynote or no? I got a couple updates. Okay, is there anything in there that you see as a developer to say, okay, this is going to make my life better. Maybe it's the AI stuff. We heard a lot of excitement, hype last night from Jensen. Bring us back to sort of real world in terms of how you can apply some of this stuff. The two things that I'm most excited about that they announced this morning were their budgets capability and their utilization metric. It's going to make it easier for us as a third party tool to understand what's going on under the hood of our customer snowflake account and help our customers more easily manage their spend. And so, you know, AI is super hot right now. But what is the raw material of AI need? It needs exceptional data management and it needs exceptional cost controls. And so, we're excited about our ability to support our customers as they dabble in those spaces. Right. Go ahead. How are you helping customers? One of the things that I think Frank Sluteman said this morning in the keynote is an AI strategy requires a really solid, robust data strategy. When you're talking to customers, where are they on that data strategic front? So that they can leverage the value of AI and develop new apps and products and services. I would say that most companies, the way I think about it is where are you on the maturity curve of your operating model? And so, in the old world, business teams would make data requests of a central enterprise data team that team has a fixed capacity and they quickly become a bottleneck. When you move to the cloud, you have to empower teams to operate via self-service in a federated model through a common set of platforms and tools. And so, I kind of look at customers as where are they on that maturity scale? And that kind of drives what value we can offer them. Because if they are sort of in this older mindset, then they're going to get value out of our visibility, our recommendations, our query advisor. But if they are more forward-leaning, then they can leverage all of our functionality around governance and workflows and separation of duties and federated approvals. I heard Cybersyn was up there this morning. You might not have caught that. They said they're exclusive to Snowflake. Are you exclusive to Snowflake? Currently, we are, yes. Currently, but that sounds like that might be in the future plans to expand? Nothing to announce right now. We'll of course keep y'all posted if that ever changes, but we're excited to be here at Summit. We're excited about our partnership with Snowflake and that's what we're focused on. As we've evolved over the last, over the first year, I said, going into year two with Slingshot, some of the, you talked about some of the features that were just announced. What are some of the things that excite you about, if you had a crystal ball looking into the future for Slingshot, I want to make a pun there with Slingshot going forward, but I can't quite think of it right now. So when you look at how you optimize your Snowflake spend, you have two levers. There's right sizing your infrastructure and then optimizing your workloads. We have, in my opinion, the best solution for right sizing your infrastructure. We've launched the first version of our workload optimization tool. And so our continued progress there, our roadmap to how we deepen that functionality, how we offer more value around workload optimization is where I'm excited about where we're headed. Awesome. Maybe a new tagline for Capital One Software. What's in your data cloud? You know, we've joked about the what's in your cloud tagline before. Didn't want to say it. My comms person might yell at me. Sorry guys, it was me. It was me. I take full responsibility. Patrick, great to have you back on theCUBE a year after Slingshot. Congratulations on the success that you've had, the best practices that you're sharing with the customers, the growth, the adoption, and the evolution. We look forward to talking to you next year. Thank you so much. Great to be here. It's a pleasure. For Dave Vellante and our guest, I'm Lisa Martin. Up next, Cube alumni, Matillion joins Dave and me with customer EDF energy. We're going to be talking about recent survey data from Matillion on the challenges data team space. We're going to talk about how EDF energy out of Britain is partnering with Matillion and Snowflake to remain really competitive and innovative among energy providers. Stick around, Dave and I will be right back with our next guests.