 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering RSA Conference 2020 San Francisco brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Hey, welcome back everyone, it's theCUBE's coverage here in San Francisco, the Moscone South. We're here at the RSA Conference. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. You know, cybersecurity is now a global phenomenon but companies have to move at the speed of business which now is at the speed of the potential attacks. This is a new paradigm shift, new generation of problems that have to be solved and companies solving them. We have a hot startup here that's growing. Hazel Cast, the CEO of Kelly Harrell, is here. Cube alumni, great to see you. Good to see you, John. Hey, so we know each other, you've been on before. You know networking, you know compute, you know the industry. You're now the CEO of Hazel Cast. So first of all, what does Hazel Cast do? And then we can get into some of the cool things. Well, Hazel Cast is an in-memory compute platform. So we're kind of a neutral platform. You write your applications to us. We sit in front of things like databases and streaming sources and we execute applications at microsecond speeds which is really, really important as we move more and more toward digital and AI. So basically when time matters, when time is money, people buy Hazel Cast. So I got to ask you, you're an industry inventor. You can do a lot of different things. You can run any companies you want. Why Hazel Cast? What attracted you to this company? What was unique about it that got your attention and what made you join the firm? Well, when I first started looking at it and realized that a hundred of the world's largest companies are their customers. And this company really was kind of a run silent, run deep company. A lot of people didn't know about it. I could not, I had this dissonance. Like how can this possibly be the case? Well, it turns out that if you go into the Java developer world, the name is like Kleenex. Everybody knows Hazel Cast because of the open source adoption of it which has gone viral a long, long time ago. So once I started realizing what they had and why people were buying it, then I looked at that problem statement. The problem statement is really increasing with digitization. So the more things are speeding up, the more applications have to perform at really, really low latency. So there was this big, big growth market opportunity and Hazel Cast clearly had the drop on the market. So I got to ask you, so we're at RSA and I mentioned on my intro here, the speed of business has always been kind of the IT kind of cliche. Moving at the speed of business. But now business has to move at the speed of how to react to some of the large scale things, whether it's compute power, cloud computing, and obviously cyber is a tax and a response. How do you view that? How are you guys attacking that problem? Well, you know, it's funny. I think the first time I truly understood security was the day that I was shopping for a home safe. Because I realized that all of these safes, they all were competing on one of the common metric, which is the mean time to break it. You had one job. And all you can tell me is that it's going to happen eventually. So the kind of the scales got peeled off my eyes and I realized that when it comes to security, the only common factor is elapsed time. And so the elapsed time is what matters. And then the second thing is that time is relative. It's relative to the speed of the attack. If I'm just trying to protect my goods in a safe, the elapsed amount of time is how long it can take for the bad guy to break into the safe. But now we're working at digital speeds. So you take a second, break that down to a thousand. That's a milliseconds. It takes 300 milliseconds to blink. Now we're working at microsecond speeds. And we're finding that there are just a really rapidly growing number of transactions that have to perform at that scale and that speed. It may have escaped people completely, but card processing, credit card debit card processing, ever done on you that that's an IoT application now? Because my phone is a terminal, Amazon's a giant terminal, number of transactions go up. They have three milliseconds to decide whether or not they're going to approve that. And now with using Hazelcast, they not just handle it within that three milliseconds, but they also are running multiple fraud detection algorithms in that same window. Okay, so I get it now. That's why the in memory becomes critical. You can't do it unless you're in memory. You've got to be in memory. Okay, so I got to ask the next logical question, which is, okay, I get that. It makes a lot of sense, and I want to dig into that in a second, but let's go to the application developer. Okay, I'm doing DevOps. I'm doing cloud. I'm cool, right? So now you just wake me up and say, wait a minute, I'm not dealing with nanosecond latency. What do I do? How do applications respond to that kind of attack velocity? Well, it's not an evolution. So the application is written to Hazelcast. It's very, very simple to do. There are 60 million Hazelcast cluster starts every month. So people out in the wild are doing this all day long. We're really big in the Java developer community, but not only Java. And so it's very, very straightforward with how to write your application and point it at Hazelcast instead of pointing it at the database behind us. So that part is actually very, very simple. All right, so take me through. I get the market space you're going after. Makes total sense. You're running, I think, the right way, in my opinion. Business model, product, how are you guys organized? Do people sign up for development? Are they on the development side? Who's your buyer? What's the business look like? Share Hazelcast 101. Yeah, yeah, so we're an open core model, meaning the core engine is open sourced and fully downloadable and free to use. The additional functionality is the commercial aspect of it, which tend to be features that are used when you're really going into sensitive and large-scale deployments. So the developers have access to, they just come to hazelcast.org and join the community that way. The people that we engage with are everyone from the developer all the way up through the architect and then the C-level member who's charged with standing up whatever this new capability is. So we talk up and down that chain. We're a very, very technical company, but we've got a very, very powerful ROI on us. So what's the developer makeup look like? Is it a software developer? Is it an engineer? So what's the makeup of the developer engineer? They're core application developers. A lot in Java, increasingly in .NET, as ML and AI are coming on, we're getting a lot of Python. So it's developers with that skill set. And they're basically writing an application that they're, basically their division is specified. So if we need this new application, it could be a new application for customer engagement, an application for fraud detection, an application for stock trading, anything that's super, super time-sensitive. And they select us and they build on us. So you have the in-memory solution for developers. Take me through the monetization on the open cores. Is it services? Is it consultant? It's a subscription, it's a subscription model. So we are paid on an annual basis for full use of the software. And however large the installation gets is a function that basically determines what the price is. And then it's just renewed annually. Awesome. Good subscriptions, good economics. It is. What about the secret sauce? What's under the covers? Can you share what the magic is? Or is it proprietary? Is it math? It's hard core computer science. It really is what it is. And that is actually what is in the core engine. But I mean, we've got PhDs on staff. We're tackling some really, really hard problems. You know, I can build anything in memory. I can make a spreadsheet in memory. I can make a word processor in memory. The question is, how good is it? How fast is it? How scalable, how resilient? So those of you saying speed, resilience, and scale are the foundation. And it took the company years and years to be able to master this. That's an asymptotic attempt. And you're never at the end of that. But we've got, you know, the most resilient system. It doesn't go down. It can't go down because our customers lose millions for every second that it's down. So it can't go down. It's got to scale. And it's got to be low latency no matter what. Which customers do you guys have right now? Can you talk about the public references and why they're using Hazelcast? And what do they say about it? Yeah, I mean, we've got a hundred of the largest. Financial services is about 60% of our revenue. E-commerce is another 20%, large cell codes. Another chunk there. It's just a lot of IOPS, type companies, right? Yeah, basically. So you know, in the financial services, it's all the names that you would know. Every logo in your wallet is probably one of our customers, as an example. Massive banks, card processors. We don't get to talk about very many of them, but you know, something like National Bank of Australia, Capital One, you can let your mind run there. Our largest customer has over a trillion dollar market cap. There's only a few that meet that criteria, so I'll let you sort on that one. I think I'm thinking that one out. One of the three. All right, so what's next for you guys? Give the quick plug on the company. Really appreciate the insights. I think in memory's hot. What are you guys looking to do? What's your growth strategy? What's your priorities as CEO? Yeah, well, we just raised a $50 million round, which is a very, very significant round. And we're putting that to work aggressively. We just came off the biggest quarter in the company's history. So we're really on fire right now. We've established a very strong technology partnership with Intel, including especially because of their AI initiatives, because we power a lot of AI applications. IBM has become a strategic partner. They're now reselling Hazelcast. So we've got a bunch of wind in our sales right now. Coming into this year, what we're going to be doing is really delivering a full-blown in-memory compute platform that can process stored and streaming data simultaneously. Nothing else on the planet can do that. We're finding some really innovative applications, and we're just really, really working on market penetration right now. You know, when you see all these supply chain hacks out there, you're going to look at more in-memory, detection, prevention, counter-strike, you know, all these things you've got to take care of. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, applications have to now respond. It's almost like a whole new SLA for application requirement. Yeah, it is. I mean, the bad guys are moving at digital speed. You know, if you have important apps that are affected by that, you better get ahead of that. You could be doing that, by the way. You could be doing that on your own premise, or you could be doing it in the cloud with the managed service that we've also stood up. Well, soon we'll get theCUBE in memory. Here we go. We're there, we'll be happy. Kelly, congratulations on the funding. Looking forward to tracking you, we'll follow up and check in with you guys. Congratulations, awesome. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Okay, it's CUBE Coverage here in San Francisco, the Moscone. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.