 Live from Midtown Manhattan, it's theCUBE, covering Big Data, New York City 2017, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and it's ecosystem sponsors. Okay, welcome back everyone here. Live in New York City, this is theCUBE from SiliconANGLE Media, special exclusive coverage of the Big Data World at NYC. We call it Big Data NYC in conjunction with Strata Hadoop, Strata Data, Hadoop World, all going on kind of around the corner from our event here on 37th Street in Manhattan. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE with Peter Burris, head of research at SiliconANGLE Media and general manager of Wikibon Research. And our next guest is one of our famous CUBE alumni, Prakash Nanduri, co-founder and CEO of Paxata, who launched this company here on theCUBE at our first inaugural Big Data NYC event in 2013. Great to see you. Great to see you, John. Great to have you back. You've been on every year since and it's been the lucky charm you guys have been doing great. It's not broke, don't fix it, right? So the CUBE is working with you guys. We love having you on. It's been a pleasure, you as an entrepreneur are launching your company. Really the entrepreneurial mojo. It's really what it's all about. Getting access to the market, you guys got in there and got a position. Give us the update on Paxata, what's happening? Awesome, John and Peter, great to be here again. Every time I come here to New York for Strata, I always look forward to our conversations, right? And every year we have something exciting and new to share with you. So if you recall in 2013, it was a tiny little show and it was a tiny little company and we came in with big plans. And in 2013 I said, you know John, we're going to completely disrupt the way business consumers and business analysts turn raw data into information and they do self-service data preparation. That's what we brought to the market in 2013. Ever since, we have gone on to do something really exciting and new for our customers every year. In 2014, we came in with the first Apache Spark-based platform that allowed business analysts to do data preparation at scale interactively. Every year since last year we did enterprise grade and we talked about how Paxata is going to be delivering our self-service data preparation solution in a highly scalable enterprise grade deployment world. This year what's super exciting is in addition to the recent announcements we made on Paxata running natively on the Microsoft Azure HDI Spark system, we are truly now the only information platform that allows business consumers to turn data into information in a multi-cloud hybrid world for our enterprise customers. And the last few years, I came and I talked to you and I told you about what we're doing and what great things are happening. But this year, in addition to the exciting announcements with Microsoft and other exciting announcements that you'll be hearing, you are going to hear directly from one of our key anchor customers, Standard Sharded Bank. 150 year old institution operating in over 46 countries, one of the most storied banks in the world with 87,500 employees. And- That's not a startup. That's not a startup. They probably have a high bar. They have a high bar. They got a lot of data. They have lots of data and they have chosen Paxata as their information fabric. We announced our strategic partnership with them recently and you know that they are going to be speaking on the Cube this week. And what started as a little experiment, just like our experiment in 2013, has actually mushroomed now into Michael Goritz and Shamik Kundu and the entire leadership of Standard Sharded, choosing Paxata as the platform that will democratize information in the bank across their 87,500 employees. We are going in a very exciting way and a very fast way and now delivering real value to the bank. And you can hear all about it on our website. And- Well, he's coming on to Cube, so we'll drill down on that. But banks are changing me. He's talking about a transformation. What is a teller? It's an Internet of Things device. The watch potentially could be a terminal. So the Internet of Things of people changes the game, right? I mean, are the ATMs going to go away and become like broadcast points or? And you're absolutely right. And really what it is about is it doesn't matter if you're a Standard Sharded Bank or if you're a pharma company or if you're the leading healthcare company. What it is, is that every one of our customers is really becoming an information inspired business. And what we are driving our customers to is moving from a world where they're data-driven. I think being data-driven is fine, but what you need to be is information inspired. What does that mean? It means that you need to be able to consume data regardless of format, regardless of source, regardless of where it's coming from. And turn it into information that actually allows you to get insight and decisions. And that's what Paxata does for you. So this whole notion of being information inspired, I don't care if you're a bank, if you're a car company, or if you're a healthcare company today, you need to have information. For the folks watching that might not know our history, I was launched on theCUBE in 2013 and have been successful every year since. Guys, really deploying the classic entrepreneur success formula, be fast, walk the talk, listen to customers, add value. Take a minute quickly just to talk about what you guys do, just for the folks that don't know you guys. Excuse me, let's just actually give it in the real example of a customer like Standard Chartered. Standard Chartered operates in multiple countries. They have significant number of lines of businesses and whether it's in risk and compliance, whether it is in their marketing department, whether it's in their corporate banking business. What they have to do is a simple example could be I want to create a customer list to be able to go and run a marketing campaign and the customer list in a particular region is not something easy for a bank like Standard Chartered to come up with. They need to be able to pull from multiple sources. They need to be able to clean the data. They need to be able to shape the data to get that list. And if you look at what is really important, the people who understand the data are actually not the folks in IT but the folks in business. So they need to have a tool and a platform that allows them to pull data from multiple sources to be able to massage it, to be able to clean it. So you sell to the business person? We sell to the business consumer. The business analyst is our consumer and the person who supports them is the chief data officer and the person who runs the Paxata platform on their data lake infrastructure. So IT sits at the data lake and you guys just let the business guys go to town on the data. Okay, what's the problem that you solve? You can summarize the problem that you solve for the customers. What is it? We take data and turn it into information that is clean, that's complete, that's consumable and contextual. The hardest problem in every analytical exercise is actually taking data and cleaning it up and getting it ready for analytics. That's what we do. It's the prep work. It's the prep work. As companies gain experience with big data, John, what they need to start doing increasingly is move more of the prep work or have more of the prep work flow closer to the analyst. And the reason is actually pretty simple. It's because of that context because the analyst knows more about what they're looking for and is a better evaluator of whether or not they get what they need. Otherwise you end up in this very, very strange cycle time problem between people in the back end that are trying to generate the data that they think they want. And so by making the whole concept of data preparation simpler, more straightforward, you're able to have the people who actually consume the data and need it do a better job of articulating what they need, how they need it, and making it presentable to the work that they're performing. Exactly, Peter. What does that say about? What does that say about how roles are starting to merge together? Because you've got to be at the vanguard of seeing how some of these mature organizations are working. What do you think? Are we seeing roles start to become more aligned? Yes, I do think so first and foremost, I think what's happening is there is no such thing as having just one group that's doing data science and another group consuming. I think what you're going to be going into is the world of data and information is in all consuming and everybody's role. Everybody has a role in that and everybody's going to consume. So if you look at a business analyst that was spending 80% of their time living in Excel or working with self-service BI tools like our partners Tableau and Power BI from Microsoft, others, what you find is these people today are living in a world where either they have to live in coding scripting world L or they have to rely on IT to get them the real data. So the role of a business analyst or a subject matter expert, first and foremost, the fact that they work with data and they need information, that's a given. There is no business role today where you can't deal with data. But it also makes them real valuable because there aren't a lot of people who are good at dealing with data and they're very, very reliant on these people to turn that data into something that actually is regarded as consumable elsewhere. So you're trying to make them much more productive. Exactly. So four years ago when we launched on theCUBE, the whole premise was that in order to be able to really drive towards a world where you can make information and data-driven decisions, you need to ensure that the business analyst community or what I like to call the business consumer needs to have the power of being able to, A, get access to data, B, make sense of the data, and then turn that data into something that's valuable for her or for him. And others. And others, and others, absolutely. And that's what Paxata is doing in a collaborative, in a 21st century world where I don't work in a silo, I work collaboratively, and the tool and the platform that helps me do that is actually a 21st century platform. So John, at the beginning of the session, you and Jim were talking about what is going to be one of the themes here at the show, and we observed that it used to be that people were talking about setting up the hardware, setting up the clusters, getting a dupe to work, and Jim talked about going up the stack. Well this is one of the indicators that in fact people are starting to go up the stack because they're starting to worry more about the data, what it can do, the value of how it's going to be used, and how we distribute more of that work so that we get more people using data that's actually good and useful to the business. And drives value. And drives value. Absolutely, and if I may just put a chronological aspect to this, right? When we launched the company, we said the business analyst needs to be in charge of the data and turning the data into something useful. Then right at that time, the world of creating data lakes came in thanks to our partners like Cloudera and Hortonworks and others, and MapR and others. In the recent past, the world of moving from on-premise data lakes to hybrid multi-cloud data lakes is becoming reality. Our partners at Microsoft, at AWS, and others are having customers come in and build cloud-based data lakes. So today what you're seeing is on one hand this complete democratization within the business, like at Standard Chartered, where all these business analysts are getting access to data. And on the other hand, from the data infrastructure, moving into a hybrid multi-cloud world. And what you need is a 21st century information management platform that serves the need of the business and to make that data relevant and information and ready for their consumption. While at the same time, we should not forget that enterprises need governance. They need lineage. They need scale. They need to be able to move things around depending on what their business needs are. And that's what Paxata is driving. That's why we're so excited about our partnership with Microsoft, with AWS, with our customer partnerships such as Standard Chartered Bank, rolling this out in an enterprise. That's the democratization that you were referring to with your customers. We see this where you free the data up. Good things happen. But you don't want to have IT be the constraint. You want to let them enable. And IT doesn't want to be the constraint. This is one of the biggest problems they have on a daily basis. They're happy to let it go free. As long as it's in their mind, DevOps like related, this is cool for them. Well, they're happy to let it go with policy and security in place. Our customers, our most strategic customers, the folks who are running the data lakes, the folks who are managing the data lakes, they are the first ones that say that we want business to be able to access this data and to be able to go and make use out of this data in the right way for the bank and not have us be the impediment, not has us be the roadblock. While at the same time, we still need governance. We still need security. We still need all those things that are important for a bank or a large enterprise. That's what Paxata is delivering to the customers. So what's next? I'm sorry, so really quickly. So an interesting observation. We talk, people talk about data being a new fuel of business. It really doesn't work because as Bill Schmarzo says, it's not the new fuel of business. It's the new sunlight of business. And the reason why is because fuel can only be used once. The whole point of data can be used a lot in a lot of different ways and a lot of different contexts. And so in many respects, what we're really trying to facilitate or if someone who runs a data lake when someone in the business asks them, well, how do you create value for the business? The more people, the more users, the more context that they're serving out of that common data, the more valuable the resource that they're administering. So they want to see more utilization, more contexts, more data being moved out. But again, governance, security have to be in place. You bet, you bet. And using that analogy of data, and I've heard this term about data being the new oil, et cetera. Well, if data is the oil, information is really the refined fuel or sunlight, as you like. Yeah, we, yeah. Well, you're riffing on semantics, but the point is, it's not a one-trick pony. Data is part of the development. I've always, I wrote a blog post in 1997, I mean, 2007, that said, data's the new development kit. And it was kind of riffing on this notion of the old days of here's your development kit, SDK or whatever, was how people did things back then, enter the cloud. Yes, right. And boom, there it is. The data now is in the process of the refinery that developers want it. Developers want the data libraries. They want whatever that means. That's where I see it. And that is the democratization where data is available to be integrated in to apps, into feeds, into... Exactly, and so it brings me to our point about what was the exciting new product innovation announcement we made today about intelligent ingest, right? You want to be able to access data in the enterprise regardless of where it is, regardless of the cloud where it's sitting, regardless of whether it's on-premise on the cloud. You don't need to, as a business, worry about whether that is a JSON file or whether that's an XML file that's a relational file, et cetera. That's irrelevant. What you want is, do I have the access to the right data? Can I take that data? Can I turn it into something valuable? And then can I make a decision out of it? I need to do that fast. At the same time, I need to have the governance and security and all of that. That's, at the end of the day, the objective that our customers are driving towards. Prakash, thanks so much for coming on and being a great part of the member of our community. Fantastic. You're part of our smart network of great people out there and entrepreneurial journey continues. Yes. Final question, just observation. As you pinch yourself and you go down the journey, you guys are walking the talk, adding new products. We're a global landscape. You're seeing a lot of new stuff happening. Customers are trying to stay focused on a lot of the distractions with whether it's security or data or app development. What's your state of the industry? How do you view the current market? From your perspective and also how the customer might see it from their impact. Well, first thing is that I think in the last four years, we've seen significant maturity both on the providers of software technology and solutions and also amongst the customers. I do think that going forward, what is really going to make a difference is one, really driving towards business outcomes by leveraging data. We've talked about a lot of this over the last few years. What real business outcomes are you delivering? What we are super excited is when we see our customers, each one of them actually subscribes to Paxata where SaaS company, they subscribe to Paxata not because they're doing the science experiment, but because they're trying to deliver real business value. What is that? Whether that is a risk and compliance solution which is going to drive towards a real cost savings or whether that's a top line benefit because they know what their customer 360s is and how they can go and serve their customers better or how they can improve supply chains or how they can optimize their entire efficiency in the company. I think if you take it from that lens, what is going to be important right now is there's lots of new technologies coming in and what's important is how is it going to drive towards those top three business drivers that I have today for the next 18 months? So that's foundational. That's foundational. Those are the building blocks. What is happening, right? Don't jump in, if you're a customer, it's great to look at new technologies, et cetera. There's always innovation projects and experiments. R&D, do POCs, whatever, kick the tires, et cetera. But now if you're really going to talk the talk about saying I'm going to be, call your word, data-driven, information-driven, whatever it is, if you're going to talk the talk, then you better walk the walk by delivering the real kind of tools and capabilities that your business consumers can adopt. And they better adopt that fast. If they're not up and running in 24 hours, something's wrong. Let me ask one question before we close, John. So your argument, which I agree with, suggests that one of the big changes in the next 18 months, three years, is this whole thing matures and gets more consistent in its application and the value it generates, we're going to see an explosion in the number of users of these types of tools, correct? Absolutely. Two X, three X, five X, what do you think? I think we're just at the cost. I think that this is going to grow up at least 10 X and beyond. In the next two years? In the next, I would give that next three to five years. Three to five years? Yes. And we're on the journey. We're just at the tip of the hype curve taking off. That's what I feel. Yeah, and it's going to be a lot more consolidation. You're going to start to see people who are winning. It's becoming clear as the fog lifts, it's a cloud game, scale game, it's democratization, community-driven, so open source software. Just solve problems, outcomes. I think outcomes are going to be much faster. I think outcomes as a service will be a model that we'll probably be talking about in the future. Real-time outcomes, not eight-month projects or year projects. Certainly we started writing research about outcome-based management. Right. Okay, Mukibon, research, okay, one more thing? I also just want to say that in addition to this business outcome thing, I think in the last five years I've seen a lot of shift in our customers' world where the initial excitement about analytics, predictive AI, machine learning to get to outcomes, they've all come into a reality that none of that is possible if you're not able to handle your, first get a grip on your data and then be able to turn that data into something meaningful that can be analyzed. So that is also a major shift. That's why you're seeing the growth we're seeing. Because it's really hard. It's really hard. I mean, it's a cultural mindset. You have the personnel. It's an operational model. I mean, this is not like throw some pixie dust on it and magically it happens. That's what I say. Before you go into any kind of BI, analytics, AI initiative, stop, think about your information management strategy. Think about how you're going to democratize information. Think about how you're going to get governance. Think about how you're going to enable your business to turn data into information. You remember you can't do AI without IA. You can't do AI without information architecture. There you go. That's a great one. Peter, that's an excellent point. And this points to why Wikibon's research of all the analysts from's got it right with True Private Cloud. Because people got to take care of their business here to have a foundation for the future. And you can't just jump to the future. There's too much this economy is a scale. Too many cracks on the foundation. You got to do your, take your medicine now and do the homework and lay down a solid foundation. All right, Prakash, great to have you in theCUBE. Again, congratulations. And again, it's great for us. I totally have a great vibe when I see you thinking about how you launched on theCUBE in 2013 and how far you continue to climb. Congratulations. Thank you so much, John. Thanks, Peter. That was fantastic. All right, live coverage continuing day one of three days. It's going to be a great week here in New York City. Weather's perfect and all the players are in town for big data NYC. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris. We'll be back with more after this short break.