 From Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE, covering the 15th Annual Grow Awards. Brought to you by ACGSV. Hey Lisa Martin with theCUBE on the ground at the Computer History Museum at Mountain View, California for the 15th Annual ACGSV Grow Awards. Can you hear the energy and all the innovation happening behind me? Well I'm here with one of the board members of ACGSV, Ashley Charver, Big Data Evangelist for Cloudera. Ashley, thank you so much for joining me on theCUBE tonight. My pleasure, I'm glad to be here. A lot of collaboration going on behind us, right? It's a great networking event. There's so many people who showed up. There's about, there's over 230 people unexpected tonight, over 100 of those are C-levels. Before we get into your association with ACGSV, talk to us a little bit about what's going on at Cloudera, does the Hortonworks acquisition was just completed the merger a couple months ago? What's going on there? It's very exciting. As most people might know, we just did a major collaboration merger with the company called Hortonworks and the two companies together were about twice the size as we were before and for the industry and for our customers it's been really exciting because we've been able to really create what we call the enterprise data cloud that really enables our customers to bring all their data together into one single platform and we call it an edge to AI solution. We're really one of the only companies right now in the world who have the ability to do that in a comprehensive manner and we can do it on the premise, we can do it in a cloud, a hybrid cloud environment so it gives you the ultimate flexibility and the merger has allowed us to really accomplish that for our customers. As we and every company that's succeeding today is living in this hybrid multi-cloud environment where the edge is proliferating, the security perimeters are morphing dramatically. Companies need to be able to transform digitally in a secure way but also enable access to data from decades ago. Yeah, most anybody who's listening to the media will hear IoT is really the big play and the ability to capture all that data from multiple endpoints, edge devices and bring it all into a single data repository is a major challenge so having the ability to do that in a, you can do it now with the way we're doing it the way your company wants to do it so if you're already in the cloud you can stay there, if you want to keep it on the premise so there's a lot of options that we now bring to the table so hopefully it becomes a little easier for our customers. So when you're talking with customers that maybe have a lot of workloads, enterprise workloads, maybe legacy is still on-prem and you're talking to them and your role as a big data evangelist. Yes. Where does the topic of AI come up? I mean, are you talking to them about here is a massive opportunity for you to actually leverage AI? You've got to go to the cloud to do it? Absolutely, I mean AI is kind of a marketing term that you hear a lot about. For us it's really about machine learning and machine learning is taking large sets of data and putting logic on top of it and so you can tease out valuable insights that you might not otherwise get. So the ability to then apply that in an AI environment becomes extremely important and the ability to do that across a large data set is what's really complicated. But if you're a real data scientist you want to have as much data as you can so your models can run more accurately and as soon as you can do that you'll have the ability to really improve your models, extract better insights out of the data you do own and provide more value to your own company and your own customers. Absolutely, it's a fascinating topic but since we're low on time here we are at the 15th Annual Grow Awards. ACGSV recognizing Arista Networks for the Outstanding Growth Award and Adesto Technologies for the Emerging Growth Award. You've been involved as a board member of ACGSV for about a year now. What makes this organization worthy of your time? Well it's really exciting because in Silicon Valley it's unique because it's all about collaboration. The innovation that we create out of this location to the globe is through networking with our peers and ACG opens up that window, provides a door that allows you to meet with your peers, your competitors, your friends and as a result you can create insights and capabilities about your own company and technology directions that's really helpful. So it's the networking, they also put on excellent C-Circle events which is really good because if your company is looking at growing as a startup you might be able to get some valuable insights from peers who know how to do HR, merger acquisitions, finance and so the ability to do networking like an event like this, the ability to come in and learn how to do business processes more effectively that all plays a really important role at ACG. Well Ashley, thank you so much for carving out some time to join us on theCUBE tonight. My pleasure, thanks for having me. I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE.