 Welcome back, theCUBE is buzzing today. We're here in our Palo Alto offices and we've got Rekana 2.0 is the topic of conversation. Rekana is doing the launch of the new product. I've got a new guest, Eric Sammers, who's the CTO of Rekana, now joining Omer to talk a little bit about what's under the covers. So we spent some time, Eric, on theCUBE now talking about some of the business problems, the role that data-driven is going to play, how it's going to affect IT operations and some of the things we just went through the crawl, walk, run, but everybody needs to have a little bit of visibility into how the underlying technologies work. We now know a little bit about what it is, but how does it work? So give us a little sense under the covers of how Rekana 2.0 is working. Sure, I think it's funny, the technology very much follows what Omer was talking about in the previous segment around the crawl, walk, run, the technology out of the hood is really there's an entire subsystem devoted to data acquisition, and this deals with the massive data integration problem. So when you guys were talking earlier about sourcing data from all these disparate systems, legacy systems, mainframes, application servers, database servers, there's a whole lot of technology that goes into simply just being able to talk to each one of those systems to acquire that data, normalize it and pull it into a format. In our case, we think of the world as made up of events, whether they're log messages, log events, metric samples, business transactions, like a user started or abandoned a shopping cart, all of these things are modeled as events. So we have a single way of thinking about that data, which again gives us, and then gives the system the ability to correlate and understand the relationships between those different kinds of events. So, there's an entire subsystem devoted to acquiring all that data, to moving it through the system, to pumping it through real-time streaming analytics and transformation to be able to get it into that format and to do the real-time analytics. So you talked about things like being able to take action on this mass volume of event data for things like spinning up VMs in response to increased load or inserting or updating firewall rules based on a denial of service attack or something like that. All of that really comes down to complex event processing, which underpins the Rokana Reflex system, which is really at its core, a complex event processing system that is geared toward simplistic use cases around alerting and notification who doesn't like more email, but all the way through to these sort of more advanced cloud orchestration, multi-data center aware actions that can come off this data. And then on top of that sits all of the advanced analytics, anomaly detection, looking for strange patterns in time series data, data visualization, the ability to kind of go deep into the data and understand exactly what happened. So once you get the alert, you really need the ability to go back down and go, well, why? Okay, so something's wrong, transactions are slow, something like that, but why, what's causing that? So we really need to give operations people, DBAs, network admins, site reliability engineers, DevOps, whatever you wanna call them, the ability to go extremely deep and go back to the original sequence of events that led up to a particular incident. That's actually a great point to maybe go one level deeper on. When you're talking about data collection, it's interesting the folks you talk to and you say, okay, there's lots of data out there, you've gotta get into one place, people logically get it. And yet most folks don't understand how hard it is to get data from point A to point B, not for a business transaction, but multiple orders of magnitude more flowing through the system. And what happens if you don't, right? Well, it's really funny because if you think about it, most organizations will devote an entire team to managing, if you're an ad serving company or something like that, you have a data pipeline team that manages clicks and impressions and all this other kind of stuff. Or at least the data about those clicks and impressions. That's right. And then you have like one lone gunman who's responsible for doing integration with 30 or 40 or 100 different systems. And if you think about the Fortune 100 or the global top end of the market, they not only have hundreds of thousands of systems, they have hundreds of business units that have hundreds of thousands of systems and different acquisitions and all this other kind of stuff. So we sort of acknowledge first class that the business end has these resources and requires these resources. And then we starve IT. And it's a really interesting thing to think about because IT is building the systems that support the rest of the business. I wanna build an ad, Eric, because I have in my background, a fair amount of marketing and a fair amount of technology. And I've observed over the years that for example, marketing automation has underwhelmed. And then for a variety of reasons, that might be the case, but I wanna focus in on one. I find it interesting that folks believe that you can do digital business and marketing automation elements of digital business without altering the way that the underlying systems work and get managed and get handled. And in many respects, is this this notion of retooling the digital business from day to up? Is that a business that's starting to recognize that as a prerequisite for doing digital business in a lot of other functions? We had a very concrete example of a company that was trying to innovate digitally, right? They wanted to capture the customer experience and use that to personalize what people saw, right? What you think of is kind of in this day and age a straightforward problem. And when you get under the covers, you realize that they themselves, IT is actually only responsible for a small fraction of the web experience. A lot of it because it's static images is actually run through a CDN, which means they don't know the end customer experience. They don't know what was served. They don't know the latency behind it. They don't know the order that stuff is loaded on the page or what gets loaded on the page until a week later when the CDN provider ships them over FTP, a zip file of the high level abstraction of rates. So the gap between where they are today and what's just required is basic plumbing to take the next step. Sometimes it's enormous. And it's that enormity that opens up opportunities for competitors to boot you out of that customer's mind. And so the goal here is to try to bring more of that real-time operations, which IT operations people are used to thinking about, even if they can't do it, but bringing through data some of that and making it available to the business more as a service. Right, and step one is data capture, a reliable data capture that's secure, that's encrypted where you manage the life cycle of the data, right? Because data doesn't go into a warehouse and sit there in perpetuity. Eventually, you've got to archive it where you're looking at the governance, where you're auditing, how people access that data. Those are first class problems when you're solving a business problem yet from an IT perspective. Most IT ops tools don't have that, right? We're gonna have that version one because it's necessary. Yeah, I mean, it really is the honeypot, right? When you think about IT data, like that is a treasure trod of PII data and PCI data. PII is? Personally identifiable information. So, if you work at a retailer, customer information that is used for things like identity theft, that could be used for things like identity theft and fraud is seen by, or could be seen by, depending, a large swath of people in IT and the tooling today doesn't understand things like record level access, role-based access control. It doesn't understand lineage and data governance the same way as the business does in the traditional enterprise data warehousing when you get into systems like Teradata and Oracle Exadata and that sort of universe, you understand data management is a real thing that you spend time on. In the IT world, they're just blog files, right? They're just metrics. What possibly could be in there? Well, we were talking earlier about there are a lot of operators within IT who are very happy that nobody's looking at their metrics and that's one of the things that needs to change. So, we've talked about the idea that Rekana is, has at least part of it, and advanced analytics for IT related activities, IT related events. So, next question is, where are some of the, I don't want to call them buzzwords, but they kind of are, but where's AI, where's machine learning, where's some of the other things that are now at the vanguard or vogue within the advanced analytics universe? This one's really interesting because there's a lot of excitement around machine learning. If you go back five years, today AI is like the big exciting thing. This is Omer's favorite, right? The idea- I'm into bots now. Omer's into bots. Omer wants to be able to talk to Rokana ops. That's our next version. I like to reboot my database. Yeah, exactly. But I think that there is something there. That said, and I don't want to beat a dead horse, I do think people start to focus on how to sprint. AI is sprinting. Omer was talking about, how do we crawl? How do we walk? How do we run? It's necessary that you do those things. They are prerequisites. However, unexciting, you know, they may be in order to get good results out of even simplistic techniques like piecewise linear regression and sort of understanding anomaly detection in systems. That the next generation though, I really think is going to be not about automating humans out of managing the data center. It's going to be helping them to understand this massive haystack when they're looking for that one tiny needle. And, you know, we talk about, let's bring all the data together and it gives us better insight. The reality is it's not just about creating the big sort of, you know, bit bucket of data. You know, people use the pejorative, you know, the data swamp, if you will. The difference between the data swamp and the data lake or the data warehouse is really being able to get at the data that you need, combine it the way that makes sense to understand how all of these things correlate and line up. It's the metadata, it's the data management. And so really when I think about AI, when I think about machine learning in a product like Rokana, it's really how can we help people understand, understand and make sense of that data in order to understand what's happening in the business? It's almost like instead of automating intelligence, we're using intelligence to assist people who are good at their jobs, they just have way too much going on to do it entirely in wetwear, right? You just can't think that fast. And the reality is, at least in my opinion, that's where most of this stuff is gonna be in the next 10 years. People are still the primary generators of value because they have discretionary responsibility because they think differently, they can correlate faster. This is making it easier for them to focus on what's really important and specifically, this is making it easier for IT people to focus on what's really important as they try to deliver business value. They can take with RokanaOps too, an operator can take the natural flow, I would look here, here and here, and if these values added up or looked irregular, I would take this action. There's a very simple rule-based flow where you say, I wanna look here, here and here, because guess what, they're all in the same system. I wanna do this every millisecond, right? And if it looks abnormal with the anomaly detection, I can just say it's one standard deviation over what it should have been, trailing back multiple weeks, then take this action and record the fact that you did it so that I can go back and say, oops, we did this wrong, show me all the events that led up to that happening incorrectly. That's the first responder experience there. You can do that all in one system and actually include data from every part of the organization that you need in order to make that kind of decision-making. So two quick comments. First off, Eric, having been there, I can tell you it's a lot nicer looking at a net new email than spending your days looking at monitors and watching events happen. So give me the email, over having a look at the monitors. I hear you. The number two is, this is, today we're talking about IT, I mentioned the idea that maybe some of these advanced analytic technologies where we're trying to do automation in more complex customer-facing functions like marketing, sales fulfillment, product management, servicing, et cetera, that this is a prerequisite. It's on the critical path to making sure that we can do those things right. You anticipate that Rekana is going to evolve over time and this amazing data down inside the systems in ways that allow developers and other people to use this data in their other automation capabilities and other functions. Absolutely. Once you have efficient access to mass volumes of data that is used to orchestrate how the business operates everyone in the business starts looking at that and saying, wow, we can do things that we've never been able to do before. We can respond to this part of the business when we see an early indicator event over there. Those systems were never connected. Finally, through this new generation of IT operations, we actually have this operational visibility. We can do something with it. We can start connecting them. All right, so we've talked about three things today. We've talked about some of the challenges that the digital businesses face and how that's creating problems for IT organizations and how a new substrate for data visibility, handling events can make life easier for the IT organization. We delved a little bit into the business problems and how to go through the crawl, walk, run of incorporating some of these new technologies. We talked a little bit about what's under the hood. So before we go, are there any other resources that you want to make available as part of this whole launch process? Places people can go, things that people can do to get a little bit more information really quickly. Absolutely, we're a digital business. It's on rocona.com. So go to rocona.com and learn more about this. All right, so this has been the rocona 2.0 launch event here in theCUBE. Digital business through a digital medium. I want to thank both Omer Treiman, CEO of Ocona, as well as Eric Sammers, CTO of Ocona for a very interesting discussion. Hope you enjoyed it. We're kind of for additional information and always come back to theCUBE because this is where we're separating the signal from the noise in the world of technology. I'm Peter Burris, thank you very much.