 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Pentaho World 2017. Brought to you by Hitachi Ventura. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Pentaho World. Brought to you of course by Hitachi Ventura. My name is Rebecca Knight and I'm here with Dave Vellante, my co-host. We are joined by Nathan Hart. He is the development manager at Next Gear Capital. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, Nathan. Thanks for having me. So let's start by telling our viewers a little bit about what Next Gear Capital is and what you do there. Sure, Next Gear Capital is a, we do auto financing for auto dealerships. So if a dealer goes to an auction and wants to buy some inventory, we're going to be the ones who actually finance that and purchase it for them and then they pay us back. Great, and your role as a development manager? Yep, I am over our integrations team. So we are responsible for basically getting data in and out of the company. A lot of that is getting data to and from our sister companies all under Cox Automotive. And the data we're talking about is? It's a whole lot of things. Obviously it's a lot of financial data as we are a finance company, but a lot of things like inventory, unit status is where a car is located. We have credit scores and that sort of work as well. So all kinds of data are coming in and out and then into our systems. So are the cars instrumented to the point where you can kind of track where they are, you know, in an automated way or is it? Yes, we do have some GPS units, not on all of inventory just because we have quite a few open floor plans, about 500,000 I believe. So, but yes, we do have some select units that are GPS and that we can track that way or we have inspectors that go to lots. Okay, so as a developer, you know this story well. Back in the day, if you had a big data problem, you'd buy a Unix box and you'd stuff all the data in there and then you'd buy a bunch of Oracle licenses and if you had any money left over, you could actually maybe do something, maybe buy a little storage or maybe conduct business. Okay, that changed quite dramatically. I wonder if you could tell us sort of your version of that story and how it's affected your business. Sure, so... Is it a fair representation? I mean, was it the old world? Was it a big data warehouse world? Yeah, so... Where it was sort of expensive to get stuff in and get stuff out and has that changed or is that sort of? Yeah, it has changed greatly. We're not quite that bad. But we do currently have an older monolithic database system that we are trying to get away from, but so... But it's hard. Yeah, exactly and so a lot of our processes right now go in and come out of this, so obviously if anything in that breaks, it hurts everywhere. Right. So yes. It's a chain reaction. Exactly. Okay, so how have you... Talk about the journey of bringing in Pentaho and how that has affected you. Sure, Pentaho has been great for us just in terms of being able to be really flexible with our data. Like I said, we're trying to get away from this monolithic service. So we have, in Pentaho, we can easily branch off and say go to the monolithic database, but also talk to another service that is going to replace it. And then it's just one click of a button and now this is off, this is on, or we can do both and we can have some replication going. Just so we have that flexibility and that kind of adaptability around those changes. So why Pentaho? I mean, a lot of tools out there. There's open source, you could roll your own. You could do everything in the cloud. Why Pentaho? We liked Pentaho because of the, I guess the freedom and independence it kind of offers in the sense that it allows us to have a large set of steps and tools that are already pre-built that we can just use right out of the box. And it's just a massive library, far greater than most of the competition that we looked at. And then it also is just built on this great Java platform that we can, if we need to, write a custom Java class, pop it in and then that can do what we need to if we don't have something out of the box. So it's integrated, but it's customizable if you need it to be. Okay, and one of the things that customers like you tell us about Pentaho is they like the sort of end to end integration. We were talking off camera, you had mentioned that you've got an initiative to move toward the cloud. Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. Yeah, so right now just Cox as a whole is kind of investigating the cloud. I definitely don't want to speak out of turn or say we're definitely going there, but that is the current initiatives are to start experimenting with how we can leverage this more. I know one of the kind of the first steps that we're taking to that is we have large archives. We keep all of the files we've ever received or sent out and we don't access them much. We don't need them much, but we want to keep them just so we have this history and we can always look back if we need to. So using the cloud for something like that where it's just like a deep storage where we can just upload it and forget it and if we ever need it, it's there and easily accessible. And this way we don't have to pay for as much storage on-prem. Very workload specific, cheap storage. Yep, probably a lot of tests and dev. Exactly. So going back to the Pentaho and why Pentaho and you mentioned the freedom and the flexibility that it provides, can you talk about a little, some of the best practices that you've discovered that could help some other Hitachi Ventura customers? Absolutely. The biggest change that learning curve that we went through, my first introduction was Pentaho when I started at Next Gear. And it was a real huge learning curve for the whole team. We all started within about a month of each other and there were only three of us to start. So it was a real learning curve of, okay, here's how we do this, here's how we do this. So once we kind of got the workflow going and understanding what we were trying to do, the next step was figuring out, okay, we can make this very modular. We can build a sub job that does a very specific task and we can use it everywhere. And we just did that again and again and again. So now we have a library of about 118 different utilities that we can just plug and drop anywhere and they just do what they need to do. We don't need to retest them. We don't need to think about them ever. And there, of course, if we update one of those, it updates every single job that it touches. So it's just, as soon as we kind of unlocked that and figured we didn't have to make a custom solution for every single job that we could use a lot of reusability, it really sped up our development and how we do things. Hey, then can you talk about data sources? Have they or how have they evolved over the last decade? Sure, I can't speak for the whole decade. I haven't actually been in the industry that long. But a lot of what we came into and inherited when I came in were flat files. Just everything is CSV, TXT, either in or out. And we still do a lot of that. That's still kind of our bread and butter just by kind of the nature of our current role. But as it's changing, we are interacting more and more with APIs. We're shifting away from this model of the database into microservices. So we're having to interact with those a lot more and figure out how we can get that real-time communication and get the data where it needs to go. So it's all in its happy place. One of the things that Brian Householder, the CEO, got up in the main stage and talked about how, for companies, the two most important assets are the people and the data. I want to talk to you about the people aspect. We're hearing so much about this shortage, the tech shortage of data scientists and other kinds of talent in this industry. How hard is it for you to recruit? Your company, as you said, is based in Carmel, Indiana. Is that right? What are you finding out there? The greater Indianapolis area, like many other places, is very starved for tech talent. It's very, very easy as a developer to throw a stone and get an interview. It's definitely a challenge. We actually currently have two openings on my team. Just do less with more and do what we can. So it's definitely a challenge, but I think that there's a lot of really great young talent coming out of colleges right now that are coming in, they've grown up with this, right? And they're a lot further along than necessarily I was when I came out of school and some of our other developers. So they can step in and already understand a lot of these complex architectures that we're dealing with and can just hit the ground running. So at least 10 times a week, I get somebody hitting me up on LinkedIn about, hey, do you need development resources? As a developer, it must happen to you a hundred times a week. But there's obviously challenges of offshoring and managing that remotely. I'm sure you've thought about it. What are your thoughts on offshoring? Do you want somebody there in a beehive effect or maybe talk about that a little bit? So at next year, we've been fairly rigid about butts in the seats in the office, real collaborative environment where you're at the morning standup, you're there in the meetings and it's a very present environment. And we are being a little bit more adaptable with that just as times change and other companies obviously do offer more remote from home or what have you. So that is shifting a little bit as far as necessarily offshoring, that's way above my pay grade to even make that call. I have worked in previous environments though where that was a large part of it. In a previous life, we had a US based team and then we had a Malaysia based team and I thought it was a really great experience because we basically all had our own counterparts over there. So at the end of your day, you just email your notes, here's what I did today, here's what I left off and then they pick it up and do the same. And then we had about a weekly meeting so I think it definitely can work and I'm all for the global tech community all coming up together when appropriate and when it works. But you got to have the right infrastructure and processes in place or it's just, it sucks all your productivity out. Absolutely, if you spend half your day trying to figure out what the other person did then you've lost your day. Yeah, and right, yeah, follow the sun, yes and no. Wait for the sun sometimes. Pentaho, back to Pentaho, what are the things that as a customer, you want them to do? What's on their to-do list? When you're talking to Donna Perlich and her team, what are you pushing them for? So the biggest things kind of on our wish list and that we're seeing is interacting more natively with those microservice like I mentioned and I was really glad that that came up in the keynote as something that they're focusing on and it's something that is going to come up in 8.0, at least the kind of stepping stones to go in that direction. So that's really exciting stuff for us, just it answers a lot of questions we're currently having of how are we going to interact with those and the answer can still be Pentaho moving forward. I was struck in the keynote when Brian was asking, okay, how many hands up please? How many people are doing business with Hitachi outside of Pentaho? And just the smattering, right? Presume you, your hand was down. My hand was down. Yeah, and then had you heard of Hitachi Ventara? I read the press release when they first announced Ventara, but that's about the extent of it. Obviously I knew about Hitachi from when they purchased Pentaho. We actually were having a week, a week long kind of a tech support get together that week that it happened. So I think on the Tuesday or something, our rep was like, I know work for Hitachi. Like it was a fun thing. But yeah, I'm not terribly familiar with Hitachi's products or I obviously, I know where they're going with the Ventara. But as a developer in a very focused area, I mean Cox Automotive obviously has some IOT initiatives I'm sure. Absolutely. It's a process automation, but I presume you haven't really dug into that yet, but when you think about the messaging that you heard this morning, what does it mean to you? Do you say, okay, nice, but I got other problems? Or do you see the potential to leverage some of the technologies down the road? I definitely see the potential to start, you know, at least exploring that direction and figuring out what can we get out of this, right? It makes a lot more sense to play in a singular ecosystem and have all those tools at our hand just in one bucket instead of trying to figure out how does this play nice with this? How does this play nice over here? If we just can have a singular ecosystem that does it all together that definitely makes our jobs a lot easier. How about the event? Is this your first Pentaho world? This is my first Pentaho world. So it's early, Bo. Why do you come to events like this and what do you hope to take away? Sure, I came to this event because I was specifically invited to. That's really it, it was nothing more than that, but I definitely come to kind of see what's next and kind of learn about the new technologies and get that chance to visit some of the booths and some of the breakout sessions for maybe things I don't get to do in my day-to-day life. We're very heads down in PDI, so I don't get to spend too much time learning about the analytics and playing with those tools. So it's a lot of fun to come here and kind of see what's out there and be like, oh, could we leverage this or how could I adapt? Or what are some of the other professionals doing that maybe I can bring back and improve our processes? And it's early days, but what are your thoughts on 8.0? I liked what I saw and then I staffed out the booth and got another demo and I can definitely already see a couple use cases where we can improve existing jobs with some of the new streaming features that they have in place. So I'm excited for that to come out and for us to start working on that. So the integration of streaming, Kafka and the like was appealing to you. Yep, absolutely. And that'll be something that we can probably use right out of the gate. So excited for that. Well, great. Nathan, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Yeah, thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from Pentaho World just after this.