 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Pentaho World 2017. Brought to you by Hitachi Ventara. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Pentaho World. Brought to you by Hitachi Ventara. My name is Rebecca Knight. I'm your host, along with my co-host Dave Vellante. We're joined by Michael Weiss. He is the senior manager at NASDAQ and Sheer Sidon who is analytics manager at NASDAQ. Thanks so much for coming back to theCUBE. I should say, you're CUBE veterans now. We are. Well, at least I am. This is his first year and his first time at Pentaho World, so excited to bring him along. Okay, so you're a newbie, but you're a veteran, so great. So tell us a little bit about what has changed since the last time you came on, which is 2015 back then. So the biggest thing that's happened in the past 18 months is we've launched seven new exchanges, integrated seven new exchanges. We've bought the ISE, the International Stock Exchange which is three options markets. We just completed that integration in August. We've also bought the Canadian Shiax, the Canadian Exchange, which also had three equities markets. So we integrated them and we went live with a dark pool offering for Goldman back in June. So now we operate a dark pool for Goldman Sachs and we're looking to kind of expand that offering at this point. So you're just getting bigger and bigger and so tell us, tell our viewers a little bit how Pentaho fits into this. So Pentaho is the engine that kind of does all our analytics behind the scenes at post-trade, right? So we do a lot of, traditionally, we're doing batch processing in the back end. We're doing a little bit more with the Hadoop ecosystem, leveraging things like EMR, Spark, Presto, that type of stuff with, and Pentaho kind of helps blend that stuff together a little bit. We use it for reporting, we do some of the BA. We're actually now looking to have the data Pentaho generates, plugging in a little bit of Tableau. So we're looking to expand it and really leverage that data in other ways at this point, even doing some things more externally, doing more data offerings via Pentaho externally. So I got to do a NASDAQ 101 from my 13-year-old. She came up to me the other day, she said, daddy, what's the NASDAQ index and how does it work? Give us a 20-second answer. On the NASDAQ index? Yeah, what's the NASDAQ index and how does it work? Probably the wrong person to answer that one, but the NASDAQ index is generally just a blend of various stocks, right? So the S&P 500 is a blend of different stocks, much like that, the Qs are NASDAQ equivalent of the S&P, right? So we use a different algorithm to determine the companies that make up that blend, but it's an index just like the S&P. They're weighted by market cap and that determines the number at the end and it goes up and down based on what the stocks in that index. Right, and that's how most people know NASDAQ, right? They see the S&P went up by five points, the Dow went down by three and the NASDAQ went up by a point, right? But most people don't realize that NASDAQ also operates 27 exchange worldwide, I think it is now. So probably a little bit more, maybe closer to 32, but. So you mentioned that you're doing a dark pool for Goldman. Yes. So that's interesting, we were talking off camera about HFT and kind of the old days and dark pools were criticized at the time. Now Goldman was one of the ones that was shown to be honest and above board, but what does that mean, the dark pool for your business and how does that all sort of tie in? So, I mean dark pools are isolated markets, right? So they don't necessarily interact with the NASDAQ exchange themselves. It's all done within the pool. You interact with only people trading on that pool. What NASDAQ has done is we took our technology and we now hosted for Goldman. So we have, I know it's our trading system, so we gave them my net. We built all the surrounding solutions, how you manage symbols, how you manage membership, even the data, we curate their data in the AWS. We do some pentaho transformations for them. We do some analytics for them and that's actually going to start expanding. But yeah, we've provided them an entire solution. So now they don't have to manage their own dark pool and now we're going to look to expand that to other potential clients. So that's NASDAQ as a technology provider, which is very interesting. So I was saying earlier, Hong Kong Stock Exchange is basically closing the facility where they house humans. Again, another example of machines replacing humans. So they're joining, well, NASDAQ kind of, but NYSE, London Stock Exchange, Singapore, now Hong Kong, essentially electronic trading. So it brings us to the sort of technology sort of underpinnings of NASDAQ. Sure, maybe you could talk a little bit about your role and give a paint a picture of the technology infrastructure. Yeah, so I focused primarily on the financial side of corporate finance. So we leveraged Pentaho to do a lot of the data integration allow us to really answer our business questions. So previously it would take days to put basic reporting together. Now you've got it all automated or we're working towards getting it mostly automated and then just answer the questions that we need and no longer use our gut to drive decisions we're using hard data. And so that's helped us instrumentally in a lot of different places. So talk more about the data pipeline, where the data is coming from, how you're blending it and how you're bringing it through the pipeline and operationalizing it. Yeah, so we've got a lot of different billing systems. So we integrate companies and we let you, historically we've let them keep their billing system. So just kind of bring it all together into our core ERP seeing how quantities and just getting the data and just figuring out on the basic side, how much do we make from a certain customer? What are we making from them? What happens in different scenarios if they consolidate or they default? So it's a lot and some of the pipeline there is just blending it all together, normalizing the data, making sure it's all in the same format and then putting it in the format where our executives or business managers can actually make decisions off of it. Well you're talking about the decision making process and you said it's no longer a gut. You're using data to drive your decisions to know which direction is the right direction. How big a change is that? And just culturally speaking, how has that changed? Yeah, it's huge. It's making us, at least on our side, making a lot more confident in the decisions we're making. We're no longer going in saying, hey, this is probably how we should do it. It's no, the numbers are showing us that this is going to pay off and we stick to it and look at the hard facts rather than what do we think is going to happen? So talk a little bit about what you guys are seeing here and you're doing a lot of speaking here. We were joking earlier, kind of losing your voice a little bit. But so what are you telling your story? What kind of reactions you're getting? Let me share with us the behind the scenes at the conference. I think at this conference you're seeing a lot of people kind of fall in line with similar ideas that we're trying to get to. Taking advantage more, instead of your traditional MPPs or your traditional relational databases, moving more towards this Hadoop ecosystem, leveraging Spark, Presto, Flume, all these various new technologies that have emerged over the past two to five years, and are now more viable than ever. They're easier to scale. If you look at your traditional MPPs, like we're a big Redshift user, but every time you scale it, there's a cost with that. And we don't necessarily need to maintain all that data all the time. So something in the Hadoop ecosystem now lets us maintain that data without all the necessary cost. So I see a lot more of that that I did two years ago. A lot more people are following that trend. I think the other interesting trend I've seen this week is this idea of becoming more claudagnostic. Where do you operate and how do you store your data? It should be irrelevant to the data processing. And I think it's going to be a tough nut to crack for any Pentaho or any vendor. But if you can figure out a way to either do some type of cloud parity where you have support across all your services, but you don't have to know what service you deploy to when you design your pipelines, I think that's going to be huge. I think we're a little ways from that, but I see that that's been a common theme this week as well, both private and your big three cloud providers right now, your Googles, your Azures, and your AWS. So I want to ask you, you said cloud agnostic, it's great, it's good vision and aspiration. But the follow-up would be, am I corrected? You don't see it as data location agnostic. You want to bring the cloud model to your data versus try to force your data into a cloud or not necessarily? I think this is coming from the, a lot of things being driven by, but not wanting to be vendor locked in, right? So they want to have the ability to, and I think this is an easier said than done, the ability to move your data to different cloud providers based on pricing or offerings, right? And right now, going from AWS to Google to Azure would be a very painful process. If you move petabytes of data across, it's not cost efficient, and by the time, all the savings you want to realize by moving to maybe a Google in the future are not going to be realized because of all the effort it's going to take to get there. We had CERN on earlier, and they were working on that problem, but that's wrong. Yeah, I mean, it's not a trivial problem to solve, so, but you know, if you can crack that and you can then say, hey, I want to deploy, and even if I'm from a service offering, like real property in a dark pool for Goldman, we also have a market tech side where we sell our trading platform in various solutions to other exchanges worldwide, if we can come up with a way to be able to deploy to any cloud provider even on a prime cloud, without having to do a bunch of customizations each time, I mean, that'd be huge. It would revolutionize what we do, right? So we're, as our own company, kind of starting to look at that, and in talking with Pentaho, there are also, and Hitachi are starting to eye that as a potential way to go with abstractions and things like that, but it's going to take some time. Were you guys here yesterday for the keynotes? Did you see some of the keynotes? I mean, the big messaging, like every conference that you go to is, be the disruptor, or you're going to get disrupted. We talked earlier off camera, trading volumes are down, so the way you traditionally made business, did business is changing, it made money is changing. We talked earlier about you guys becoming a technology provider. I wonder if you could help us understand that a little bit from the standpoint of NASDAQ strategy, when we hear your CEOs talk, real visionary technology-driven transformations. Yeah, I think Adena's coming in is definitely looking at that as a trend, right? Like our trading volumes are down, they've been going down, they've kind of stabilized a little bit, and we're still being able to make money in that space, but the promise is there's not a ton of growth. We acquire the ISE, we acquire the Chi-X, we're buying market share at that point. So you increase revenue, but you also increase overhead in that way. And you can only do so many major acquisitions at a time, right? You can only do how many $1 billion acquisitions that you hear before you have to call it a day, and we can look at more strategic, smaller acquisitions for exchanges, but that doesn't necessarily bring you the transformation, the net revenue you're looking for. So what Adena has started to look at is how do we transform it to more of a technology company? We're really good at operating exchanges, how do we take that, we already have market tech doing it, but how do we make that more scalable, not just to the financial sector, but to your other exchanges, your Uber's or your Stubhubs are the world, right? How do you become a service provider or a platform as a service for these other companies to come in and use your tech? So we're looking at, how do we rewrite our entire platform from trading to the back end to do things like, can we deploy to any cloud provider? Can we deploy on-prem? Can we be a little bit more technology agnostic, so to speak, and offer a bunch of microservices so that if a startup comes up on one stand of an exchange, they can do it, they can leverage our services and build whatever other applications they want on top of it. And I think that's the transformation we need to go through. I think it's a good vision, and I'm looking forward to executing it. It's going to be a couple of years before we really, before we see the fruits of that labor, but it's good. Adina's really doing a great job of coming in and really driving that innovation, and Brad Peterson as well, our CIO, has really been pushing this vision, and I think it's really going to work out for us, assuming we can execute it. Well, you know what's interesting about that, if I may, is financial services usually so secretive about their technology, right? But your business, you guys are becoming a technology provider. So you've got to face the world and start marketing your capabilities now, and opening up about that. It's sort of an interesting change. I think you'll see that start to become more of a thing over the next year or two, as we start actually looking to build out the platform and figure it out. You know, we do market on the market tech side. I mean, it's not a small business, but we're more strategic about who we market to, because we're still targeting your financial exchanges more internationally than in the U.S., but there's only so many of them. So now you got to start, again, you got to start looking at rebranding, rebuilding, and rethinking how we think about exchanges in general, not thinking of just a financial thing. Well, that's what I wanted to get into, because you're talking about this rebranding and this rebuilding, this transformation to the backdrop within an industry that is changing rapidly, and we have sort of the threat of legislative reform, perhaps administrative reforms coming down all the time. So how do you manage that? I mean, those are a lot of pressures there. Are you constantly trying to push the envelope right up until when any changes take place, or what would you say, Sheeran Michael? Yeah, probably, again, not the right person. No, we're definitely trying to stay on top of the cutting edge and innovation, and the technologies out there that, whether it be blockchain or different types of technologies, I mean, we're definitely trying to make sure we're investing in them while maintaining our core business. Right, it's trying to find that balance right now of when to make the next step in the technology food chain, and when to balance that with regulatory obligations. And if you look at it going back to the idea of being able to launch marketplaces, I think where you ended up seeing over the coming years is your Uber's, your Stubhub's, I think they're going to become more regulated at some level. So we're good at operating more regulated markets, so I think that's where we can kind of come in and play a role and help wade through those regulations a little bit more and help build software to be adhered to those regulations. Since you brought up blockchain, right? Jamie Dimon craps all over blockchain, or Bitcoin, and then clarifies his remarks saying, look, that technology underneath is here to stay. Thoughts on blockchain, obviously financial services looking at it very closely, doing some really advanced stuff. What can you tell us? Yeah, I think there's no argument that it's definitely an innovation and a disruptive technology. I think that it's definitely in its early stages and on across the board. So we're definitely, as we've said, we're investing in it where we can and trying to keep a close eye on it. We think that there's a lot of potential in a lot of different applications. As the NASDAQ transforms its business, how does that affect the sort of back end analytics activity and infrastructure? Yeah, I mean, the data's just growing. I mean, that's like the biggest challenge we have now. Data that used to be done in Excel is just no longer an option. So now in order to get the insights that we used to get just from having a couple people doing Excel transformations, you need to now invest in the infrastructure in the back end. And so there's a lot that needs to go into building out an infrastructure to be able to ingest the data. And then also having the UI on the front end so that the business can actually view it the way they want. So skills-wise, how's that affecting who you guys are hiring and training and how's that transformation going? I'll let you first. Yeah, I mean, I think there's definitely, data analytics is a hot field, it's very new. There's definitely a big skills gap in administrative work and the analytics side. Usually you have people could perform analytical functions just by being administrative or operational. And now it's really we're investing in analysts and making sure that we have the right people in place to be able to do these transformations or pull the data and get the answers that we need from. I mean, from the tech side, I think what you're seeing is where we traditionally would just plug a developer in there, whether a Java developer or an ETL developer. I think what you're seeing now is we're looking to bring more of a business-minded data analyst to the tech side, right? So we're looking to bring a data engineer so to speak to more of the tech side. So we're not looking to hire a traditional four-year computer science degree or a software engineering degree. You're looking for a different breed of person. Because quite honestly, your traditional Java Dev or C++ developer, they're not skilled or geared towards data. And when we've tried to plug that paradigm in, it just doesn't really work. So we're looking now as hiring more of an analyst but someone who's a little bit more techie as well. They still need to have those skills that do some type level of coding. And what we are finding is that that skill gap is still very much, there's a gap, there's a huge gap. And I think it's closing, but... And as you have to fund those for the new areas, I presume, like many companies in your business, you're trying to move away from the sort of undifferentiated, low level infrastructure deployment, hassles and the IT labor costs there, especially as we move to the cloud, presumably. So is that shift palpable? Can you see that going on? Yeah, I think we've made a lot of progress over the past couple of years in doing that. We do more one-button deployments where the operation cost is a lot lower. A lot more automation around alerting, around when things go wrong. So there's not necessarily human beings that are watching the computer. We've invested a lot in that area to kind of reduce the cost and make the experience better for our end user, right? And even from a development side, the cost of a new application is a lot less every time you have to do a release. The question is how do you balance that with the regulations and make sure you still have a good process in place, right? Like the idea of putting single-button deployments in place is a great one, but you still have to balance that with making sure that what you push to production has been tested well-defined and it meets the need and you're not just arbitrarily throwing these out there. So we're still trying to hit that balance a little bit. It's more on the back-inside. The trading system is not quite there for obvious reasons. We are way more protective of what goes out there than surrounding it a lot of the times, but I can see a future where a trading, again, going back to this idea of transforming our business, where you can stand up into exchange with a click of a button. And I think that's a trend we're looking at. It's not too far in the future. No, I don't think it is. Last question, Pentaho report card. You know, what are they doing really well? What do you want to see them do better? Yeah, so I think they've been, they continue to focus in the right areas, you know, focusing more on the data processing side around, and with the big data technology, trying to play that gap, fill that gap in the big data and be the layer that you don't have to tie yourself to like cloud error or map R. You can kind of be a little bit more plug and play. I think they still need to do some improvements on their visualizations in the front ends. You know, I think they've been so much more focused on the data processing data, that part of it, that the visualizations kind of lack behind. So I think they need to put a little more focus into that, but all in all, I mean, they're in A and we've been extremely happy with them as a software provider. Great. Yes, similar stuff. I think the visualization part is the part that, you know, allows people to understand the value being created at Pentaho. So I think being able to, you know, maybe improve a little bit on the visualization could go a far away. Michael Shear, it's been so much fun having you on theCUBE and having this conversation. Keep that bull market coming, please. Do whatever you can. You're best. I'm Rebecca Knight. We're here at Pentaho World, sponsored by Hitachi Vantara. For Dave Vellante, we will have more from theCUBE in just a little bit.