 Well hello everybody, John Wall is here on theCUBE and glad to have you along here for day two of our coverage here at AWS re-invent 22. We're up in the global startup program which is part of AWS's startup showcase and I've got Kevin Farley with me. He is the Director of Strategic Alliances with MariaDB and Kevin, good to see you this morning. Thanks for joining us. Thank you, appreciate it. Yeah, first off, tell us about MariaDB. Obviously, data's your thing, but to share that with some folks at home who might not be familiar with your offering. Yeah, so MariaDB's been around as a corporate entity for 10 plus years and we have a massive customer base. There's a billion downloads from Docker Hub, 75% of the Fortune 500. We have an enormous sea of really happy users but what we realize is that all of these users are really thinking about what does it mean to transform IT? What does cloud monetization mean and how do we build a strategy on something we really love to drive it into the cloud and take it to the future? So what we launched about two years ago, two and a half years ago, is SkySQL. It's our database as a service. It leverages all the best elements what we provide on the enterprise platform. It marries to the AWS cloud and it really provides the best of both worlds for our customers. So your thought then, what problem is that solving? I think what you see in the overall database market is that many people have been using what we would call legacy technology. There's been lots of sort of stratification and mixes of different database solutions. All of them come with some promise and all of them come with a lot of compromise. So I think what the market is really looking for is something that can take what they know and love, can bring it to the cloud and can drive the performance and scale that completely changes the landscape, especially as you think about what modern data needs look like, right? What people did 10 years ago with the exponential scale of data no longer works and what they need is something that not only can really deliver against their core business values and their core business deliverables, but gets them to the future. How do we drive something new? How do we innovate? How do we change the game? And I think what we built with AWS really delivers what we call cloud scale. It's taking something that is the best technology and I as a beacon build, marrying it to Kubernetes layer, marrying it to global availability, thinking about having true global high availability across all of your environments and really delivering that to customers through an integrated partnership. Could we see this coming? I mean, because data, right? I mean, everybody talked about the tsunami of growth back 10, 11 years ago, but maybe the headlights didn't go far enough, but you could see that there was going to be crunch time. There's no doubt, and I think that this has been a, there's been these sort of pocket solutions, right? So if you think at the entire no-sequel world, right? People said, oh, I need scale, I can get it, but what do I have to give up? Acid compliance. So I have to change the way I think about what data is and how I can govern it. So there's been these things that deliver on half the promise, but there's never been something that comes together and really drives what we deliver through PSI SQL is something called expand. So distributed SQL really tied to the SQL query language, having that ACID data, so having everything you need without the compromise built on the cloud allows you to scale out and allows you to think about, I can actually do exponential layers of data, data modeling, data querying, complete read write, driving that forward, and I think it gives us a whole nother dynamic that we can deliver on in a way that hasn't been before. And I think that's kind of the holy grail of what people are looking for is how am I building modern applications and how do I have a database in the cloud that's really going to support it? You know, you talk about distributed SQL, and I mean, there's a little mystery behind it. Isn't there, or at least maybe not mystery, there's a little, I guess, confusion or just misunderstanding. I mean, nail that down a little bit. I would say the best way to say it, honestly, this is the great thing is people believe it's too good to be true. And I think what we see over and over again. You know what they say about that. But this is the great part, is we've just had two taste studies recently with AWS with Hit Labs and Certified Power, both on expand, both proof in the pudding. They did the POCs, they're like, oh my God, this works. If you watched the keynote yesterday, Adam had a slide that was as big as the entire room, and it highlighted Samsung, and he said, you know, we're doing 80,000 requests per second. So the story there is that AWS is able, as an entity, with their scale and their breadth to handle that kind of workload. But guess what that is? That's MariaDB expand underneath there, driving all of that utilization. So it's already there, it's already married, it's already in the cloud, and now we're taking it to a completely different level with a fully managed database solution. How impressive is that, right? I mean, you would think that somebody out there who, I mean, that volume, that kind of capacity is mind blowing. I mean, to your kind of previous point, it's like one of those things, do I see what's coming? And it's here, right? You know, is it actually ever going to be possible? And now we're showing that it really is on a daily basis for some of the biggest brands in the world. We're also seeing companies moving off, not only transitioning from MariaDB or MySQL, but all of the big licensed conversions as well. So you think about Oracle, DBS Bank is one of our biggest customers, one of the largest Oracle conversions in the world, on to MariaDB, and now thinking about what is the promise of connecting that to the cloud? How do you take things that you're currently doing on-prem, delivering a hybrid model that also then starts to say, hey, here's my path to cloud modernization. SkySQL gives me that bridge. And then you take it one layer farther and you think about multi-cloud, right? That's one of the things that's critical that ISVs can really only deliver in a meaningful way, is how can we have a solution for a customer that we can take to any availability zone? We can have performance proximity, cost proximity. We're always able to have that total data dexterity across any environment we need, and we can build on that for the future. So if we're talking about cloud database, there's so many good things going for it here. You're talking about easy use and scalability and all that. But as whatever, have you talked about this? There's some push and there's some pull. So what's the other side that still, that you think has to be addressed? And I think that's a great question. So we see that there's pull, right? We've seen these deals, this pipeline growth, this great adoption. But what I think we're still not at the point of the massive hockey stick adoption is that customers still don't fully understand the capabilities of the distributed SQL and the power that can actually deliver. So the more we drive case studies, the more we drive POCs, the more we prove the model, I think you're going to see just a massive adoption scale. And I also think customers are tired of doing lots of different things and lots of different proxies. So another one of the key elements of SkySQL is we can do both transactional and analytical data out of the same database, driven by the same proxy. So instead of having DBAs and developers try to figure out, okay, I'm going to pull from this database here, that there, it's this big spaghetti wire concept that is super expensive and super time intensive. So the ability to write modern applications and pull data from both pockets and really be able to have that as a seamless entity and deliver that to customers is massive. I mean, another part of the keynote yesterday was a new deliverable, like kind of no ETL. Adam talked about Aurora and Redshift and the massive complexity of what used to exist for getting data back and forth. You also have to pay for two different databases. It's super expensive. So I think the idea that you can take the real focus of AWS and us as customer value, how do you deliver that next thing that changes the game, always utilizes AWS, delivers on that promise, but then takes a net new technology that really starts to think about how do we bring things together? How do we make it more simple? How do we make it more powerful? And how do we deliver more customer value as we go forward? But you know, if I'm still an on-prem guy, just pretend I'm not saying I am, just pretend I am, just for the sake of the discussion here, it's like I just can't let it go, right? I still, you know, there's control, there's the known versus the unknown, the uncertain. So twist my arm just a little bit more and get me over the hump. First of all, you don't have to, right? And there's going to be some industries and some verticals that will always have elements of their business that will be on-prem. Guess what? We make the best AWS in the world. It can be MariaDB. But there's those that then say these elements of our business are going to be far more effective moving to the cloud. So we give you SkySQL. There's a natural symbiotic bridge between everything we do and how we deliver it where you can be hired and it's great. You can adopt the cloud as your business needs grow and you can have multi-cloud. This is that idea that you can have your cake and eat it too, right? You can literally have all these elements of your business met without these big pressure to say you got to throw that away, you got to move to this. It's really how do you gracefully adopt the cloud in a way that makes sense for your business? Where are you trying to drive your business? Is it time to value, right? Is it governance? There's different elements of what matters the most to individual businesses. We want to address those and we can address those. So you don't have to dive in. You don't have to dive in. You can go ankle deep, knee deep, whatever you want to do. Absolutely and some of the largest MariaDB users still have massive, massive on-prem implementations and that's okay. But there's elements that are starting to fall behind. There's cost savings. There's things that they need to do in the cloud that they can't do on-prem and that's where Expand SkySQL really says okay, here is your platform, grow as you want to, migrate as you want to and we're there every step along the way. We also provide a whole SkyDBA team. Some guys just say, I want to get out of the database world at all. This is expensive, it's costly and it's difficult to be an expert. So you can bring in our DBA team and they'll run your entire environment. They'll optimize it. They'll troubleshoot it. They'll bug fix. They'll do everything for you so you can just say I just want to focus on building phenomenal applications for my customers and the database game as we knew it is not something that I want to invest in anymore. I want to make that transition. That makes DAS really attractive to a lot of people because you talk about a lot of headache there. So let's talk about AWS before I let you go. Just about that relationship. You've talked about the platform that provides you and obviously the benefits but just talk about how you've worked with AWS over the years and how you see that relationship allowing you to expand your services no pun intended. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I would start with the way we even contemplated architecture. We worked with the SaaS factory team. We made sure that the things that we built were optimized in their environment. I think it was a lot of collaboration on how does this combined entity really make the most value for our customers? How does it make the most sense for our developers as we build it out? Then we work in the global startup team. So the strategic element of who we are not all startups are created equal, right? We have 75% of the Fortune 100. We've got over a billion downloads. We come in with promise and the reason this partnership is so valuable and the reason there's so much investment going forward is because what really, what do the cloud guys care about the very, very most? They want all of these mission-critical big workloads that are on-prem to land in their cloud. What do we have? A massive, massive TAM sitting out there of these customers that could go to AWS. So we both see like if we can deliver incredible value to that customer base these big workloads will end up in AWS. They'll use other AWS services. And as we scale and grow, we have that platform that's already built for it. So I think that when you go back to the tenants, the core principles of AWS, the one that always stands out, the one that we always kind of lean back on is are we delivering customer value? Is this the best thing for the customer? Because we do have some co-opetition just like many other other partners do, right? So there is Aurora and there is RDS and there is times when that's a great service for a customer. But when people are really thinking about where do I need my database to go? Where do I really need to be set for the future growth? Where am I going to get the kind of ROI I need going forward? That's where you can go, hey, SkySQL, expand distributed SQL. This is the best game in town. It's built on AWS. And collectively, we're going to present that to a customer. I'm so done. I love it. MariaDB, check them out. They're on the show floor, great traffic. I know at the booth, they're here at AWS re-invent. So check them out, MariaDB. Thanks, Kevin. Hey, thanks, John, appreciate the time. Appreciate it, great. That was great. Back with more. You're watching The Cube, the leader in high-tech coverage.