 Live from San Francisco, California, theCUBE, covering MarkLogicWorld 2015. Brought to you by MarkLogic. Now, here are your hosts, Jeff Frick and Jeff Kelly. Welcome back everybody, we're live here at MarkLogicWorld 2015. I'm Jeff Kelly, I'm here with my co-host Jeff Frick. We're joined by our next guest, Tavo De Leon, who is the Senior Director of Big Data Strategy Solutions in Cognizant's Enterprise Information Management Group. Tavo, welcome back to theCUBE, theCUBE alum. We appreciate you coming back. Well, thank you for having me. You know, we're at Cognizant, big fans of you guys, theCUBE, wikileon.org. So, it's a great pleasure to be here and I'm thrilled. Well, we're happy to have you. So, talk a little bit about, we're here at MarkLogicWorld. You know, we've talked in the past on theCUBE about Big Data and about Kadoop. Well, now we're talking about MarkLogic and kind of their interesting approach to NoSQL. Talk a little bit about the relationship with Cognizant and MarkLogic. Well, it's different than you'd expect in the big data world. We've had a relationship with them for over seven years, almost eight. So, it's a very mature relationship as far as like not only understanding the technology at its depth, but we've seen the evolution of it over time which has been quite fascinating for us and our customers, our enterprise customers. So, today, we're right up there with and with, you know, the enterprise needs are really becoming the thing that's the most important and we're finding that there are some cases where people get things, products, projects to a certain state of readiness and not having that enterprise capability prevents either functionality from going out or the product or the process gets canceled. Talk about enterprise, right? The term gets thrown around a lot. Enterprise ready, you know, this is an enterprise solution. You talked about the evolution, you talked about people hitting walls. What are some of the really critical things that make it enterprise? Okay, so enterprise really means large corporation. You know, there's lots of state and for most of these companies, either at an IT or a business level, it means that you have asset-compliant transactions. What basically means is when you commit something to the database, it's committed and it's involuntary. So, that's very important to our customers and they're used to that coming from an RDBMS background. The other part of it is the whole idea of disaster recovery, that the facilities are built in, point-in-time recovery, backups on an active queue with a large cluster. These are things that in other NoSQL technologies and other big data technologies, you truly have to engineer on your own if you're out in front. And you have to wait for an open source project to come along to support that and it may not be a direct support of your enterprise need. Mark Lodzick already has answered a lot of those questions and so those people on the enterprise are much more comfortable to deal with those things and things move along more quickly. Well, talk about the evolution of Mark Lodzick. You've been a partner, I think, for about seven years, so you've seen it come quite a long way from really kind of a point solution to more of a comprehensive database platform. Talk about how that evolution has occurred and how you've seen usage within the enterprise, your enterprise clients kind of change along with the evolving capabilities of Mark Lodzick. So, I think the most important thing is that they started out and we worked with them as a content management company and we did an incredible amount of really good work with them in the communications industry, entertainment industry, et cetera, just as you might expect with content management. And then there was a period of time where work went different ways and they realized that they needed to evolve into something much more than that to be what they are today. On the other side, our business is involving very differently in that we're finding that this year, digital transformation is what's really key to the enterprise. And we're dealing with that at every level, from the board level down, all the way through IT stack. And we find that it's companies like Mark Lodzick that are highly responsive to that and make it so that it's possible and make it so that it's in some ways easy or easy to explain. Because there's just so much different data that needs to come together to have a productive digital experience for an enterprise that actually generates revenue. So talk a little bit about some of the success stories you've seen in your enterprise customers in terms of leveraging Mark Lodzick, probably bringing in other types of technologies as well. No technology lives on an island. What are some of the cooler things you've seen? Kind of differentiating capabilities companies have been building. So one of the most interesting things we've seen it's actually a little boring. But it's, we've seen an entire large healthcare organization is collapsing all of their silos into a Mark Lodzick cluster. So this very diverse, I guess it's somewhere between 20 to 30 silos over the next couple of years will be collapsed onto a single platform. And this just hasn't existed before. It'll all have the same security. It'll all have all the same rights, privileges, accesses, all the data will be together. And finally they'll be able to do these analytics across these data sets that have never been possible before in a very flexible way as their business changes. And for a lot of these healthcare companies they're finally having to deal with a customer rather than an insurance policy member. And that's a huge data change when you think about an RDMS table. I mean you're literally flipping it over and turning it around. And you need a flexible data model, a schema that you can be reactive in that way to that business. That's purely a government regulation that drove that. That's a disruptive event that occurred. Mark Lodzick is allowing that company to go forward with it in a very positive way. Yeah, I was going to ask you what was the motivator of these types of behaviors? You know, is it the character, is it the stick or is it the article that came out the other day about all dinosaurs are going to die? Believe in unicorns or not, but all dinosaurs eventually die. Exactly, exactly. But there are a lot of sticks out there these days, right? You know, whether it's in the financial services industry and that includes insurance and a variety of other verticals that we service, healthcare, et cetera. But there's the other side of it where Mark Lodzick is the logical solution to get out a positive user interface that actually works with the customer's demands at the business level user. So we're finding that we can go through a development cycle there that's maybe not fewer people, but faster. And we're finding that in some of our projects that they're naturally gravitating towards agile, even though it may be a waterfall project on paper. Right, right. So it's understanding how we work with them quite a bit so we bring part of it to it. And in these digital projects that we're doing in particular where Mark Lodzick is playing a big part, their technology is driving our customers to work with us on that. So it's highly cooperative and it's kind of an interesting synergy that's occurred, unexpected. It's interesting on the agile piece because beyond agile software development, which is a very particular thing, just an agile kind of business methodology in terms of you just don't know and in this disruptive day and age, you just got to keep moving, you got to keep improving and you don't necessarily know what it's going to be. So I think the impact of agile as a business methodology is so significant, especially in these crazy times. Yeah, yeah. So if you look at our world and then the customers we service and we have deep roots with these customers, multi-year relationships with them, most of them understand at the board level that they have to go through a digital transformation. Now whether they have the plans in place or they have the commitment to go forward or they are the ones that are going forward with it, this is really what we're seeing in our audience, in our customer base right now. The important point there, to your point, is that they can't wait. So you have to look at ways to do it faster. And we use agile in a very broad way, but in real terms, they need to see results in four, five, six months that show that the ROI is coming or it's actually there and on the way up. Because there could be a reorg. There could be new regulations that come out. The world is just moving so much faster and the digital transformations are really oriented around a lot of the user experiences, even if it's B2B users. And that is evolving every day and we've got yet one disruption after another. As you guys catalog as you go through all these conferences as you go through, and you've got to be responsive to that. And if you can't, then you're always going to be one disruption behind and maybe you're relevant. Yeah, yeah. And then you've got on your LinkedIn profiles, we're looking up, as we do for all guests, big data and big giant blocks, right? Then you get the whole big data phenomenon. How are you seeing that really manifest itself in the real world and the customers that you're dealing with? And the customers we're dealing with, they, everybody's been involved in big data forever. Okay? It's whether you could do anything about it in a horizontal way or whether really for us, what we're looking at is can you get this to some type of a digital solution or some type of enterprise analytic that actually provides value. And that's really what we're seeing as the main driver these days. So what are the kind of the hot buzzwords we're hearing this week at Marnifogic World is all around semantics. I know that's a topic that excites you. I can see it in your eyes. Tell us a little bit about what you guys are doing there with Marnifogic and generally around semantics and using those capabilities to drive some business value to your clients. So I'm gonna make a wild assertion here and I'll ask you to prove it later on. Go to Google, type in semantic data lake and you will see our thought leadership on the smart data lake. This is a semantically driven data lake architecture using big data technology. This is some incredible thought leadership and we actually have our author of it here, Thomas Kelly. And he's here to work closely with the Markologics semantic experts because we believe that that's the next thing that's coming. We believe this is where the efficiencies are gonna come for our enterprise clients. And so we're stepping out forward and it's my assertion that we're in front. Well, pack it a little bit, semantic data lake. What does that mean? How does that differ from the more, I guess, traditional term? If you call it that, or for your series of data lake. Data lake, or data ocean. Yeah, data ocean. So what are the key characteristics of a semantic approach to the data lake? So there's really two parts to it. We've all seen the data lake diagrams. There's an ingestion, there's the lake and then there's consumption. So on the ingestion side, we're seeing things like semantic tagging on induction. When the data comes in, you're semantically tagging it. So it's immediately available. So you don't have to wait for the ETL cycles, et cetera, people that want that data or can actively consume it at that point because they're knowledgeable, it's right there. It's even in the staging area, possibly where they can get to it. There's also the model management or the, in the lake area where we can put semantic models on top of this, depending on which type of technology or which technologies we want to apply. And then that gets promoted out to the consumption layer. And the neat thing about semantics is it's not about just queries, it's about search and query. So it's about discovery and facts, and that brings insights. And what we're talking about is not just schema on read or schema on write, in the future, it's schema on insight. So as there's an insight that appears, we believe that people will, in a sense, punch the button and that will go into the repository for the enterprise as part of their semantic collateral, that they're competitive in. So, I mean, clearly, yeah, this is kind of a newer concept. Is this resonating with your clients? I mean, are they understanding some of the complexities that, or I should say some of the benefits that could provide? So that's the next challenge for everyone over about the next two years, is getting this down to chunks that are meaningful for the enterprise that fit their digital strategies and understanding where the benefits are. There's a wide group of people that really understand this well. They're not all in enterprise positions, and so our thought leadership work is driving that type of understanding within the enterprise, and we feel that that's the first thing that needs to happen for then the benefits to be realized with the technology. Very good. So we're running close on time. So we want to give you the last word. So I mean, we'll talk a little bit about this event, maybe your future plans to the extent that you can share with Mark Logic, how you see this relationship kind of evolving as Mark Logic continues to add capabilities, and as of course as you kind of build your practice around big data. So it's funny because Mark Logic and Cognizant share a lot in the way of DNA, customer excellence and delivery and a passion. And we're in business with Mark Logic as a strategic alliance, not so much as they're a database vendor, and we're looking to have projects with lots of database work. We're really working with Mark Logic strategically on solutions, either horizontal solutions that we can bring to market or vertical solutions are very important. We find that their stack is highly conducive to taking our IP and translating it into things that our customers immediately get or long-term problems that they've had and have been gnawing at them or their new regulations, as you pointed out earlier, that are now in the forefront. And it's really vendors like Mark Logic that make that much easier to do. They're solution-oriented, we're solution-oriented, it's a good match. Well, Tableau, thanks again for joining us on theCUBE. I'm sure we'll have you back again soon. Our paths seem to cross more and more frequently, so that's great. Tableau de Leon from Cognizant, thanks so much for joining us here on theCUBE at Mark Logic World. My pleasure. All right, thanks. We'll be right back with our next guest here live at Mark Logic World 2015.