 Good morning from New York City. Lisa Martin and John Furrier with theCUBE. We are at AWS Summit NYC. This is a series of summits this year, about 15 summits globally, and we're excited to be here, John, with about 10,000 folks. It's crowded, New York is packed, big showing here at AWS Summit, so it's super exciting. Super exciting, just a little bit before the keynote, and we have our first guest. Kevin Farley joins us, the Director of Strategic Alliances at MariaDB. Kevin, welcome to the program. Thank you very much, appreciate you guys having us. So, all of us out from California to NYC, lots of us. We came out with Warner Volgals coming up, which should be some good news, hopefully. Talk to us about MariaDB's SkySQL Cloud Native Version released a couple years ago. What's going on? Yeah, well, SkySQL for us is really a bet on the future. I think when we think about what the company's real mission is, it's just creating a database for everyone. It's any cloud, any scale, any size of performance, and really making sure that we're able to deliver on something that really kind of takes advantage of everything we've done in the market today. If you think about it, there's not very many startups that have a billion downloads, and 75% of the Fortune 500 are already using our service. So what we're really thinking about is, how do we bridge that gap? How do we create a natural path for all of these customers? And if you think about not just MariaDB, but anyone else using the SQL query language, all the MySQL people, what I think most Andy Jassy, TK, anyone says, you know, it's about 10% of the market currently is in the clouds. 90% of a total addressable market that hasn't done it yet. So creating cloud modernization for us, I think it's just a huge opportunity. You guys have a great history with AWS. I want to just step back. You mentioned some stats on success. Can you scope the size and track record of MariaDB for us real quick and set the table? Because I think there's a bigger picture going on that we've been tracking for the past 13 years of the address is the role of the database has always been one of those things where they didn't believe a one database fits all things. You guys have been part of that track record, scope the size and scale of MariaDB, the uses, the use cases, and some of the successes. Yeah, I mean, like I said, some of the stats are already throughout there. So, you know, it is pervasive. I think it was the best way to put it. I think what you look at with the database market really became is very siloed, right? I think there was a lot of unique solutions that were built and delivered that had promise, but they also had compromise. And I think what you look at the landscape of a lot of Fortune 500 companies, they have probably 10 to 15 different database solutions, right? And they're all doing unique things, they're difficult to manage, they're very costly. So what MariaDB is always kind of focused on is how do we continue to build more and more functionality into the database itself and allow that to be a single source of truth where application developers can seamlessly integrate applications. So then the theme of this event in New York City, which is scale dot dot dot anything, must align quite well with Maria and your objectives. I mean, honestly, I think when I think of the problems that most database companies face, customers, I should say, it really comes down to performance and scale. Most of them, like MariaDB, like you said, it's like the car you know and love. You've been driving it for years, you're an expert at it, it works great, but it doesn't have enough range. It doesn't go fast enough. It's hitting walls that modern data requirements are just breaking. So scale for me is the favorite thing to talk about because what we launched is MariaDB Expand, which is a pluggable storage engine that is integrated into SkySQL and it really gives you dynamic scale. So you can scale in, you can scale out, it's not costly compute to try to get for seasonality so you can make your Black Friday numbers. It's really about the dexterity to be able to come in and out as you need in a share nothing architecture with full failover, self-healing, high availability, married to the cloud for full cloud scale. And that's really the beauty of the AWS partnership. Can you elaborate a bit more on the partnership? How long have you guys been partners? Where is it now? Anything exciting coming out? It's actually been a wonderful ride. They've really invested from the very beginning. We went for the SaaS factory so they really brought a lot of resources to bear. And I think if you're looking at why it works, it's probably two things. I think the number one thing is that we share one of the core tenants and it's customer obsession. In an environment where there is co-opetition, you have to find paths for how do you get the best thing for the customer. And the second is pretty obvious, but if you look at any major cloud, their number one priority is getting large mission critical workloads into their cloud because the revenue is exponential on the backside. So what do we own? Large mission critical workloads. So if you marry that objective with AWS, the partnership is absolutely perfect for driving true revenue growth scale and revenue across both entities in the partner ecosystem. Kevin, talk about the hybrid strategy because you're seeing cloud operations go hybrid, Amazon announced, state of the art announced, outpost like four years ago. Now edge is super hot. So you're seeing like most of the enterprise is saying, okay, I love cloud, love the cloud database, but I got the on-prem hybrid cloud operations. So it's not just proprietary operations, it's cloud ops. How do you guys fit into that? What's the story? We actually, there's all these new deliverables, outposts come out with a promise. What we have is a reality right now. One of the largest networking companies, which I can't mention yet publicly, we want a really big SkySQL deal, but what they had manufacturing plants, they needed to have on-prem deployment. So MariaDB naturally syncs with SkySQL. It's the same technology. It works in perfect harmony. So we really already deliver on the promise of hybrid, but of course there's a lot more we can grow in that area and certainly thinking about outposts and other solutions is definitely on the longer-term road map of what could make sense for us in our customers. What are some of the latest things that you guys are doing now that you weren't doing a few years ago that customers should know about, the audience should know about? I mean, I think the game changer, we're always innovating. I mean, when you're the company that writes the code, owns the code, we can do hot fixes, we can do security patches, we can always do the things that give you real-time access to what you need. But I think the game changer is what I mentioned a little bit earlier. I think it's really the holy grail of the cloud. It's like, how can we take the SQL query language, which is well over 50% of the open source market, right? And how do we convert that seamlessly into the cloud? How do we help you modernize on that journey and expand gives you the ability to say, I can be a small startup. I got my C round. I don't want to manage databases. I can use the exact same service as the largest Fortune 100 company that has massive global scale and needs to be able to drive that across the globe. So I think that's the beauty is that it's really a democratization of the database. At least, you know, we've been covering the big data space for 10 years. Remember, all those different conversations had to do those days and, oh, they have big data. But then it's like too hard to set up. Then you had that kind of period where you saw a spark and data lakes emerge. Then you said, now, it almost seems like now more than ever, there's a data revolutions back. It was almost like a lull in the market a little bit. Yeah, I'm going to democratize data science. Now you got data. So now it just seems to be an explosion at that level. What's your analysis on that? Because you've been in the weeds and in this market for 10 years, okay? And nothing really changed. It's just now it's more ready. What's your observation? Why has it happened? I think that's a really good question. And I love it. Because I mean, what the promise of things like Hadoop and NetNew technologies, sort of, it was always out there, but it required this whole NetNew lift. And how do I do it? How do I manage it? How do I optimize it? The beauty of what we can do with MariaDB is that SkySQL is what you already know and love, right? And now you can deliver a data lake on S3, right? You can pull that data. And we also have the ability to do both analytical data and transactional data from the same database. So you can write applications that can pull column store data up into your application, but you can also have all of your asset transactions which are absolutely required for all of your mission critical business. So I think that we're seeing more and more adoption. You've seen other companies start to talk about bringing the different elements in, but we're the only ones that really do it. And SQL standardizing that front end, even better than ever before, all the stuff under the covers is all being connected. That's the awesome part, Israel, is you're literally doing what you already know how to do, but you blow it out on the back end married to the cloud. And that I think is the real revolution of what makes usability real in the data space. And I think that was always the problem before. When you're in partner conversations, you mentioned co-opetition. So I think when you're in partner conversations and customer conversations, there's a lot of competition out there. Everyone's got their own key messages. What are the key differentiators that you're saying, AWS, MariaDB together better, and here's why? Yeah, I think that certainly you start with the global footprint of AWS, right? So what we rely on the most is having the ability to truly deal with global customers in the availability zones that can optimize performance from them. But then when we look at what we do that really changes the game, it comes down to scale and performance. We actually just ran a Sysbench test against Cockroach. It also does distributed SQL. Absolutely, the results were off the charts. So we went public and said, we have an open challenge. Anyone that wants to try to beat, expand in SkySQL, if you can, we'll put $25,000 towards charity. So we really are putting our money where our mouth is on that challenge. So we believe the performance because we've seen it and we know it's real. But then it's really always about data scale. Modern data requirements are breaking the mold of sharding. They're breaking the mold of all these band-aids that people have put in these traditional services and we give them future. We future-proof their investments so they can say, I can start here, but if I end up being a startup that becomes Airbnb, I'm already built to blow it out on the back end. I can already use what I have. Speaking of startups being the next Airbnb, if you look at behind us here, you can see this is a really packed event in New York City. Events are back, but the ecosystem here is even flourishing. So Dave and I and Lisa were observing that we're still kind of in a growth mode at the time. So yeah, there's some market forces, headwinds for the big unicorns overfunded, public companies, maybe the valuations are a little bit off, but there's still a surge of new innovations, new companies coming out of this. And it's all around data and scale. It's all around new names we've never heard of. What's your take on them and reaction to that? Another awesome segue is in addition to the public clouds, I managed the ecosystem. And one of the things that we've really been focused on with SkySQL is making it accessible, API accessible. So if you're a company that has a huge MariaDB footprint, change data capture might be the most important thing for you to say, we want to do this, but we want you to stay in sync with our environments. Things like monitoring, things like BI, all of these are ecosystem plays and current partners that we have that we really think about, how do you holistically look at not only the database of what it can do, but how does it deliver value to different segments of the customer base or just your employee base that are using that stuff? So I think that's huge for us. What, you know, one of the things that we talk often about is that every company these days, regardless of industry, has to be a data company. Yep. You've got to be able to access the data, glean insights from it and act on it quickly, whether it's manufacturing, retail, healthcare. Are there any verticals in where MariaDB really excels? So certainly we excel in areas like financial services, it's huge, DBS Bank in APAC, one of our biggest customers. Also one of the largest Oracle migrations, probably the that we've ever done. A lot of people trying to get off Oracle, we make it seamless to get into MariaDB. You can think about Samsung cloud and their entire consumer cloud is built on MariaDB. Why? It's integrated with expand, right? Seasonality, so there's customers like that that really bring it home for us as far as service now, tech sector, right? So these are all different ones, but I think we're really strong in those areas. So this brings up a good point. Dave and I coined a term called super cloud at re-invent and Lisa and Dave were at multiple events, we were together at events and so a lot of people are getting behind this because this multi-cloud sounds like something's broken. So we call it super cloud because customers are building on top of ecosystems like MariaDB and others, not just AWS. So AWS does all the capex and provide the value. So now people are having this new super cloud moment where we're saying we can get all the benefits of cloud scale without actually being a cloud. So this is where the next gen layer comes. What's your reaction to super cloud? Do you think it's a thing? Well, I think it's a thing in the sense from our perspective as an ISV, we're laser focused on making sure that we support any cloud and we have a truly multi-cloud platform. But the beauty of that as well is from a single UI, you're able to deploy databases in different clouds underneath that you're not looking at so you can have performance proximity but you're still driving it through the same SkySQL UI. So for us, it's unequivocally true and I think it's only ISVs like MariaDB that can deliver on that value. Because you're enabling. We're enabling it, right? We partner, we build on top of everything, right? So we can access everything underneath. And they can then build on top of you. Sure, exactly, and that's exactly where it goes, right? So that, I think in that sense, the super cloud is actually already somewhat real. It's interesting, you look at the old IT spend, they take a big company, I won't say a name, but a leader and a vertical. They have such a big spend, now they can leverage that spend in with the super cloud model, they then could become a service provider in the vertical. Capital one's doing it, you're seeing Goldman Sachs doing it. They have the power on the spend that they're leveraging in for their business and servicing their vertical and the smaller players. Do you see that trend? Well, I think that's the reality is that everyone is getting this place where if you're talking about sort of this broader super concept, you're talking about global scale, right? That's, in order to deliver a backbone that can service that model, you have to have the right data structure and the right database footprint to be able to scale. And I think that's what they all need to be able to do and that's what we're really well positioned with SkySQL. To enable companies, as we talked about in a minute ago, to truly become data companies and to be competitive and to scale on their own, where are your customer conversations? Are they at the C-suite level? Has that changed in the last couple of years? That's actually a really great way to state that question because I think you would've traditionally probably talked more to the DBAs, right? They're the people that are having headaches, they're having problems, they're trying to solve. We see a lot of developers now, tons, right? They're thinking about, I have this new thing that I need to do to deliver this new application and here's the requirements and the current model's broken. It doesn't optimize that. It's a lot of work and it's hard to manage. So I think that we're in a great position to be able to take that to that next phase and deliver. And then of course, as you get deeper in with AWS, you're talking about CIO level, CISO level. They need to understand how do you fit into our larger paradigm? And many of these guys have hundreds of million dollar commits with AWS, so they think of their investment in the sense of a cloud stack. And we're part of that cloud stack, just like AWS services. So those conversations continue to happen certainly with our larger customers because it truly is married. It is and they continue to evolve. Kevin, thank you so much for joining me. You're welcome, it's great. John and me talking about what's going on with MariaDB. Thank you, John. Thank you, Lisa. On behalf of MariaDB, it was wonderful. We appreciate it. Excellent, fantastic. We enjoyed it as well. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from New York City at AWS Summit NYC. John and I will be back with our next guest in a minute.