 Live from Munich, Germany. It's theCUBE. Covering DataWorks Summit Europe 2017. Brought to you by Hortonworks. Okay, welcome back everyone here. Day two coverage of theCUBE here in Germany, Munich, Germany for DataWorks 2017. I'm John Ford, my co-host Dave Vellante. Two days of wall-to-wall coverage. SiliconANGLE meets theCUBE. Our next guest is Raj Verma, President and COO of Hortonworks. First time on theCUBE. New to Hortonworks, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much, John. Appreciate it. Great keynote, looking good with a three-piece suit. We were commenting when you were on stage. Great scene here in Europe. Again, different show, VisaV North America in San Jose. You got the show coming up there. It's the big show. Here, it's a little bit different. A lot of IOT in Germany. You got a lot of car manufacturers, but the industrial nation here, smart cities, initiatives. A lot of big data. What's your thoughts? Yeah, now I, firstly, thanks for having me here. It's a pleasure. And good shit chatting right before the show as well. We are very, very excited about the entire data space. Europe is leading many initiatives about how to use data as a sustainable competitive differentiator. I just moderated a panel and you guys heard me talk to a retail bank, a retailer, and really Centrica, which was nothing but British Gas, which is a rather, you know, an organization steeped in history, so as to speak. And that institution is now, calls itself a technology company. And it's a technology company or an IOT company based on them using data as the currency for innovation. So now British Gas or Centrica calls itself a data company. When would you have ever thought that? I was at dinner with a very large automotive manufacturer and the kind of stuff they're doing with data, right from the driving habits, driver safety, real time insurance, premium calculation, the autonomous drive. It's just fascinating. No matter what industry you talk about, it's just very, very interesting and we are very glad to be here. And, you know, international business is a big priority for me. We've been following Hortonworks since its inception when it spun out of Yahoo years ago. I think we've been to every Hadoop world going back to, except for the first one. We've watched the transition and it's interesting, it's always been a learning environment at these shows and certainly the customer testimonial speaks to the ecosystem. But I have to ask you, you're new to Hortonworks. You have an interesting technology background. Why did you join Hortonworks? Because you've certainly seen the movies before and the cycles of innovation, but now we're living in a pretty epic machine learning data AIs on the horizon. What were the reasons why you joined Hortonworks? Yeah, sure. You know, I've had a really good run in technology. Fortunately, it was associated with two great companies, Parametric Technology and Tipco Software. I was 16 years at Tipco, so I've been dealing with data for 16 years. But over the course of the last couple of years, whenever I spoke to a C-level executive or a CIO, they were talking to us about the fact that structured data, which is really what we did for 16 years, was not good enough for innovation. Innovation and insights into unstructured data was a seminal challenge of most of the executives that I was talking to, senior-level executives. And when you're talking about unstructured data and making sense of it, there isn't a better technology than the one that we are dealing with right now, undoubtedly. So that was one, dealing with data, because data is really the currency of our times. Every company is a data company. Second was, I've been involved with proprietary software for 23 years. And if there is a business model that's ready for disruption, it's the proprietary software business model. Because I'm absolutely convinced that open source is what I call a green business model. It's good for Planet Earth, so as to speak. It's a community-based, it's based on innovation, and it puts the customer and the technology provider on the same page. The customer's success drives the vendor's success. And yeah, so the open source community data, it's sustainable, pun intended, in the sense that it's had a continuing run, and it's interesting, tier one software is all open source now. 100%. And by the way, not only that, if you see large companies like IBM and Microsoft, they have finally woken up to the fact that if they need to attract talent, and if they want to be known as thought leaders, they have to have some very meaningful open source initiatives. Microsoft loves Linux. When did we ever think that was going to happen? And by the way, five years. I think Steve Ballmer once said it was the cancer of the industry. Now they're behind it, but the Linux Foundation is also growing. We saw projects just last, this past week, Intel donated a big project to the Linux Foundation, she's taking over, so more projects. Yes, there's more action happening than ever before. You know, absolutely, John, five years ago, when I would go and meet a CIO, and I would ask them about open source, and they would wink, they say, of course we do open source, but it's less than 5%, right? Now, when I talk to a CIO, they first ask their teams to go evaluate open source as the first choice, and if they can't, they come kicking and streaming towards proprietary software. Most organizations, and some organizations with a lot of historical gravity, so as to speak, have a 50-50 even split between proprietary and open source, and that's happened in the last three years. And I can make a bold statement, and I know it'll be true, that in the next three years, most organizations, the ratio of proprietary to open source would be 20 proprietary, 80 open source. So obviously you've made that bet on open source, joining Hortonworks, but open is a spectrum, and on one end of the spectrum you have Hortonworks, which is, as I see it, the purest, you know? Now, even Larry Ellison, when he gets on stage at Oracle OpenWorld, will talk about how open Oracle is. I guess that's the other end of the spectrum, so my question is, won't the Microsofts and the Oracles and the IBM, they're like recovering alcoholics, and they'll accommodate their platforms through open source, embracing open source. We'll see if AWS does the same. We know it's a unidirectional there. How do you see that industry dynamic? Well, we'll talk about that later. How do you see that industry dynamic shaking out? No, absolutely, I think, you know, I remember way back in, I think the mid to late 90s, I still love that quote by Scott McNeely, who's a friend, Dell, not Dell, digital, came out with a marketing campaign saying, open VMS. And Scott said, how can someone lie so much with one word? You know, open, so it's just the fact that, you know, Oracle calling itself open, well, I'll just, you know, leave it at that. It's a good joke. I think the definition of open source to me is when you acquire a software, you have three real costs. One is the cost of initial procuring that software and the hardware and all the rest of it. The second is implementation and maintenance. However, most people miss the third dimension of cost when acquiring software, which is the cost to exit the technology. Our software and open source has very low exit barriers to our technology. If you don't like our technology, switch it off. You own the software anyway, switch off our services, and the barrier of exit are very, very low. Having worked in proprietary software, as I said, for 23 years, I very often had conversations with my customers where, you know, I would say, look, you really don't have a choice, because if you want to exit my technology, it's going to probably cost you 10 times more than what you've spent till date. So it's a lock-in architecture, and then you milk that customer through maintenance, right? Switching costs, really, are the metric. Switching costs are exactly. You gave the example of blockbuster off-camera, right, and the rental, the late-charge fees. Okay, that's an example of lock-in. So as we look at the company you're most compared with, now that it's going public, Plowdera, in a way I see more similarities than differences. I mean, you guys are both sort of birds of a feather, but you are going for what I call the long game, with a volume subscription model, and Plowdera has chosen to build proprietary components on top, so you have to make big bets on open, you have to support those open technologies. How do you see that affecting the long-term business model? Yeah, I think we are committed to open source. There's absolutely no doubt about it. I do feel that we are connected data platform, which is data address and data in motion across on-prem and cloud is the business model that's going to win. We clearly have momentum on our side. You've seen the same filings that I have seen. You're talking about a company that had a three-year head start on us, had a billion dollars of funding, right, at very high valuations, and yet they are only one year ahead in terms of revenue, and they have burned probably three times more cash than we have, so clearly, and it's not my opinion, if you look at the numbers purely, the numbers actually give us the credibility that our business model and what we are doing is more efficient and is working better. One of the arguments that I often hear from analysts and press is, how are your margins on open source? According to the filings again, their margins are 82% on proprietary software, my margins and open source are 84%. So from a health of the business perspective, we are better. Now, the other is, they claim to have been making a pivot to more machine learning and deep learning and all the rest of it, and they actually like us to believe that their competition is going to be Amazon, IBM, and Google. Now, with a billion dollars of funding with the Intel ecosystem behind them, they could effectively compete against Hortonworks. What do you think are their chances of competing against Google, Amazon, and IBM? I just leave that for you guys to decide, to be honest with you, and we feel very good that they have virtually advocated this space and we've got the momentum, so very excited. On the numbers, what jumps out at you on the filing? So obviously, I'm sure everyone at Hortonworks was digging through the S1 because for the first time now, Cloudera exposes some of the numbers. I noticed some striking things different. Obviously, besides their multiple on revenue and valuation, pretty obvious there's going to be a haircut coming after the public offering. But on the sales side, which is your wheelhouse, there's a value proposition that you guys at Hortonworks have been, we've been watching the cadence of getting new clients, servicing clients with product evolution is challenging, but also expensive. It's not, you guys, but getting better, as Sean Connolly pointed out yesterday, you guys are looking at some profitability targets on the EBITDA coming up in Q4, publicly stated on the earnings call. How's that different than Cloudera? Are they burning more cash because of their sales motions or sales costs, or is it the product mix? What's your thoughts from the filings around Cloudera versus the Hortonworks? Well, look, I just feel that I can talk more about my business than there's. Clearly, you've seen the same filings that I have, and you've seen the same cash burn rates that we have seen. We clearly are more efficient, though we can still get better. But because of being public for a little more than two years now, we've had a thousand watt bulb being shown at us, and we have been forced to be more efficient because we were in the limelight. You're open. And we're open, right? So people knew what our figures are, what our efficiency ratios were, so we've been working diligently at improving them, and we've gotten better, and there's still scope for improvement. However, being private did not have the same scrutiny on Cloudera. And some would say that they were actually spending money like drunken sailors if you really read their S1 filing. So they will come under a lot of scrutiny as well. I'm sure they'll get more efficient, but right now clearly, you've seen the same numbers that I have, their numbers don't talk about efficiency either in the R&D side or the sales and marketing side. So yeah, we feel very good about where we are in that place. I mean, in open source is this two-edged sword. Like, take yarn, for example. From my perspective, Horton works and he really led the charge to yarn. And then well before Docker and Kubernetes' ascendancy, and then all of a sudden that happens, and of course you've got to embrace those open source trends. So you have the unique challenge of having to support sort of all the open source platforms. And so that's why I call it the long game. In order for you guys to thrive, you've got to both put resources into those multiple projects, and you've got to get the volume of your subscription model which you pointed out, the marginal economics are just as good as most, if not any, software business. So how do you manage that resource allocation? Yeah, so I think a lot of that is the fact that we've got plenty of contributors and committers to the open source community. We are also seen as the angel child in open source because we are just pure, kosher open source. We just don't have a single line of proprietary code. We are committed to that community and we have, over the last six or seven years, developed models of software development which helps us manage the collective, bargaining powers so as to speak, of the community to allocate resources and prioritize the allocation of resources. It continues to be a challenge given the breadth of the open source community and what we have to handle. But fortunately I'm blessed that we've got a very, very capable engineering organization that keeps us very efficient and on the cutting edge. We're here with Raj Verma, the new president and COO of Hortonworks, Chief Operating Officer. I've got to ask you, because it's interesting, you're coming in with a fresh set of eyes coming in, as you mentioned, from TIPCO. Interesting, which is very successful in the generation of its time and the history of TIPCO, where it came from and what it did was pretty fantastic. I mean, everyone knows connecting data together. It was very hard in the enterprise world. TIPCO has some challenges today as you're seeing with being disrupted by open source. But I got to ask you, as a prospective new executive, you got, looking at the battlefield and opportunity with open source, there's some significant things happening and what are you excited about? Because Hortonworks has actually done some of the interesting things. Some, I would say, the world spun in their direction. Their relationship with Microsoft, for instance, and their growth in cloud has been fantastic. I mean, Microsoft's stock price, when they first started working with Hortonworks, I think it was like 26, and I was seeing Satya Nattela on board. Azure, their more open source on open compute to Kubernetes and microservices. Azure doing very, very well. You also have a partnership with Amazon Web Services. So you already are living in this cloud era, okay? And so you have a cloud dynamic going on. Are you excited by that? And you bring some partnership expertise from TIPCO. How do you look at partners? Because you guys don't really compete with anybody, but you're partnering with everybody. So you kind of like Switzerland, but you're also doing a lot of partnerships. What are you excited about vis-a-vis the cloud and some of the other partnerships that are happening? Yeah, absolutely. I think having a robust partner ecosystem is probably my number one priority. Maybe number two, after being profitable in a short span of time, which is again publicly stated. Now our partnership with Microsoft is very, very special to us. Being available on Azure, we are seeing some fantastic growth rates coming in from Azure. We are also seeing remarkable amount of traction from the market to be able to go and test out our platform with very, very low barriers of entry. And of course, almost zero barriers of exit. So from a partnership platform, cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft are very, very important to us. We are also getting a lot of interest from carriers in Europe, for example. Some of the biggest carriers want to offer business services around big data and almost 100%, actually not almost. 100% of the carriers that we have spoken to thus far want to partner with us and offer our platform as a cloud service. So cloud for us is a big initiative. It gives us the entire capability to reach audiences that we might not be able to reach bringing one doorbell at a time. So it's, as I said, we've got a very robust integrated cloud strategy. Our customers find that very, very interesting and building that with a very robust partner channel, high priority for us. Second is using our platform as a development platform for application on big data is again a priority and that's, again, building a partner ecosystem. The third is relationships with global SIs, Accenture, Deloitte, KPMG, the Indian SIs of Infosys and Vifro and HCL and the rest. We have some work to do. We've done some good work there, but there's some work to be done there. And not only that, I think some of the initiatives that we are launching in terms of training as a service, free certification are all things which are aimed at reaching out to the partners and building, as I said, a robust partner ecosystem. There's a lot of talk at conferences like this about, especially in Hadoop, about complexity, complexity ecosystem, new projects and the difficulties understanding that. But in reality, it seems as though today anyway, the technology's pretty well understood. We talked about millennials off camera, coming out today with social savvy and tooling and understanding gaming and things like that. Technology, getting it to work seems to not be the challenge anymore. It's really understanding how to apply it, how to value data we heard in your panel today. The business process, which used to be very well known, it's counting, it's payroll, simple. Now it's kind of ever changing daily. What do you make of that? How do you think that will affect the future of work? Yeah. I think there's some very interesting questions that you asked in that. The first, of course, is what does it take to have a very successful big data or Hadoop project? And I think we always talk about the fact that if you have a very robust business case backing a Hadoop project, that is the number one key ingredient to delivering a Hadoop project. Otherwise, you can tend to boil the ocean, all right? Or try and eat an elephant in one bite, as I like to say. So that's one. And I think you're right. It's not the technology, it's not the complexity, it's not the availability of the resources. It is a leadership issue in organizations where the leader demands certain outcomes, business outcomes from the Hadoop project team. And we've seen whenever that happens, the project seemed to be very, very successful. Now, the second part of the question about future of work, which is a very, very interesting topic and a topic which is very, very close to my heart, there are going to be more people than jobs in the next 20, 25 years. I think any job that can be automated will be automated or has been automated, right? So this is going to have a society and impact on how we live. I've been lucky enough that I joined this industry 25 years ago and I've never had to change or switch industries. But I can assure you that our kids, and we were talking about kids off-camera as well, our kids will have to probably learn a new skill every five years. So how does that impact education, right? We in our generation were testing champions. We were educated to score well in tests. But the new form of education, which you and I were talking about again in California where we live and where my daughter goes to high school. And in her school, the number one, the number one priority is to instill a sense of learning and joy of learning in students because that is what is going to contribute to a robust future. You know, that's a good point. I want to just interject there because I think that the trends we're seeing in the higher ed side too, also point to the impact of data science to curriculum and learning. It's not just putting catalogs online. It's just now kind of an iterative, kind of non-linear discovery to proficiency. But there's also the emotional quotient aspect. You mentioned the love of learning. The immersion of tech and digital is creating interdisciplinary requirements. So all the folks say that, what? There's statistics like half the jobs that are going to be available. Haven't even been just figured out yet. Meaning that there's a value creation around interdisciplinary skill sets and emotional quotient. Absolutely. Social emotional. Because of the human social community connectedness. This is also a big data challenge opportunity. No, 100%. And I think one of the things that we believe is in the future, jobs that require a greater amount of empathy are least susceptible to automation. So things like caring for old age people in the world and nursing and teaching and artists and all the rest would be professions which would be highly paid and numerous. I also believe that the entire big data challenge about how you use data to impact communities is going to come into play. And also, I think, Joni, you and I were again talking about it, the entire concept of corporations is only 200 years old, really, 200, 300 years old. Before that, our forefathers were individual contributors who contributed a certain part in a community. Babers, tailors, farmers, what have you. We are going to go back to the future where all of us will go back to being individual contributors. And I think, and again, I'm bringing it back to open source. Open source is the start of that community which will allow the community to go back to its roots of being individual contributors rather than being part of a organization or a corporation to be successful and to contribute. You know, the Coase's Penguin has been a very famous seminal piece of work. I'll see Ronald Coase, who wrote the book The Nature of the Firm, is interesting, but that's been a kind of historical document. If you look at Blockchain, for instance, Blockchain actually has the opportunity to disrupt what the nature of the firm is about because of smart contracts, supply chain and whatnot. And we have this debate on theCUBE all the time. There's some naysayers. I was just in Tim Connors of VC and I were talking on our Friday show on Silicon Valley Friday show. He's actually a naysayer on Blockchain. I'm for a Blockchain because I think there's some skeptics that say Blockchain is really hard to do because it requires an ecosystem. Yes. However, we're living in an ecosystem of world of communities. So I think that the nature of the firm will be disrupted by people organizing in a new way vis-a-vis Blockchain. Because that's an open source paradigm. Yeah, no, I concur. So I'm a believer in that entire concept. I 100% agree. I want to come back to something you're talking about about individual contributors in the relationship and link to open source and collaboration. I personally, I think we have to have a frank conversation about, I mean, machines have always replaced humans. But for the first time in our history, it's replacing cognitive functions. To your point about empathy, what are the things that humans can do that machines can't? And they become fewer and fewer every year. And a lot of these conferences, people don't like to talk about that, but it's a reality that we have to talk about. And your point is right on, we're going back to individual contribution, open source collaboration. The other point is data. Is it going to be at the center of that innovation? Because it seems like value creation and maybe job creation in the future is going to be a result of the combinatorial effects of data, open source collaboration, other innovation. It's not going to be because of Moore's law, right? So, thought on that. 100%, and I think one of the aspects that we didn't touch upon is the new societal model that automation is going to create would need data-driven governance. So a data-driven government is going to be a necessity because remember in those times, and I think in 25, 30 years, countries will have to explore the impact of negative taxation, right? Because of all the automation that actually happens around citizen security, about citizen welfare, about cost of health care, cost of providing health care. All of that is going to be fueled by data, right? So it's just, as the Chinese proverb says, may you live in interesting times. We definitely are living in very interesting times. And pardon the public policy implications. Your friend and one of my business heroes, Scott McNeely, says there's no privacy in the internet get over it. We interviewed Don Tapscott last week. He said, that's unacceptable. We have to solve that problem. So it brings up a lot of public policy issues. Well, the social economic impact right now, there's a trend we're seeing where the younger generation, we're talking about the post-911 generation that's entering the workforce, they have a social conscious, right? So there's an emphasis you're seeing on social good. AI for social good is one of the hottest trends out there. But the changing landscape around data is interesting. So the word democratization has been used, whether you're looking at the early days of blogging and podcasting, which we were involved in in research to now in media, this notion of data and transparency and open source is probably at a tipping point, all time high in terms of value, creation. So I want to get your thoughts on this because as someone who's been in the proprietary world, the mode of operation was, get something proprietary, lock it down, build a fence and a wall, protect it with boats with machine guns and fight for the competitive advantage, right? Now the competitive advantage is open. Okay, so you're looking at a pure open source model with Hortonworks, it changes how companies are competing. Because what is the competitive advantage of Hortonworks? Actually, to be more open. Now 100% and hardness. How do you think of that? Yeah, absolutely, I just think the proprietary nature of software has disrupted a lot of businesses, right? And it's not resistant to disruption itself. I mean, there has never been a business model in the history of time where you charge a lot of money to build a software or sell a software that you've built and then whatever are the defects in that software, you get paid more money to fix them, right? It's the entire perpetual and maintenance model. That model is going to get disrupted. Now there are hundreds of billions of dollars involved in it so people are going to come kicking and screaming to the open source world but they will have to come to the open source world. Our advantage that we are seeing is innovation now, in a closed loop environment, no matter what size of a company you are, cannot keep up with the changing landscape around you from a data perspective. So without the collective innovation of a community, I don't really think a technology can stay at par with the changes around it. This is what I say about this. I think it's such an important point that you're getting at because we started SiliconANGLE actually in the Cloudera office so we have a lot of friends that work there. We have a great admiration for them but one of the things that Cloudera has done through their execution is they've been very profit oriented, go public at all costs, kind of thing that they're doing now. You've seen that happen. Is the competitive advantage that you're pointing out is something we're seeing that's similar with that Andy Jassy's doing at AWS which is it's not so much to build something proprietary per se, it's just to ship something faster. So if you look at Amazon's competitive advantage, is that they just continue to ship product faster and faster and faster than companies can build themselves. And also the scale that they're getting with these economies is increasing the quality. So open sources also hit the naysayers on security. Everybody says, oh, open source is not secure. As it turns out, it's more secure. Amazon at scale is actually becoming more secure. So you're starting to see the new competitive advantage be ship more, be more open as the way to do business. What do you think the impact will be to traditional companies, whether it's a startup competing or an existing bank, this is a paradigm shift. What's the impact going to be for a CIO or a CEO of a big company? How do they incorporate that competitive advantage? Yeah, I think the proprietary software world is not going to go away tomorrow, John, you know that. There's so much of install software and there's a saying from where I come from that even a dead elephant is worth a million dollars, right? So even that business model, even though it is sort of dying, it'll still be a good investment for the next 10 years because of the locked in business model where customers cannot get out. Now, from a perspective of openness and what that brings as a competitive differentiators to our customer, just the very pace at which, you know, as I said, I've lived in a proprietary world, you would be lucky if you were getting the next version of our software every 18 months, you'd be lucky. In the open source community, you get a few versions in 18 months, you know? So the cadence at which releases come out have just completely disrupted the proprietary model, right? It is just the collective, as I say, innovative or innovation ability of a community has allowed us to release, to increase the release cadence to few months now, all right? And if our engineering team had its way, it'll further be cut short, right? So the ability of customers and what does that allow the customer to do? 10 years ago, if you looked for a capability from your proprietary vendor, they would say you have to wait 18 months, so what do you do? You build it yourself, all right? So that is what the spaghetti architecture was all about. In the new open source model, you ask the community and if enough people in the community think that that's important, the community builds it for you and gives it to you. And the good news is the business model of open source is working, so you guys have been public. You've got Cloud Air going public, you have MuleSoft out there, a lot of companies out there now that are public companies are open source companies. So a phenomenal changeover. But the other thing that's interesting is that the hiring factor for the large enterprise to the point of, your point about proprietary not updating, it's the same as true for the enterprise. So just hiring candidates out of open source is now increasing the talent pool for a large enterprise. 100%, 100%. Well, I wonder if I could challenge this love fest for a minute. So there's another saying. I didn't grow up there, but a dying snake can still bite you. So I bring that up because there is this hybrid model that's emerging because these elephants, eventually they figure it out. And so an example would be, we talked about Cloud Air and so forth, but a better example I think is IBM. What IBM has done to embrace open source with investing years ago, a billion dollars in the Linux, what it's doing with Spark to essentially try to elbow its way in and say, okay, now we're going to co-opt an ecosystem and then build our proprietary pieces on top of it. That to me is a viable business model, is it not? Yes, I'm sure it is. And to John's point that with the mule going IPO and with Cloud Air having successfully built a $250 million, $261 million business, it's a testimony to the fact that companies can be built. Now, can they be more efficient? Sure, they can be more efficient. However, my entire comment on this is why are you doing open source? What is your intent of doing open source? To be seen as open or to be truly open? Because in our philosophy, if you add a slim layer of proprietaryness, why are you doing that? And as a businessman, I'll tell you why. You increase the stickiness factor by locking in your customer, right? So let's not, again, we're having a frank conversation. Proprietary code equals customer lock-in, period. We're great. And as a business model, as a business model, I do. It is, yeah, look at that, yeah. So it's a customer lock-in. Now as a business model, if you were to go with the business models of the past, yes, I believe most of the analysts will say it's a stickier, better business model. But then, we would like to prove them wrong. And that's our mission as open source. So I say that Amazon's the mother of all lock-ins. You kind of bristled at that before. No, but they use a lot of open source. I mean, do they open source it? But getting back to the lock-in, lock-in is a function of stickiness, right? So stickiness can be open source. You could argue that Horton works through their relationship with partnering as a lock-in spec with their stickiness of being open, right? So I come back down to the proprietary thing. My search engine, I like Google. So it's- Well, I mean, Google's certainly got a ton of- They've got me locked in, because I like it. Well, there was a lot of, do you care? It's proprietary technology that Google's built. But we, switching costs, as we talked about before. No, well, the difference- But you're not paying for six. True. If the value exceeds the price of the lock-in, then it's an opportunity. So Paul Mauritius talked about the hard and top. The hard and top. Do you care what's in an Intel processor? Well, Intel is a proprietary platform that provides processing power, but it enables a lot of other values. So I think the stickiness factor of, say, IBM is interesting, and they've done a lot of open source stuff to defend them on Linux. For example, they do it on a ton of blockchain. But they're priming the pump for their own business. That's clear for their lock-in. But Raj wasn't saying there's not value there. He's saying it's lock-in. And it is. Well, some customers will pay for convenience. But you're like, hey, 100%. There's, if the value exceeds the lock-in risk, then it's working. Yes, that's my point. Okay, yeah. 100%, 100%. And that's where the opportunity is. So you can use open source to get to a value trajectory. That's the barriers to entry. We've seen it on the entrepreneurship side, right? It's easier to start a company now than ever before. Why? Because it will open source in cloud, right? So does that mean that every startup is going to be super successful and beat IBM? No, not really. Do you think there'll be a red hat of big data, and will you be it? You hope so. If I had my way, definitely. That's really the best example, right? Yes, it's, and you know, the one thing that excites us about our business here is, you know, as my former boss used to say, you could be as good as you think you are, or the best in the world. But if you're in the landline business right now, you're not going to have a very bright future. However, the business that we are in, the pull from the market that we get, and you're seeing here, right? And these are days that we have very often where customer pull is remarkable. I mean, this industry is growing at, you know, depending on which analysts you're talking to, somewhere between 50% to 80% year on year. All right, every customer is a prospect for us. There isn't a single conversation that we have with any organization almost of any size where they don't think that they can use their data better, or they can enhance and improve their data strategy. So if that is in place, and I'm confident about our execution, very, very happy with the technology platform, with the support that we get from our customers. So, you know, all things seem to be lining up. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate your time. We had a little bit over, I think a lot of time, but I wanted to get your insights as the new president and chief operating officer of Board and Works. Congratulations on the new role and looking forward to seeing the results. Since you're a public company, we'll be actually be able to see the scoreboard. Congratulations and thanks for coming on theCUBE. There's more coverage here live for DataWorks 2017. I'm John Furrier. Stay with us. More great interviews, day two coverage. We'll be right back.