 Live from San Jose, it's theCUBE, presenting Big Data Silicon Valley, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE on day two of our coverage of our event, Big Data SB. I'm Lisa Martin, my co-host is Peter Burris. We are down the street from the Strata Data Conference. We've had a great day yesterday and great morning already. Really learning and peeling back the layers of Big Data challenges, opportunities, next generation. We're welcoming back to theCUBE an alumni, the CMO of Connecticut, Dan Raskin. Hey, Dan, welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you, thank you for having me. So, I'm a messaging girl, look at your website, the insight engine for the extreme data economy. Tell us about the extreme data economy and what does that mean for your customers? Yeah, so it's a great question and from our perspective, we sit, we're here at Strata and you see all the different vendors kind of talking about what's going on and there's a little bit of word spaghetti out there that makes it really hard for customers to think about how Big Data is affecting them today. And so what we're actually looking at is the idea of the world's change, that Big Data from five years ago doesn't necessarily address all the use cases today. If you think about what customers are going through, you have more users devices and things coming on, there's more data coming back than ever before. And it's not just about creating the data-driven business and building these massive data lakes that turn into data swamps, it's really about how do you create the data-powered business. So when we're using that term, we're really trying to call out that the world's changed that in order for businesses to compete in this new world, they have to think about how to take data and create core IP that differentiates. How do I use it to affect the Omni channel? How do I use it to deal with new things in the realm of banking and fintech? How do I use it to protect myself against disruption and telco? And so the extreme data economy is really this idea that you have business in motion, more things coming online ever before. How do I create a data strategy where data is infused in my business and creates core IP that helps me maintain category leadership or growth? So as you think about that challenge, there's a number of technologies that come into play. Not the least of which is the industry, while it's always to a degree been driven by what hardware can do, that's moderated a bit over time. But today, in many respects, a lot of what is possible is made possible by what hardware can do and what hardware is going to be able to do. We've been using similar AI algorithms for a long time. We didn't have the power to use them. We had access to data, but we didn't have the power to acquire it and bring it in. So how is the relationship between your software and your platform and some of the new hardware that's becoming available, starting to play out in a way of creating value for customers? Right, so if you think about this in terms of this extreme data concept and you think about it in terms of a couple of things. One, streaming data, just massive amounts of streaming data coming in. Billions of rows that people want to take and translate into value. And that data is coming from? And that it's coming from users, devices, things interacting with all the different assets, more edge devices that are coming online. And, you know, the Wild West essentially. You know, you look at the world of IoT and it's absolutely insane with the number of protocols and device data that's coming back to a company. And then you think about how do you actually translate this into real-time insight? Not near real-time where it's taking seconds, but true millisecond response times where you can infuse this into your business. And what one of our whole premises of Connecticut is the idea of this massive parallel compute. So the idea of not using CPUs anymore to actually drive the powering behind your intelligence but leveraging GPUs. And if you think about this, a CPU has 64 cores, 64 parallel things that you can do at a time. A GPU can have up to 6,000 cores, 6,000 parallel things. So it's kind of like lizard brain versus modern brain. How do you actually create this next generation brain that has all these neural networks for processing the data in a way that you couldn't? And then on top of that, you're using it not just the technology of GPUs, you're trying to operationalize it. So how do you actually bring the data scientist, the BI folks, the business folks all together to actually create a unified operational process? And the underlying piece is the Connecticut engine and the GPUs to do this, but the power is really in the use cases of what you can do with it and how you actually affect different industries. So can you elaborate a little bit more on the use cases in this kind of game changing environment? Yeah, so there's a couple of common use cases that we're seeing. You know, one that affects every enterprise is the idea of breaking down silos of business units and creating the customer 360 view. So how do I actually take all these disparate data feeds, bring them into an engine where I can visualize concepts about my customer and the environment that they're living in and provide more insight. So if you think about things like whole foods and Amazon merging together, you now have this power of how do I actually bridge the digital and physical world to create a better omnichannel experience for the user? How do I think about things in terms of what preferences they have, personalization? How do I actually pair that with sensor data to affect how they actually navigate in a whole food store more efficiently? And that's affecting every industry. You could take that to banking as well and think about the banking omnichannel and ATMs and the digital bank and all these fintech upstarts that are working to disrupt them. A great example for us is the United States Postal Service where we're actually looking at all the data, the environmental data around the US Postal Service. We're able to visualize it in real time. We're able to affect the logistics of how they actually navigate through their routes. We're able to look at things like postal workers separating out of their zones and potentially kicking off alerts around that. So effectively making the business more efficient. But we've moved into this world where we always used to talk about brick and mortar going to cloud. We're now in this world where the true value is how you bridge the digital and physical world and create more transformative experiences and that's what we want to do with data. So it could be logistics, it could be omnichannel, it could be security, you name it. It affects every single industry that we're talking about. So I got two questions. What is Connecticut's contribution to that? And then very importantly as a CMO, how are you thinking about making sure that the value that people are creating or can't create with Connecticut gets more broadly diffused into an ecosystem? Yeah, so the power that we're bringing is the idea of how to operationalize this in a way where again you're using your data to create value. So having a single engine where you're collecting all this data, massive volumes of data, terabytes upon terabytes of data, enabling it where you can query the data with millisecond response times, visualize it with millisecond response times, run machine learning algorithms against it to augment it with, you still have that human ability to look at massive sets of data and do ad hoc discovery but can run machine learning algorithms against that and complement it with machine learning. And then the operational piece of bringing the data scientist into the same platform that the business is using so you don't have data recency issues is a really powerful mix. The other piece I would just add is the whole piece around data discovery. You can't really call it big data. If in order to analyze the data you have to downsize and downsample to look at a subset of data. It's all about looking at the entire set. So that's where we really bring value. So to summarize very quickly, you are providing a platform that can run very, very fast in a parallel system and memories in these parallel systems so that large amounts of data can be acted upon. That's right. Right, so the next question is there's not going to be a billion people who are going to use your tool to do things. How are you going to work with an ecosystem and partners to get the value that you're able to create with this data out into the hands of an enterprise? Yeah, it's a great question and probably the biggest challenge that I have which is how do you get above the word spaghetti and just get into education around this? And so I think the key is getting into examples of how it's affecting the industry. So don't talk about the technology and streaming from Kafka into a GPU powered engine. Talk about the impact of the business in terms of what it brings in terms of the Omni Channel. You look at something like Japan in the 2020 Olympics and you think about that in terms of telco and how are the mobile providers going to be able to take all the data of what people are doing and relate that to ad tech, to relate that to customer insight, to relate that to new business models of how they could sell the data. That's the world of education we have to focus on is talk about the transformative value it brings from the customer perspective, the outside in as opposed to the inside out. On that educational perspective, as a CMO I'm sure you meet with a lot of customers. Do you find that you might be in this role of trying to help bridge the gaps between different roles in an organization where there's data silos and there's probably still some territorial culture going on? What are you finding in terms of Connecticut's ability to really help educate and maybe bring more stakeholders, not just to the table, but kind of build a foundation of collaboration. Yeah, so it's a really interesting question because I think it means, not just for Connecticut, but all vendors in the space have to get out of their comfort zone and just stop talking speeds and feeds and scale. And in fact, when we were looking at how to tell our story, we did an analysis of where most companies were talking and they were focusing a lot more on the technical aspirations that developers sell, which is important. You still need to court the developer, you have community products that they can download and kick the tires with, but we need to extend our dialogue, get out of our customer comfort zone and start talking more to CIOs, CTOs, CDOs. And that's just reaching out to different avenues of communication, different ways of engaging. And so I think that's kind of a core piece that I'm taking away from Strata is we do a wonderful job of speaking to developers. We all need to get out of our comfort zone and talk to a broader set of folks, so business folks. Right, because that opens up so many new potential products, new revenue streams on a marketing side theme with a really target, your customer base audience with relevant timely offers to be able to be more competitive. The worst scenario is talking to an enterprise around the wonders of a technology that they're super excited about, but they don't know the use case that they're trying to solve. Start with the use case they're trying to solve, start with thinking about how this could affect their position in the market and work on that in partnership. We have to do that in collaboration with the customers. We can't just do that alone. It's about building the partnership and learning together around how you use data in a different way. So as you imagine the investments that you're going to, Connecticut's going to make over the next few years with partners, with customers, what do you hope Connecticut will be in 2020? Yeah, so we want it to be that transformative engine for enterprises. We think we are delivering something that's quite unique in the world and you want to see this on a global basis, affecting our customer's value. I almost want to take us out of the story and if I'm successful, you're going to hear wonderful enterprise companies across Telco, banking and other areas just telling their story and we happen to be the engine behind it. So you're an ingredient in their success? Yes, a core ingredient in their success. So if we think about over the course of the next technology, set of technology waves, are there any particular applications that you think you're going to be stronger in? So I'll give you an example. Do you envision that Connecticut can have a major play in how automation happens inside infrastructure or how developers start seeing patterns in data and imagine how those assets get created? Where are some of the kind of practical but not really talked about applications that you might find yourselves becoming more of an ingredient because they themselves become ingredients to some of these other big use cases? There are a lot of commonalities that we're starting to see and the interesting piece is the architecture that you implement tends to be the same but the context of how you talk about it and the impact it has tends to be different. So I already mentioned the customer 360 view, first and foremost, break down silos across your organization, figure out how do you get your data into one place where you can run queries against it, you can visualize it, you can do machine learning analysis. That's a foundational element and I have a company in Asia called Lippo that is doing that in their space where all of a sudden they're starting to glean things they didn't know about their customer before to create doing that ad hoc discovery. So that's one area. The other piece is this use case of how do you actually operationalize data scientists and machine learning into your core business? So that's another area that we focus on. There are simple entry points, things like a Tableau acceleration where you put us underneath the existing BI infrastructure and all of a sudden you're 100 times faster and now your business folks can sit at the table and make real time business decisions where in the past if they clicked on certain things they'd have to wait to get those results. Geospatial visualizations and no brainer, the idea of taking environmental data, pairing it with your customer data for example and now learning about interactions. And then I'd say the other piece is more innovation driven where we would love to sit down with different innovation groups in different verticals and talk with them about how are you looking to monetize your data in the future? What are the new business models? How does things like voice interaction affect your data strategy? What are the different ways you want to engage with your data? So there's a lot of different realms we can go to. One of the things you said as we wrap up here that I couldn't agree with more is the best value articulation I think a brand can have period is through the voice of their customer. And being able to be, and I think that's one of the things that Paul said yesterday is, defining Connecticut's success based on the success of your customers across industry. And I think it really doesn't get any more objective than a customer who has, not just from a developer perspective, maybe improved productivity or even workforce productivity, but actually moved the business forward to your point early, maybe bridging the gaps between the digital and physical and actually enabling that business to be more profitable, open up new revenue streams because this foundation of collaboration has been established. No, I think that's a great way to think about it. Which is good, because he's your CEO. Yes, yes, that sustains my job. But the other piece is, I almost get embarrassed talking about Connecticut. You know, I don't want to be the car salesman or the vacuum salesman that sprinkles dirt on the floor and then vacuums it up. I'd rather us kind of fade to the behind the scenes power where our customers are out there telling wonderful stories that have an impact on how people live in this world. To me, that's the best marketing you can do is real stories, real value. Can do great more. Well Dan, thanks so much for stopping by sharing what things that Connecticut is doing, some of the things you're hearing and how you're working to really build this foundation of collaboration and enablement within your customers across industries. We look forward to hearing the kind of cool stuff that happens with Connecticut throughout the rest of the year. And again, thanks for stopping by and sharing your insight. Thank you for having me. I want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Peter Burris. We are at Big Data SV, our second day of coverage at a cool place called the Forager Tasting Room downtown San Jose. Stop by, check us out and have a chance to talk with some of our amazing analysts on all things big data. Stick around though, we'll be right back with our next guest after a short break.