 Welcome everyone, I'm Dave Nicholson with theCUBE. This is a special CUBE conversation that is part of the AWS startup showcase season two. Got a very interesting conversation on deck with Steve Francis, who joins us from Instacluster. Steve is the chief revenue officer and executive vice president for go-to-market operations for Instacluster. Steve, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, Dave, good to be here. Looks like you're coming to us from an exotic locale or do you just like to have a nautical theme in your office? No, I'm actually on my boat. I have lots of kids at home and it can be very noisy. So we call this our apartment in the city and sometimes when we need a quiet place, this does nicely. Well, fantastic. Well, let's talk about Instacluster. First, give us a primer on Instacluster and what you guys do. And then let's double click on that and go into some of the details. Sure. So Instacluster, we offer a SaaS platform for data layer open source technologies. And what those technologies have in common is they scale massively. We curate technologies that are capable of massive scales. So people use them to solve big problems typically. And so in addition to SaaS offerings for those open source projects where people can provision themselves clusters in minutes, we also offer support for all of the technologies that we offer on our SaaS platform. We offer customer support contracts as well. And then we have a consulting team, a global consulting team who are expert in all of those open source projects that can help with implementations, that can help with design, health checks, you name it. So most of what they do is kind of short-term expert engagements, but we've also done longer-term projects with them as well. So your business model is to be a SaaS provider as opposed to an alternative, which would be to provide what's referred to as open core software. Is that right? Yeah, that's exactly right. So when our customers have an interest in using community open source, we're the right partner for them. And so really what that means is if they, whether it's our SaaS platform, if they want the flexibility to say, we wanna take that workload off of your SaaS platform, maybe at some point in the operated ourselves because we're not throwing a bunch of proprietary stuff in there, they have the flexibility to do that. So they always have an exit ramp without being locked in. And with our support customers, of course, it's very easy. What we support is both the open source project itself and if there's a gap in that open source project, what we'll do is rather than create a proprietary piece of software to close the gap, we'll source something from the community and we'll support that. Or if something does not exist in the community, in many cases, we'll write it ourselves and open source it and then support it. Yeah, it's interesting. Supposedly, Henry Ford made a comment once that if you ask customers what they want, they'll tell you they want a faster horse. But he was inventing the automobile and some people have likened open core to sort of the faster mechanical horse version of open source where you're essentially substituting an old school legacy vendor for a new school vendor that's wrapping their own proprietary stuff around a delicious core of open source but it sort of diminishes the value proposition of open source. It sounds like that's the philosophy that you have adopted at this point. That's a, I love that story. I hadn't heard that before. One that I like, you know, matching metaphor for metaphor is the Luddites, right? You know, the Luddites didn't want to lose their weaving jobs and so they would smash weaving looms and, you know, to protect their weaving jobs. And I think it's the same thing with the open core model. They're protecting, you know, they're creating fear, uncertainty and doubt about open source saying, oh, it isn't secure. And, you know, those arguments have been used for 15 years or 20 years. And, you know, maybe 15 years ago there were some truth to it. But when you look at who is using open source, community open source now for huge projects, you know, if you just do a search for Apache Kafka users and go to the Apache website, you know, it's kind of the who's who in big business. And these are people using community open source. And so a lot of the fear and uncertainty and doubt is still used. And it's just, you know, it's just kind of hanging onto a business model that isn't really, it's for the benefit of the vendor and not the benefit of the customer. Well, so I can imagine being a customer and realizing several years into an open core journey that I basically painted myself into a similar corner that I was in before. And so I can see where that, you know, that can be something that is a realization that creeps up over time from a customer perspective. But from your business model perspective, if I'm understanding correctly, when you scale, you're scaling the ability to take over operations for a customer. At some level, I'm sure you've got automation involved in this, but at some level you've got to scale in terms of really smart people. Has that limited your ability to scale? So first talk about what have the results been? You guys, we've been covering you since 2018. What have your results been over time? And has that sort of limited, that limit to your scalability been an issue at all? It's hard to find people. It's hard for our customers to find people and it's hard for us to find people. So we have an advantage for two reasons. Number one, we have a really good process for hiring people, hiring graduates, recent computer science graduates, typically, and then getting them trained up and productive on a platform and within a pretty short timeframe of three or four months. And so we have a really well proven process to do that. And then the other thing that you've already alluded to is automation, right? There's a ton of automation built into our platform. So we have a big cost advantage over our customers. So, you know, our customers, you know, if they want to go hire a seasoned, you know, Kafka person or Postgres person or Cassandra person, these people are incredibly expensive in the market. But for us, we can get those people for relatively less expensive. And then with the automation that we have built into our platform to do all the operational tasks and handle all the operational burdens on those different open source projects, it's a lot of it's automated. And so, you know, where one of our experts can use, you know, the number of workloads that they can operate is usually, you know, many times more than what someone could do without all the operational capability or all the automated capabilities that we have. So what has your, what is your plan for scaling the business look like into the future? Is it additional investment in those core operators? Are you looking at expansion geographically acquisition? What can you share with us? You know, we've done some acquisition. We added a Postgres capability. We recently added a further Alaska search capability and really buttressed our capabilities there. I think we'll do more of that. And we will continue to add technologies that we find interesting in a federal model. Usually what we look for technologies that are pretty popular, they're used to solve big problems and they're complicated to manage, right? If something's easy to manage, people are not likely to perceive our value to be that great. So we look for things that, you know, we kind of take the biggest, harriest, gnarliest open source projects for people to manage and we handle the heavy lifting. Can you give me an example of something like that? You don't have to share a customer name if it's not appropriate, but give us an example of Instacluster in action. Pretend I'm the customer and, you know, you mentioned Elasticsearch. Let's say that that is absolutely something that's involved and I have a choice between some open core solution and throwing my people at it to manage it and operate at the data layer versus what you would do. What does that interaction look like? How does the process look? So one thing that we hear from Elasticsearch customers a lot is their customers, some of them are unhappy and what they'll tell us is, look, when we get an operational problem with Elasticsearch, we go to Elasticsearch and the answer we get from them is, we got to buy, you know, you got to buy more stuff. You got to add more nodes and they're in the business of, you know, that's their business and sure, you know, they do have a SaaS offering, but, you know, they're also in the business of selling software. And so when those customers, those same customers come to us, our answer is often, well, hey, we can help you optimize your environment. And, you know, a lot of times when we onboard people onto our platform, they'll achieve cost savings because maybe they weren't on the cloud, maybe they weren't completely optimized there and, you know, we want to make sure that they get a good operational experience and that's how we kind of lock customers in, right? We don't lock them in with code. We make sure that they have a positive experience, that we take a lot of that operational stuff off their hands. And so there's just a good natural alignment between what we want to provide that customer and what they ultimately want to consume. You know, that alignment I think is uniquely high within our business. Well, so how have things changed just in the last several years? Obviously, I mean, you know, the pandemic has affected everything in one way or another, but in terms of things that live at the data layer being important, I mean, just in the last three or four years, the talk of various messaging interfaces and databases has shifted to a degree. What do you see on the horizon? What's getting buzzed that maybe didn't get buzzed a year ago? What are you looking for is, well, if you're out looking for people with skill sets right now, what are those skill sets you're hiring to? I don't hire engineers, right? I rarely go to market organizations. I hire marketers, salespeople, consultants, but so it's probably different. I'm maybe not the best person to ask from an engineering standpoint, but your question about the data layer and how, you know, that's evolving trends that we see, it's becoming increasingly strategic. You know, every, there's a couple of buzzwords out there that, you know, for years now, people have been talking about modernization, digital transformation, stuff like that, but, you know, there's a lot to it, like digital, you know, every business kind of needs to become a digital business. And as that happens, the amount of data that's produced is just as mushrooming, right? You know, the amount of data on the planet doubles about every two years. And so for a lot of applications, for a lot of enterprise mission critical applications, data is the most expensive layer of the application, you know, much more expensive than delivering a front end, much more expensive than delivering a middle tier when you've, you know, just when you factor in storage, just the kind of moving data in and out, you know, data transfer fees, the costs of engineering resources, it's incredibly expensive. So data layers are becoming strategic because organizations are looking at it and realizing, you know, the amount that they're spending on this is eye-popping. And so that's why it's becoming strategic. It's on the radar, just due to the size of bills that organizations are looking at. And we could drive those bills down, you know, our value proposition is really simpler. It's a better, faster, cheaper, and we eliminate the license fees. We can, you know, we are operational experts so we can get people architected in the cloud more efficiently and probably about a third of the time we save our customers cloud fees. So it's, you know, it's a pretty simple model, but some of those things that are strategically more, or they're, sorry, traditionally more tactical are becoming strategic just because of the scope and scale of them. We're having this conversation as part of the AWS startup showcase, which basically means that AWS said, hey, SiliconANGLE, have your CUBE guys go talk to these people because we think they're cool. So why, why, why do they think you're cool? Are you a wholly owned subsidiary of AWS? Did you, did you and your family exceed the 300 order Amazon threshold last year? Why, what's your relationship with Amazon? I want to elf on the shelf from, I don't know why. You know, we're growing fast and we're growing north of 50% last year in 21 and closer to 60%. You know, we certainly, I think when our customers sign up for our services and you know, Amazon gets more workloads, that's probably, you know, a positive thing for Amazon. We're certainly not, you know, there's much, much, much bigger vendors than partners than us that they have, but you know, they're, I think they're aware that there's some of the smaller vendors like us will grow up to be, you know, the bigger vendors of tomorrow. But they've kind of, they've been a great partner. You know, we support multiple, we do support multiple clouds and Amazon's cool with that. You know, we support GCP, we support Azure and kind of give our customers the choice of what clouds they want to run on. Most of our customers do run an Amazon that seems to be sort of a de facto standard, but yeah, they've been a great partner. But AWS, it's not a dependency. If you're working with Instacluster, it doesn't mean that you must be in AWS. No, we can support customers. That's a great question. So we can support customers in multiple clouds and we even support them on-prem, right? If they, if organizations that have their own data center, we actually have an on-premise managed service offering. And if that's not a fit, we even have, we can offer support contracts like if they want to do with themselves and do a lot of the heavy lifting and just need sort of a red phone for emergency situations. We offer 24 by seven, 365 support with 20-minute service levels for urgent issues. So your chief revenue officer, that means that you write the code that runs operations in your system. I'm not smiling, but I'm actually joking. Sorry for the dry sense of humor. But seriously, let's talk about the business end of this, right? We have a lot of folks who tune into the queue because of the technology aspect of it. But let's talk about your growth trajectory over time. This isn't a drill down. I'm not asking for your pipeline, Steve. But give us an idea of what that trajectory has looked like. What's going on from that? Yeah, I mean, most recent year, we're getting to be, I don't know what I'm permitted to share or expect, but we've had a lot of growth. If we've run a couple hundred percent, our revenue has the amount of time that I've been here which is three years. And we're the point now where we're pretty good size. And that gives us, it's cool. It's exciting. What we're noticing in the market is people who, two years ago, people know and knew who we were. And now we're beginning to talk to some partners, some resellers and customers. And they will say things like, oh yeah, we've heard of you. We didn't know what you did, but we've heard of you and that's fun. That's a great place to be. It becomes a little bit self-sustaining at that point. And we are about to launch. It's not a secret because this is in public preview. So I think- I noticed the pause there. I noticed the pause where you're like, can I say this or not? Go ahead and say it, Steve. Yeah. Go ahead and say it. I was trying to think, wait, am I revealing anything here I shouldn't? But we did just go public preview, probably a month ago with a project called Cadence, Cadence Workflow. You can actually go to the Instacluster website and look up Cadence. It's right on our homepage. Or you can, if you wanna go to the open source project itself, you can go to cadenceworkflow.io. This is a project that's trending pretty highly on Google. It's got a lot of important movers in the technology business that are using it and having a lot of success with it. And we're gonna be first to market globally with a SaaS offering for Cadence Workflow. And it's an incredibly exciting project and it's exciting for us too, specifically because it's a little different, right? It's not, it's a middle tier project that is targeted at developers to increase developer productivity and developer velocity. You joked about my being a CRO writing code, but I actually used to be a coder long time ago. I was not very good at it, but what I did enough of it to remember that a lot of what I did as a coder was write plumbing code. Rather than writing that code that makes the business application function, a huge amount of my time as a developer was spent writing just the plumbing code to make things work and to make it secure and to make it transactional and just all that kind of nitty gritty code that you gotta do in a nutshell, Cadence makes writing that code way easier. So especially for distributed applications that have workflow-like capabilities requirements, it's a massive productivity and increasing. So what's cool, exciting for us is now we can, rather than just target data operators, we can actually target developers and engage not just at the data layer, but kind of at that middle tier as well and begin to identify and synergies between the different services that we have and our customers will obviously benefit from that. So that's a big part of our growth strategy. Yeah, so more on from a business perspective and a go-to-market perspective, what is your go-to-market strategy or do you have a channel strategy or you're working with partners, you're going out directly- Our channel strategy is pretty nascent. Our go-to-market strategy for the most part has been, we pay the Google gods and lots of people come to our website and say they wanna talk to us, we talk to them and we get them signed up on our SaaS platform or with a support contract or with a consulting team. We also do outbound, we do, we have an inside sales team that does outbound prospecting and we also have some self-service, we have some self-service customers as well that just anyone can go to our website, swipe the credit card, sign up for our SaaS offering and begin literally get fired up in minutes and use in the platform. So it's a bit of a mix of high touch, low touch. I think we have tons of big logos, lots and lots of our customers are household name, really big organizations solving big problems. And that's kind of where the bulk of our business is. And so I think we've been a little more focused there and go to market than we have sort of the start up, selling to startups and the people that just from super developer focus wanting low touch. So, but I think we need to do better at that part of the market and we are investing some resources there. So we're not so lopsided at the high end of the market. We want kind of the more of a balanced approach because some of those younger companies are gonna grow up to be big massively successful companies. We've had that DoorDash has been a customer of ours for years and they were not nearly, they were custom bars pre-pandemic and we all know what happened to them during the pandemic. And so we know there's other DoorDashes out there. Yeah, yeah, now final question, geography. You guys global, I know you're in North America but what does that look like for you? Where are you? Yeah, we're super global. So, in my go to market organization we have sellers in Asia pack in Europe, multiple in Asia pack, multiple in Europe, lots and lots in the States. Same with marketing, same with engineering, same with our tech ops delivery team. We have most of them in Australia which is where we were founded but we also have a pretty good size team out of Boston and kind of a nascent team in India as well to help them out. So, yeah, very much global and getting close to 300 employees when I started, I think we're about 85 to 90. That's an exciting growth trajectory and I'm just going to assume because it just feels awesome to assume it that since you're on a boat and since you were founded in Australia that that's how you go back and forth to visit the luxury. Yeah. So, I want to say. It takes a while, it takes a while. So with that, Steve, I want to say smooth sailing and thanks for joining us here on theCUBE. I'm Dave Nicholson. This has been part of the AWS startup showcase, my conversation with Steve Francis of Instacluster. Again, thanks Steve, stay tuned. Thanks very much. Thank you, your source for hybrid tech coverage.