 Live from Orlando, Florida, extracting a signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering Pentaho World 2015. Now your host, Dave Vellante and George Gilbert. Hello everybody, this is theCUBE. theCUBE is here live at Pentaho World. We've got two days of wall-to-wall coverage. Erin Latham is here. She's the president of MoMix Solutions, Erin. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for having me. Let's mix it up. MoMix, what's happening with MoMix? What's MoMix all about? Thank you. We are, MoMix is a dedicated SaaS cloud business intelligence company. And we focus on serving the public sector in higher education and driving better outcomes by giving them actionable insight to their data and being more transparent to the constituents. So we've been in Pentaho partners since about 2010. We've embedded their technology within our SaaS cloud BI offering. So we love the SaaS stories. You see the hardware business, kind of this collapse of pricing. You see everybody talking about value up the stack and the cloudification of applications is occurring. And of course it happens in a variety of ways. Application, niches, vertical industries, specialization. So talk a little bit more about how you guys came about, how you founded the company. Why did you start the company? Absolutely. So our backgrounds really started in the Oracle space. Implementing large ERP applications for state and local government and higher education. And so that included everything from their accounting, their workforce systems, their budget applications. And what we realized year over year is that they would spend millions on these huge legacy implementations. Yet at the end of the day, they said it felt like their data was in a grand canyon. They couldn't get it out. And we realized the opportunity back in around 2009 that we had the core competency of understanding what their business challenges were. Married with business intelligence technology, we ran across Pentaho, realized its capabilities in the application we wanted to build and bring to market. And we said, sass is the way to go. Because so much of what government needs to report on from a taxpayer perspective is consistent across a city, a county. We could put our wrapper around it and deliver it in a way that was cost effective, that could immediately aggregate, extract that data, transform it in a way that any consumer could use it out of that ERP system. So whether I'm a mayor down to an operational AP clerk to a citizen, that information should be open and accessible and understood. And that's what we chose sass. I've been calling it a citizen's analytics. It is. So back in the day, you'd have to, if you had a data problem, you'd shove it all into a box, a big Unix box, you'd buy some Oracle licenses and hope you had enough money left over to actually get something done. So you've embraced this whole notion of sass, big data analytics, and changed that. So I wonder if you could talk more about how you approach that and getting data in the hands of the users. That didn't just happen overnight, right? A lot of our practitioners in the Wikibon community talk about their EDW environment as like a snake swallowing a basketball. You call it the Grand Canyon before. So how did you come to that realization? We kept hearing the challenges over and over from the different consumers of data that couldn't get their information out, and we saw the prevalence movement of open data and transparency and the need. We spent years identifying with them and collaboration with them. We did a lot of public-private partnerships and saying, what are the business decisions that you need to make? We knew from implementing the systems what the transactions were that we were configuring, but what's the information that's empowering that not only gives you operational reporting, because government's very unique in what they have to comply with from regulation and regulatory requirements, but what is the information that's going to change the dynamic of decisions and outcomes on the services that they provide the constituents? The only way to do that is to get the data in a consumable way that a citizen can start participating in the process. So it's not just about the dollars and cents. How am I managing your tax dollars? It's as a citizen, are we providing the outcomes, the value, because I am your customer, right? As a citizen, you're servicing me with my tax dollars. How well am I servicing you? What can I do different? What can I do to improve transportation or parks or health? It's all in that smart city IOT space and that's what we're really excited about with this Hitachi acquisition is where we can help facilitate what we've pre-designed and delivered our best practices in data management for the ERP and the legacy business application. Where's the extensibility into smart cities? Because if you don't have the dollars, you can't fund the initiatives and programs. TAM expansion, I love it. That's a huge opportunity for you guys. Go ahead, George. You know, one of the things we've learned to the industry's great dismay in healthcare is that, oh, we have these electronic medical records, but try moving them from one provider to another and you find out that they're nothing more than a bunch of stovepipe, spaghetti code, you know, electronic medical records. Right. Systems of record, ERP, we're all about standardizing business processes. Right. How did you find the commonality in the data across implementations without breaking the applications? That's a fantastic question and what we looked at is fundamentally, whether it's SAP or Oracle or Workday or JD Edwards, fundamentally they're capturing the same data and what we created was a universal master data model that transforms that data from the way that that source system captures it in a meaningful way that a consumer needs to be able to understand it. And that transformation we used Pentaho's technology to help us through the PDI ETL. So how would you have done that without Pentaho? Would it have been possible? Would it have just cost a lot more? Would it have taken longer? Would you have not been able to do it? Our ROI value is because of Pentaho. We've been able to leverage that data pipeline that they talk about of being able to reuse all of their technologies from the PDI into the analytics for the interactive reporting. We're looking at big data in Weka for predictive and so for us to be able to have that full underlying foundation stack gives us our extensibility to be a SaaS offering and embed those analytics in immediate value to our end consumer to cost effective. When did you start using Pentaho? I believe we first started investigating it in 2009 and we started our actual kickoff of our product development in 2010. So pretty early days of the whole people didn't even know what the juke was back then. So you kind of bet your career on that. I mean, bet your life. That's right. The president of this company. So it works out. That's right. They always say I'm a gambler. So this time it paid off. This be possible with technology advances since 2009 2010 where you didn't have a packaged ERP app, but you had the mess say that the federal government has been accumulating for five decades. Would you be able to attack that problem? Back in 2009? No, now. And I'm not asking it is this a business opportunity because obviously that's a scale a sales process that you're not set up for. But I'm asking if technology makes that a tractable problem. Absolutely. I mean, we've seen more and more, for example, cities that have gone bankrupt. Detroit's a prime example. And I was with the former mayor of Detroit about a year and a half ago at an economic conference and he said, if we had had access and visibility to information, we wouldn't be in the situation that we're in now. And that's the challenge is that it's not that the data is not there, it's being able to access it in a timely way because as government works, typically they close their books, their financial records on a monthly and yearly process. If you're able to have that on a daily process to know that your budget is way off from your actual spend or revenue management the outcomes become different. You make different decisions in a more timely manner. So you're describing a situation where the reporting is such a hairball that they can't even get a sense as to whether or not they're spending more than they're bringing in. That's right. That's right. And a lot of it's done in Excel today, which is amazing for the technology advancements that are at their fingertips. But a lot of times in the small to mid-sized city county, space school districts, too, they don't have the infrastructure or the talent within inside their shops to be able to effectively roll out a solution. And that's why we felt a SAS pre-built solution for them that instead of trying to go and get a budget for a multi-million dollar BI project and a separate budget for a transparency portal, if you roll that all into one application, you have a consistent annual subscription. We saw the challenge of a multi-year engagement and multi-year cost. That's the true ROI. Right. And prior, part of you guys they had a huge data quality issue. Absolutely. And they probably, it sounds like you're dealing with a mix of organizational sizes. That's right. Is the small, medium, large as well or not necessarily? Okay. Absolutely. The large guys might have a chief data officer and a whole system to deal with that data quality, but the small guys don't. They don't. And we're starting to see more CDOs coming into play. But in that mid-sized space, for example, one of our clients is the largest county, the fastest growing county in the nation. They're amassing floods of data. Right. And they're trying to wrangle that data in a way to be able to make infrastructure decisions, to be able to influence and say, we need to pass this bond. We need your participation. And the challenge for them was that the comptroller for the state was posting that they were almost a billion dollars in debt. So the taxpayers were up in arms and saying, we're not going to vote for this new bond to support the infrastructure and growth for this county, because they didn't understand. The county couldn't tell their story. They implemented our transparency application that allowed them to visually tell their storage to the constituents. Show that it rated. Show why they're fiscally responsible and why they needed to grow through the bond initiative. They received the votes that they needed from the constituents because they used our transparency application to tell their stories. Because most of their constituents were hitting the website through their mobile devices. So, using your SaaS application, they're able to avoid all the non-differentiate and heavy lifting that put the infrastructure in. But they still have to be able to analyze the data and then take action on it. So I want to take that specific case study, the county that couldn't sell the bond but then was able to because he got visibility. What skill sets did they have to amass to be able to tell that story? So, from our perspective their story comes from a business need and opportunity. They married the data that we were able to provide them and be able to present them back out to the public. They added the context around it. Their own story. Through the application, they were able to add the context of their debt. Why they were so in debt? So it wasn't a specialized skill because the heavy lifting we had already done, it was creating the story they wanted to tell that at that time they were going out to every single community trying to sell that bond. Why should you vote for this bond? This allowed them to have mass media communication. So, basically people with financial accounting skills that could tell a story? Absolutely. Okay, so it wasn't data science? Not at all. Is that typical? Not at all. Your customers to get value. It's just basically putting data in their hands of normal business people or LOB, a lot of business people. Right. It is the transformation of data in a way that can be consumed by any consumer within a government and any constituent because governmental accounting, workforce succession planning, span analytics, if you're a business consumer you understand your department. We transform that data in a way that they can understand it and use it. I understand you guys are an excellence award winner, that's always cool. We are, thank you. I love that at these events because you're up against a lot of people that would like that recognition. Why did you win and what does it mean to you? It means a lot to us. Obviously this has been a labor of love since 2009, beginning our inception with Pentaho to see the value being really recognized by the government and the education. We feel like we're really providing some social innovation to them. We're being able to provide a difference. We're able to save tax dollars both in hard and soft costs and we're making their jobs more efficient, which hopefully down the road means that our wallets become a little bit heavier because those tax dollars haven't gone out for programs and initiatives that were not well spent or well supported. Good. Are you part of the equation of for the government agencies showing the sort of the trust in the data that it goes from end to end, you know exactly what's happened to it. Is that a critical part? Absolutely. So now that you've sort of achieved this transparency for city, county state level spend are you being pulled into similar areas where the data is deep in silos and it's not just silos in one organization but between organizations and I can't help but thinking of healthcare like the records just aren't portable. That's exactly right. Are you being pulled in that direction? We are and that's how we created the framework of the application to be extensible so we focused on the core business areas first, finance, workforce, spend, projects and grants. Those areas that are most heavily used across every department within a government. Next we're looking at energy and sustainability. Being able to say what are the most important things to a citizen and to our environment that need to be shared where we can have an impact. So that's where we're starting to evolve into some of the internet of things and the social innovation but we see it in all sorts of application and I love what Hitachi's doing with crime analytics. Public safety in the Sheriff's Department within this particular county that we're working for had no visibility into overtime so we just, I don't know if y'all read in the papers we had the huge floods that hit Wimberley and Austin and so for this particular county they all of a sudden needed access immediate access into that overtime and the dollars that they hadn't accounted for and so for us to be able to use our platform as leverage and continue to add the content of the analytics that are going to impact smarter cities and smarter counties is going to be really revolutionary. So I got to ask you, we're down at Grace Hopper this week in Houston, Grace Hopper a big women in tech event so we always love the women in tech angle. So tell us about how you got here, are you sort of technical by background? Are you a geek or a wallet? A geek or a wallet. I've never heard that before. Nor am I. Or both. I guess I'm the wallet even though I started working in Oracle right out of college and it was a means to an end for us and so for me it was about making a difference I love making a difference, I love empowering women in fact about 80% of our workforce is women at Momix both from coding to sales to product strategy and so I'm a big believer in empowering women in entrepreneurial roles. Awesome, I can say we have had for a couple years now big women in tech program led by Jeff Frick who's the GM of the Cube. We got a lot of competition this week but I'm nominating Aaron here for our guest of the week in women in tech. Thanks very much for coming on the Cube, really appreciate it. My pleasure. Alright keep right there buddy we'll be back this is the Cube Silicon Angle, we're live from Orlando, Pentaho World 2015 we'll be right back. Hi I'm Mike Q and VP IBM Storage and you're watching the Cube, live. I am Craig Nunes, VP of Marketing with HP Storage and you're watching the Cube with John and Dave. Hi I'm Stuart Williams Vice President of Research and you're watching the Cube. Hi I'm Mike Workman, Senior Vice President of Storage at Oracle Corporation and you're watching the Cube. Hi Russ Stanley with the San Francisco Giants, Managing Vice President of Ticket Sales and Services and you're watching the Cube. Hi I'm Evan Powell, CEO and co-founder of StackStorm and you're watching the Cube. Hello I'm Kelly Wright, Executive Vice President of Sales at Tableau Software and you are watching the Cube. And it's like you know your morning cup of coffee I don't know how you get by you know thinking about what's going on in our industry without watching the Cube. You might be like kind of in the flow with Dave and then John will come in just like totally spin you around on a different topic and when you step back though it's just a wonderful way to kind of tie a lot of things that our practitioners are thinking about out there. If you think about the notoriety and the brain power of the people on the Cube present company excluded the kind of insights that folks get in just you know thinking about what their next step is invaluable so I don't know how you get through life without it. I'm Craig Nunes, VP of Marketing at HP Storage and I'm a Cube alumni. It's so spontaneous it's here when it's happening you know you're in the moment. So the hosts are really amazing in the sense that they find this down