 Live from Las Vegas, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering IBM Insight 2015, brought to you by IBM. Now your host, Dave Vellante and Paul Gillin. So it happens when we do the switch. Thank you, Sam. Okay, hey, here we are, we're back. We're live from Las Vegas, everybody. This is theCUBE. theCUBE goes out, we extract the events. We extract the signal from the noise, we go out to the events. We're here at IBM Insight 2015 at the Mandalay Bay. Jonathan Eppers is here. He's the CEO and founder, co-founder of RADPAD. Really interesting story there. And Phil Buckaloo is the vice president of Enterprise Mobile at IBM. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Phil, good to see you again. Jonathan, talking a little bit about your startup offline, really exciting times. Let's start there, RADPAD. What's so rad about RADPAD? Well, the name first. No, we started RADPAD because actually I was kind of trying to solve my own personal issue. I was looking for an apartment about three years ago. I live in Los Angeles. And LA's second biggest rental market in the country. And there's a lot of people looking for apartments. It's very competitive. And finding a great place is actually really difficult. And so, two guys, Tim Tyler and I started RADPAD to help people sort of find apartments easier. Really around their phone. Most people in LA drive around neighborhoods looking for apartments. And so, what do you have when you're driving around? You have your phone. And being able to pull up your phone on a street and see what's for rent around you and have all the information at your fingertips was key to our early success. So, this is like mobile first. Yeah, it's a mobile first company. We didn't have a website for the first six months. It was just an app. It was an iPhone app. That's what we started with. That's awesome. So, where are you at with RADPAD? You started in 2013. You funded the company, raised $14 million, I think you told me. Yeah, two and a half years old. Just moved into a new office in Culver City. We started in Los Angeles in terms of the product, but we've morphed out in the last year and a half. We're strong in LA, Chicago, DC. We're getting bigger in Boston. It's one of the guys on the show. Our boy, can use that. He's heard RADPAD in Boston, which is awesome. We're getting bigger in Texas. So, we're sort of taking a market-by-market approach. We rent things local, right? And when we go into a new city, we really want to know the city. And we want RADPAD to feel like it's a local part of the city. Hi, Phil, what's going on here? I mean, I thought you guys sold to big banks, insurance companies. Absolutely. Multi-billion dollar firms. We absolutely do. But we also sell to guys like Jonathan that are looking to leverage mobile and try to get data and get it in the right way and use those insights to help him reach his customers in really new and cool ways. And I think the fact that IBM is able to go high and low and be able to deliver solutions that really all enterprises of all sides need to mobilize their business and get the most out of the data that exists in the world today. So, how did you guys find each other? Did you guys do a sales call? And I think, you know, IBM, oh, you start running, right? I mean, you're afraid of the big blue, but how did that all happen? Give us your perspective, Jonathan. Yeah, so we, you know, when you're a startup, you sort of build, you know, you kind of find your own technologies and go on and build on top of that. And we started, we were on sort of a smaller architecture. That's what you need when you're small. But as we grew, we grew really quickly. That architecture no longer sort of scaled well with the company. And we started running into issues where the site would run slower. And so we went out and we were looking for a solution. Our backend team was comprised of just one guy at the time, I was looking for a sort of a service that we could use that scale, you know, millions of listings and still deliver the kind of performance that we needed to give our customers. And we found Cloudant. This is back in 2013 before IBM acquired Cloudant. And it was very easy to install and integrate on our product. And then we found out that IBM acquired Cloudant. At first, we were a little nervous because, you know, it's like, we didn't know what to expect. But honestly, it's been an awesome relationship. And what's great about Cloudant is it just works. And last year, we haven't had to call Cloudant one time for a support or service call. It just works and enables our team to sort of build great products and innovate on top of that without having to be experts sort of on the architecture. So why were you nervous when IBM bought Cloudant? Just to find a big company coming in. I mean, you don't think of IBM as sort of a fast moving company, right? And when you're a startup, like the key to sort of being successful early on is you got to move fast. And so, you know, I wasn't familiar. I obviously knew IBM, but sort of wasn't familiar with other products. And so the first thing we got was a letter from IBM, saying, hey, we just acquired Cloudant and you're going to start sending your invoices to us. And so, you know, my first thing was, they're going to jack the prices up and I'm going to have all these sales people call me and it's going to, you know, bog down your organization. And it's been not the case at all. The pricing structure has been great. We're a startup. We can't afford to spend a lot of money on this. And the support has been great when we need it. And like I said, before we came here, I asked sort of our engineering team, when was the last time you contacted IBM or Cloudant? And they said, we haven't had it to you because it just works. And that's something I like to hear. So you've got a self-service sort of environment and it's up for the cloud, obviously, right? That's right. You're not hosting your own. That's right. So whether our customers are using RADPAD, is they're out driving around in their cars or they're like, guess what, when I like got here to Las Vegas, I opened the app to see what sort of runs around here or you got work on your computer. The service just works and it works fast across different platforms. So tell me more about RADPAD and how it differentiates from the real estate sites like Julio or Zillow. The first thing is, we sort of see ourselves as like renter focus. What I mean by that is, I'm a renter and my team is renters. So we're really solving a lot of our own challenges. And one of the key differences when we first started RADPAD is we required all of the listings to have at least three photos. And I know it doesn't sound groundbreaking, but in our industry, when you're looking for places, like we kind of first look with our eyes. And so we required three photos, but what that caused was this immense amount of data that we were collecting on the back end. And that's sort of why we had to sort of move off of post-grass and onto no-sequel architecture, which is where Clodding came in. Yeah, because when you rent, like you go on these, you know, VRBO sites, for instance, and you rent, and you see one photo, you don't even forget it. Yeah, it's like, I'm not renting that. It's like, why did the person put up one photo? You know, they want me to drive across town and rush our traffic to see this place. And so we thought by putting up more, you know, better data, more photos, people could make better decisions and they could make better decisions. When they get there, they would convert higher. And that's actually what we're finding is that our customers are converting higher because they have better information to make better decisions. So Phil, what's, do you add your perspective to this conversation? I think some of the things that Jonathan mentioned are really key, and they really point to really some of the changes that are fundamentally reshaping, you know, a lot of the business we're in. The fact that Jonathan's team is able to go get infrastructure with a database as a service, he mentioned briefly that it's a NoSQL database. Well, that's very different than a lot of the work that we've done with traditional backends, and it's a lot faster. And for mobile devices, mobile apps, that's absolutely critical, to be able to make those changes very quickly and having a company like IBM do a lot of the plumbing. And I'll say that since we acquired Cloudin, you know, we knew that those guys were a leader in the space for NoSQL databases and databases as a service. The way more and more companies want to consume through that digital OPEX, pay a little only when you use it kind of a mode. And we've actually had the leadership teams from Cloudin has actually pervaded a good chunk of the IBM teams. We of course, from the traditional IBM businesses, have been adding in a lot of other capabilities, like we added a lot more encryption to the devices and the ability to be able to do additional scaling and add more of your use cases so that you can start as a small company like Jonathan has, but then scale and grow from there to be able to support lots of other industries, banking, insurance companies, telcos, all around the world where we've got a great presence. Yeah, I mean, you know, we listen to the financial calls, your mobile business is exploding. Maybe talk about your business a little bit and maybe sort of break it down. I mean, you know, you got customers like Jonathan's firm and RADPAD, but you got a wide spectrum, maybe share that with us. Yeah, absolutely. You know, we've got over 5,000 customers that have interacted with IBM and our mobile first solutions. Those of you listening to our CFO, we talked about our businesses quadrupled in the mobile space, lot of growth, lot of momentum here. And one of the reasons that, you know, we're trying to make a push out here today is because of the importance of pulling that analytics in and that insight so that you can get the most of your mobile apps. Jonathan mentioned the importance of photos. Having those unstructured data and being able to use that and deliver a compelling experience for your users, that's fundamental and that's really what's driving a lot of the improvement in business productivity that we're seeing from a lot of our clients and we are seeing a lot of business benefits as well. So Jonathan, where do you want to take the company and what do you want from IBM in terms of helping you get there? Well, certainly we want to be international. We want to make it so that people can move around from country to country and that process of moving is as seamless as we're trying to make it here in the States if you want to go from here to London or China. And certainly as we grow that and we add, you know, there's more data and more people using RADPAD, it's going to be important we have a back end that supports that growth. And I think that's the thing that I love most about IBM and with Cloud and is that it's just been easy and we have a small team and so when we have to dedicate resources to sort of fixing things, analyzing things, they can't spend a time on working on the innovative things that we're trying to do that is going to move for RADPAD forward. And I think for us, that's what we look for and people that we partner up with. Let me just add a little bit because I think of what Jonathan's looking at in his future for his company is consistent with what a lot of our enterprises and small companies are facing. They need to be able to expand to a global footprint but they need that performance that you get from a company like Cloud. Cloud rests on a lot of our data centers based on the software technology and that allows you to put the data in the geographies where you need to. That helps a lot of our big companies with data residency requirements can also help with performance because you get that data in the right format for mobile developers, JSON, NoSQL data but you can have it close to where it's being consumed by the end user. And that's really a key part of our strategy to be able to scale with our clients, benefit from things like having the data where they need it, other data residency requirements and that's really something that we think is really important to all of our clients. So you guys are moving fast. You see, you raise 14 million, you do another raise, right? So a little growth injection to help you take this thing globally which is great, it's ambitious. And competitively, there's guys like we mentioned a couple before and I've talked about VRBO but that's sort of rental for vacation rentals. They short-term me, I feel like I want to travel somewhere, right? Right, so do you have a lot of competition or are they starting to see what you do? Yeah, I know it's a very competitive marketplace and I think one of the ways we've been successful is A, focus on mobile. My background was designed, my other co-founder Tyler, his background was designed. So between the two of us, RAP has a user experience that's really made for consumers where traditionally in this marketplace it's been built for sort of the landlords. And there's this digital divide between renters and landlords. For example, 90% of renters in the country still write a check to pay their rent. Why do they write a check? Because that's the only thing that the landlord will accept. So we built Pay With Rad Pad and actually bridges that gap by allowing renters to use a credit card, debit card, or Apple Pay to pay their rent. And what we do is we cut the landlord a check for the renter. So the renter can still use a credit debit card which is what we want to use but my landlord will still get the check. And I don't have to bother my landlord and say, hey, we'll sign up on Rad Pad so I can pay you through Rad Pad. So how do you get paid? You take a big off of that transaction or? We take a small percent of the payment transaction but really the bigger idea is to help people sort of streamline that process of getting an apartment. So one of the biggest frustrations for a lot of people is, hey, I found a place, now I got to go through the process of getting it which is filling out a rental application, doing a credit report, waiting for the landlord to kind of approve you. I can take a couple days, there's anxiety there. So by March, April will be at a point where you can actually do the entire transaction on our platform. So as a renter, you can tell us what you want, you can tell us who you are, which includes your credit score and your income and in real time, landlords can qualify you so Rad Pad can say, hey, look John, you qualify for this apartment today, hypothetically I can click a button, sign a lease and through Rad Pad pay the landlord in a matter of seconds. And so the landlord would pay for that service, is that right? Landlords will pay to be able to instantly qualify renters in real time. Right, I mean, think of the value of that. I mean, they should be doing that anyway. They should be paying somebody to qualify or they should be doing it themselves. I can imagine if you list an apartment and you get 20 people to reach out to you, but who are these people? I've got to call them, I've got to meet with them, that's a lot of time. What if we could tell you immediately who these people are? They smoke, they have a pet, how big is the pet? What's our credit score? It's pretty exciting. So where do you get in those analytics? Is IBM supplying those? Is it sort of third party data that you're... Yeah, a lot of these users are generated so people give us this information or we've gone out and partnered up with like, for example, we just did a partnership with TransUnion which we're very excited about to populate the credit piece of our data. IBM has done, and with Cloud, it really just kept the service up. And... That's what you want. That's what we want. Give me infrastructure and make it invisible. Exactly. Invisible. If Radpads down, people go use another, one of our competitors, not using our product, but slow, they go use another one of our competitors. So, you know, Cloud sort of allows us to build these great new things much more quickly than if we had to spend time doing this ourselves. So talk about the data sources that you're ingesting. Obviously you got geolocation data, you got pictures, what else do you have? Yeah, we're sucking a lot of data. A lot of it comes from listings. Every day we process more than 100,000 listings. It's about 15 million photos a month in terms of the amount of photos that come through Radpads. We get data from renters that are coming on Radpads and actually filling out these like, questionnaires we're asking them, where they live, where they work. We get location data that we're using to help us sort of understand where our customers are at. I mean, if we go to a market like Chicago, it's really helpful to know that 60, 70% of our customers want to live in these neighborhoods. And we can focus in on those neighborhoods versus trying to spend a lot of money all around Chicago. So there's a lot of data that comes in Radpads and we sort of use it differently to kind of make decisions. And how do you handle all that data? In terms of like, how do we like understand it? Yeah, are you building a data pipeline? Are you, what's your sort of architecture? So we use like off the shelf products like Google Analytics and mobile analytics tools like Flurry to kind of help us look at sort of that data in real time. We actually also build our own data tools, which is kind of unique, I think. But our engineering team loves to be able to analyze data on their own. Sometimes we can't find a service that works for us. So we'll build it ourselves. So is it fair to say your IP is sort of the integration of all this stuff and your business model? Is that right? I think it's yeah, it's the product. It's the sort of the data. I mean, the data is really what's made Radpads very valuable. I think one of the things like, unlike our competitors like Trillian Zillow, who have no idea who renters are, we can actually tell you who our customers are. We know their ages, we know where they live, we know where they work, what their incomes are. We know if they have a pet, we know what the pet's name is. That's not something our competitors can tell sort of the landlords who these people are. Yeah, I mean, you mentioned those two sites. I mean, they're pretty weak for the purpose, the use case that you're talking about. You guys are very specific. Yeah, we built Radpads and we focus on demand, and that sort of demand is bringing in the supply side. Cool. All right, we got to leave it there. Phil and Jonathan, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your story. It was great. Great, thanks. All right, keep it right there. We'll be back after a short break. This is theCUBE, we're live from IBM Insight 2015. Right back.