 Live from San Francisco, California, theCUBE, covering MarkLogic World 2015. Brought to you by MarkLogic. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Kelly. Hello everyone, welcome back. This is theCUBE live in Silicon Valley from MarkLogic World 2015. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Jeff Kelly, chief analyst with big data for Wikibon. Our next guest is Paul Lilford, Global Director of Technology, Partners of Tableau Software. Welcome back to theCUBE. Great to see you. Great to be back, guys. We cover your events multiple years in a row, Tableau, Fabulous Company, big fans, just because just great product, great people, great market growth, perfect timing, in the tornado of innovation around big data, visualization, it's been a great ride for you guys, been fun to watch and document the evolution of Tableau. So congratulations and what's going on now? I mean, it's still growing. I mean, the cloud has brought huge enablement to your business, companies like MarkLogic's platform allows developers to be unshackled or as Gary Bloom said, take that straight jacket off of your data and flex some muscles, if you will. Yeah, I mean, for us, you know, it's continue more of the same and continue to make our customers successful. And you know, when you look at MarkLogic and know SQL for us, it's a green field frontier. Early days, as Gary likes to talk about, but we think the potential in the market is going to be tremendous as we continue to move forward and removing the schema as a shackle, as our MarkLogic friends like to talk about, is going to be a big deal to analytics everywhere. Let's talk about Tableau, we're going to the MarkLogic Conference, we want to jump right into Tableau, so you're doing great, companies great, you're moving to the show to Vegas here, the growth is phenomenal. You got competition and I was at Amazon Summit last week and David Floyer and I from Wikibon were discussing if he thinks Amazon might be peeking him, like I don't think so. But it brings up the notion that you have agility, you have speed, everyone has been seeing Amazon do what they've done for a few years now, competition is creeping in, certainly everyone's on notice, you guys are in the same boat, competition is out there. What's going on? I mean, how you feel the heat, you use it, extending your lead, what are you guys doing with competition and what do you guys do to continue the pace of innovation to extend your lead in visualization? Well, so for us, we never really looked directly at what the competition's doing or base what we're doing on that. So we just released version nine of our product. If you look at what we did in it, it's got major features across the board, whether it's parallel calc, just the speed of the server interactions, the kind of a relook at the UI in general. So we continue to do that year over year, put major features into the release and we still put 26% of our top line back into product and our plan is to continue that and hopefully that'll remain an advantage but we also think competition's good for the space, right? The space has evolved in part because we've been there and some of our competitors have been there and we will not base what we do on what anyone else is doing. It's what makes Tableau beautiful. At the same time, we do see more pressure in the space to compete. Okay, so I'll ask differently so you don't pull out page 14 questions. Exactly. Keep PR response. Innovation, what are you guys doing specifically around innovation now? Obviously, Unstructured Day's been around for a while. You got kind of that baseline foundational market. Talk to us a little bit about cloud, Amazon. Ask people of the cloud, how has that changed your business model and how has it changed your innovation strategy? Yeah, so for us, it's been a big one. I mean, Amazon's one of my most strategic partners so we partner very closely. The cloud has changed the game for everyone in my view. It's made the disposable analytic a possibility. The speed of deployment has changed completely for customers and so for us, we've got big investments in Tableau Online. We've made our cloud connectivity sources with Amazon and others stronger and we're gonna continue to do that. I think cloud's the one factor that's out there that's impacting the entire ecosystem of storage and databases and everyone, right? It's not just a Hadoop thing or just a traditional database thing or a NoSQL thing. It's an accessibility to more information at great speed and so I think what Amazon's doing is tremendous in the market. We're excited about what we're doing with them but it also creates some interesting new challengers that'll come into the space. That'll be small and agile and quick with low cost of overhead to operate and that model plays in a lot of ways. So you'll see across the board our strategy with cloud and online continues to evolve and a lot of focus for Tableau related to them. Let's talk about the intersection with big data. I was at the Cloudera analyst event oh, I guess a couple months back now and they mentioned that one of the leading drivers for them in terms of their new businesses people wanting to use Tableau on top of Cloudera's Hadoop distribution to visualize big data. We're here at the Mark Lodzik show and NoSQL database. Talk about how that movement both Hadoop and NoSQL has impacted your business. How do you look in terms of partnerships which you oversee? How do you look at structuring those partnerships and how do you get the most out of those relationships? Yeah, so actually I'll start with Mark Lodzik since we're at the event here. So from the keynotes even this morning if you listen to the messaging it's a lot like Tableau's messaging. It's about disrupting the database space. We did that in analytics and BI and we're going to continue to do it there. But it's interesting to see the traditional technologies taking the hit the way they are like the schema is an old way to think and the new stack way of doing it is Hadoop or NoSQL or any of those technologies. So we love the disruptive methodology and the message because we think it helps customers innovate and innovate quickly and get better value out of their assets. At the same time our connectivity has always been through kind of the standard SQL interfaces of the world. So we're going to continue to adapt how we do that over time to take advantage of what those stores do. And as disruptive as the big data players are there's going to be traditional data warehouses aren't going away and traditional databases but then you've got new approaches like Mark Logic and Hadoop complimenting those. How does that make your job tougher when you've got even a more complex data landscape if you will that Tableau's got to kind of connect into? Yeah, so it does make it fun. We connect over 42 sources today and then we have this other ODBC option which allows hundreds of others. And so it makes it always challenging to connect and do that with experience that people can really appreciate and leverage. But I think for the market it's overdue, right? The same in BI we saw which was the bottleneck of going to IT to ask for a request so you could build a report was kind of an old thought. And the idea of going there to say adjust my schema I want to add a column is kind of an old thought but I think you're going to see the traditional players or friends at Teradata or friends at some of the other relational players they're going to evolve their message just as the traditional BI players did to address the self-serve market and the new stack way of doing it. So all of those players now have Hadoop messages, right? They brought that quickly. And so you're going to see them continue to do that. I think the space is going to continue to consolidate. Gary called it out today that when they started there were 140 NoSQL players and now it's below 120. And I think you'll continue to see that happen a bit and they'll be the top 30, 40 or so standing and then the rest. Yeah, I completely agree. We're definitely going to see some consolidation. But so Paul, whenever we talk, one of the things I love to ask about it where are the cool stuff you're seeing from your customers? Maybe some of your joint Mark logic customers. What are some of the cool things you're seeing out there that's kind of getting you excited? Yeah, so, you know, we're still early stages with NoSQL, but you know, their by temporal features one that kind of geeks me out personally doing things like slow changing dimensions and dealing with like real business problems around it. It's a hard thing to visualize. You say by temporal to a CFO and they'll look at you like, what does that mean? But if you say, hey, you know, the time at which you achieved data and you're reporting it was actually incorrect based on your view at that time. So that's a feature that kind of intrigues us. We've done a couple of use case demos around it. But more and more, we're starting to see the application of our name connector. So we're getting more and more data as to what people want to do and how they do it. Unstructured is tough to visualize at times, right? When you've got to see if text, you know, how do you visualize it? So we're starting to get better information but I still think we're so early, Jeff, that it's hard to know which use case is going to be the most common. Tech search is one. By temporal, I think it's going to be a massive feature. But so early in that that it's hard to know exactly the application or use cases. I can think of 10 or 15 that would geek me out but maybe not as much for customers. So Paul got to ask the hard question because it's on our mind. We always ask stuff that we're thinking about to see if we can't crowdsource a little cube data from our guests. Strike that signal out of your brain if we can share with the guests here on the cube as well as ourselves. The data world is changing, you know. Data-getting was a phrase coined on Silicon Valley Show on HBO, which we've got a lot of laughs on Twitter but the reality is is these platforms out there are all hoarding their data and they're not sharing. Linked in Facebook, Twitter, examples on the social network. Yet customers want free-flowing data and APIs are the norm. So I got to ask you, what's your thoughts? And again, this hasn't really been discussed. It's a conversation we started, which is if everyone's going through an API-based system, JSON, endpoints, or whatnot, how is that going to change the Tableau product and what are you guys doing specifically to create the kind of agility for the visualization as visualization becomes much more prominent when you start to see automation, you're going to start to see programmatic visualization. Which means data and APIs will be prevalent to mobile, to all different form factors internet of things. So again, bringing it into Tableau, you guys were the canvas in real time to play with data. Now you want to automate that. There's going to be all kinds of new ways to visualize. How do you guys think about that and what's the discussions internally with your customers? Yeah, so we've been starting to address that over the past few years. We've introduced more APIs. So when I started at Tableau, we didn't have an API. Like not one in the product. We had a scripting language but no APIs. We now have a TDE, which is our extract API. We have a JavaScript API. We have a REST API. So we're doing more in that front to kind of integrate with that method and that move. You know, we're thinking about connections to things like JSON directly. So you'll see us introduce new connection types over time. You know, the timing of that will be determined by our customer's need for it. But you know, we're looking hard at that. I think we've taken a pretty big step as a company to get, I'll say more technical in kind of the plumbing of what we do. Our version nine releases will start to that. Our nine one release will be our big mobile release and you'll see some additional capabilities there as well. So, you know, I think we're trending pretty well with it. You know, but we still want to be fast easy, beautiful. And it's hard to do, you know, one of our founders, Kristalty likes to say it's hard to make easy software. It's really hard. And it's one of the challenges we face is how do we keep our interface this fast experience and this easy thing for people to do, but at the same time get technically deeper. And it's a really big challenge. How about multi-share? Obviously MOOCs in the education world, multi-online courseware, gaming, this multi-player concept could be applied to data because now if you have APIs that are talking to each other as another trend. Any thoughts on this kind of future? Yeah, you know, we've seen some use cases actually with customers that are doing that more collaborative stuff within the product today. You can embed things in iFrames. But yeah, I think that's actually a good call out, John. It's one of the things that'll happen in the future is this idea of not just a visual for an individual or a visual for an organization, but kind of this collaborative space where you're interchanging in real time and you see this flow. We're gonna continue to see a demand for that and a need for that. So, you know, from a partner perspective, we'll start to look harder at some of the collaboration-type tools and doing integrations there. Okay, so I gotta ask the global question because right now we, the startups are getting hundreds of millions of dollars, potentially a new competitor could be, the bubble doesn't burst, could be funded tomorrow. That's three in a year old and you have a billion dollar valuation. In all seriousness, going global is a very difficult thing. I know you guys have a huge push to be global. What's the update there? Any new revelations? Yeah, so we continue to grow extremely well globally. You know, our teams in Australia, in Tokyo. We've added offices in Germany. We're adding one in France. So we have a lot of things coming globally and we continue to see similar expansion there that we've seen in the States. You know, we're growing at a pretty good clip. Some of those areas are growing at exceptional clips. So talk about the internally at the company. When you're growing that fast, things change. The culture, you know, can sometimes change. What's it like working in kind of this rocket ship? Yeah, well, it is definitely fun. You know, our boot camps that used to be 20 people are now 70 or 100 people. So we're onboarding new employees all the time. It's hard to keep up with who's new and what's happening, but we've managed so far to keep it still a tableau or a tableau way. As Kelly right, our SVP likes to talk about. We've kept it our personality, but it's going to be harder as we continue to grow and once you get to four or 5,000 employees, it's hard to maintain that kind of personal feel that we have as a company, but our executives are committed to it. We're committed to it as a cultural thing at Tableau, but it'll definitely change. I think there's no doubt it has to. What's your take on the marketplace out there with respect to startups and other innovation? Do you feel it's kind of bubbly right now? Do you see certain conditions in the marketplace, more prevalence and more growth versus faking it or you always say in startup land, fake it till you make it, but with Cloud you can make it pretty quickly. So what are you guys seeing there and thoughts on just the personal observations? Well, so there's a couple of things that I think are happening in the market. I mean, the NoSQL thing that Gary and team talk about is one of the trends that I think is in big data. How do you get to the 80 plus percent of the world's data that's unstructured? But I also think in the predictive space, you're starting to see the democratization of predictive. This kind of, it used to be a scripting data scientist function, but how do you bring that to the masses? And I think that's one of the interesting things we see. So most analytics is backward looking, how well did I do or how poorly did I do? But less of it is how well could I do if something happened a certain way? So we're seeing more and more of that predictive pieces. We've added some elements, as we will, but that space I think is going to be really interesting over the next two years, along with what happens in the traditional space to your point, Jeff, the traditional database isn't going away, but the kind of right size and use of that technology and its own bottlenecks that are in the way causing a demand for things that maybe are not prime time, right? So there are plenty of things out there that get a lot of noise that still need feature function. One of the things I love about more logic is they have acid and transaction and secure and all those things that you think about as an enterprise customer, but a lot of the other players don't. And so you're going to see, I think it's the matrician there, but you're going to, I think the democratization in general in technology is one of the big trends that I think, you know, I don't know that we invented it or started it, but I think we've done really well at it, and I think you'll continue to see that in other spaces which is really interesting. What are some of the top three conversations that you're involved in, both on a personal and professional level around visualization, big data, the industry, with customers and whatnot? You share the posts out there. We're trying to capture top line conversations. So for us, one of the big things is as great as our product is, as easy as it is to use, how do you shift your culture as an organization to actually deliver self-service? Because although our product allows it, organizations are not actually set up to do it in many cases, the technical organization you have isn't set up to let the business people go. So how do you do self-service, but with governed data? Right, and that's one of the big topics. So a lot around governance and lineage of data and the quality of the visuals, because I can create a great visual, but it doesn't mean that the data's right if I made a bad data assumption. So that's one we hear a lot. You know, the predictive one comes up, you know, more and more. And then, you know, getting the most out of what they've invested in, selfishly for me, I'm in the technology partner space. So what I have a lot of conversations with customers about is, you know, I've invested in technology XYZ, how do I maximize my usage of it? And you know, we're a little different than traditional tools in that we don't know the question you're going to ask until you ask it. And with the traditional tool, you've built the whole solution around the questions coming in. And you know, it's a hard shift for organizations to make. So I think that cultural shift is one of the biggest ones I see. How about your partnerships? Obviously you're dealing with other people, you guys have great partnerships, you guys partner very well. You're a nice platform, you're horizontal, you're an overlay to a lot of data. What observations are happening in the ecosystem? Can you share any thoughts on ecosystem? Yeah, so ecosystem for us, I mean, on the service partner side, we're seeing more and more people that have kind of adopted the new stack way of doing it, the self-service way. So our consulting partnerships are picking up across the board. You know, for me, the hardware type partners, you know, we partner, we're in the early stages of partnerships with Intel and Cisco. And so for me, how do you make data more productive and more usable? It's maximizing not just the software asset you have, but the hardware that utilizes it, right? New stack players need to use the chip differently than some of the older technologies. So I think that hardware space is a green field to kind of optimize there. We've added some feature for it, but still have a long way to go. I think the developer angle is going to be hot for you guys going through. My vision is just that visualization is so critical. You start seeing native stuff happening. It's going to be exciting where our software-defined data center is a trend. We're seeing, I see a software-defined analytics visualization layer coming very quickly. So super excited. I think you guys have so much headroom. Stock's at 95 and up to the right. Had a little trough in 2014, our 2013 went back up in last year. Had great performance. Congratulations. Thank you. I look forward to continuing to cover you guys. Just final question. What's going on with under the hood here at MarkLogic? What's your thoughts with these guys? And give us a quick plug on what's going on with MarkLogic. Yeah, so for me, as I mentioned, I love their kind of disruptive message. I think we've only just started to scratch the surface. We partnered with them for two and a half years, so it feels like we've been around a long time, but I don't think we've really even scratched the surface yet of the opportunity in this space. So as kind of the content store idea becomes more prevalent, the unstructured, schemalist piece becomes more common day. I think you'll see more and more, but still so early day in my view, even after two and a half years, it feels like we just started. What is the big thing about MarkLogic that you would share with folks watching out there that they might not know about? I mean, these guys are seasoned vats. They've got some great tech, certainly full stack. What's the big thing that people might not know? I mean, they're not the big front page, New York Times, unicorn company, where they're doing some amazing things and just moving the chains day by day, giving them great value for their customers. Kind of like Tableau. What's the thing about these guys that no one, that people should know about them that they might not know about? Yeah, so for me, they definitely have one of the sexiest technologies around in their space. Sexy's going to sound weird here because it's about compliance and auditability and transaction control and not losing your data. That's nuts and bolts. It can be sexy. But for me, that's a really critical thing, right? It's, if I can't trust the data that I've got or that it's safe and I'm in banking or if I'm in healthcare or if I'm in some of the places I came from, then it's a game stopper, right? And so I think it's really, as a technology powerful, I love what they did in their version eight release. So they made it easier. They started giving away training. We love that at Tableau. So they started to do a lot of that. And for me, it's a big, big market. They had a good business model. Yeah, it's great. Well, you just said sexy and nuts and bolts can be sexy. Kind of doing the blocking and tackling to create value might be boring on terms of headlines, but it's sexy in the sense of it's very Tableau-like. I mean, at your conference, probably one of the highlights, I was talking to one of the market logic executives, is like, these customer stories look boring on paper. You know, a tire manufacturer or a supplier or a train company, getting to see data unshackled creates an opportunity to see outliers of which can create great value. And I think at your conference, I talked to a customer, you know, who saw an outlier that created a billion dollars in value for their business. That's right. Right, so that's sexy. Money is sexy, right? That's right. So I mean, business value, this is the new normal that you see, do you agree? Yeah, I do. I mean, one of my favorite analogies ever is, you know, no one cares about plumbing until you dig up your yard to fix it. And then you all of a sudden care about it. And the beauty of a great data store, a great technology is when it's working, you don't think about it. The second it stops you, it's everyone's front of mind. As Jeff Kelly and Dave Vellante could attest, if you live in Massachusetts and want to put a septic tank in, not only does it look bad after it's like a six foot mound in your yard, but it's out of place. That's right. Landscaping too after though. All kinds of rip and replace going on there. Paul, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Always great tableau. One of the best companies on the planet right now. Love what they do, love your products. Obviously we're big fans and obviously the track record you guys have is amazing. Here at the Mark Logic World 2015, this is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Kelly. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.