 Hello and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. My name is Dave Vellante, and we're here with Raj Gosane, who's the Chief Product Officer at Alation. We have some news. Hello Raj, thanks for coming on. Dave, it's great to be with you on theCUBE again. Yeah, good to see you. So, okay, we're going to talk about Alation connected sheets. You know, what is that? Talk to us about what it is, what it does, what it brings to the customers. So we recognize like spreadsheets are really the dark matter of the data universe. And, you know, they're used by over 78 million people use spreadsheets on a regular basis to drive critical business analysis. But there's a lot of challenges with spreadsheet usage. It brings risk to the organization. There's no visibility into where data comes from. And so we wanted to bring the power of the Alation Data Intelligence Platform to business users where they spend most of their time. And that's in a tool that they love and that's spreadsheets. And so we're launching a brand new product next week called Alation Connected Sheets. So to talk more about that. Yes, I get the lineage issue. Like, who did this? Where does this data come from? I got different data. But talk more about the problems that Alation Connected Sheets solves specifically for customers. Yeah, so the big challenges that we see when we talk to data organizations is how do they understand where the data came from? Is it trusted? Is it reusable? Should it be used in this format? And if you look at where most users that use spreadsheets get the data to power their spreadsheets, it's maybe it's a CSV download from a database and then you have no idea where the data came from and where it's going. Or even worse, it's copying and pasting data from other spreadsheets. And so if you take those problems, how can we bring trusted data from governed sources like Snowflake and Redshift and put it in the hands of spreadsheet users and given the power and flexibility of Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel, but use trusted, reliable, well-governed data so that the data office feels great about them using spreadsheets and the end users, the business users can take advantage of the tool that they know and love and do the work that they need to do quickly. So, okay, so I'm furring from your comments there that you've got the ability to take data from, you mentioned a couple, Snowflake and Redshift, other popular data warehouses. So talk about the key capabilities that you have any specific features that we should know about. Sure, so we built the leading data intelligence platform in the leading data catalog and one of the benefits of that catalog is we have visibility into all of the trusted governed data sources that a data organization cares about, whether it's enterprise warehouses like Snowflake or Redshift, databases like SQL Server, Google BigQuery, what have you. So what we've done is we've brought the power of that data catalog directly into both Google Sheets as well as Excel. And the idea there is a user can log into their application, authenticate to Elation, using the Elation Connected Sheets plugin into their spreadsheet tool and browse those trusted data sets that are surfaced in the Elation catalog. They get trust signals, they get visibility into where this data came from. So lineage insights, descriptive information and then with one or two clicks, they can choose a data set from their warehouse, basically apply filtering conditions. So let's say I'm looking for customer data in Snowflake, I can find the right customer table. If I only want it for say 2022, I can apply some filter conditions, I can reorder columns, push one button, authenticate to that data source. So we want to maintain and ensure security is being applied. So only those users that have access to the warehouse can actually download that data set. But once they've authenticated, that data gets downloaded into their spreadsheet and there's a live connection that's maintained to that spreadsheet. So anytime I need to refresh the data, one push of a button and that data set gets updated, I can schedule the updates. So if I have to produce a report every Monday morning, I could have that data set refreshed at 8 a.m. Monday morning or whatever schedule the user wants. So it gives the user the data set they need, but the data organization, they can see where that data came from and they understand the lineage of the data as it is used in analysis in those spreadsheets themselves. So Raj, I know you're at the Superbowl this week, aka re-invent, and I know you've got very close relationships with Snowflake. You've mentioned them a couple of times at the data summit last spring. So, and I know you've done some integration work with those platforms and I'm sure others. So should we think of this as your extending that sort of trust and governance out to spreadsheets? Is that right and stretching that out? That's exactly right. The way we talk about it is, how do we bring data intelligence to business users in the tool that they know and love, which is the spreadsheet? And so the data catalog and data intelligence platforms in general have really primarily been focused on servicing the needs of data users, data analysts, data scientists, data engineers, but our vision, our aspiration and elation is to really bring data intelligence to any business user. And so it's a big part of our strategy to make sure that the insights from the elation catalog and platform can find their way into tools like Excel and Google Sheets. And so that's what you highlighted, Dave is exactly correct. We wanna maximize the likelihood that a business user can have self-service access to trusted, governed data due to the work that they need to do and ensure that the organization has a set of data assets in spreadsheets as frankly as opposed to liabilities, which is the way most data organizations look at spreadsheets is it's almost like a risk factor. We want to convert that risk, that liability into an asset so that people can reuse data sets and they understand where this analysis is actually coming from. It's something that we've talked about for well over a decade on theCUBE. Is data an asset or is it a liability? You obviously want to get value out of it, but if you can't share it, it's not trusted. So what people do is they lock it down and then that constricts value creation. My understanding is this tech came out of an acquisition from a company, Claudio. Tell us about Claudio, why Claudio was the fit there. Yeah, so Claudio is a company, it's about five years old. We closed the acquisition of the company in March of this past year and they had about 20 customers, 10 engineers and we saw an opportunity with the spreadsheet tool that they created to really compliment our data intelligence strategy. And as you said, Dave, extend the value of data intelligence to business users. And so we brought the Claudio team into the fold. I think I'm most excited about as a product guy is within, if seven months of them joining Elation, we're actually shipping a brand new product that's gonna drive revenue and meet the needs of tens of millions of users ultimately. That's really our aspiration. And so the tech they had was extremely modern. It reinforces the platform position that we have with this microservices architecture that we've built Elation around made it easy for that new team to come in and leverage existing APIs and capabilities from our platform and the tech that they brought into Elation to essentially connect the dots and deliver a brand new set of capabilities to an entirely new audience to help our customers achieve their business objectives, which is really creating a data culture across their entire organization, inclusive of business users, not just like I said, the data X users that are already taking advantage of solutions like Elation and Claude warehouses, et cetera. So I have two questions, follow up questions, and I think you might have answered the second one. The first one is like, what's the secret sauce behind Claudio? How's the technique? The second question is, how does it fit into the Elation portfolio? How are you able to integrate it so quickly? Maybe that's the microservices architecture, but start with the secret sauce. What is it? What can you share with me? I think the thing that we saw with Claudio that got us excited and the fact that they, even though it was a small company, they had 20 customers that were generating revenue and they were delivering real value to business users by really enabling business users to tap into the value of trusted governed data and frankly, get IT out of the way. We almost refer to it as like smart self-service, which is they could find a data asset and connect to that source. And just with a couple of clicks, almost like a low code, no code type of an experience, bring that sort of data into their spreadsheets so they could do the work that they needed to do. That opportunity, that tech that the Claudio team had built out, the big gap that they had is, my goodness, what does it take to actually be aware of all the data sources that exist across an organization and connect to them? And that's what Elation does, right? That's why we built the platform that we built so that we can basically understand all of a customer's data assets, whether they're on-prem or in the cloud. And so it was a little bit of, that Reese's Peanut Butter Cup analogy, the chocolate and the peanut butter coming together, the Elation platform, the Elation catalog coupled with the technology that Claudio brought to us, really was sort of a match made in heaven. And it's allowed us to bring this new capability to market that really is value add on top of the platform and catalog investments that our customers have already made. Yeah, so they had this magic pixie dust, but it was sort of isolated. And then you've integrated it into your catalog. And that's the second part of my question. How were you able to do that so quickly? So, we've been on this evolution, enhancing the Elation data intelligence platform. We've moved to a microservices architecture. We're fully multi-tenant in the cloud. And the fact that we'd made those investments over the past few years, gave us the opportunity to make it easy for an acquired business like Claudio or perhaps a future acquisition or third party developers leveraging APIs that we expose to make it easy for them to integrate into the Elation platform. And so, I think it's a bit of foresight. We recognize that in starting with the catalog, the opportunity was much bigger than just providing a data catalog. We've added data governance. We've built out this platform and we recognize that more and more users can and should be benefiting from data intelligence. And so, I think those platform investments have paid significant dividends and accelerated our ability to deliver Elation-connected sheets as quickly as we have. Sounds like a great acquisition, like a diamond in the rough. I mean, I love these big mega acquisitions because the media company can write about them. But I really love the high return, low denominator, high value. So, congratulations. We can people learn more about this. Maybe play around a little bit with it. Yeah. So, we're going to be demoing Elation-connected sheets at AWS re-invent next week. And it's going to be available starting next week, so the 28th of November. And obviously you'll see it online on social media on our website as well. But folks that are going to be in Las Vegas next week, come to the Elation booth and you'll get a chance to see it directly. Awesome. Okay, Raj, thanks for spending some time with us today. I really appreciate it. Great, thanks so much, Dave. Great to see you. Hey, you're very welcome. And thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.