 from the Corinium Chief Analytics Officer Conference, Spring, San Francisco. It's theCUBE. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at the Park 55 Hotel at the Corinium Chief Analytics Officer Spring 2018 event. About 100 people, pretty intimate affair, a lot of practitioners here talking about the challenges of big data and the challenges of analytics. And we're really excited to have a very special CUBE guest. I think he was the first guy to launch this company on theCUBE. It was big data in New York City 2013. I remember it distinctly. It's Prakash Nanduri, the co-founder and CEO of Pixata. Great to see you. Great seeing you. Thank you for having me back. Absolutely. You know, we got so much mileage out of that clip. We put in all of our promotional materials like you don't launch your company, launch your company on theCUBE. You know, it seems just like yesterday but it's been a long run and it's been a fantastic run. So give us just a quick general update on the company where you guys are now, how things are going. Things are going fantastic. Continue to grow. If you recall when we launched, we launched the whole notion of democratization of information in the enterprise with self-service data prep. We have gone on to now, you know, deliver real value to some of the largest brands in the world. We're very proud that 2017 was the year when massive amount of adoption of Pixata's adaptive information platform was taken across multiple industries, financial services, retail, CPG, high tech in the IoT space. So we just keep growing and it's the usual challenges of managing growth and managing, you know, the change in the company as you grow from being a small startup to now being a real company. Right, right. Those are good problems and bad problems. Those are the good problems. Yes. So, you know, we do so many shows and there's two big themes over and over and over like digital transformation, which gets way overused and then innovation and how do you find a culture of innovation? And in doing literally thousands of these interviews, to me, it seems pretty simple. It is about democratization. If you give more people the data, more people the tools to work with the data and more people the power to do something once they find something in the data and open that up to a broader set of people, they're going to find innovation simply the fact of doing it. But the reality is those three simple steps aren't necessarily very easy to execute. Your spot on, your spot on, I like to say that when we talk about digital transformation, the real focus should be on the D and it really centers around data and it centers around the whole notion of democratization, right? The challenge always in large enterprises is democratization without governance becomes chaos. And we always need to focus on democratization. We need to focus on data because as we all know, data is the new oil, all of that. And governance becomes a critical piece too. But as you recall, when we launched Bexata, the entire vision from day one has been while the entire focus around digitization covers many things, right? It covers people processes, covers applications. It's a very large topic, the whole digital transformation of the enterprise. But the core foundation to digital transformation, data democratization governance, but the key issue is the companies that are going to succeed are the companies that turn data into information that's relevant for every digital transformation effort. Because if you do not turn raw data into information, you're just dealing with raw data, which is not useful, and it will not be democratized. Because the business will only consume the information that is contextual to their need, the information that's complete, and the information that is clean, right? So that's really what we're driving towards. And that's it, because the data, there's so many more sources of data, right? There's data that you control, there's structured data, unstructured data. I mean, I used to joke, it's just the first question when you'd ask people, where's your data? Half the time they couldn't even get beyond that step. And that's before you start talking about cleaning it and making it ready and make it unavailable. Before you even start to get into governance and rights and access. So it's a really complicated puzzle to solve on the backend. I think it starts with first focusing on what are the business outcomes we're driving with digital transformation. When you double click on digital transformation and then you start focusing on data and information, there's a few things that come to fore. First of all, how do I leverage information to improve productivity in my company? There's multiple areas, whether it is marketing or supply chain or whatever. The second notion is how do I ensure that I can actually transform the culture in my company and attract the brightest and the best by giving them the environment where democratization of information is actually reality, where people feel like they're empowered to access data and turn it into information and then be able to do really interesting things because people are not interested on being subservient to somebody who gives them the data. They want to be say, give it to me, I'm smart enough. I know analytics, I think analytically and I want to drive my career forward. So the second thing is the cultural aspect to it. And the last thing which is really important is every company, regardless of whether you're making toothpicks or turbines, you are looking to monetize data. So it's about productivity, it's about cultural change and attracting of talent and it's about monetization. And when it comes to monetization of data, you cannot be satisfied with only covering enterprise data, which is sitting in my enterprise systems. You have to be able to focus on, oh, how can I leverage the IoT data that's being generated from my products or widgets? How can I generate social and mobile? How can I consume that? How can I bring all of this together and get the most complete insight that I need for my decision-making processes? So I'm just curious, how do you see it in your customers? So this is the chief analytics officer. We go to the chief data officer. I mean, there's all these chief something officers that want to get involved in data, right? And then marketing is much more involved with it. Forget about manufacturing and all those other things. So when you see successful cultural change, what drives that? Who are the people that are successful and what is the secret to driving the cultural change that we are going to be data-driven? We are going to give you the tools. We are going to make the investment to turn data, which historically was even arguably a liability because I had to buy a bunch of servers to stick it on into that now being an asset that drives actionable outcomes. You know, recently I was having this exact discussion with the CEO of one of the largest financial institutions in the world. This gentleman is running a very large financial services firm. He's dealing with all the potential disruption where they're seeing completely new type of fintech products coming in, the whole notion of blockchain, et cetera, coming in. Everything is changing. Everything looks very dramatic. And what we started talking about is the first thing as a CEO that we always focus on is do we have the right people? And do we have the people that are motivated and driven to basically go and disrupt and change? For those people, you need to be able to give them the right kind of tools, the right kind of environment to empower them. This doesn't start with lip service. It doesn't start about us saying we're going to be on a digital transformation journey, but at the same time, your data is completely in silos. It's locked up. There is 15,000 checks and balances before I can even access a simple piece of data. And third, even when I get access to it, it's too little, too late, or it's garbage and garbage out. And that's not the culture. So first, it needs to be CEO-driven, top down. We are going to go through digital transformation, which means we are going to go through a democratization effort, which means we are going to look at data and information as an asset, and that means we are not only going to be able to harness these assets, but we're also going to monetize these assets. How are we going to do it? It depends very much on the business you are in, the vertical industry you play in, and your strengths and weaknesses. So each company has to look at it from their perspective. There's no one-size-fits-all for everyone. There are some companies that have fantastic cultures of empowerment and openness, but they may not have the right innovation or the right kind of product innovation skills in place. So it's about looking at it across the board. First, from your culture and your empowerment. Second, about democratization of information, which is where a company like Paxada comes in. And third, along with democratization, you have to focus on governance, because we are for-profit companies, we have a fiduciary responsibility to our customers and our regulators, and therefore we cannot have democratization without governance. And that's really what our biggest differentiation is. And what about just in terms of the political play inside the company? You know, on one hand, used to be if you held the information, you had the power. And now that's changed, really, because there's so much information. It's really, if you are the conduit of information to help people make better decisions, that's actually a better position to be. But I'm sure there's got to be some conflicts going through digital transformation, where I was the keeper of the kingdom, and now you want to open that up. Conversely, it must just be transformational for the people on the front lines to finally get the data that they've been looking for to run the analysis that they want to, rather than waiting for the weekly reports to come down from on high. You bet. You know what I like to say is that if you've been in a company for 10, 15 years, and if you felt like a particular aspect, purely selfishly, you felt a particular aspect was job security, that is exactly what's going to make you lose your job today. What you thought 10 years ago was your job security, that's exactly what's going to make you lose your job today. So if you do not disrupt yourself, somebody else will. So it's either transform yourself or not. Now this whole notion of politics and struggle within the company, it's been there for, as long as humans generally go towards entropy. So you always, if you have three humans, you have all sorts of issues. The issue starts, frankly, with leadership. It starts with the CEO coming down and not only putting an edict down on how things will be done, but actually walking the walk with talking the talk. If as a CEO, you're not transparent, if you're not trusting your people, if you're not sharing information, which could be confidential, but you mentioned that it's confidential, but you have to keep this confidential. If you trust your people, you give them the ability to do it. I think it's a culture change thing. And the second thing is incentivization. You have to be able to focus on giving people the ability to say, by sharing my data, I actually become a hero. By giving them the actual credit for actually delivering the data to achieve an outcome. And that takes a lot of work, but if you do not actually drive the cultural change, you will not drive the digital transformation and you will not drive the democratization of information. And have you seen people try to do it without making the commitment? Have you seen them pay the lip service, spend a few bucks, start a project, but ultimately they hamstring themselves because they're not actually behind it? Look, I mean, there's many instances where companies start on digital transformation or they start jumping into cool terms like AI or machine learning. And there's a small group of people who are kind of the elites that go in and do this. And they're given all the kind of attention, et cetera. Two things happen. Because these people who are quote unquote the elite team, either they're not able, they're smart, but they're not able to scale across the organization or many times they're so good they leave. So that transformation doesn't really get democratized. So it is really important from day one to start a culture where you're not going to have a small group of exclusive data scientists. You can have those people, but you need to have a broader democratization focus. So what I have seen is many of the siloed, small tight mini science projects end up failing. They fail because number one, either the business outcome is not clearly identified early on or two, it's not scalable across the enterprise. And a majority of these exercises fail because the whole information foundation that is taking raw data, turning it into clean, complete, contextual and consumable information to feed across the organization, not just for one siloed group, not just one data science team. But how do you do that across the company? That's what you need to think from day one. When you do these siloed things, these departmental things, a lot of times they can fail. Now it's important to say, I will start with a couple of test cases, but I'm going to expand it across from the beginning to think through that. So I'm just curious to your perspective, is there some departments that are the ripest for being that leading edge of the digital transformation in terms of they've got the data, they've got the right attitude, they're just a short step away. Where have you seen kind of the great place to succeed when you're starting on kind of a smaller PLC, I don't know, say PLC project or department level? So it's funny, but you will hear this, it's not rocket science. Always they say follow the money. So in a business, there are three incentives, making more money, saving money, or staying out of jail. Was it good? I don't know if I'd put them in that order, but. Exactly, and you know what? Depending on who you are, you may have a different order, but staying out of jail is pretty high on my list. I'm with y'all now. So what are the areas? Risk and compliance, right? That's one of those things where you absolutely have to deliver, you absolutely have to do it. It's significantly high cost, it's very data and analytic centric, and if you find a smart way to do it, you can dramatically reduce your cost, you can significantly increase your quality, and you can significantly increase the volume of your insights and your reporting, thereby achieving all the risk and compliance requirements, but doing it in a smarter way and in a less expensive way. That's where incentives have really been high. Second, in making money, it always comes down to sales and marketing and customer success. Those are the three things, sales, marketing, and customer success. So most of our customers who have been wildly successful are the ones who have basically been able to go and say, you know what, it used to take us eight months to be able to even figure out a customer list for a particular region. Now it takes us two days because of Paxata and because of the data prep capabilities and the governance aspects. That's the power that you can deliver to them, and when you see one person who's a line of business person who says, oh my God, what used to take me eight months now is done in half a day, or what used to take me 22 days to create a report is now done in 45 minutes, all of a sudden you will not have a small kind of trickle down, you will have a tsunami of democratization with governance. That's what we've seen in our customers. Right, right, I love it. And this is just so classic too. I always like to joke, you know, back in the day you would run your business based on reports from old data. Now we want to run your business with stuff you can actually take action on now. I mean, this is public. Shamik Kundu who's the Chief Data Officer of Standard Chartered Bank and Michael Goritz who's the Global CIO of Standard Chartered Bank, they have embraced the notion that information democratization in the bank is a foundational element to the digital transformation of Standard Chartered. They're very forward thinking and they're looking at how do I democratize information for all our 87,500 employees while we maintain governance. And another major thing that they are looking at is they know that the data that they need to manipulate and turn into information is not sitting only on premise. Right, right. It's sitting across a multi-cloud world. And that's why they've embraced the Paxata Information Platform to be their information fabric for a multi-cloud hybrid world. And this is where we see successes and we're seeing more and more of this because it starts with the people, it starts with the line of business outcomes and then it starts with looking at it from scale. All right, Prakash, well always great to catch up and enjoy really watching the success of the company grow since you launched it many moons ago in New York City. Fantastic, always a pleasure to come back here. All right, thank you so much. Thank you, Prakash. I'm Jeff Rick. You're watching theCUBE from downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching.