 Hey everyone, welcome to this CUBE conversation featuring Carto, I'm Lisa Martin and today we're excited to be joined by Javier De La Torre, the founder and chief strategy officer at Carto. We're going to be talking about how Carto is bringing cloud native spatial analysis to the cloud with AWS. Javier, great to have you on the program. Thank you, Lisa, very nice to be here. Talk to us about Carto, what do you guys do? Great, so Carto is a location intelligence platform but we really is enabling organizations to work with location data on the context of the AWS cloud. So essentially enabling organizations to analyze where should they open new stores, where should they deploy their new incentives. In essence, understanding the location dimension is helping them to figure out where to do things. From Carto's perspective, talk to me about why spatial analysis location data is important, what power does it give to businesses in any industry? Right, I mean, we like to say that everything happens somewhere, right? So we understand that the physical world is a very important dimension. So understanding where things happens and the relation within space is a pretty fundamental dimension when it comes to analytics. I'd like to put examples of, if all your neighbors install alarms in their homes, the likelihood that you will get an alarm is also increases quite a lot. So that's in the end, so it says that we are all influenced by the things that happens around us. And if you can model and understand those spatial relations, you can then look to optimize or predict what is going to happen based on where things are happening. And this is something that we've seen a lot, for example, with the pandemic. But now we've seen many organizations utilizing it for finding out where they can find new customers. So like I said, where do they deploy the new infrastructure? Everything at the end has a spatial component and that's what a spatial analytics and location intelligence allows you to do. Give me some examples of spatial data. The first thing that pops into my mind is GPS, but I know that there's a lot more than that. Right, GPS has been one of the most important types of data, of course. So it's the availability of GPS and with mobiles and different sensors are starting adding it. We've seen an incredible amount of location data coming into place. But you're right, there's many other types of location data that people tend not to be so aware. I'd say any company that is handling customers, they're likely going to have their addresses. So if you have the address of a customer, you have a location already. We call that the process of geocoding. We transform an address into coordinates, right? But you also have the same, with IPs and you have the same, with many different SIP codes. It's many different ways that you can represent location and once you identify those location bits in your data, then you can start thinking about what type of analysis you can do with them. So it is, like I said, in many, many places, but definitely the rise of GPS and sensors have been very dramatic. Now we're seeing in also like a huge stream of location data coming, for example, from satellites. With all these constellations of satellites capturing daily images from Earth, that is also giving us a lot of contextual information. But so it is mobile phones when you connect to cell towers. There's many different pieces that are now kind of giving us location data. So you alluded to that earlier, a lot more businesses are using location data in their strategies. Talk to me about the acceleration that you've seen of that in the last couple of years alone. Yeah, so I think one thing that we've seen massively on the industry, obviously, is these companies are going through the data transformation. They're applying analytics to bigger and bigger areas of their businesses, right? And in a way, location, Gala came as one of the last dimensions that a lot of organizations have started to look at. And over the last two years, we've seen that changing a lot. We've seen many more organizations now making the questions around where things happens, how does it actually matter to my business? So this acceleration has essentially meant that many more people are now starting to look at, not only seeing things on the map, like where my customers are, where my warehouses are, how is my logistics, how do I change, where is it located? Now we're starting to see many more organizations looking at questions about how can I predict where something is going to happen? Or how can I optimize my business process so that I can reduce the number of kilometers that I have to drive miles? So I guess it's a mix of the need for sustainability, optimizing the business process, and the fact that more and more organizations are starting to do much more detailed transformations that now location data has become a much more interesting aspect for many more organizations. So I think all these things together has made in a way the perfect storm, and now we're seeing a lot of demand to companies that want to go beyond seeing things on the map to understanding why things happens in those cases. And that's, I think, again, a multitude of drivers that is pushing this industry. Can you talk about some of the key use cases and maybe some of the vertical industries where you've really seen this take off in the last couple of years? Yes, and I think this is, in a way, one of the most interesting factors of our industry. Traditional industries have been on the area around security in the public sector, and it was very much on the military and in the intelligence ecosystems. But now we're seeing tremendous adoption on industries like retail, right? Where they are now consolidating, what is their physical presence? Where do they open stores? Food chains, where do they open restaurants? It's a much more analytical process now towards making these decisions, and that involves the usage of location and intelligence space analytics, which we do. That's one, but we've seen also like tremendous increase in usage on things like telcos, telecommunication now with all the deployment of 5G networks, fiber optics. Most of those operations require a very good understanding of where you should deploy your networks, which areas you want to go start first in order to have a smart capex kind of strategy. So that's, I would say it's also has been a tremendous increase. The public sector is obviously very important, especially with COVID, a lot of the, in a way, we all got a master of why geography matters and how to understand your location. And the last one that I would say that it's also connected very much with climate change, transportation and logistics very, very important factor now. So understanding what is the best strategies for last mile delivery, how to organize your warehouses to better meet your needs. Those are the places that now we're seeing my really growing really fast. So tremendous amount of use cases, a lot of opportunity there for optimization. How have companies traditionally analyzed spatial data? And why does that need to change? Yeah, so to certain extent, I would like to say that there's not that much usage of location data. And that I think is one of the most exciting parts that for many organizations, this is the first time that they're looking at location as a new dimension that they need to understand. So there were several organizations that are doing already spatial analytics. But right now it's really seeing the expansion of our industry. And catching up in major companies. So those are more advanced. We'll have used the so-called traditional GIS systems. GIS is a type of software that's been existing for many years, but it was only used by a very small needs of analysts. You had to go almost four years to school to become a GIS expert and then do GIS analysts. This is right now changing dramatically. And I think, you know, Carter's part of that transition to essentially making spatial analysis in GIS part of just the general analytics. And I think this is one of the most exciting times that we have because we've seen the democratization of spatial analytics now to a much wider audience. So now we're seeing, you know, like analysts that used to know how to make a map, see things on a map, you know, where something was happening. Now we're starting to see them making much more interesting questions. So I'm like, okay, if it happens here, where else could they be happening? Right, so this is, you know, like right now, they're the huge stakes. I'd say, you know, like many organizations is the first time they're going to GIS. And for people like me who've been very passionate about the possibilities of really improving processes. I mean, this is super exciting time. I can definitely feel your passion here through Zoom, Javier. Talk to me a little bit about how Carto and AWS are helping organizations to embrace the democratization of spatial data and really unlock its superpowers. Yeah. Well, I mean, obviously, you know, like AWS as the leader of the cloud, I mean, like that, in a way it has fundamentally changed the way that we think about, you know, like analytics, right? So not only the cloud, you know, I provide us with the huge scalability, you know, like scalability, affordable scalability. So that's one of the things that, you know, has been incredibly transformative in our industry. With AWS now, we can do analysis at the scale that wasn't possible before. So that's one part. So for us, you know, what we've embarked with AWS is rethinking how we can do a spatial analytics in the cloud. We're calling it, you know, Carto cloud native. It's providing a full cloud native approach towards performing the spatial analytics for the traditional GIS. And for us, you know, this is, again, giving us a huge amount of scalability. We use services like RedSafe, that now with their server-less capabilities, we like an organization have their data already on that data warehouse of RedSafe, and using Carto spatial extension to RedSafe. Now they can do a spatial analytics directly on the warehouse. This is one of the biggest characteristics of Carto. By being the first cloud native platform, every computing that we do actually gets pushed down to the warehouse. So the customer is already using the computing engine that they're already, they've been using it for many other things, they're paying for already, and that gives us a scalability, it gives us also very cost-effectiveness. The storage computing separation that the RedSafe service provides, it makes it very competitive from a cloud, like a cost perspective. And then also it's very convenient, it means that you can use this traditional SQL that many analysts know how to use within the tools that they've been using for many years. So I think like the Carto spatial extension to RedSafe, and then also we've incorporated in the Amazon location services, so we can talk to, and it essentially provides a cloud native, you know, like a scalable cost affordable, you know, like efficient and much more easy to use solution to perform a spatial analytics that anything that has been done before. So tremendous amount of opportunity, it sounds like we're just scratching the surface, but really interesting things that Cartier was doing and how you're enabling organizations in every industry to accelerate the use of spatial data. Javier, thank you so much for joining me on the program today. Fascinating information and best of luck to you. Thank you very much. For Javier de la Torre, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, stay right here for more coverage of the hybrid tech event world.