 Hi, Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We are on the ground at Cassandra Summit 2014, getting the latest story, I think it's the fourth year of the conference, a lot of excitement, a great keynote by Billy and the team this morning. We're joined next by Patrick McFadden, evangelist for DataStacks. Yeah, how are you doing Jeff? I'm doing great, thanks for stopping by. So, evangelist, it's always a great title, I love people who have the evangelist title. What do you evangelize in these days? Well, I always remind everybody, you know, Steve Jobs was the evangelist for Apple, right? I mean, I'm not Steve Jobs, but that's what he did. And a good one. He got up there and he said, you know, you're going to buy a billion of these. And because it was good, it was cool, right? It wasn't because he just said that, but, I mean, when I talk about Cassandra, I talk about it as a user. Everyone in my evangelist team is an engineer. We're all have experience with Cassandra, so we want to talk to users at their level. When we talk, we're like, hey, you know, this is what I did. This is what you're doing. Let's get together and let's talk about how we can work together. And you're talking about, when you talk about users, you're talking about the developers, right, that are building the applications. And because what I'm curious about is how much of the functionality that was talked about earlier today is driven by the, oh my God, now I can finally do what I wanted to do versus, you know, kind of a pull demand from the applications and the, not the developer users, but the end users that want to do things that they couldn't do before. Well, it's not only developers, it's operations too, but, you know, developers probably the bigger story now, because when you're writing an application, a big part of that is the database now. And you have a lot of choices. So if you notice this morning, a lot of that buzz was around, I mean, 2.1 shift today, and that's a big deal. There's some big changes in the data model. We also dropped a Node.js driver, a Ruby driver. We upgraded all of our drivers to 2.1 this morning. So it's a big deal for developers. They should be pretty excited because we've tracked everything along and we're really increasing the amount of coverage we have for what they need to get done. We're just making it easier for their job to be, hey, I'm just going to kick out some really cool apps and I'm going to use Cassandra. This is not going to be a hard thing to do. But talk a little bit about the challenges of evangelizing and how you split your time between evangelizing and Cassandra as an open source project versus data stacks as a for-profit company. Well, you know, that's an interesting dichotomy, right? Well, what's interesting about data stacks is we're very open source, very community. I get paid by data stacks to basically be a part of the community. That's my job. And so it's not a part of the profit motive. It's really just to be a part of the Cassandra experience and part of the community. And so we're just a part of the community as any other user. So that's a great part of this company. This is one of the things I love about data stacks is that we put our money where our mouth is. And so when I work with committers, when I work with contributors, I'm talking to them as a community member, not just as some shill for my company. And they know that. Right, right. And we've seen that this kind of hybrid model where the open source exists with the for-profit. Because obviously you've got investors, Clint just said you brought in another 100 million bucks. Those guys eventually want to get some of that money back. So you do need to make money, even though you do leverage kind of the open source in the community aspects of Cassandra. Absolutely. And don't get me wrong. Data stacks is so core to this too. Because look at the drivers. They're all data stacks driven drivers. We tell people if you need that top tier premium experience, if you need enterprise grade features, use data stacks enterprise. But we're still driving community because it's such a core part of what's going on. You look at people when they contribute. That happens in the open source. It's an Apache project. Data stacks does not own Cassandra. It is an Apache project. So whenever we talk to people about just that fact, it's not like we're saying use our product. We're saying use Apache Cassandra and data stacks enterprise if you need a better experience for a lot of things. So I'll put you on the spot a little bit. You're not the product guy. So you may not have the inside knowledge. I can't say I don't know. But what are we going to be talking about? You're the evangelist. You're out in front next year at Cassandra Summit 2015. I don't know. It's kind of the type of just released 2.1. But if you're out front, you're talking to people. Where are we on? What's still to be conquered? Are there any big balance to be conquered? Or is the still incremental change at this point? Or are we still so early in the game? Well, next year is going to be probably 3.0. That's where we're headed now. And it's all steam ahead. So 3.0 is going to change a lot of things. And it's just what we're looking at is a better experience for developers. Lowering the barrier to entry. So it's more drivers, better drivers. And 3.0 experience is going to be so different in the amount of density, premature note, and performance aspects. So there's really not going to be a lot of other choices for you, including the spark integration that we now offer, which is really ramping up. We were just here at the Spark Summit in June, at the end of June, talking about Cassandra and spark rating on the topic of Cassandra. That has just begun. Next year, it's going to be a really big deal. Because that's yet another Apache project that works with Cassandra. And it actually makes spark run better. Excellent. Well, Patrick, thanks for stopping by. I'm sure notice we grabbed them out of the hallway. That's what we like to do. I'm Jeff Frick. I'm on the ground at Cassandra Summit 2014, the West in St. Francis, San Francisco, California.