 From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and we're here at the East Coast Studio for SiliconANGLE Media. Happy to welcome back to the program a many time guest, Chris Selland, who is now the Vice President of Strategic Growth with Unify Software. Great to see you, Chris. Thanks so much, Stu, great to see you too. All right, so Chris, we'd had you in your previous role many times. I think not only is the first time we've had you on since you made the switch, but also the first time we've had somebody from Unify Software on, so why don't you give us a little bit of background of Unify and what brought you to this opportunity? Sure, absolutely, happy to sort of open up the relationship with Unify Software. I'm sure it's going to be a long and good one, but I joined the company about six months ago at this point, so I joined earlier this year. I actually had worked with Unify for a bit as partners where when I was previously at the Vertica business inside of HP as you know for a number of years prior to that where we did all the work together. I also knew the founders of Unify who were actually at Green Plum, which was a direct Vertica competitor. Green Plum is acquired by EMC, Vertica was acquired by HP. We were sort of friendly respected competitors and so I've known the founders for a long time, but it was partly the people, but it was really the sort of the idea, the product. I was actually reading the report, the Peter Burris or the piece that Peter Burris just did on I guess wikibon.com and I read about distributed data and it plays so into our value proposition. We just see it's where things are going. I think it's where things are going right now and I think the market's bearing that out. Yeah, the piece of reference, it was actually, it's a wikibon research meeting. We run those weekly. Internally, we're actually going to be doing them soon. We'll be broadcasting video because of course we do a lot of video, but we pull the whole team together and it was one, George Gilbert actually led this for us talking about what architectures do I need to build when I start doing distributed data with my background really more in kind of the cloud and infrastructure world. We see it's a hybrid and many times a multi-cloud world and therefore one of the things we look at that's critical is like, wait, if I've got things in multiple places, I've got my SaaS over here, I've got multiple public clouds of music and I've got my data center, how do I get my arms around all the pieces and of course data is critical to that. Right, exactly. And the fact that more and more people need data to do their jobs these days, working with data is no longer just the area where data scientists, I mean, organizations are certainly investing in data scientists but there's a shortage, but at the same time marketing people, finance people, operations people, supply chain folks, they need data to do their jobs and as you said, where it is, it's distributed, it's in legacy systems, it's in the data centers and warehouses, it's in SaaS applications, it's in the cloud, it's on premise, it's all over the place, so yeah. Chris, I've talked to so many companies that are, everybody seems to be nibbling at a piece of this, we go to the Amazon show and there's this just ginormous ecosystem that everybody's picking at, can you drill in a little bit for what problems do you solve there, as I said, I've talked to people, everything from just trying to get the licensing in place, trying to empower the business unit to do things, trying to do, you know, governance and compliance of course, so where's Unify's point in this? Well, having come out of essentially the data warehousing market and now of course this has been going on of course with all the investments in HDFS and Hadoop infrastructure and open source infrastructure, so there's been this fundamental thinking that, well the answer is if I get all of the data in one place then I can analyze it, well that just doesn't work because it's just not feasible, so I think really, and it's really when you step back it's one of these like, yeah that makes total sense, what we do is we basically catalog the data in place, so you can use your legacy data that's on the mainframe, let's say I'm a marketing person, I'm trying to do a analysis of selling trends, marketing trends, marketing effectiveness and I want to use some order data that's on the mainframe, I want some click stream data that's sitting in HDFS, I want some customer data in the CRM system or maybe it's in Salesforce or Mercado, I need some data to work there, I want to use some external data, I want to use say weather data to look at seasonal analysis, I want to do neighborhooding, so how do I do that? You know, I may be sitting there with click or Tableau or Looker or one of these modern BI products or visualization products, but at the same time where's the data? So our value proposition starts with, we catalog the data and we show where the data is, so okay you've got these data sources, this is what they are, we describe them and then there's a whole collaboration element to the platform that lets people as they're using the data say, well, yes that's order data, but that's old data, so it's good if you use it up to 2007, but the more current data is over here, do things like that and then we also then help the person use it and again, I almost said like IT, but it's not data scientist, it's not just them, it's really about democratizing the use because business people don't know how to do inner and outer joins and things like that or what a schema is, they just know, I'm trying to do a better job of analyzing sales trends and I got all these different data sources, but then once I've found them, once I've decided what I want to use, how do I use them? So we answer that question too. Chris reminds me a lot of some of the early value propositions we heard when kind of Hadoop and the whole big data wave came, it was how do I get as a smaller company or even if I'm a bigger company, do it faster, do it for less money than the things that used to be, okay, it's going to be millions of dollars and it's going to take me 18 months to roll out. Is it right to say this is kind of an extension of that big data wave or what's different, what's the same? Absolutely, we use a lot of that stuff. I mean, we basically use, and we've got flexibility of what we can use, but for most of our customers, we use HADFS to store the data. We use Hive as the most typical data format of whether you have flexibility around there. We use MapReducer Spark to do transformation of the data. So we use all of those open source components and as the product is being used, as the platform is being used, and as multiple users, because it's designed to be an enterprise platform or using it, the data does eventually migrate into the data lake, but we don't require you to sort of get it there as a prerequisite. As I said, and this is one of the things that we really talked about a lot, we catalog the data where it is in place. So you don't have to move it to use it. You don't have to move it to see it, but at the same time, if you want to move it, you can. So, but the fundamental idea, I got to move it all first. I got to put it all in one place first. It never works. We've come into so many projects where organizations have tried to do that and they just can't. It's too complex these days. All right, Chris, what are some of the organizational dynamics you're seeing from your customers? You mentioned data scientists, the business users, who is identifying, who's driving these issues? Who's got the budget to try to fix some of these challenges? Well, it tends to be, our best implementations are driven, really almost all of them these days are driven by use cases. So they're driven by business needs. Some of the big ones, I've sort of talked about customers already, but like customer 360 views, for instance, there's a very large credit union client of ours that they have all of their data that is organized by accounts, but they can't really look at Stu Miniman's of my customers. So, how do I look at Stu's value to us as a customer? I can look at his mortgage account, I can look at his savings account, I can look at his checking account, I can look at his debit card, but I can't just see Stu. And I want to organize my data that way, that type of customer 360 or marketing analysis I talked about to Great Use Case, another one that we've been seeing a lot of is compliance, where just having a better handle on what data is, where it is, this is where some of the governance aspects of what we do also comes into play, even though we're very much about solving business problems. There's a very strong data governance, because when you're doing things like data compliance, we're working for instance with, and MoneyGram is a customer of ours, this day and age in particular, when there's money flows cross borders, there's often times regulators want to know, wait, that money that went from here to there, tell me where it came from, tell me where it went, tell me the lineage, and they need to be able to respond to those inquiries very, very quickly. Now the reality is, that data sits in all sorts of different places, both inside and outside of the organization. Being able to organize that, and give the ability to respond more quickly and effectively is a big competitive advantage. It both helps with avoiding regulatory fines, but it also helps with customer responsiveness. And then you've got things like GDPR, the general data protection regulation, I believe it is, which is being driven by the EU, where it's sort of like the next Y2K. I mean, anybody in data, if they're not paying attention to it, they need to be pretty quick. At least they're a big enough company, they're doing business in Europe, because if you're doing business with European companies or European customers, this is going to be a requirement as of May, I think May next year. So there's a whole another set of how data is kept, how data is stored, what customers can control over data, things like right to be forgotten. So this need to comply with regulatory, as data's gotten more important, as you might imagine the regulators have gotten more interested in what organizations are doing with data. So, you know, having a framework that organizes and helps you be more compliant with those regulations is absolutely critical. Yeah, my understanding GDPR, if you don't comply, there's hefty fines. Major fines. Major fines. That's going to hit you. Does Unify solve that? Is there other rearchitecture and redesign that customers need to do to be able to be compliant? Well, we provide a platform that can solve this. No, no, that's a whole idea again, where like being able to leave the data where it is, but know what it is and where it is, and if and when I need to use it, and if and when and where it came from, and where it's going and where it went, all of those things. So we provide the platform that enables the customers to use it or the partners to build those solutions for their customers. Yeah, I'm curious, customers, they're an option of public cloud. How does that play into what you're doing? Is that they deploy more SaaS environments? We were having a conversation off camera today talking about the consolidation that's happening in the software world. What do those dynamics mean for your customers? Well, public cloud is obviously booming and growing, and any organization has some public cloud infrastructure at this point, just about any organization. I mean, there's some very heavily regulated areas. Actually, healthcare is probably a good example where there's very little public cloud, but even there, we're working with, we're part of the Microsoft Accelerator Program, we're very closely with the Azure team, for instance, and they're working in some healthcare environments where you have to be things like HIPAA compliant, so there's a lot of caution around that, but nonetheless, the move to public cloud is certainly happening, but I think I was just reading some stats the other day. I can't remember whether Wikibon or other stats, it's still only about 5% of IT spending, so, and the reality is organizations of any size have plenty of on-prem data, and of course, with all the use of SaaS solutions, Salesforce, Workday, Marketo, all of these different SaaS applications, it's also in somebody else's data center, much of our data as well, so it's absolutely a hybrid environment. That's why the report that you guys put out on distributed data, really it spoke so much to what our value proposition is, and that's why I'm really glad to be here to talk to you about it. Great, Chris, tell us a little bit about the company itself, how many employees you have, do you share, what metrics can you share about, number of customers, revenue, things like that? Sure, no, we've got about, I believe about 65 people at the company right now. I joined, like I said earlier this year, late February, early March, at that point, we were like 40 people, so we've been growing very quickly. I can't get in too specifically to like our revenue, but basically we're well in the triple-digit growth phase, you know, we're still a small company, but we're growing quickly. Our number of customers, it's up in the triple digits as well, so expanding very rapidly, and again, we're a platform company, so we serve a variety of industries, but some of the big ones are healthcare, financial services, but even more than the industries, it tends to be driven by these use cases that I talked about as well. And we're building out our partnerships also, so that's a big part of what I do also, is work with our- Can you share anything about funding where you are? Oh yeah, funding, you asked about that, sorry. Yes, we raised our B round of funding, which closed in March of this year, so we seed AB, so a company called Helion Venture Partners, who you may know, Canaan Partners, and then most recently, Scale Venture Partners are investors, so the company's raised a little over $32 million so far. Okay, partnerships, you mentioned Microsoft already, any other key partnerships you want to call out? We're doing a lot of work, we have a very broad partner network which we're building out, but some of the ones that we're sort of leaning in the most with Microsoft is certainly one. We're doing a lot of work with the guys at Cloudera as well, you know, we really work, we also work with Hortonworks, we also work with MapR. We're really working almost across the board in the BI space, we have spent a lot of time with the folks at Looker, who was also a partner I was working with very closely during my Vertica days, we're working with Klick, we're working with Tableau, we're really working with actually just about everybody in sort of BI and visualization, I don't think people like that term BI anymore, but the sort of, you know, the desktop visualization space. And then on the public cloud also Google, Amazon, so really all the kind of major players, I would say that though, the ones that we worked with the most closely today, as I mentioned earlier, we're part of the Microsoft Accelerator program, so we're certainly very involved in the Microsoft ecosystem. I actually just wrote a blog post, which I don't believe has been published yet, about some of the, what we call the full stack solutions, we've been rolling out with Microsoft for a few customers, where we're sitting on Azure, we're using HD Insight, which is essentially Microsoft's Cloud Hadoop distribution, visualized in Power BI, so we've really got a lot of deep integration with Microsoft, but we've got a broad network as well. And then I should also mention service providers, we're building out our service provider partnerships also. Chris, I'm surprised we haven't talked about kind of AI yet at all, machine learning, it feels like everybody that was doing big data, now it's kind of pivoted and maybe a little bit early in the buzzword phase, but what's your take on that? You've been part of this for a while, is big data just old now, and we have a new thing, or how do you put those together? Well, I think what we do maps very well until at least my personal view of what's going on with AI slash ML, is that it's really part of the fabric of what our product does. In that, so I talked before about once you've sort of found the data you want to use, how do I use it? Well, there's a lot of ML built into that, where essentially, so I see these different data sets, I want to use them. We do what's called one click functions, which basically, and what happens is these one click functions get smarter, is more and more people use the product and use the data, so that if I've got some table over here and then I've got some SAS data source over there, and one user of the product, or we might see like field names that, we grab the metadata, even though we don't require moving the data, we grab the metadata, we look at the metadata, and then we'll sort of tell the user, we suggest that you join this data source with that data source, and see what it looks like, and if they say, aha, that worked, then we say, oh, okay, that's part of sort of the whole ML infrastructure. Then we're more likely to advise the next few folks with a one click function that, hey, if you're trying to do an analysis of sales trends, well, you might want to use this source and that source, but you might want to join them together this way. So it's a combination of AI and ML built into the fabric of what we do, and then also the community aspect of more and more people using it, but that's, going back to your original question, that's what I think that there was a quote, I'll misquote it, so I'm not going to directly say it, but it was just, I think it might have been John Furrier who recently was talking about ML and just sort of saying, eventually we're not going to talk about ML anymore than we talk about phone business or something, it's just going to become sort of integrated into the fabric of how organizations do business and how organizations do things. So we very much got it built in, you could certainly call us an AI slash ML company if you want, it's actually definitely part of our slide deck, but at the same time, it's something that will just sort of become a part of doing business over time, but it really, it depends on large data sets. I mean, as we all know, this is why it's so cheap to get, like Amazon echoes and such these days, because it's really beneficial because the more data, there's value in that data. There was just another piece, I actually shared it on LinkedIn today as a matter of fact about talking about Amazon and Whole Foods and saying how, why are they getting such a valuation premium? They're getting such a valuation premium because they're smart about using data, but one of the reasons they're smart about using the data is because they have the data. So the more data you collect, the more data you use, the smarter the systems get, the more useful the solutions become. Yeah, absolutely. Last year at Amazon Reinvent, John Furrier and I interviewed Andy Jassy and I had posited that the customer flywheel is going to be replaced by that data flywheel. And enhance to make things spin even further. That's exactly right. And once you get that flywheel going, it becomes a bigger and bigger competitive advantage. By the way, that's also why the regulators are getting interested again these days too, right? So they're sort of that flywheel going back the other way, but from our perspective, I mean, first of all, it just makes economic sense, right? It's like these things could conceivably get out of control. That's at least what the regulators think if you're not careful and there's not some oversight. And I would say that yes, probably some oversight is a good idea. So you've got kind of flywheels pushing in both directions, but one way or another, organizations need to get much smarter and much more precise and prescriptive about how they use data. So, and that's really what we're trying to help with. Okay, Chris, want to give you the final word? Unify software you're working on kind of the strategic growth pieces. What should we look for from you in your segment through the rest of 2017? Oh, well, I think, I've always been a big believer. I've always, I've probably cited crossing the chasm like so many times on the cube, during my prior HP tenure and such, but I'm a big believer and we should be talking about customers. We should be talking about use cases. It's not about alphabet soup technology or data lakes. It's about the solutions and it's about how organizations are moving themselves forward with data. I mean, going back to that Amazon example. So I think from us, yes, we just released 2.0. We've got a very active blog come by unifysoftware.com, visit it. But it's also going to be around what our customers are doing and that's really what we're going to try to promote. I mean, if you remember, this was also something that for all the years I've worked with you guys, I've been very much, you always have to, you know, make sure that the customer has agreed to be cited. You know, it's nice when you can name them and reference them and we're working on our customer references because that's what I think is most powerful in this day and age because again, going back to my, what I said before about, you know, this is going throughout organizations now. People don't necessarily care about the technology infrastructure, but they care about what's being done with it. And so being able to tell those customer stories, I think that's what you're going to probably see and hear the most from us, but we'll talk about our product as much as you let us as well. So, great thing. It reminds me when Wikibon was founded, it was really about IT practitioners being able to share with their peers. Now when the software economy today, when they're doing things in software, often that can be leveraged by their peers and by the flywheel that they're doing, just like when Salesforce first rolled out and make one change and then everybody else has that option, we're starting to see that more and more as we deploy as SaaS and as cloud, it's not the shrink wrap software anymore. I think to that point, you know, I was at a conference earlier this year and it was an IT conference, but I was really sort of floored because when you ask what we're talking about, what the enlightened IT folks, and there's more and more enlightened IT folks are talking about these days is the same thing, right? It's how our business is succeeding by being better at leveraging data. So, and I think the opportunities for people in IT, but they really have to think outside of the box, right? It's not about Hadoop and Scoop and SQL and Java anymore. It's really about business solutions, but if you can start to think that way, I think there's tremendous opportunities and we're just scratching the surface. Absolutely, we've found that's really some of the proof points of what digital transformation really is. All right, Chris Allen, always a pleasure to catch up with you. Thanks so much for joining us and thank you for watching theCUBE. Thanks, Stu.