 We're here at HackReduce. More specifically, we're at the Squirrel World Headquarters, which is upstairs at HackReduce. Mark Taranzoni is here, the new CEO of Squirrel. Mark, good to see you. Great to see you, Dave. Yeah, so you've been on all the three weeks, so throwing you right into the fire. But first of all, congratulations. I mean, Squirrel, we've been tracking Squirrel now for over a year. Very excited about the innovations that are coming out, starting to create a lot of buzz in the industry. So what brought you here? Well, you know, first of all, the team. You know, it's a phenomenal team. They've been working on the project for, you know, almost five years, which is somewhat unique to a startup. We're an eight month old startup, but the core to our technology is Acumulo, which is a no SQL open source foundation, top level Apache project that has been developed by the NSA and brought out to open source in the last year. That core technology, Dave, has been running at very large scale, security focused, mission critical apps, you know, for over five years. So we're a startup that's bringing that core technology to market and commercializing it. You know, no one else has that advantage of a proven technology at the largest scale, bringing to a commercial marketplace. So that's number one. Number two, you know, big data is just, you know, exploding. It's exploding everywhere. We have an opportunity, you know, and anyone that's working with big data today, whether it's terabytes or petabytes, you know, three years from now, it's going to be 10 times. Yeah, the thing that interests us about Acumulo specifically was, I mean, obviously places in the government and certain areas like financial services are going to be much more sensitive to security. But what struck us was that by architecting security in and getting scale, you're going to solve some problems that others can't solve. We're talking to a lot of practitioners that are hitting the wall on certain, you know, no-SQL databases. So are you seeing that? I mean, I know it's only been three weeks, but you've got to be excited about the commercial possibilities. Absolutely. We're seeing a lot of traction on the commercial side, in the financial community. Even across multiple verticals, you know, telecom, you know, we're solving some unique problems. One of the use cases is cybersecurity, more specifically internal, where multitudes of different sets of data and log files need to be brought into the system. You know, we can bring that data in in its natural form. You know, without creating schemas, let the system actually create the schemas on the fly and allow, you know, the practitioners to be able to see things that they never had the ability to see before because they had to, you know, almost decide what they were looking for. They don't have to do that with our system. The data can actually come in and show you some edge case, you know, connections that you never saw before. So, you know, we're seeing that as an early traction for sure. And we focused, you know, a lot on the commercial. We know we're going to get some fed space, some of our early customers, and certainly where the product came from in a cumulative being much more well-known in the government sector. But I'm trying to get some more focus around the commercial side of the business as well. Well, and I think that's an advantage for you two because you actually are, Kimmel was known inside a lot of government circles, and a lot of the commercial companies who are trying to get into the government space, you can actually help them there and there's a quid pro quo, isn't there? Absolutely, absolutely. And we'll leverage our relationships there. There's a lot more cooperation between Fed and commercial, and we'll certainly leverage that. But back to your point about security, we're seeing a lot of focus in the industry right now around security requirements in big data and in the stores themselves. I think there's been a couple, you know, announcements in the ecosystem over the last month. The beauty of our technology is, as you mentioned, is that security was architected at the core of the design. So because of that, there's very low latency associated with that security. And, you know, we're seeing that as a tremendous advantage. Well, I think too, you know, we love to talk about Oracle, you know, there are a lot of fun, and Larry Ellison's this great fodder for a company like ours. But one of the things he said last year at Oracle OpenWorld was that security really should be designed in at the database level, not necessarily at the application level. Now you can certainly design it at the application level, many people do it. But if you have it at the database level, you can actually have a multi-tenant database, you know, in the cloud. And that's, again, something that Acumulo is really well suited for, isn't it? Absolutely. And if you think about it from that perspective, it's a cost-saving scenario, it's a time-to-development scenario. When you have to develop applications knowing what the security requirements not only are today, but what they may go do in the future, every application development is done differently. It creates vulnerabilities in the system. You know, you have to protect every aspect of entry into your data. When you create it at the vault level, at the database, and create that, you know, security at large scale, you know, you don't have to really worry about what those applications are doing. It's much quicker to develop, it's much more cost-effective, the example you gave, multi-tenancy. You don't have to have silos of data to protect the specific security needs. All you really have to do is use your security policies that you've already developed for your organization and apply them to our system. And you have that coverage. Mark, I was out in California last week, and I was meeting with the folks over at Hortonworks. Of course, we love Hortonworks, we love what they're doing, pure open source. And they brought up Acumulo, they've actually brought up Squirrel, they showed me one of their slides of their partners, and you guys came up in the conversation. So that's got to be exciting, working with companies like Hortonworks. It's sort of the blending of Acumulo's open source, and then you're adding a layer on top of that. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, absolutely. We have a relationship with Hortonworks, we've announced that about six weeks ago. We see them in the field, we work together, we're collaborating on a number of opportunities. Certainly great folks, and I look forward to cementing that relationship even further down the road. Yeah, so how's the whole location, co-location with HackReduce working out? I mean, you've got a lot of people in Cambridge, talk about that culture a little bit. Yeah, this is phenomenal. It's an epicenter, there's meet-ups here three, four times a week. We have an opportunity. The ecosystem, the startup ecosystem is a lot different today than it was in my previous days at startups. Companies actually working together. It's a co-operative model. We're helping each other. There's a little bit of overlap in some of the things we're doing, but I think we're kind of teaming up, and HackReduce is a phenomenal place to foster some of those relationships. Excellent, Mark. Well, again, welcome aboard. We're excited about the adult supervision you're bringing to Squirrel, and good luck with everything. Thanks, Dave. Thanks, great. Thanks for watching everybody. We'll be right back. We'll be at the HackReduce SAP startup event all day, covering it end-to-end. My partner, John Furrier, is here, so keep it right there. We'll be right back.