 Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE in our luxurious press room, festive green digs that we have here. I think, again, we're at Databricks data and AI summit. I gotta say I'm excited to have Steve Sobel with me because who heads up global industry leader for communications, media, and entertainment. I've known you for at least six months now. We go way back. We go way back. I actually have a sticker from when I spoke at one of their conferences back in December. I was new, you were a good man. Yeah, when I was somewhere else and everything. Now I'm the other guy on the other side of the fence here asking all the fun questions about this. But no, I think this has been great. I gotta say you guys put on a fantastic show this week. The customers have been fantastic. We had Alexander on from the Texas Rangers yesterday. You know, he's more on the sports side of things versus the entertainment side of things. He's not really the fan engagement side of things. But I know you guys do a lot with sports teams. And I know it's just, you know, there's such a wide variety of things they can do with Databricks. Not only in that part, but also on the entertainment side, which is more the traditional what people think of. Help us understand kind of what is that you're doing and what your customers look for? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, where we find ourselves right now, you know, certainly in the telecom industry, certainly in the media and entertainment industry, we're in this massive time of transformation. We've had this time in media where everyone is going direct to consumer. They're trying to figure out how do we drive better consumer relationships? How do we focus on personalization? Of course, that's all driven by data and AI. On the telecommunications side of the world, you know, we have everyone, you know, rolling out their 5G networks and trying to understand how do we monetize this beyond churn? You know, what are kind of the opportunities we have around monetizing our data? So we've had an incredible amount of excitement this week, simply because, you know, the excitement is powered by our customers. You know, whether it's customers like Warner Brothers Discovery, like if you're a max customer, all of the personalization, all of that consumer life cycle is driven by Databricks. If you're a magazine reader, Condé Nast, they power all of their advertising targeting with Databricks. So it's really, or companies like Comcast, we power the X1 platform with, you know, when you speak into your voice activated remote, the reason you're getting those recommendations is Databricks is under the hood, so. What's funny is that two out of the three of those, I get more GQ emails than I've ever seen in my entire life, so thank you very much for that. You're a handsome man. You should get those GQ emails. I try to make it, you know, the coif go, right, so. But also, I think you start to look at what they're doing and it's beyond that because I think what's critical to those companies is it's, it helps them with their margins, right? I mean, because they need, from what I've seen from those, that, the media and entertainment industry, they're really leaning in and really leaning in towards the AI they've been early on with modeling on top of Databricks and really pushing you guys, isn't that true? I mean, if you think about it, you know, the whole industry on media, the legacy of media is we create content, we throw it against the wall, it sticks or it doesn't. We're in this time now where consumers have more choice than ever before on how they consume content, where they consume content. The content now has to find the consumer. And that's all powered by, you know, the ability to collect lots of data, the ability to normalize that data, apply machine learning so that you can create differentiated experiences. It's super interesting because I think actually, we're in this really interesting time where media companies are becoming retailers, where they're focusing on consumer experience. Retailers now want to be media companies. They're rolling out retail media networks, they're trying to figure out how do they better monetize the shopper experience via ads? So, even though I focus on, you know, communications and media, I actually am spending a ton of my time with retailers as they're kind of, you know, getting a better understanding of how do they build and scale, you know, sustainable ad businesses. Yeah, and I think that's also it, I think you hit on two things there. It's not only the ad business part of it, but it's the customer experience part of it. And I think that's a huge thing. When I've talked to some of your customers, even beyond the ones that we've had on theCUBE over the last couple of days here, and even before this, they really look at it about how do they make a better customer experience? We actually had the guys from FiveTran on earlier on that helped bring some of that data in for you. What are you seeing from a, how are they pushing the envelope and adopting AI in that way? You know, I think the big trend right now is there's just this huge focus on real-time experiences. And, you know, from a technologist's perspective, you know, being able to deliver real-time experiences is insanely hard. Let's think of it for a moment. You know, I'm on a website, you know, you're looking at my clickstream data, you're seeing me hover over certain words, certain topics, certain images. You know, maybe I'm feeding that, you know, behavior into how I make recommendations for content, how I make recommendations for an Omni-Channel experience use case. And the ability to be able to do that in real-time, I mean, we all have these experiences as consumers where, you know, I abandon my shopping cart, I get an alert, or have you finished watching this content? We now almost have, you know, the digital assistance in our lives for every aspect, every application to deliver these better experiences and to deliver more, you know, if you think about media as an industry, I mean, it's really the industry of fun. It's the media of content and, you know, really engagement. So how do you not just let content stand on itself, but deliver those better experiences vis-a-vis data and machine learning? Yeah, and they all have, they're all competing with each other. And I think to your point, everybody has become a media company to a certain extent and it keeps just growing. And, you know, I mean, again, Max, with their name change from HBO, Max, and all of that, and seeing, they routinely reach out to me and say, hey, you haven't watched anything this week. Why is that? We think these are the good things for you to go and watch based on your history and stuff like that, which I actually like. I like the personal experience. How have you seen them gauging how that fits with their customer base? You know, I think there's always this bar around, like as a consumer, what level of data are you willing to give a company in order to get an experience in return? And it has to be based on a value exchange, always. You can't just expect people to give you the house without whining and dining you before. So what we're seeing is a big focus right now on experience, on how do we optimize the customer journey? How do we focus on first-party data collection? A hugely important thing in media right now is what do we do with Life Beyond Cookies? Google's gonna be degrading cookies next year, and this has been a hair on fire issue for the industry for the last number of years, but it's finally coming to fruition that the tool that most marketers and most media companies use to be able to target their consumers and engage with them vis-a-vis cookies is going away. The challenge for the industry now is, well, what do we do in this world? How do we kind of think about, and it's not a technology problem all the time, it's often business process and what is the barrier with which we can collect information? What is the value exchange? How do we think about this more holistically in terms of the full experience? And again, data in AI is really at the core of powering all of that, getting it to real-time, getting it one-to-one, and where we sit in all of that is we see a lot of customers that almost think of us as the glue, meaning you have all of your data coming in, you need to ingest, clean it all, make it perfect so that you can get it out and send it to Adobe, your Salesforce, or HubSpot, your Martek stack. We're seeing more and more a trend around interoperability. How can you basically have it such that you have bi-directional flow of data across the full stack, which really for our customers is all about not only getting value from us, but deriving more value from the application stack as well. What I like about this is that you play very well with your partners in this space, like you have Snowplow on the open source side, you have Rutter stack. You actually, the one that surprised me most about the announcements this week was Twilio. That one was, I think that's gonna open up crazy value for those customers that are over there, because they can now take advantage of what you've been doing for other CDPs in that space to really get, and again, there's five countries still in Europe that have banned Google Analytics, and so beyond the first-party cookie issue, I think that also becomes an issue of data governance, and I think the sovereignty, data sovereignty. Well, you're bringing up a really good point, I mean, it's been a very intentional strategy for us to particularly around like the CDP use cases, clean room use cases, marketing activation use cases of us going out and building partnerships with this ecosystem so that we're not leaving the integration up to our end customer, it's managed by the partner. So Twilio segment, that's one, we also announced a partnership with Brace recently, Habu, which is an awesome clean room partner that's focused on interoperability. They've been an amazing partner, so in the last like six months, we've probably lined up over a dozen different partnerships that are specifically focused on the ad tech and Martik space, and frankly, we're just getting started. We think that there's gonna be a fast follow for the ecosystem when everyone, we're kind of seeing the demand and the pull to us as kind of the data platform. Yeah, I think we could go on probably for an hour, because I think, especially on the clean room stuff and how people are gonna monetize their data in this space, I think that one, we could take a whole other segment on that one, and maybe we'll get up to be able to get you on again soon and go through that. But right now, I wanna thank you for being on. This has been a lot of fun, it's great seeing you again. I mean, it's been too long. It has been. A whole six months or something like that. You can't even blame the pandemic anymore. No, we can't, we can't, but hey, but I'm glad 12,000 of our friends came along to see us get together again. It's been an amazing week. And 75,000 online, it's been fantastic, and you guys put on a hell of a show, so you should be very proud about that. We're super proud, and we're proud of all of the work that our customers do, and super grateful that you could have me on today. Yep, thank you. All right, so that's it from theCUBE here in the Lakehouse Press Room at the Intercontinental at Databricks Data and AI Summit. We'll be back shortly with a surprise guest for you. Take care.