 Hi, this is your host, Sublim Bhartiya, and welcome to the 2023 Predictions series. And today we have with us, once again, Eric Semmer, CEO and founder of Decodable. Eric, it's great to have you on the show. Thanks so much for having me, it's a pleasure. Before I ask you to pick your crystal ball and share your predictions, talk a bit about the company itself. Decodable is a stream processing platform, which really means that we connect to the source systems, operational database systems, streaming systems, like Kafka, Pulsar, those kinds of things, Kinesis. And on the destination side, things like Snowflake, data warehouses, data lakes, those kinds of systems, but also operational databases, caches, those kinds of things. And in the middle, we do real-time processing on that data. And that can be everything from simple transformation to routing, cleansing, normalization, but also aggregations and enrichments like joins and those kinds of things. And we offer that as a platform to folks in the cloud with as much as we can, a silky smooth developer experience, because we think that that's where the big challenge is, is stream processing today. Now it's time for you to grab your crystal ball and tell us what predictions you have for us. My first big prediction here, and I don't know that this is deeply insightful, it might be sort of the least controversial prediction ever, but I think that stream processing is finally here. I think that stream processing is gonna go really mainstream this year. I think streaming in general has been adopted by the lion's share of the Fortune 500, but I think what we're seeing now is going beyond just the movement and the connectivity of data and getting into pushing more of the analytics, more of the sophisticated processing, microservice logic onto the stream in real time. And I think that that's happening for a couple of reasons. One, the business cases are finally here. I think logistics, retail, security, operations, you name it, all of these obviously financial services, all of these use cases are finally, they make sense to do in real time. And I think customers expect that these days. So I think that that's the big driver that's causing this kind of shift. The second big prediction that we have this year for stream processing, you know, or really with respect to stream processing, which is sort of how we think about things, is that it is not just about ingesting data into the analytical stack. I think we are seeing more operational or online use cases going real time. We see product recommendation systems. We see inventory management systems. We see all of these kinds of things getting what I would call sort of the real time treatment, you know, which is driving more and more of these critical customer experiences, reducing churn, driving greater revenue for things like retailers because they're recommending better products or recommending the right products or recommending products that are in stock. So I think it's just further increasing. And I think people are really starting to understand the implications of not having that kind of infrastructure in place. And so I think that that's the second big thing that I think we're gonna see this year. The third major thing that I think we're gonna see this year is that people are, and again, like I don't think that this is a big surprise but I think that increasingly people are moving to the cloud. We are seeing more of the enterprise data infrastructure being pushed to vendors so that customers can focus not necessarily on bits and bytes and query engines and like those kinds of things but around the business value that sits on top of it. When we talk to customers, we see anywhere from five to 10 to 15 to 20 people who do nothing but maintain nondifferentiated data infrastructure as part of like a platform team. And that can be even just in the real-time category, setting aside data warehousing and batch infrastructure and BI and other analytics infrastructure but really just kind of keeping the lights on for this infrastructure that powers all of these real-time systems. And I think that the big challenge for people is that these are expensive people. They're $200,000 a year software engineers that are maintaining these platforms and all of that work doesn't fundamentally provide value to the business. It's not financial services specific or insurance specific or logistics specific. It's really just about data infrastructure when in fact the real value is the business, the business specific logic and applications that people build on top of these systems. And so by getting themselves out of the business of maintaining this low-level infrastructure and punting that to vendors, I think people are gonna get greater leverage and find that the real win is in the analytics, not in the infrastructure that powers the analytics. And I think people are starting to really see that. I think it's gonna come to a head this year, especially with the macroeconomic situation, people sort of figuring out how they can reduce cost and get better lift off of the talent that they have internally. Thanks for sharing these predictions. Talk a bit about what is going to be your focus by you mean the focus of the company this year? I think for us, we are in, honestly I feel very lucky and very privileged. I think the company Decodable is in this great position to sort of catch a lot of these trends at the right time. I think that especially the real time market has had, I don't know that I wanna go as far as calling it false starts over the last decade or so, but I think it hasn't really caught the way that a lot of people expected it to. But we're seeing increased investment and I think Decodable is benefiting from that in a significant way, both from the venture capital community, but also customers directly and pushing these projects forward. So for us, it's all about keeping up with demand, being able to help our customers, deploy the right underlying data infrastructure to power the analytics that we're talking about here and let them do more. And to do it at a price point and a cost profile that makes sense. So rather than having 20, 30, 40, 50 people building these kinds of platforms to power the analytics, they can really use those folks to actually build the analytics themselves. And I think we're in the right position to catch that, the market timing there. Other things that I think we think about it, of course it's just growth at our stage, not just in customer acquisition, but in sort of the team and sort of who we bring on and where. So we're really going to be focused around, I mean, we're always focused on developer experience and enterprise class features. But I think this is our opportunity to really double down on that kind of stuff. Let's talk about what are the challenges that you see will be there in 2023 and also how decodable is going to help customers, users navigate through these challenges. I think the big challenge is the macroeconomic situation. I think people are, transparently, we are seeing a lot of people doing layoffs, 10%, 20%, really significant chunks of the business which is super unfortunate, especially for the folks involved. I think for the businesses, they're looking at ways to reduce costs. I mean, I don't think it's a unique situation. They're looking to reduce costs, but they don't want nor can they cancel a bunch of the projects that they have. So if you're a retailer, you still need to sell products. If you're a financial services company and commercial banking, you still need to execute transactions. So I think that the need doesn't go away. So people are really going to be looking to do more with less. And I think that that's a really challenging situation for a lot of people. So I think we're going to see, and I think we're already starting to see, even now just in January, some, let's call it creativity, sort of how people are approaching some of those challenges. And I think this is a place where if you can shove some of the non-differentiated work to an organization that can pick that up, I think that that's a high value decision. I mean, we do it internally with cloud services even inside of Decordable. And I think that other people are doing it where they're looking to companies like us to help pick up some of that slack. Eric, thank you so much for taking time out today. And of course, share your predictions to focus on the challenges that are ahead for us to tackle this year. And as usual, I would love to have you back on the show. Thank you. Pleasure is all mine. Thank you so much for having me.