 Okay, welcome back to live coverage of Silicon Angles, the CUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angle. I'm joined by co-host and segment Jeff Kelly from wikibon.org, analyst from open source content. Go to wikibon for free research, go to Silicon Angle for the latest and greatest reference point in tech innovation. Our next guest, Gary Bloom, the president and CEO of Mark Logic, former Oracle executive, industry luminary. Been around the block a few times, seen a few cycles in the past of a computing revolution. Welcome to the CUBE. Thank you, glad to be here. We're just having a little glory day reminiscing about the old days. And we didn't even talk about the veritas too, right? Early on, yeah, veritas. These are big companies that were born out of innovation opportunities in these cycles that come out. So you're now new to Mark Logic, 18 months in the job, you've been at Oracle, you know what's going on. Mark Logic had a peek into the future with their history. Describe why you were there, what attracted you to Mark Logic. And 18 months in the job, what has been your core focus and what do you see going forward? Wow, one nice short question to get started with. Yes, so the short answer is why am I there? Yeah, Mark Logic's a really interesting technology company. And when I look for jobs and roles, as I've done earlier in my career, I look for companies that can make a fundamental difference in the way computing's done in the world. And I believe that Mark Logic's in a position to do that. I characterize it sometimes as we focus heavily on the 80% of the world's data that today is not in a traditional database. The reality is we focus on that 80%, but we also do a lot with the traditional data and the relational databases as well. And so what I saw at Mark Logic was an opportunity to have a product that had an established customer base in a really important space, solving very interesting, complex technical challenges in a new market. Yeah, we've seen this in the big data world in particular, like us talking with the founders of CloudEra and Hortonworks were both at Yahoo, web presence company, they had to invent their own systems because no one else had anything. And on the database side, it's been this cycle of SQL to no SQL over the years. And then 9-11 hits, it's not a relational issue anymore. It's a different data model. So, talk about what Mark Logic did that was innovative that put them on the map and what carries them here and what is going to be the enablement for the next level for the company. Right, so it's interesting, you mentioned the 9-11 stage and what the intelligence agencies had to do with the data. If you think back to that era, the complaint the intelligence agencies had is, you know, give a 9-11 is you had all the data but you didn't do anything with it. And arguably they were correct and you, but if you look at it and you say, well, why was that the case? The database technology of the day didn't allow them to do anything with it. So in that funny sense of you could put it in a database, you just couldn't do anything with it. And that's essentially what relational databases became really good at doing. And it's part of the ongoing sales strategy that relational guys today is to get out there and say, hey, you can put it all in Oracle, you can put it all in DB2. And technically they're correct as long as you don't want to do anything with that data. But if you actually want to do something with all that data, then you actually need to put that data into a database that was designed and built to process data that doesn't have predefined structure. And if you think about what intelligence agencies deal with, they're in data sharing agreements, they're in agreements where lots of video data, lots of voice data, data of all different kinds and formats come together. And the ultimate thing they're trying to do is they have the find it problem. I have to go into all this data, the big data and find it, find that nugget of information that's so important for the future. And that's what we helped them do. And that's why we became so successful in that sector. We did the same thing in the publishing sector, by the way, the publishing sector, everything was digitizing. If they didn't find a new way to manage their content, they're going to go out of business. And you look at the document management systems of the past, what do they do? They manage documents, they manage blobs of data called documents. What do we do? We manage the content within the documents. I think it's much more interesting to search within the document than to search for a document. I like to know what's in it. Right, so let's dig into that a little bit more. You know, your statement that really, you can get all this data into your Oracle or your IBM database, but you can't do a lot with it once it's there. So, you're talking about the content with inside of documents, other unstructured types of text. Talk a little bit about some of the constraints that you have in that traditional relational world and specifically how you guys overcome that. And what's interesting is that, you know, SQL is a hot topic now, but you guys have been around for over a decade. So, I'm interested to hear a little bit about, I know you've only been with the company for 18 months, but I'm curious, did Mark Lottick see something that the rest of the market didn't ahead of time? Yeah, so what's interesting is our founder, when he started the company, he was a search expert. And he looked out there and he said, gee, there's all this data in corporations that needs to be searchable, you need to be able to look at. So, he set about to build a search engine to go search all that data. And what he realized pretty quickly as he started building a search engine, that if you actually want to be able to look at that data through a search engine, you actually have to store it differently. And he started building technologies, which ultimately became a database, to store the data differently so he could search it effectively. And that's what he did with the technology. So, his initial vision was search engine. So, just as Google had started searching the web, he wanted to do the same thing for corporate data and build a search as vast array of corporate data. And so, he built the database to go along with it. And as we were talking about a second ago, the early adopter that became the publishing sector and government intelligence. If we drill down, we say, well, what's the fundamental technical difference between the two technologies? The main fundamental difference is we don't have a schema. We do not have to do this pre-existing data map that maps out and knows what data is in each column of the database. I just ingest all the data as it currently is and I make it all searchable. It's so exciting. Yeah, making it discoverable is very key. What are the innovations that people don't look at and don't actually think top of mind of making that happen? Because pouring a lot of data into its ingestion is, it makes a lot of sense, okay, I'll take video from surveillance, I'll take a bunch of data from databases, data exhaust from mobile phones, and then now, no schema, again. How do you make it discoverable? What is the core innovation that makes that happen? The core innovation is we index all that data as we're ingesting it. So we make it searchable. So the data doesn't have to have structure coming in. We'll create the structure dynamically in the technology itself. And so we do create that structured format. And if you fast forward and you say, okay, well, the early adopters were government intelligence and publishing, today we're selling in very traditional places. We're just, our most recent transaction was with a global financial services company, Global Bank, doing trading information. Healthcare's hot. And the healthcare's hot. We power the Obama Healthcare Exchange. So the Center for Medicare and Medicaid, the Healthcare Exchange is powered on MarkLogic. And you say, well, why would they have built something like that on MarkLogic? The reason is, if you think about all the insurance information and all the data coming from all these different insurance companies, they do not have an agreed to format. They don't have an agreed to database. Some of them keep it in files, some of them keep it in Oracle, some of them keep it in DV2, some of them use CyBase. They use all different kinds of database technologies. If I'm using all these different kinds of database technology, so what were they to do if they had to bring it all together into a common marketplace? So every citizen of the US can search for healthcare insurance. They'd have to agree on a common format. You and I, all of us doing this interview right now, we'd all be 150 years old before we got all the insurance agency's degree on a common format. I would argue the same is true in intelligence. Getting all the intelligence agency's degree on common formats for all the data around the globe, we'd be 150 years old. So I'll say software is a key driver in all of this. Obviously, you're hearing that from day one in IP and software, all new techniques. But also it's the confluence of the innovation in the hardware. You're just talking about in-memory earlier. What are those key balancing between the innovations in infrastructure cloud? How would you weight that 80, 20, 50, 50, 60, 40 with the innovations and really enabling that because you've got amazing compute available now. You have in-memory, persistent, basically flash which can act like RAM. It's changing the software paradigm a bit. Schemalist databases on top of, I mean, how do you weigh that? I mean. Yeah, no, it's a great question. So you think about the Schemalist database on top of a scale out architecture with unlimited amounts of low cost memory. Yeah. And you go, well, that could be a recipe for success or it could be a recipe for disaster. And the way we make it a recipe for success is all those enterprise things you had to do with your traditional relational database, you don't throw those out. So think back, what made Oracle popular 15, 20 years ago or 20, 25 years ago, I guess now? I'll age myself a little bit. You know, when I started Oracle, we had to bring in all the characteristics of the mainframe into the Oracle environment. And you look today, what does Oracle do? It runs in mission critical database environments, core financials, core manufacturing, core HR systems. People run their businesses on this technology. When we talk about the NoSQL world and we talk about all this unlimited scalability of storage and memory and data, it's the same thing. You still need all those enterprise capabilities. That's how MarkLogic in that market, that's how we differentiate ourselves from all the open source players. Our target market is not two guys and a dog in a garage building a website. Our target market is corporations and large enterprises around the globe that need high availability. And integration is a big part. Need integration, need compartmentalized security. Need all those things necessary to build mission critical applications. So this is the decade where the silos will be broken down. And yes, everyone's been hoping for like two decades. I mean, that scale out gives the enterprise a large opportunity to integrate and break down those silos. Well, and it's not solely that they want to break down the silos. They have to. They have to break down the silos. Yeah, the government intelligence agencies figured out they had to break down the silos to do good intelligence work. If I look in the global financial services industry, what did the regulators do to that industry? They said, you're going to run all operations of your banks independently. They're not going to talk to each other. So they went out and chose eight or 10 different technologies, each of the banks independently. Now they've come in with the Dodd-Frank Act and regulations, but we're going to regulate you as a single entity. Do you think I have to break down those stovepipes in a global bank? I have to bring all the data together from multiple different entities, bring it all into a database and be able to do the same kinds of things I've been able to do. With no security holes. With no security holes and compartmentalized security. And it does change, would you agree, the fundamental way the organization looks at data? Because now you've got, if you've got access to all your data, now you can do things that you couldn't do in the past because you can be broken down these silos. You've got to change your expectations of the users about what they can do. And it's really an education effort, I think. So how do you go about helping customers both understand some of the new capabilities and also build the applications on top? Because ultimately, Markology is a great database, but you need applications on top to surface that data. How do you tackle those two challenges? Education and actually building applications that are going to solve business problems. Yeah, so I would say we're largely prevailing on the education side. We have well in excess of 350 enterprise class customers that have built out mission-critical applications. Yeah, and we talked about the FAA, we talked about Center for Medicare and Medicaid. I have a global financial services company. They run their derivatives trade store on MarkLogic. Yeah, so I have government agencies, publishers around the globe that have standardized our technology. So we've largely kind of dealt with some of the education. The part that people don't realize yet is that the time to results in this new technology are materially different and materially better than the time to results with traditional relational technology. So think about what I have to do if I want to build an application in Oracle or in DB2. I spent two years doing a data model. I don't have to do a data model. The projects where we've replaced failed Oracle implementations, we come in after a year of trying to get the data to work in Oracle. And in eight weeks, we do a proof of concept. In eight weeks, that proof of concept largely becomes the application. That is the FAA's emergency operations. And a lot of them are doing it in Amazon and then it's just rolling it into a private cloud and with a fully integrated stack, well, not homegrown, but like off the shelf. With that, I want to pivot on that outlook for MarkLogic, because that is a trend. You're seeing the new developers come in, not necessarily that savvy on Java. They've never installed a Linux patch before. They go on to the Amazon, they're seeing the environment where, hey, I want to do some note on the front end with Rails. I can just have a full stack underneath it, all completely automated, AKA DevOps. Now you're seeing a developer market that wants to be more agile like that. So the enterprise has kind of been a slow, anemic environment where not a lot of muscle in the development area, mostly homegrown apps, big, fat apps, kind of a derivative from the mainframe days. What does the enterprise need to do from a development standpoint and what are you guys doing in there? Because at the end of the day, let's train them how to build their own apps and enable them to do it on their own. Well, I think the first thing you have to do is you have to get them past their biases for the technology of the past. You know, I sometimes joke when we're selling against Oracle, what am I really selling against? I'm selling against the union that supports the hundreds of thousands of DBAs that manage Oracle databases, because in this next generation database technology, their job's not the same. My DBA workload for MarkLogic is about a half of a DBA to 10 DBAs for a similar Oracle application. So that's nine and a half jobs that are going away to go to that agile development environment, go to that idea that says, let me build things of value, instead of just sitting here restructuring schemas and rebuilding databases and adding indexes for a living. And you saw that in the mainframe, they clutched onto their service contracts and then finally client services broke that through, and some guys kind of clinged on, but ultimately they ended up shedding their jobs anyway. Well, I was at Oracle through many of those years and I was a mainframe guy by trade. In fact, I ran the mainframe division at Oracle. That was my first job, first major job at Oracle. And you- That division is as fast as possible. Yeah, it was a funny division because what we did is we influenced Oracle on what do mainframe customers need to get off. That was our primary value. We sold a lot of software, but not enough to sustain. And what's funny about it though, is you look and you say, hey, 10 years later, 15 years later, roll the clock forward now, 25, 30 years later, people are still building mainframe applications. They're still doing it. So there's a class of applications that still belong on the mainframe. There's also a class of applications that still belong on traditional relational. So you're very traditional ERP systems. Yeah, I had a gentleman from a government agency come up to me at an event and said, well, I'm so unhappy with Oracle, can you swap it out and put Mark Logic under my SAP implementation? And my comment to him is that'd be using the wrong tool the opposite way. Yeah, just as Oracle was never designed to do what we do, we were never, essentially, Mark Logic was not designed to do what Oracle does. Where are those DBA jobs going? That's a really amazing statistic. Half a DBA for 10 Oracle DBAs. And that's significant. We're seeing all the consistent message across the board. Is it data science? Is it analyst role? Is it more DevOps? Some people are set up for DevOps, some aren't. What do you see that shift moving to? Well, some of them are retiring out of the industry, just as mainframe guys have retired out. It's a 25-year-old trend. So I get lots of LinkedIn connections from people that I worked with at Oracle in the early years that are well-retired. But a lot of it is going to the data scientists and data analytics. The model is switching from, if I can build applications really quickly, what do I get to switch to? I get to switch to what's the value of my data and extracting knowledge out of data, making data into information. And ultimately, when you net it all out and you say, well, what does MarkLogic do for a living? We take all this data and we make it, we take all this data and we make it into information that's valuable for an enterprise, whatever that enterprise may be. We do it at an extremely low cost. So last question, we're running close on time. So I wanted to talk a little bit about, so as we talked about before the segment, we've, here at Wikibon, we've done our big data market sizing. MarkLogic has come out on top in the no-sequel space. But you've got a lot of very hungry, very innovative companies, you know, making a push to companies like MongoDB, formerly TenGen and others. So what do you, as a relatively old and established company in a relatively young market, what are you going to do? What do you need to do to keep innovating, to keep those competitors at bay? So ultimately, if you believe that enterprises that are building enterprise class database applications, if you believe that they ultimately need high availability, disaster recovery, security, and even little things like transactional consistency, the idea that when I update data, I don't lose it, if you think any of those things are important, the reason we're as big as we are, and the reason on your chart, if you add up all the other no-sequel players, you get a number smaller than MarkLogic. The reason is, is because we solve the enterprise class problem. We provide all the security availability that enterprises need to truly use new technology. No different than Oracle had to do, before Oracle had a major impact on the mainframe market. We had to build in at Oracle when I was there, we had to add all that enterprise capability. MarkLogic has arguably a four or five year lead on the enterprise capabilities that every IT shop in the world needs to have. My final question for you is, as a legend in the industry, well-known, multiple business cycles, MarkLogic, great opportunity for you, obviously taking the helm there. What's the vision? Where are you going to take that bus in terms of where you see the company going? What are the market opportunities? Obviously, large enterprise, big market, big data, converged infrastructure. What's your vision? Where are you going to take the company? Yeah, so it's kind of a funny question because if you think about the big data market, we're kind of in the first, maybe the second inning of the big data market, and we have an opportunity to win the World Series of the big data market. And so the goal here is build a big, successful company. We're solving real IT problems with 80% of the world's data that's not in an Oracle database, not in a DB2 database. We do a lot with the data that isn't very structured and relational, so we can kind of process all of the company's data and make it immensely valuable to the enterprise. I think that creates an opportunity for a company of significant value. More importantly for me, my real interest at this stage is how do I build out a technology company that fundamentally makes a difference in the way people think about their data? I've been in the data industry my entire career, and now we're finally going to change it. How do you feel about the team and the composition? Obviously, that's a World Series. It's a long season, 180 games, whatever the games they are now. Game one now going on. What's the makeup of the team look like? Yeah, so we're doing great. We have generally, the entire executive team, myself included, this is one of the smaller things any of us have ever done in our career. So we're ready to be the big company. We're not one of these companies that as we grow, we have to throw everybody out and start all over again. So we have a team on the field that can go dominate and win in the marketplace and show the maturity necessary to sell in the top global financial industry, sell to healthcare, sell to oil and gas. So it's really a matter of, let's take what's been kind of a specialty product in the early phases to a broadly deployed technology across the world. And that's where we're focused on. Gary Blum, the CEO of Markologic Experience Team, foundation set, take it to the next level. Markologic inside theCUBE, great to have you. We'll be right back live from San Francisco. This is theCUBE, Oracle Open World 2013 coverage, day one of three days of wall-to-wall live coverage. Be right back.