 Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We've got a special breaking news. AtScale has hired a new CEO, Chris Lynch, is the big news, and taking over Dave Mariana. We have the EVP of technology. Important because one, a CUBE alumni, and also, we've seen all the big data advance doing amazing work in the cloud scale data market for many, many years. We're very familiar with AtScale, both David and Chris Lynch, both CUBE alumni. Chris, great to see you. Congratulations, new CEO of AtScale. Thanks, John. I really appreciate being here. So, we know each other. You've been on the CUBE before. You're formerly the CEO of Vertica Soul to HP, other CEOs before that, also a venture capitalist at Atlas Ventures before that distinguished career. Why this move right now? What's attracted you to AtScale, take over the helm from the co-founder who will be partnering with you on this? It's a great question. I'm still asking myself that, but I think what it comes down to is, I met Dave years ago when I was at Atlas and it didn't work out the time for us to make an investment, but I tracked the company and what they were doing and I left Accomplice a little over a year ago and working with some companies out in the West Coast to have been to be out here and I reached out to Dave and said, hey, you want to grab dinner? Which we did and by the end of the evening, he was like, you know, you should come help us really commercialize this and take it to the next level. They've been on our radar for a while. Obviously, I met David at Hadoop some of it, I think three, four years ago and he was formerly at Cloud. We kind of hit it off, clearly a big data visionary and also entrepreneur, but they had a unique model at that time. Hadoop was certainly viewed as, you know, the king of the castle in big data at that time, but CloudScale wasn't on everyone's radar on the mainstream. They had a unique perspective. Has anything changed with the tech? Is that what's attracted to you? The scale, the piece of it? What's the secret sauce that got you enticed on this? So I am aware of the company's history. That's not what got me interested. What got me interested is I think that they are the only player today in the market that has a production product that can actually take customers from the data center to the cloud and do so transparently. And I liken it to what we did at Acopia when we virtualized file systems. And frankly, when we virtualized HTTP traffic at arrow point. So the idea of an abstraction layer or a federation layer made sense to me. And, you know, as a venture capitalist, I've seen the lack of adoption of big data workloads in the cloud. You know, there's a $200 billion opportunity. I think these guys are uniquely qualified to take advantage of it. So that's really what drove me from a business perspective. I see this opportunity as unique versus anything I've seen on either coast. You get a great reputation as an operator, also someone who can manage and operate businesses and grow them. And ultimately, you had some great exits in your day. Vertica is well known in the history of tech for two reasons. One is it was probably the best DLHP has ever done on acquisition value-wise. Also, it was before and during the whole Vertica and autonomy acquisition, which was billions of dollars. So they ended up throwing that away, keeping Vertica and that became the flagship. So you've seen how companies can take it away and get in the right position. You've done that with Stonebreaker in the past founder of Vertica. Do you get the same movement here with this company? It's the same playbook. What's different? Is it the same? What's the opportunity for this company? So I think the opportunity for this company is different. At Vertica, it was about executing against the excellent product that they had built in a known market they were targeted for. My vision for at scale is to move beyond the day-to-lake Hadoop market and really take all the legacy warehousing vendors to the cloud. Cloud-proof those solutions behind the firewall and begin to deliver those workloads in earnest to the cloud, transparent to the user, irrespective of the BI tool, whether the technology is behind the firewall in front of the firewall. And I think that's a game changer. Certainly, we've seen on theCUBE in the big conversation in the industry has been hybrid cloud, multi-cloud. But if you squint through that, those trend lines, it's really about integration, right? So you mentioned getting people to the cloud. How big is that right now from an action standpoint? Is it accelerating? Is it early stages? Where is the progress bar on companies accelerating to the cloud? It's stalled frankly because there are thousands of app, tens of thousands of applications in the Fortune 500 that the ability to take those applications and that data and move it to the cloud is it's on par with trying to operate, to heart surgery on a patient while they're running the Boston Marathon. So it's too difficult, it's too disruptive to a business, too risky. What we do is we create a federation layer that basically abstracts all that complexity from the user and makes that transition transparent. So to the user, they don't have to care whether it's behind the firewall in front of the firewall, what cloud it sits on, what analytics store you're drawing from, what BI tool. It doesn't matter to the user. So they've basically been able to separate those two things and that's going to allow people to scale and evolve into the cloud, right? Today cloud is a revolution, not an evolution. It needs to be an evolution for Fortune 500 companies to take advantage of it. I got to ask you the hard question because ultimately Amazon, they're kicking ass 10 ways from Sunday, they're obviously the numbers are off the chart even in public sectors just down there last week. You got Azure retooling, essentially they're going to try to replicate the economies of scale. I think they're going to have a hard time but still they're not going anywhere either. And you got Google changing the game, focusing on their core competencies and where they can differentiate. All that is potentially competition. So this company at scale, they definitely have tech shops. So that's, you know, we know the team there. So they had a lot of credit for that. But $25 million raised and later last round of funding, total capital day, 45 million. How are you going to compete? How are you going to take this and commercialize this opportunity and not be driftwood but instead ride that wave? It's a terrific question. I actually think that one of the things that excites me about this opportunity is the first opportunity as an operator that I've had that I haven't been in a David Goliath thing. I actually don't think that any of those people are competitors. I think when at scale wins, BI vendors win, traditional data stores win, and the cloud provider wins and ultimately the customer wins. So my view is all of those companies you mentioned, if Google wants to be relevant in the enterprise, they need to get those big data workloads to their cloud, we can do that. We can continue to help Amazon do that. We can help Oracle secure cloud do that. We can help Microsoft do that. And all the time we're future proofing the legacy data stores of the Teradata's and the Oracle's and the IBM's. So this is the first opportunity that I've seen where the game isn't to go disrupt and call out the competition. It's to work with all these people to drive workloads to the cloud in a scale that hasn't been done before. So you didn't have to unseal them. You just got to ride the cloud way pretty much. Yeah, we have to demonstrate to these guys that we do what we say we do. But my view is when we win, all those participants can potentially win. Awesome. How about staff funding? You feel good that enough dry powder in there? Is there another round of funding on the horizon? Yeah, I mean, I haven't even started yet, but my expectation is that in this marketplace with my track record, raising capital or attracting capital will not be an issue. It'll be about figuring out the business model and making sure it's right and then investing behind that business model. There's enough cash now, I'll certainly do that. Talk about the Boston, California. You're going to stay in Boston, that's news. Company's based in California. You have a pedigree in Boston, certainly in being a VC down there, but also you run businesses down there. There's talent down there. Is there plans for a Boston expansion, a Boston bi-coastal situation? What's their opportunity there? So the company will remain headquartered in San Mateo and I'll take up residence here and I'll go back and forth. So my family's not moving, so I'll have a residence in Boston and one here. But you can absolutely expect that I'm going to leverage the ecosystem that I've grown up in and we will have a significant presence on the East Coast. Awesome, Chris. Final question, machine learning. You guys were close to that for a long time at Vertica. You guys were doing someone that was cutting edge machine learning before it became super popular as it is now as they call it AI now, but essentially that was the beginning of the common store database which you guys pioneered. Speed and using data for competitive advantage. How is that now scaled up in the market now? How robust is it? How mature is it? How ready is it? And how does at scale take advantage of that growth? So I think that the world of data science in general has matured. If you look at one of my proudest investments company called DataRobot, they are the leaders in automated machine learning and their business is growing triple digits every year. The level of adoption is really only gated by practitioners and people to apply the technology to these business problems but it's gaining incredible momentum. For us, I plan to integrate automated AI into components of our architecture which I think makes it really a game changer. So of course we expect competition but by the time that they get 100 miles behind us we're going to hit that, what's that button that you have on those Teslas that you guys drive out here? Insane mode. And it'll be automated machine learning, we'll be powering that. What's your impression of the marketplace right now is that obviously you're seeing global landscape. We see the China situation going on in Asia, a lot of activity, a lot of growth outside the United States and obviously cloud you're seeing region specialties. Any thoughts on how that's going to play into it? Is it not relevant to you guys right now? What's the, what's your thoughts on the global landscape? I mean I think it's relevant to everyone because I think it's what's driving valuations and this influx of money coming from these different places. I mean, if you look at the Middle East, they're writing checks to any sort of tech company they can because they're trying to divest of what they know is a dead business, right? So that's going to drive valuations, it's going to drive, in my opinion, a lack of discipline and bad behavior as we've seen in 2000 and other times in 2008. I think for us as a company, we're going to be disciplined and the fact that we can raise money and raise money attractive valuations isn't a reason to do it. If you have a business model of fund that's a reason to do it. So I don't think it'll be a distraction for us but I think it will increase the amount of noise in all the key markets and I think cyber, we've seen it, AI for sure, IoT, Bitcoin, all these things. What's the most exciting thing in the data business that as it evolves now to the center of value proposition that you see and as the CEO now of that scale that you're going to capture this? I think, I would say two things. In the AI machine learning space, I think the fact that with democratization of data, you're now actually seeing people applying machine learning way broader in organizations and way deeper than ever before and that's going to transform businesses, low tech business as well as high tech businesses. For us, I think that the real opportunity exists. It's a question of just taking these legacy workloads and moving them to the cloud and that's not a trivial task, not just technically but you always have to be sensitive to companies ability to absorb technology and I think one of the challenges is you're trying to transform a business that basically was informed as it developed in technology that was 1980. Well Chris, congratulations on the CEO opportunity at that scale. What can people expect from you? What if you can write the narrative of the first couple moves off the line of scrimmage here? What are you going to do? What's your order of business? What can they expect from you? Well, the first thing I'd like to do after I meet the customers and the employees and the existing partners is go out and get two significant partnerships. I'd like to see a couple of partnerships in cloud and a couple of partnerships with the classic data store vendors. So that's probably going to be my first mission to get that moving and we'll see how quickly it goes but I think that's super important to do. Yeah, and certainly scale right now has been a big competitive advantage. Here's a company at scale on their five year anniversary. Interesting gestation period for this big data world because Hadoop, people look back in the 2010 days, Hadoop was supposed to be the biggest thing since sliced bread, but what happened was the world became bigger and from a day of not just outside Hadoop gave these guys an opportunity and their architecture fits well. You see it scaling quicker. What's your, what's your point of scale? How do you see this scaling up? So I think that the company probably rightly so at the time hitch their wagon to Hadoop but I think as you said, it's really a subset of the data landscape and it's actually a pretty small one. The real opportunity is in driving all the legacy data and analytics stores, those islands of analytics and bringing them to the cloud. And that, like I said, I think is a $100 billion business. Well, certainly great to see you and congratulations getting back at the chief position. You did a great job at Vertica, great journey. We followed you on that one, that was fantastic and then certainly watched it unfold. Certainly at HPE create a lot of value. Congratulations and at scale has got a good hire there. Congratulations. Thank you, I appreciate it. This is theCUBE Conversation here inside the Palo Alto Studios, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.