 Welcome back to the IRA in Las Vegas, everybody. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of SaaS Explorer, hashtag explore SaaS. Maranella Prophius here. She's the AI solutions marketing lead for SaaS. And Colin Nuggerin, who's the co-founder of Notalyze. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, David. It's so awesome to be here. We're going to talk hacking. So you guys, you have a hackathon heritage. Tell us about the SaaS hackathon. What's the scope? What's the history? Okay, so the SaaS hackathon started as an idea that we brought as a proof of concept in Europe. We started it from Europe and now it's become a global event that we've been loving it from the past two, three years. So what is the SaaS hackathon? The SaaS hackathon is basically a competition that lasts for one month. It's all digital. We have teams across different industries, different organizations, different backgrounds that compete and build real world use cases using AI, using machine learning, user or platform, SaaS Viya or AI analytics platform. And for over a month and they build solutions that solve real world problems. So for example, just to give you a few numbers, we had 1,400 applications this year across 75 different countries. I didn't know if that existed in many countries. 75 different countries that ended up to more than, you know, we had a hundred teams and over, you know, more than 40 organizations. And the beautiful thing is that the teams, they could be data scientists, they could be statisticians, they could be really passionate about data, they could be students or business analysts, they could be marketers. So it's a really, really diverse kind of competition. And the idea is to use SaaS technology with open source technology to build real world challenges. And I can give you a few examples very quickly. I'll think that some teams built. We had, for example, a hospital in Portugal, they worked to better detect sepsis in newborn infants. We had a team from Kazakhstan. They basically built a digital twin to optimize gold mining and other industrial processes. We had a Japanese team and they worked to build a health device for older adults to monitor like their posture, their heart rate and, you know, detect diseases and prevent, you know, death. Or we had a team from Poland, they analyzed social media data to identify negative body images and signs of self-loathing. So this is just to give you an idea of the diversity. Wow, amazing. 1400, of course, over a month, I want to get into a little bit more detail there before I do. Colin, Nautilize, what's the background on the company? Well, thank you for your interest. It's a pleasure to be here. So I'm Colin from Nautilize and we are a SaaS partner in the base in the Netherlands. We work with customers all across Europe to get the most out of their SaaS environments, mostly on Vaya. And we compete in the SaaS hackathon since the first, well, the first time that they started in Europe and it's been so much fun. Okay, so you participated this year. Tell us about your participation. What was the team like? What was the project that you initiated? Did it evolve over time within that 30 day period? Yes, definitely. So we were asked by a cheese factory in the Netherlands to work with them to optimize their production process. And well, they actually found us because we did this other hackathon project last year in which we were one of the winners in the manufacturing topic. And this year we started with this new company and we knew nothing about cheese but we learned a lot in 30 days. I know a lot about cheese. I'm Italian, so I know a lot about it. You know about making cheese? I wish, no, just eating, just eating. Okay, but it's all about data, right? I mean, that's the beauty of data. Yes, it's technically good. You don't have to know a lot necessarily. Although, so what was the outcome of the project and the hack? Well, in the end we helped to optimize the use of the data for the technologist in the factory to make certain that they can produce much more cheese. So it not only we speed up their process because they have all the data now available to them and we build models to advise them on certain changes in the settings. And finally, we were able to improve six to seven percent of the yield. So that's a huge win for a factory with 100 million kilograms. Six to seven. Wow. Six to seven. Six to seven, I was like, okay, no. Okay, so six to seven percent yields which has dropped right to the bottom line. Yes, exactly. Okay, I was going to say 67. That would have been horribly unproductive, but okay, I couldn't believe they say in business. Is this a competition? Well, this is more than just a competition. Well, we, you know, everybody who participates is a winner. We like to say that way, because at the end of the day the winner owned the IP. What you're building is yours. To hypnotize, that's them continuing to work. And we love seeing how are the teams that participate in the SAS hackathon, they continue to evolve after the hackathon, commercializing their solutions, putting in the model marketplace, developing, deploying the model they built during that month. So, but obviously we'll have a winner. Obviously we say, we like to say everybody is a winner, but we'll have a grand champion. Okay. And we're going to be announcing that too on Thursday here in Las Vegas at SAS Explorer on main stage. You're going to have to tell us, yeah, we'll have to watch and see that is so we can socialize it. Oh yeah. So what was the motivation for you getting involved in this? Was it just sort of to meet colleagues, to have some fun, to win the prize? Well, all of that of course. Look, we are a small company. So we have a team of 20 people by now, but we are growing quickly. So there are new people coming in every day and they need to get up and running, using SAS, applying real projects and building something on a time pressure timescale. So, well, we had a team captain and we found a few of our colleagues that wanted to help him and we did a great job in the end. And do they basically, what did you do? You say, okay, you've got a month, so you go do this, you can take some time off and this is your job? Or did you say, this is your night and weekend project? Well, it's a week before. Which is what I would do. So, of course, the other projects are not stopped. So they get a few days a week off to actually do this. And, well, in the end, it was very successful. And we won the manufacturing category. They are the manufacturing winners category. And one thing that I want to add there is that as part of the SAS hackathon, each team has a SAS mentor that works with them throughout the entire month to provide advice on the technology, consulting and expertise to make sure that the team is fully on board. Wait, wait, how many teams were they? You had 1400 apps, there was 100 teams. 100 teams, that means 100 mentors. So you had to call, did you say 1400 apps? We had 1400 individual applications and then we combined them into teams and it ended up being 100 teams. Okay, so you had to narrow those down. But still, you had to provide 100 SAS experts. Yes. Was that, did you have a draft? Like, would you pull them out of a hat? Well, actually we had a call for mentors application and we had more mentors than we needed. So we had to filter them down. I mean, people are so passionate about the hackathon. It's really a hands-on experience where you can just only literally learn, so. Is there any visibility during the month as to what some of the other teams are doing? Oh, I was just asking for you. Is there like a leaderboard or a progress board? Well, we share things both on social media and on the SAS web pages. And we have to push, publish updates, like every week to see what's happening. And there is a lot of interesting projects coming on from these different teams. And now he's learned a lot about these different topics as well and came across some of the applications that we hadn't thought of ourselves yet. So it's been a great experience. So everything's in GitHub, right? Is that true or no? People go in and snoop. Our project is, but not everybody. Some projects are, not for everybody's project. Yeah, the financial services guys that unite all their stuff, you know. Exactly, it depends on the industry. And you said your work is mostly in Vaya? Is that right? Everything is in Vaya. Yeah, okay. How's that experience been for you? Well, it's a great place to have all your data models in one place and your team can collaborate within the different parts of Vaya, ranging from the data, getting it in, cleaning it up and then building the first models, analyzing the data, visualizing it and also building the final application that our customers should be using. So, and we have all that in one place and that's something that's really powerful. And we as a SaaS partner have been working with many SaaS clients to move their progress to the SaaS cloud and to Vaya and that's been a great step from where we were. So this really helps to enable that. Oh, that's music to my ears. Is it like, everybody starts at the same blank sheet of paper? You start with this and then you've got to spin up your cloud, you've got to provision your infrastructure. Well, it might sound really complicated like that, but we actually have a learning environment where we provide a lot of learning resources, obviously for free and it could be around cloud, it could be around app development, it could be around SaaS Vaya, how to build models, open source for the teams. We have this learning platform for free for a month as well as an access to the mentorship. So I mean, obviously the first weeks are all about building the app and building the project and then the last week or so I would say, that's how long you took, like they do the, because they have to submit something, right? Like, what do you submit? It's a video. So they have submit a video that then a jury of experts takes a few weeks to just see through, go through a hundred videos and select winners for different categories for each industry and then we have a grand champion and I'm all across all the different categories. It's the video of the outcome or the process or both? Well, both. For us it was one of the hardest parts to make a good video to show what you have done actually. So that must be a challenge as well. Well, you did a great job though. You did an amazing job. You put it to music or what? Oh, you did. So there's a little marketing involved in the video. Oh yeah, the most creative ones are the ones that catch judge's eyes. Right, right, right. How often do you do the hackathon? Is it a once a year thing or? It's once a year. We typically do it around like March and April. And you do it now globally? You don't do it in Europe? Nope, we do it globally. But it started in Europe? It started in Europe at first because we wanted to just kind of test it as like in a smaller environment but then we just saw that the interests were so much. We're like, guys, let's just make this global. There is, we have a website, sas.com slash hackathon. You can say up, you know, people can go and you guys can see the grand champion. Submit your interest if you want to apply for next year's hackathon. What is it, sas hackathon? Sas hackathon. Great, and you're going to compete next year? Well, it's great. Actually, there are already customers calling us and say, well, we have an interesting case for you. So, well, the new spreads. So you get a product out of this right at the end of the day, right? It's something that you could. It's been a huge surprise to us. That's amazing. Well guys, congratulations. Thanks David. And I really appreciate you guys sharing the story with us and can't wait to hear about the winner. Thank you, yes. Thursday morning, sas explore. Yeah, and check out sas hackathon.com. Yep. Put in your app now. Yes, yes. And maybe you'll get selected. Yes, absolutely. We can't wait to see next year's sas hackathon. Well, thanks you guys. Hey, this is a wrap on this. So one day here for theCUBE, hopefully we'll be back next spring and do a multi-day cube, which we'd love to do. But check out all the videos at thecube.net. Everything will be on demand as soon as the videos go up. We get them up very, very quickly. Go to siliconangle.com for all the news. And this is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. We'll be back out here next week and we'll be in DC. So double show next week. Dave Vellante for John Furrier. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.