 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Pentaho World 2017. Brought to you by Hitachi Ventara. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Pentaho World. Brought to you, of course, by Hitachi Ventara. I am your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We're joined by Anthony DeShazer. He is the Chief Solutions Architect and SVP of Customer Success at Pentaho. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you for having me. Wonderful to be here. So, before the cameras are rolling, we were talking a little bit about your career. You've been at this company for 12 years. 12 years. And in different iterations of the company. Right. Tell our viewers a little bit about how the company has evolved and also how your role has evolved. One of the things that I really have watched Pentaho go through is the evolution to be more customer centric. We began as a technology company. A bunch of geeks getting together, had some neat tech. We can write some code and it was fun. We enjoyed it. But now as we start getting more customers, we realize the technology had to serve the customer versus the customer serving the technology. That's a wonderful transformation to go through to figure out how do you take that technology, bend it to the will of the customer and have that customer at the center of all your conversations. That was something that took us about six years to go through. And where we had all the geeks kind of out of the room and put them in the back. I was one of the geeks, so I got excused for some of those strategy conversations. But we've got some good sales guys involved, some good marketing people who really brought that customer focus. Along the way, we built better solutions because we were listening more to our customers. It's interesting, when you hear what people want to do, you have a better chance of actually achieving it. Versus, let me build it and then they will come. It was some other way. What do they need? Now let me build that. And really, you said you're a geek but you also really straddle the non-geek side too because you can speak the other side. I mean, how do you do that? What is sort of the secret sauce to? I actually attribute that to some of my kind of non-Pentaho, non-technical training. I'm actually a pastor of a church in Orlando, Florida. So I've done a lot of theological studies, a lot of homo-letics that teach you how to stand on stage and how to relate to people even at a distance. That actually comes through when you talk one-on-one with people. They feel like you're actually listening to them. And I actually attribute that all to that training. But the underlying architecture still has to be malleable in order to accommodate that vision that you just put forth. It's kind of like the platforms versus products. Yes. You built a platform, you know, not a product. And if you don't start with the vision of a platform, you get a bunch of products that don't necessarily tie together. Take us back to the early days. You know, was that part of the design thinking? Actually it was. Our five founders at Pentaho had that at their DNA. We had done three startups. I've been lucky enough, or maybe stupid enough, to do three of their startups. They've done three, I've done all three. But at the very core, it was we needed to build something that was embeddable, that can work in process. Something that could be molded to the client's problem. We understood that whatever we built would never be enough. It would never be able to solve all of the problems. So if we put gates around it, it will reduce what we can do. So we wanted to build something that was extendable. Something that was a platform that if we didn't have the functionality, you could easily build it. That's one of the reasons why we went open source initially. Where all the code was open source, anyone can extend it, anyone can bend it. Just because we understood there is no way for us sitting in an ivory tower to really figure out what's needed. And these decisions were made in the early to mid 2000s. So they way predated Hadoop. Yes. Then you had Hadoop saying, okay, we're just going to bring compute to the data. And totally different development paradigm and platform approach. Was it that sort of philosophy that allowed you to adapt or did you have to do a heavy lift to adapt? Actually it wasn't a heavy lift. I mean, the legend has it. I wasn't in the conversation, but I found in CEO had a conversation with one of our architects. I think they were having drinks or something at when the local bars or pubs around Orlando, around the Orlando office. They began to talk about Hadoop, put out a white napkin and just drew some things on the back of the napkin. A week later, we had a first integration with Hadoop. That's built upon that extendable, pluggable architecture that was there at the core. So that's really allowed us to adapt to new technologies to really catch the waves early and maybe sometimes anticipate the waves. So in this latest iteration of the company, Hitachi, Vantara, what can customers expect? The one way I can describe it is that it's maturity. You know, you get the size of Hitachi Vantara behind you. You can do things that you could not do as a small company. As great as Pintaho was as a standalone company, I believe we're going to be that much bigger when you have the whole weight of Hitachi Vantara standing behind you. We had our strategic advisory board yesterday and one of the things I shared with those customers is that now you will see us to attack things that we could not even fathom before. We have more developers so we can move features further, faster. We have more people in different regions so we can now do more services, help customers better in far regions like in the APAC region, for example, where we've struggled in the past as a standalone company. When you have a support center, a whole geography dedicated to Hitachi Vantara already there, it's now how do we, instead of build the infrastructure, just add that analytic DNA to the infrastructure that already exists. So that's what I think our customers will experience very quickly. We can do more faster. We can do more in different locations and we can even do more at a higher level of efficiency and in quality, if you would, because we have that backing of Hitachi Vantara. You were sharing with us off camera, you do a lot of traveling, you talk to a lot of customers, you spend a lot of time in an aluminum tube. When you talk to customers and you compare it sort of now versus in the early days, the technology when you guys started was sort of mysterious. And today, the technology, there's plenty of it, it's abundant and it's pretty well, generally well understood. Sometimes it's hard to make work, but when you guys talk about digital transformation and disruption, be the disruptor, not the disruptee, a big thing that's changing is the processes within organizations. Those are largely unknown. It used to be very well known processes, accounting or HR or whatever it was. Now the processes are changing every day. Do you have those conversations with customers and how are you as a company adapting and supporting that premise? One of the things I've noticed is that we have new roles introduced every day. All of a sudden we had a data engineer. They used to be called DBAs. Now they're data engineers. Now we have data scientists. We have some companies, I know they have data janitors and we have data prep. All these people now new roles in the organization all related to data. What we've been looking at is how do we make sure that every person, no matter their role, understands how to use the data. My interest and my focus here at Pentaho is not just around architecture, but also customer success. And we learned very quickly in the last two years as we've been on this customer success journey, you can install the best technology. It can be absolutely pristine from an architectural standpoint. You can get awards on architecture, but if you can't get the people to adapt, to adopt and use the software, use the solution, you've basically just wasted your time. So what we've been focused on, how do we identify those new roles? How do we identify what skills do they need? How do we do training on the solution that was built so that no matter what their role is, they understand how the solution can add value. How does the solution improve your job, improve your life experience, maybe get things done faster, maybe do more than you used to be able to do? But we've gotten out of the old tradition that there's a training department, accounting department, there used to be a time, I'm old enough to say this, where there was a business analytics team. But now every team has business analytics in it. It's part of someone's job to analyze the data, even if that's not their primary function. So how do you make sure that no matter the role, they have the skills and the access to the data? So how are you fostering collaboration between those roles? You always hear the story of data scientists spend 80% of their time trying to invest with the data, right? But you're right, you got the data engineer, the quality engineer, the application developer now. Data's like the new development kit. So how are you approaching the collaboration across those roles? So one of the things we've challenged our customers with is do you have a center of excellence? Doesn't have to be a dedicated center of excellence, it can be a concept or a virtual team, but do you have a forum where people can collaborate? If you're doing analytics in a silo, if you're doing data integration in a silo and people are not talking to each other, you're missing opportunities for efficiency, for innovation, even for understanding, wait, if I do this, that allows you to do this better. So how do you create that center of excellence? We have services now that our professional services team are working with our customers to start that concept. Let's train one or two people, make them the go-to people for everyone else. Evangelists, too. Exactly, they become the evangelists. That helps us in two ways, that one helps us when it comes to getting people to use the technology in the right way. When you have a platform, that means people have to use it correctly. You can build some amazing things with Pentaho, but you can also build some pretty, let's just say not efficient things with the same platform. And then of course, me being the customer guy, they're gonna blame the technology and I have to have that very delicate conversation. It's like, not really the technology, it's the builder, it's what you built, that's the problem. So we have some experts there that we can train and have them be the guardians, if you would, the custodians of the quality of the solutions to make sure there's consistency and best practices. But the other side, we're also a renewable-based company where we want to get the subscriptions, we want to get the renewals. So if I have evangelists there that can help the company use the solutions, adopt the solutions, that makes the renewal conversations that much easier. So I want to talk to you about measuring success because one of the things that really came out in the keynote today was Pentaho's underlying principles of social innovation and not just saving companies money or making them more money, but also doing good in the world and bettering society. So how do you pitch that to customers? How do customers respond? I mean, how do you approach that idea? So it's a hard one at times because most companies are focused. I need to solve my problem. I don't care what we're doing about the rest of the world. I have this major pain point. This is what I need you to focus on. And fair enough. Absolutely, that's what they're paying the money for. That's where we start. We start there. Can we get in to start solving some problems together? And as the partnership develops, now what else can we do? So it's not just, let me go sell this one solution. Let's partner for your good, but for the good of the whole society. Are there things we can do that actually make not only your job easier, bring you money, but actually make things better? So some of the customers I love, you heard IMS, you heard Dr. Elena there, L, excuse me, today. I met with some of the other ones that are working with IMS, Dr. Ben. That story is absolutely close to my heart because who doesn't want to save money on their insurance but who also doesn't want better and safer cars. That's a social innovation story. Absolutely, we're driving down the cost. We're helping companies manage their risk, understand their risk around insurance, but then we're also helping them get feedback on what makes cars better. What makes them safer? How can we avoid accidents? That is social innovation. That's what we're looking for. That's what Brian talked about with that double bottom line. How can we help you achieve your business goals but go beyond that to better society? So we've heard a lot about transformations. Satachi's own transformation. Pentaho, you just talked about Pre-Hadoop, the Hadoop big data meme, you guys caught that wave. Now you're sort of entering, I don't know if it's your third wave or not, could be your fifth, 10th, I don't know, but there's another big wave coming. Absolutely. Which is this industrial IoT. Brian talked about IT and OT coming together. And it's definitely early days, but what are you seeing in the customer base? It was interesting, Brian, very transparent. I said, how many Itachi customers are out there? Like a few hands went up, but not a ton. So as I say, it is early days, but on paper, the potential is enormous. It's a trillion dollar market, makes a lot of sense. You see a lot of big industrial giants going after this and you've got some real assets that you can bring to bear. So what are the conversations like with customers and where do you see that all going? The way we approach customers and what I hear from customers, they don't really mention the word IoT. Most of them don't understand that they have an IoT problem. All they know is I have this problem. So where we're using IoT is to say, you have that outcome, you desire that outcome. And to get that outcome, you need to get data from all your devices. We have an IoT platform that can help you do that. So where the word even IoT comes up for us is only in the solution, not in the problem. Where I think some companies are missing the mark is they're selling the technology. We have an IoT platform. Please come by our platform. Well, we've been a platform player forever with Empanthaho and we understand if you go there with a blank slate, say here's my platform, come by it, people don't understand it. They don't see the value. But if you can come and say, what's the problem you have? What's the outcome you're looking for? Let's focus on that outcome and back our way into the technology. And that's how we're approaching customers. That seems to be working so far. We have some IoT customers today that did not realize they were doing IoT. So big product announcement today with Pentaho, Pentaho 8, what can we expect? Scale, that's the one word I would use for Pentaho.8. This is one of the best releases I think we've had. We have a new functionality called Worker Notes. We have customers who've been implementing something similar to this in the field for years. We've now productized it. It allows customers to scale out. We've heard from Brian and from others that to do this right, you have to do it at scale. You have to provide this data, this analytics at scale. What our Worker Notes allows customers to do is spin up, spin down, distribute the workload on-prem in the cloud. We don't really care. It's just we have a workload. You've given us a set of notes that we can work on. We'll distribute the workload throughout that. And when we're done, we can spin them down. That elasticity, that flexibility is absolutely needed for today's data solutions. Great, Anthony, thank you for a great guest. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you for having me, thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from Pentaho World just after this.