 Welcome back to Boston, everybody. This is the birthplace of theCUBE in 2010, May of 2010 at EMC World, right in this very venue. John Furrier called it the Chowda and Lobster Post. I'm Dave Vellante. We're here at Reinforced 2022, Ed Wall, CEO of Chaos Search. Doing a drive-by, Ed. Thanks so much for stopping in. You're going to help me wrap up in our final editorial segment. I really appreciate it. Thank you for including me. How about that, 2010? That's amazing. It was really in this building. Yeah, really in this building. We had to sort of bury our way in, tunnel our way into the blogger lounge. We did four days. It was epic. It was really epic. But I'm glad they're back in Boston. AWS was going to do June in Houston, which would have been awful. No, this is perfect. Yeah, thank God they came back. Boston in summer is great. I know it's been hot, but, and of course you and I are from this area. So how you been, what's going on? I mean, it's a little crazy out there. The stock market's going crazy. Having the tech lash, what are you seeing? So it's an interesting time. So I ran a company in 2000, 2008. So we've been through this before. By the way, the world's not ending. We'll get through this. But it is an interesting conversation. Investor, but also even the customers. There's some hesitation, but you have to basically have the right value of prop. Otherwise, things are going to get solved. So we are seeing longer sales cycles, but it's nothing that you can't overcome. Like, but it has to be something that it's nice to have, it has to be a need to have. But I think we all get through it. And then there is some, on the VC side, it's now buckled down. Let's figure out what to do, which is always a challenge for, you know, start plans. In pre 2000, you maybe weren't a CEO, but you were definitely an executive. And now it's different. And a lot of people, younger people haven't seen this. You've got interest rates now rising. Okay, we've seen that before, but it looks like you've got inflation. You've got interest rates rising. In the consumer spending patterns are changing. You've got five. Six, $7 gas at one point. So you have these weird cross currents. And people are thinking, okay, post September now, maybe because of the recession, the Fed won't have to keep raising interest rates and tightening, but I don't know what to root for. It's like half full, half empty. We haven't been in an environment with high inflation, at least not in my career. I mean, I got into a 92. Like that was long gone, right? So it is an interesting regime change that we're going to have to deal with. But there's a lot of analogies between 2008 now that you still have to work through too, right? So anyway, I don't think the world's ending. I do think you have to run a tight shop. So I think the growth, all costs has gone. I do think it's got disciplines back in, which for most of us, discipline never left, right? So to me, that's the name of the game. What's the, what do you tell just generally? I mean, you've been the CEO of a lot of private companies. And of course people, one of the things that you do to retain people and attract people is you give them stock and it's great and everybody's excited. I'm sure they're excited because you guys are a rocket ship. But so what's the message now that, okay, the market's down, valuations are down, the trees don't grow to the moon. We all know that. But what are you telling your people? What's their reaction? How do you keep them motivated? So like anything, it's you want to over communicate during these times. So I actually over communicate. I get all these, you know, the Sequoia decks, you know, 2008 and the recent. Rest in peace. Good times, that one, right? I really share it. Why? It's like, hey, this is what's going on the real world. It's going to affect us as almost nothing to do with us specifically, but it will affect us. Now we can't not pay attention to it. It does change how you're going to raise money. So you got to make sure you have the right runway to be there. So it does change what you do, but I think you over communicate. So that's what I've been doing. And I think it's more like a student of the game. So I try to share it and I say, some appreciate it and you know, others, I'm just saying, this is normal. Like we'll get through this. And this is what happened in 2008. And trust me, once the market hits bottom, give it another month afterwards, then everyone says, oh, the bottom's in and we're back to business. The valuations don't go immediately back up, but right now no one knows what the bottom is. And that's where kind of the world's ending type of things. Well, it's interesting because you talked about, like I said, rest in peace, good times, that was the Sequoia deck and the message was, tighten up, you know, okay. And I'm not saying you shouldn't tighten up now, but the difference is there was this period of two years of easy money. And even before that, it was pretty easy money. And so companies are well capitalized. They have a runway. So it's like, okay, I was talking to Frank Slutman about this now, of course, they're a public company. He's like, we're not taking the foot off the gas. We're inherently profitable. We're growing like crazy. We're going for it. You know, so that's a little bit of a different dynamic. There's a lot of good runway out there, isn't there? But also you look at the different companies that were either born or were able to power those in environments are actually better off. You come out stronger in a more dominant position. So Frank, you know, listen, if you want to see what Frank's done, it's been unbelievable to watch his career, right? Actually he was at Dad and me and I was at Abamar. So, but look at what he's done since he's crushed it, right? So for him to say, hey, I'm going to hit the, I'm going to literally hit the gas to keep going. I think that's the right thing for snowflake and a right thing for a lot of people. But for people in different roles, I literally say that you have to take it seriously. What you can't be is, well, Frank's in a different situation. What is, how many billion does he have in the bank? So it's a little bit different. Over a billion, over a billion. Well, you're on your way, Ed. Come on. Okay, I want to ask you about this concept that we've kind of coined this term called super cloud. You can think of it as the next generation of multi-cloud. The basic premise is that multi-cloud was largely a symptom of multi-vendor. Okay, I've got, I've done some M&A. I've got some shadow IT, spinning up, you know, shadow clouds, you know, projects. But it really wasn't a strategy to have a continuum across clouds. And now we're starting to see ecosystems really build. You know, you've used the term before, you know, standing on the shoulders of giants. You've used that a lot. And so we're seeing that, you know, Jerry Chen wrote a seminal piece on castles in the cloud. So we coined this term super cloud to connote the subtraction layer that hides the underlying complexities and primitives of the individual clouds and then adds value on top of it and can, you know, adjudicate and manage irrespective of physical location, super cloud. Okay, what do you think about that concept? How does it maybe relate to some of the things that you're seeing in the industry? So, standing on shoulders of giants, right? So I always like to do hard tech either at big companies, small companies. So we, we're probably your definition of a super cloud. We had a big vision, how to, you know, literally solve the core challenge of analytics at scale. How are you going to do that? You're not going to build on your own. So literally we're leveraging the primitives, all everything you can get at the Amazon cloud, everything you can get at Google Cloud. In fact, we're even looking, what you can get out of this snowflake cloud and how do we abstract that out, add value to it? That's where all our patents are. But it becomes a simplified approach that customers don't care, well, they care where their data is, but they don't care how you got there. They just want to know the end result. So you simplify, but you gain the advantages. What things interesting is in this particular company, KS Search, people try to always say, at some point in the sales cycle, they say, no way, hold on, no way that can be fast, no way or whatever the different issue. And initially we used to try to explain our technology. And I would say 60% was explaining the public cloud capabilities and then how we harvest those, I guess, make them better add value on top and what you're able to get is something you couldn't get from the public clouds themselves and then how we did that across public clouds and it's abstracted it. So if you think about that, like it's the shoulders of giants. But what we now do is literally to avoid that conversation because it became a lengthy conversation. So how do you have a platform for analytics that you can't possibly overwhelm for ingest? All your messy data, no pipelines. You leverage things like S3 and EC2 and you do the different security things. You can go to an environment and say, you can't possibly overwhelm me. I could not say that if I didn't literally build on the shoulders giants of all these public clouds. But the value, so if you're going to do hard tech as a startup, you're going to build, you're going to beat the principles of super cloud. Maybe they're not the same size of super cloud that's slipping in that snowflake. But basically, you're going to leverage all that. You're abstracted out and that's where you're able to have a lot of values at that. So let me ask you. So I mean, I don't know if there's a strict definition of super cloud. We sort of put it out to the community and said help us define it. So it was, you got to span multiple clouds. It's not just running in each cloud. There's a metadata layer that kind of understands like where you're pulling data from. Like you said, you can pull data from snowflake. It sounds like we're not running on snowflake, correct? We're complementary to them in their different customers. That one I built on top of a data platform, data apps. Right, and of course they're going cross cloud. Right. You know, is there a PaaS layer in there? We've said there's probably a super PaaS layer. You're probably not doing that, but you're allowing people to bring their own PaaS sort of thing. So we're a little bit different, but basically we publish open APIs. We don't have a user interface. We say keep the user interface. Again, we're solving the challenge of analytics at scale. We're not trying to retrain your analytics, either analysts or your DevOps or SOV or your SecOps team. They use the tools they already use, Elastic Search API, SQL APIs. So really they program, they build applications on top of us. Equifax is a good example. Kay said it coming out later on this week after 18 months in production, but basically they're building, we provide the abstraction layer. The quote, I'm going to kill it, Jeff Chinsher who owns all of SREs, Worldwide from the set to the effect of, hey, I'm able to rethink what I do for my data pipelines. But then he also talked about how, that he really doesn't have to worry about the data he puts in it. We deal with that and he just has to, just query on the other side. That simplicity, we couldn't have done that without that. So anyway, what I like about the definition is if you were going to do something hard in the world, why would you try to rebuild what Amazon, Google and Azure or Snowflake did? You're going to add things on top. We can still do intellectual property, we're still doing patents, so five grant patents all in this, but literally the abstraction layer is the simplification that the end users do not want to know that complexity, even though they ask the questions. And I think too, the other attribute is it's, it's ecosystem enablement. Whereas I think in general, you know, in the multi-cloud 1.0 era, the ecosystem wasn't thinking about, okay, how do I build on top and abstract that? So maybe it is multi-cloud 2.0. We chose to use super cloud. So I'm wondering, we're at the security conference, you know, reinforce. Is there a security super cloud? Maybe Sneak has the developer super cloud or maybe Octa has, you know, the identity super cloud. I think CrowdStrike maybe not because CrowdStrike competes with Microsoft. So maybe, because Microsoft, it was interesting, Merit, Merit Bear was just saying, look, we don't show up in the spending data for security because we're not charging for most of our security. We're not trying to make a big business. So that's kind of interesting, but is there a potential for the security super cloud? So I think so. But also, I'll give you one thing I talked, just today, at least three conversations where everyone wants to log data. It's a little bit specific to us, but basically they want to do the security data lake. The idea of, and Snowflake talks about this too, but the idea of putting all the data in one repository and then how do you abstract out and get value from it? Maybe not the perfect, but it becomes simple to do but hard to get value out. So the different players are going to do that. That's what we do. We're able to, once you land it in your S3 or, it doesn't matter, cloud of choice, simple storage, we allow you to get after that data, but we take the primitives and hide them from you and all you do is query the data and we're spinning up Stateless Compute to go after it. So then if I look around the floor, there's going to be a bunch of these players. I don't think, why would someone in this floor try to recreate what Amazon or Google or Azure had? They're going to build on top of it. And now the key thing is do you leave it in standard and now we're open APIs. People are building on top of my open APIs or do you try to put them in a walled garden and they're in now your supercloth? Our belief is, part of it is it needs to be open access and let you go after it and build your applications on top of it openly. They come back to Snowflake, that's what Snowflake's doing. And they're basically saying, hey, come into our proprietary environment and the benefit is, and I think both can win. There's a big market. I agree. But I think the benefit of Snowflake says, okay, we're going to have federated governance. We're going to have data sharing. We're going to have access to all these ecosystem players and as everything's going to be controlled and you know what you're getting, the flip side of that is, I mean, Databricks is the other end of that spectrum, which is no, no, you've got to be open. So what's going to happen, what's happening clearly is Snowflake's saying, okay, we've got Snowpark, we're going to allow Python, we're going to have Apache Iceberg, we're going to have open source tooling that you can access. By the way, it's not going to be as good as our walled garden. With the flip side of that is you get Databricks coming out from the data science and data engineering perspective and there's a lot of gaps in between, aren't there? And I think they both win. Like for instance, so we didn't do Snowpark integration but we work with people building data apps on top of Snowflake or Databricks. And what we do is we can add value to that of what we've done, again using all the super class stuff we've done, but we deal with the unstructured data, the four V's coming at you, that lack, you can't pipeline that to save. So we actually can be additive as they're trying to do like a security data cloud inside a Snowflake or do the same thing in Databricks, that's where we can play. Now we play with them at the application level that they get some data from them and some data for us but I believe there's a partnership there that we'll figure out that we'll do it inside their environment. To us, they're just another large scalar environment that my customers want to get after data and they want me to abstract it out and get value. So it's another repository to you. Okay, and I think Snowflake, I think recently added support for unstructured data. You chose not to do Snowpark because why? Well, so the way they're doing the unstructured data is not bad, it's JSON data. Basically, this is the dilemma. Everyone wants their application developer to be flexible, move fast securely, but just productivity. So you get to give them flexibility. The problem with that is analytics on the end want to be structured, be performant. And this is where Snowflake is, they have to somehow get that raw data and it's changing every day because you just let the developers do what they want. Now, in some structured database, but do what you need to do your business fast and securely so it completely destroys. So they have large customers trying to do big integrations with this messy data and it doesn't quite work because you literally just can't make the pipelines work. So that's where we're complimentary doing it. So now the pipe, the particular integration wasn't, we need a little bit deeper integration to do that. So we're integrating actually at the data app layer but we could, I could see us and I don't listen, I think Snowflake's a good actor. They're trying to figure out what's best for the customers and I think we just participate in that. Yeah, and I think they're trying to figure out what's how to grow their ecosystem because they know they can't do it all. In fact, we saw the key thing. They just can't do certain things and we do that well. It's, you know, I have SQL, but that's where it ends. It's, I do the messy data and how to play with them. And you, when you talk to the, like they're one of their founders anyway, Ben White comes on theCUBE and it's like, we start with simple, right? It reminds me of the guy, some pure storage. Like that guy, Kaz, he's always like, no, if it's not, if it starts to get too complicated, so that's why they said, I, we're not going to start out trying to figure out how to do complex joins and workload management and they turn that into a feature. So, like you say, it's a, it's a, I think both can win. It's a big market. I think it's a good model and I love to see Frank, you know, move. Yeah, I forgot, you saw Avamar, and you started, you guys used to hate each other, right? No, no, no, no, no, I mean, it's all good, right? But the thing is, look at what he's done. I wouldn't bet against Frank. I think it's a good message. You can see clients trying to do it. Same thing with Databricks. Same thing with BigQuery. We get a lot of, same dynamic in BigQuery. It's good for a lot of things, but it's not everything you need to do and there's ways for the ecosystem to play together. Well, what's interesting about BigQuery is that it's truly cloud native as is Snowflake, you know, whereas, you know, Amazon Redshift was sort of par Excel, cobbled together. Now it's, you know, great engineering, but BigQuery gets a lot of, you know, high marks, but again, there's limitations to everything. That's why companies like yours can exist. And that's why, so back to the super cloud. It allows me as a company to participate in that because I'm leveraging all the underlying pieces, which I couldn't have done, we couldn't be doing what we're doing now without leveraging the super cloud concepts, right? So. I really appreciate it coming by. Help me wrap up today in a reinforce. Always a pleasure seeing you, my friend. Thank you. All right, okay, this is a wrap on day one. We'll be back tomorrow. I'll be solo. I'm afraid I had a had a fly out, but we'll be following what he's doing. This is reinforced 2022. You're watching theCUBE. We'll see you tomorrow.