 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2017, presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AWS re-invent 2017. This is day two for us, incredible day one we had, great buzz on day two, great announcements coming out from AWS today. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host, Keith Townsend, and we're excited to be joined by CUBE alumni, Erin Cowell, the head of product, and the founder of Elation, welcome back to the show. Thanks so much for having me, excited to be here. Absolutely, so speaking of excitement, you can hear the buzz behind us. Interesting about Elation, the first data catalog design for human collaboration. What gap did Elation see in the market five years ago when you started? That's a great question, Lisa. So yeah, so we're the first data catalog period, and we're excited to see a lot of other people kind of using that label. It really validates, this is a space, anything that everybody needs. And I think our approach, as you said, was to really approach it from the human side, to say the data might be generated by machines or stored on machines, but it's not meant to ultimately be consumed by machines. Even if there's algorithms that are pulling it in, it's to ultimately serve human interest. So the goal was to design from the human back, and really think, what does this data mean? Can I trust it? Is it going to drive the processes correctly? So Erin, I've have seen that term quite a bit, and data catalog, for me, means one specific thing. Can you kind of wrap that up for us? What is a data catalog? That's a really great question, Keith. And I think what's interesting is we took a lot of inspiration in the early days, actually from Amazon.com, right? So Amazon is an amazing modern product catalog. You can go in, type in English, and see a variety of products that match that keyword. And for each one, you can see who's bought it before, how many stars did they give it, is it good? So it helps you find, understand, and trust, and get the right product for your need. We want to do that same thing for data. How do you find a trustworthy data asset, understand what it is, and put it to you? So that's exactly the goal. So a simple problem is I've worked with a ton of researchers in the big farmer industry. Data across the world, basically. Absolutely. And a lot of data sets, repetitive, team in Germany is working with one set of data, team in New Jersey working with another one. How does that, your solution help those researchers find the data that they're looking for? It's exactly right. So the problem is many different data sets, many different things claiming to be true. Some of them are just plain wrong. Sometimes the answer might be one thing in Germany, but something else elsewhere, and they're both valid. And so you've hit the nail on the head. The way people use data contains a lot of hints about the way you should use data. So just like Amazon, again, because we're here, you know, we'll say, oh, customers who bought what you're about to buy also bought this, and that can help you discover something useful. We try to expose what we call behavior IO, let the past behavior of the most knowledgeable people in the organization drive the future behavior. It's a big part of what we do. So one of the things I was reading about you guys on your website and some editorials is, a lot of data lakes fail. Why is that? How is elation different? That's a great question. So I think it's interesting that a data lake is, it's kind of like having a huge basement, right? And it can make you adopt a hoarder mentality. We say, oh, it's so cheap to store everything, we'll just store it. And then when we need it, we'll figure it out then. Well, the truth is, it's not always how it goes. Often you store so many things, it's cheap to store it, but when that actual human, it was an actual analytical question they want to answer, or an actual business process they want to improve, goes looking for the data, all they see are all these unlabeled boxes, right? So I think the key is to think about how do you make information searchable, discoverable, understandable, trustworthy? And what's great is, is a lot of people are migrating from their on-premise data lakes to the clouds, and obviously, you know, S3, it always is a big leader in where that's going. It gives you an opportunity to ask, just like when you move houses, to say, let me look at what I've got, and can I adopt that approach that, you know, what do I actually need? You might keep it all, but what's going to be in the top shelf, what's going to be in the basement, and how do you make everything accessible? So, Eric, can you talk a little bit about today's announcements? A lot of machine learning, analytics announcements from AWS. However, I don't know what I already have. So how can I make use of that data? Can you help talk about how Elation helps to leverage some of these new tools from AWS? Absolutely. So we have a bunch of customers on AWS Stack already, and increasingly so, you know, fundamentally, our customers are people who do analysis. A lot of them are using S3, Redshift, the like. Many people are hosting, you know, on the cloud increasingly. And it's exactly the problem you described. It's, I know I have it somewhere, but I can't get my head on what I already have. What region is it in? What? Exactly. Is it in the region? Is it in my data center? Where is it? Exactly. So whether that data is in Redshift, in S3, or somewhere else, maybe it's, you know, in a Postgres or SQL server, or Oracle server, often that's an RDS hosted one. Whatever it is, we crawl and index everything you have. Just the way Google crawls and indexes everything out on the web, and we make it searchable, and we put information of it, who's used it, and how good it is front and center. Just the way you can say, oh, this is a five-star product on Amazon, I'm going to go click buy it now. So one challenge with data lakes is security around that data. So data catalog, I get metadata around the data that I have, but some of that data is sensitive. How do you guys handle security around the data catalog itself? Absolutely. So we respect all the security and privacy settings that exist that are on the data itself, and we sort of surface those in the catalog. Some of our customers say, look, we want to let people know what exists so they can ask for permission. Others say, even having awareness of this data is too much for us, and that'll, you mentioned pharma, that'll vary by industry. Where do you guys get involved in the customer conversation? You said many customers of yours are already using AWS for different things, but where does Elation come in to the conversation? Are you brought in by AWS? Are you brought in by customers? Where are they on this journey towards leveraging the cloud for the things that they need, agility, the speed, and the cost reduction? Absolutely. So our promise is we help you find, understand, and trust your data wherever it lives and whoever you are about democratizing it. So customers choose the right infrastructure for their needs, given costs, given performance. Obviously Amazon is increasingly a part of that, but that's the first they make, and we resolve to handle that wherever it is. And as of customers, our customers are so smart. We learn so much from them. We're meeting a bunch of CIOs, both the prospects, also talking to some current customers like Expedia today here at AWS lunch with our investor, Costa Noah, and another at dinner tonight. And folks like Chegg at Invoice2Go who've been longstanding AWS customers using SVA, using Redshift, and trying to say, and actually in Chegg's case, they have a lot of homegrown tooling that they developed on the back end, but they said Elation is the best place to surface that and have it be the central portal for business users and analysts who might not be able to otherwise access things that are just available via an API, something more technical. So how are you, Elation and AWS, helping a customer like Chegg extract ROI quickly? Yeah, it's a great question. So AWS is really great for cost containment. You have all this data and all this processing, but you have peaks and you have troughs and how do you make sure you're not overpaying and scale-elastic? So it's great for helping with storage and computation. And Elation helps with the human side. How do you get that upside by saying you have this data, that could affect the way you stock your shelves, the way you price your products or who you hire, what markets you go into. And that requires that last step. If you have the data, but it isn't in the right hands at the right time or it's interpreted incorrectly, it has no value. So the two of them together vital end-to-end solution. So Aaron, with GDPR coming up, quick enforcement of that coming up May 2018, customers have to be concerned about having data they shouldn't have. Does Elation help identify some of that data? Absolutely. So we're going to data catalog is fundamentally an inventory of everything you have plus information about how it has been and could be consumed. We very much focus on the upside potential of using that to drive better business choices and better analysis. But we have customers actually saying, oh, we can use that same information about what we have, who's using it, what's in it to instead make sure that it's used compliantly with a regulation like GDPR to make sure that you aren't holding onto health records longer than you should or PII. And it's absolutely a very big use case for many of our customers. So data is touched by a lot of people in an organization. AWS has done a great job of really developing a lot of synergy with the developer community for a long time now. But we're also seeing a lot of, or some trends suggesting they're going up the stack. They want to get more enterprises. Enterprises are at the precipice as Andy Jastie said of this mass migration to the cloud. You mentioned all the work with AWS and the CIO events that you're having here. Where are you guys in a conversation with customers? Are you more now having to get to that C-suite as now their businesses are absolutely predicated upon the best use of data to identify ways to monetize new revenue streams? How influential is that C-level in this conversation? It's a great question. So I think what's interesting is all companies, we sort of commoditized the basic business school, consultant, best practice, knowledge. But everyone is kind of already doing that. To get to the next level, our customers are recently telling us it is only by finding key insights in data that they're going to beat out the competition and stay relevant. I mean, look what Amazon and Netflix have done to the industries that used to be, you know, they weren't as data driven. They didn't have that kind of agility around data. So everybody wants to do the same thing. So CIOs, CDOs, chief data officers, we're seeing them crop up more and more and being more and more empowered in the organization because it's seen as central to hitting revenue targets and making an impact, which is what customers want to do. And I mentioned CISOs as well with the question that you asked Keith about security. The CISOs, the chief information security officers. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So I think usually, you know, often a CISO, well, report into a CIO, often CDOs adjacent to them, there's somebody who needs to have the confidence as they do in the relations process of mirroring what's in the data source, not introducing security holes, potentially even, you know, taking step forward and saying, as I implement GDPR and other policies, how do I use a comprehensive automated inventory like relations to make sure that process isn't just started, but actually finished and avoid the fines and the adverse events? We absolutely see across the C-suite a lot of interest. So let's go one step below the CIO. And after, you know, I think the CIO understands this. This data is the new oil, the very, very straightforward. But now you're getting into the enterprise architect, the VP of infrastructure, and they have to implement these technologies. What have been some of the rewards and challenges with those conversations? It's a great question. Right, so here at AWS re-invent, we have a very technical audience, very infrastructure minded. Those are folks that we love to engage with, but our primary audience is the business. Right, right. And so I think what's interesting is, the problem we solve for the more infrastructure minded executives is, how do I deal with these business users? How do I do this relationship that feels adversarial where they're putting strain on my system? They're upset about cost overruns. We don't speak the same language of the same values. Elation can be a great bridge because we do all of this automated extraction and tying to the sources where they are and kind of meet the people where they live, but then can communicate the value in a clean interface that demonstrates real business ROI to the business. We can kind of be an ambassador between those sides of the customer. I love that being an ambassador. Erin, your passion for Elation, what you do, your engaging with customers is palpable. So we thank you for joining us on theCUBE and wish you guys the best of luck with what you're doing here at AWS re-invent. Lisa, thank you so much for having me. Awesome. Great job, Erin. Thank you for watching. We are live at AWS re-invent 2017 with 42,000 other people. I'm Lisa Martin from my co-host Keith Townsend and Erin Cowb. Stick around, we'll be right back.