 Hello and welcome to this CUBE conversation. As part of our ongoing coverage of AWS and cloud ecosystems and in conjunction with the AWS NYC summit, we're pleased to bring a startup story of humble beginnings that work backwards from the customer then leverage the cloud to simplify the perpetual hunting and pecking for and management of open source tooling and created a rocket ship. Hang on, Ian Messingham is back on theCUBE. He's the CMO of Ivan. Ian, good to see you again. Yeah, great to see you, Dave. I'm lovely to be back on theCUBE. It's been a while, but I'm really happy to be back. Yeah, it's great to have you. So, all right, so zoom out. Give us the big picture and the trends that you guys see in the marketplace. You can tell us about the customer pain points and what are the challenges that you guys are seeing out there? Sure, of course. So we've seen a lot of customers become more and more dependent on open source data technology over the past few years. With the economic downturn that occurred in 22, customers are increasingly constrained in the amount of resources that they have, but they still find that delivering digital projects and driving software innovation is really important. This has led them to be constrained with access to resources and become more cost-conscious in delivering that technology. And these are the precisely the areas within which Ivan operates. So we make it really simple and easy for customers to operate and deploy the most popular open source data infrastructure technology. And we're growing really fast as a result of customer adoption of products that we offer in that space. You know, it's all we talked about during the pandemic. Of course it was the pandemic and we had this forced march to digital. We don't talk about it so much anymore. You know, it's like back pain once it goes away and forget about it. But the effects of that forced march are really still felt. And that's when Ivan really had sort of its ascendancy. Tell us a little bit more about the company. I alluded to it upfront. How do you help organizations address the challenges that you just talked about? Yeah, sure. So Ivan is a Finnish headquartered series D stage startup. We were founded back in 2016 by four co-founders who all had a long history of working together in organizations like F-Secure, like many people in the Finnish technology ecosystem. Quite a few of them spent time at Nokia as well. In these roles, they developed really strong competency in deploying and operating data infrastructure at really high scale. Actually at F-Secure, the founders were building and operating early cloud environments to enable them to analyze an instrument malware. So malware malicious software analysis was a big area of focus for them. They realized that these technologies and skills they were developing were generally applicable. And they went on to found Ivan, launching our first services back in 2017. And we started with Postgres as a managed service across all three major hyperscale clouds. What's happened in the interim is we've added 10 other popular open source services to the platform. We have created a platform that makes it really simple for customers to deploy, operate, and scale these different components and also provides out of the box integrations between them. So it's a toolkit for organizations of any size that want to build sophisticated and robust data-centric applications featuring data streaming with Kafka analysis with operational databases like Postgres and Cassandra and increasingly observability and search capabilities as well with open search and Grafana. So we've got a really broad portfolio of the most popular open source data infrastructure technologies. And of course, open source technology, I would say, we would say, is the most popular way that organizations deliver technology innovation, digital innovation today. So as a result of these coinciding factors, Ivan has been growing really fast. We have about a thousand customers today growing a really rapid clip across all kinds of markets. And actually since the economic downturn last year, more and more of our customers are enterprise customers. And we've been focusing on delivering product innovations like our bring your own cloud capability which allows customers to run Ivan services inside their own hyperscaler cloud accounts benefiting from their cost discounting structures that they might have in place and also meeting sophisticated security and compliance needs. So it's really the enterprise that is driving the growth of Ivan now in addition to that core that we have of high growth digital native customers that have been with us since the early days. So a couple of things there. I mean, there's a lot of open source tooling out there. You guys lasered in on sort of data and data adjacencies. Why did you start there? And I mean, that's maybe it's an obvious question but I'd like you to talk about that. Well, I mean customers organizations are heavily heavily dependent on data infrastructure technology. I challenge you Dave to show me any substantial company in the world today that doesn't have a reliance on relational database technology, non-relational systems and increasingly more and more and more organizations are using streaming because they want to respond in real time to the actions and demands of their customers or the people that they serve if they're governmental organizations. So data infrastructure is absolutely pivotal to success of the modern organization but it's actually hard to do and particularly hard to do well. If you wanna build robust data infrastructure and do that yourself, you can guarantee that you're gonna have a large team and a pretty substantial cost line associated with that operational capability. And in a way it's plumbing, it's non-value adding in the eyes of many customers and many organizations. Nobody notices when it's working well but you sure notice if it breaks. So offloading that heavy lifting to an expert provider like Ivan with a technology platform that automates and simplifies the process of deploying, operating and scaling this core data infrastructure tech. So really, really high value area for customers in an area where we can deliver value for them and grow as a result of that. So it's really taking away the mundane lowering costs allowing organizations to focus on more strategic area. I mean, it's the classic cloud value proposition. Yeah, I mean, you'll know that I was at AWS for a little while and we talked quite a lot when I was there. And I still remember Andy Jassy describing that undifferentiated heavy lifting offload Ivan is doing precisely that but in a very specialized focus area of data infrastructure. We don't have the breadth of a hyperscaler and we would contend that that specialist focus that we have makes us really good at meeting the needs of customers, demanding customers in this particular area of data infrastructure. This is the unique aspect of the cloud. I mean, like I said up front, this is a humble beginnings. This is not a story of a Silicon Valley startup. You know, it was a company, I think it was Helsinki, it was founded. And then of course, of course once the US VC has got wind of it, you know, it was like, okay, let's go. The US VC has got wind of it but you know, the most interesting thing about Ivan is the company was founded in Helsinki but the first customer that Ivan acquired was a Mexican headquartered trucking company. So I don't think the founders had international expansion from day one in mind, but they created a great product that customers all over the world really like and a lot of international organizations have adopted it in the Americas, in Asia Pacific, Japan and of course all over Western Europe and back to the Nordics. So we have this kind of horizontal technology portfolio which is pretty much ubiquitous across industry, technology industry or you know, more traditional industries around the world and we have customers everywhere or as a result of one simple thing, the fact that the product works and it works really well, customers really like it. So now you have all this focus on data, you talked about streaming, you know, real time and then boom, you have the AI shot heard around the world. So what's that been like? It's almost like the market just came to you but I wonder if you could address the impact of that AI boom. Yeah, so there's a few things that we're doing. You know, some of the open source technologies that we support most notably open search and Postgres already have features that have been built into them that are AI powered features. Vector search would be a great example of this and we just recently announced support for something called PG Vector inside our Postgres service which allows customers to do similarity search using vector search techniques, very advanced search technology that's very effective for things like recommender systems and can actually link recommender systems with transactional data such as stocking data. So one of the ideal use of cases here, for example, would be in retail. You can do a recommendation search using vector search technology that only returns results of products that you have in stock, verifiably in stock using the transactional integrity within the Postgres system. So we have a few of the open source projects that we're working on that have AI capabilities. And then the second thing is a lot of data flowing through our systems with Kafka, with Click House, MPP data warehousing technology that we support on the platform. Customers are using this for training, of course and with Kafka for doing inference in real time on streaming data. And then lastly, we have a startup program Ivan called Cluster which is a mechanism that we built for supporting early stage organizations with credits to build and run their businesses on Ivan. One thing we have noticed is a lot of AI startups are applying to and joining the cluster program that we have and are benefiting from Ivan credits as a mechanism for establishing their businesses and scaling them. So AI, definitely a hot topic. Anybody that's working in the data centric space like we are is definitely seeing the effect of that today. You mentioned vector search and vector databases are obviously exploding. It's a fundamental ingredient of these large language models. So as you get new open source tools on the market, how do you think about the open source community and the ecosystem? And how do you prioritize all that in terms of the managed services that you provide? Yeah, there's so much to talk about here. We're constantly evaluating new open source technology which is rising in popularity and increasing in prominence, increasing in developer adoption. And we're looking today at other engines. Consider LLM execution or inference environments as engine similar to databases. The LLMs in that case would be analogous to the schemas and data sets that exist within Postgres, for example. So we're constantly evaluating open source tools that we could add to the platform in a kind of managed runtime sense. That's one thing that we're working on. The second thing on open source more generally is Ivan has, I think, a unique model for sustainable open source. We have a large open source program office here at Ivan and we seek to hire contributors that are making meaningful contributions to the open source projects and technologies that we rely on here at Ivan. So we have several Kafka committers working at Ivan. We have contributors to the Postgres project. We have contributors to the majority of the open source projects that we operate on behalf of our customers there. And that will continue to be an area of focus for us. And I would say that the sustainability of open source is something that is very core to the identity and culture here at Ivan and something that we focus on a lot. It's really, really important for us to build a meaningful way to support the open source projects that we and our customers depend upon. I mean, it's important to build credibility in the open source community by providing commitments. Explain more why that is so important to the open source movement. Well, I would say the main reason is we have a business model that differs somewhat for many of the comparator organizations that customers may work with. I'm sure you're familiar with the concept of open core where organizations develop open source products and technology and they give those away to the community and invite contributions from other community members. But then they maintain proprietary software around the open core and they monetize those proprietary components. There's many, many examples of that. Elastic would be a great example and Confluent would be another but there are loads of other organizations that use the same kind of model. And I would say that I'm not criticizing those companies and they're great companies with phenomenal technology. I've done a huge amount for the ecosystem but our approach is somewhat different to them. So we believe that customers should be able to access all of the components that they need to derive value from open source technology under open source licenses. And a great example of this would be work that we've been doing in collaboration with AWS recently to develop a feature for Elasticsearch or rather OpenSearch, the open fork of Elasticsearch called FlatObject which is a proprietary feature within Elasticsearch but which we collaborated with AWS to create an open source compatible alternative for. So this makes it easier for customers to migrate to and adopt OpenSearch by providing more complete feature set and it makes it open search that is more effective for customers that wanna use it for log search capabilities. And ultimately we believe that will help us and the OpenSearch community grow adoption of open source and will give us an opportunity of course to generate revenue through service adoption there but we're definitely in favor of creating open alternatives to proprietary extensions to really important and critical open source projects such as Kafka, such as OpenSearch and such as the other open source projects that we contribute to. And then your monetization model is managed services, correct? Yeah, monetization model is cloud managed services I would describe them as. So customers will opt to use Ivan. They can actually deploy it across nine different clouds. We support all three major hyperscalers, AWS, GCP and Azure of course. And the predominant way that customers would deploy it is to create services inside an Ivan account within a dedicated VPC and peer those VPCs with their cloud provider account in order to provide access to the services. Just this last quarter, we announced the new capability called BYOC or bring your own cloud. This provides customers with the capability to deploy those exactly the same Ivan services within their own hyperscaler cloud infrastructure accounts. So deploying within AWS, GCP or Azure and consuming their own compute resources and consuming their own network egress resources as well. And this can offer larger customers a cost advantage mechanism to run Ivan by depleting their existing hyperscaler cloud consumption commitments. So they're sustained use discounts or their EDP for example, and also helps customers meet specific compliance or privacy or security requirements that they might have to run resources inside their own security perimeter if you want to call it perimeter in the cloud. So definitely with building capabilities that support the ecosystem, they're intended to drive down cost of operations for customers as well. Well, that your timing, you know, whether it's by good luck or good fortune or just being smart is actually quite good. You've got, you hit, you know, the steep ramp and you've got product market fit and now you're sort of focused on the go to market fit. So that's fantastic. You're growing like crazy. You're well-capitalized. What's the future hold for Ivan? The future for Ivan holds increased focus on enterprise customers on meeting the needs of larger organizations through product development to improvements in our GTM model that you just briefly mentioned. And also through building out our support and services capabilities as well to make sure that we can really meet the needs of the most demanding and largest customers and help our customers exploit the full value of this open source data and infrastructure technology which we just fundamentally believe is the best way for organizations to deliver data-centric applications moving forward. Okay, Ivan IO, a-i-v-e-n.io is your website. Any other resources that people should focus on? Yeah, so definitely visit us at Ivan.io. That's the main website. We've got a blog on there, of course, which has a lot of information about our contributions to open source, customer success cases and also the continuous innovation stream as we work to enhance the products and capabilities that we have for customers. And then lastly, we recently launched a developer resource center which is targeted on practitioners, of course, developer practitioners, SRE types, DevOps professionals. And that includes a lot of resources which will help you get more value out of open source data infrastructure technology more generally but also help you exploit Ivan for fun and profit, let's say. So I definitely encourage you to take a look at those resources. Well, congratulations Ian. Looks like you picked a winner or maybe they picked you, but I really appreciate you coming to theCUBE. I hope so. Great to be here. Thanks again, Dave. Really appreciate you hosting us today. I'll see you soon. All right, you're welcome. All right, and thank you for watching everybody of this CUBE Conversations. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time.