 Hello, everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's ongoing coverage of SuperCloud 5, the battle for AI supremacy. I will never tire of saying that. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We've got two great guests for this segment. We've got Elena Zakoba. She is the VP of Partnerships at Ivan, and Jonathan DeYong. He is the SVP of Engineering at Globo. Thank you both so much for joining us. We're happy to be here. So I want to start, great. I want to start with you, Elena. Can you tell us a little bit more about your role at Ivan and sort of how you help customers achieve their business goals? Right. So Ivan is an open source data platform for everyone, trusted open source data platform. And I think we'll talk more about open source, about the pros and cons, but we are 100% open source company, and we brought it on a single platform to make it easy for our customers to really achieve that time to value. What I do is I'm running our global partnership. So I work with partners around the globe, which essentially helps us to reach more customers like Globo with the solutions that we have built. Okay, now Jonathan, tell us more a little bit about Globo. It's a B2B provider of translation, technology and services. Tell us a little bit more about the company and then also what your role there is. Sure. So Globo is a language services company. It's a fancy way for saying we help people communicate when they don't speak the same language. Our primary use case that we work in is healthcare. So most times we're helping a patient communication with their care provider. And because of that, we like to think ourself more as a patient communication company because we're helping that patient communicate throughout the entire life cycle of their healthcare journey from the start when they're scheduling their appointment to when they're going home to complete their care for themselves after they've been released from the hospital. So we like to join that entire care continuum, but we also do work in other industries as well, but that's one that we focus a lot on. My role at Globo is essentially leading our technology. So building our platforms, working with our data science teams and engineering ops teams to ensure that our systems are up 24-7 for our clients. So how do you work together with Ivan and achieve these goals? What does your data infrastructure look like today? Well, our data infrastructure is mostly running on top of Ivan. We moved our primary Postgres databases over to Ivan about a two and a half, three years ago at this point. And they allow us to run in multiple different regions, multiple different availability zones throughout currently on the Amazon Web Services as well as back up our data to another cloud provider as required of our different use cases. So they've made it really simple to orchestrate how our databases run and operate. And we've also set up some additional services outside of Postgres with them and are continuing to expand how we can use their platform to really run in the highest availability mode possible. Okay, so both Ivan and Globo have grown incredibly fast in the last few years. What are your main priorities, Jonathan, as SVP of engineering? I mean, I think I have a couple of different goals. One is as our platform scales, obviously we need to support that scale. So finding partners like Ivan who can help us do that seamlessly. That's definitely one of them. Second one is really AI. We have doubled down on AI. We've decided that, you know, we want to be the AI leader in our industry and are doing everything on our power to do that. And it's not just about, you know, replacing our workforce with AI which some people have tried to do in their industries. We really want to augment what our teams are doing to make them better. How do we make each of our interpreters and translators better at what they're doing? How do we find workflows that don't need an interpreter that we can introduce AI to make it better? How can we do all these different things using these new technologies as they evolve where they make sense? And that's the really important part because at least in the medical world some of them don't make sense yet. The technology is just not there yet. The models are just not there yet. So how do we help bring about that change to find those workflows that we can support today or can continue to work with AI partners to evolve their technology to get to a place where it can actually solve our problems? So Alina, I want to bring it back to you. Just hearing Jonathan talk about how the company is using AI not necessarily to replace workers but to enhance the products and services and also help those workers do their jobs more effectively, more productively and probably have more satisfaction too. Can you talk a little bit about some of the recent developments on the Ivan platform and how you're helping customers achieve better outcomes? Yes, absolutely. I think Jonathan just said it really well that what they focus on is solving the problems for their customers and for patients, essentially the users. So how we see our role is really being the backbone for our customers, that we enable them to focus what they do best, delivering value to their customers while we are taking care of all the plumbing if you wish and making sure that it's available, it's scaling, right? And it's also helping them to manage their costs. So if we talk about recent developments on the platform, we currently have 11 open source technologies available on the platform and two latest additions have been Flink, which when it seamlessly is integrated in our case with Kafka, so it allows you to process millions of events per minute. And then another addition, which I think Jonathan will be interesting to you is the Click House because that's super powerful tool when we talk about AI and the big amounts of data. So it's analytical database that can handle things extremely fast and extremely large volumes of data while helping you to again manage that cost. One example is Jonathan, you mentioned that you are using postgres and then you're looking for ways, how will it scale obviously as you grow? One of the customers we had actually was struggling with the storage. So they were using postgres and it was like 1.2 terabytes of data and they were growing really, really fast. So that was a hybrid growth company. So they actually moved to Click House and the storage was cut in more than twice. So it's below 500 gigs now and that's as you can imagine a huge saving right there. Another development on the platform which we're still working on but really going to be available is the tiered storage in Kafka. So if you want to get access to some of your older data you might want to keep that data in a different kind of cheaper tier of storage so that becomes possible with that feature. Okay, so when it comes to building different products and services you're both working with different providers and different partners and to quote you Jonathan from the beginning of our conversation not everyone is always speaking the same language. I'd love to hear how you work with these different technology partners and how they play a role in your growth journey. Jonathan I'll start with you but I'd also like to hear from you on this Elena. Jonathan. Well I think there's a lot of opportunity out there because each one has a different perspective. I mean just like we can talk about all the different LLMs that exist in the world each one has a different perspective on how it responds to a request. So I think that's what I've always tried to do I think that's what we've tried to do as a team at Globo is find partners who can help make us better. So whether it's Ivan whether it's Amazon whoever it might be trying to find partners who think like us who are trying to solve problems like us who aren't just approaching it as here's the one solution here's a set of solutions or a couple of different ways you can solve the problem because that will often be the most effective. I always like to say we collect databases at Globo we have a number a lot of different databases we work with and the reason is because no one database can do everything and I think that's the best analogy I can get from a technical perspective is we use Redis for real-time key storage we also use Redis for caching but we use a Redshift for data warehousing we use Postgres for operation database we use other databases for other things and I think that's really what we look for is finding things that fit the solution we're trying to actually achieve not just go out and everything is to a hammer everything's a nail I love that quote because it can happen in tech so often that you just turn everything into nails when you really need to look at kind of the finesse of a partnership the finesse of the solution you're trying to implement so we work with a lot of different people for that very reason and Ivan's been a great part of that story for us. Alina how about you I'd love to hear from your perspective innovation is sort of what needs to happen in every organization today and companies have different approaches to how they bring out the best in their teams and how they collaborate what do you look for in your partners and how do you then work together to make sure that you do have a cohesive approach but you're all bringing your best creativity and ingenuity to bear? I think that the answer to that is really in understanding the customer so for me what Jonathan just said he's approached by hundreds of companies so it's a lot of noise and it's a lot of different messages and everyone claims to be the best so when I define our partnership strategy and where do we want to be having that better together story I always say that I put customer in the center and then I map out who are these customers interacting with obviously the hyperscalers and their data solution portfolio so how do I integrate with that to make it better experience smooth integration for the customer obviously the other technology partners other ISV companies how do I partner with them and which of them do I partner with so that it always mapped back to what customer is using together with Ivan platform or next to adjacent solutions to Ivan so that it's easy for the customer so that's really the definition of who do we want to engage with so that it brings most value to the customer and decreases that noise so that it's not confusing what to choose while you have the options clearly mapped out there okay okay so I want to talk more about AI because it has been the buzz word the buzz technology of 2023 and that does it shows no signs of slowing down Jonathan I know that Globo intends to become the most AI enabled service provider in your industry can you talk a little bit about what those aims really mean and how you approach that from a technical perspective and the work that you and your team are doing to make that happen I think it means that any part of our business that we can enable AI we want to that goes from anything in our line of business offering like how we operate our business all the way through our service offering that we provide to our clients so Globo HQ is our platform that provide to all of our clients it allows them to access and manage their services that includes reporting and in all sorts of other information that we can give them and trends that are happening in their health system and I think that anywhere we can enable AI there in that capability is something we're going to want to do we're also there's some stuff I can't really talk about but there's a lot of stuff we're going to do around how we deliver our service how we actually look at our interpreters and how we make them better but that's going to hopefully revolutionize our industry in how especially how quality is assessed because today there's really no good quality standard that is across how good a linguist is there's certifications that linguists can become certified however the certifications only cover a couple languages and once you get outside those languages it kind of becomes a mess of what's the standard that we evaluate against so how do we come to a common standard of quality and how can we use AI to help that so that's some of the stuff we're looking at but basically anywhere in our business that we find can AI can be used we plan on implementing it Alina do you have customers that are building AI based solutions and if so how does Ivan's offering support them in their missions to do that? Yeah, yeah we do and I think one of the key things now Jonathan said about the quality of data and when I engage with our AI customers or with some of the partners in that space because we're also looking to build partnerships with AI companies very often we discuss that you know building LLM or educating and training a machine is to a certain extent only as good as the data that you put in it or make available for it and that's where we come in I'm kind of saying that focus on the algorithms or do what you do best because you know your business and you know your use case but let me cover what I know best which is that data because it's not only availability of data but it's its relevance it's the format it comes from security, compliance you know especially depending on the if we talk about healthcare you definitely want to make sure that you're compliant end to end and the data that is available is in the right format and right shape and you know secure essentially so these are the discussions we have with most of the customers who are in AI and then of course there are some well technical features within the portfolio like Vector, PG again talking about Click House and how great combination it is with Flink to do that fast moving large data volumes those are brilliant same as Open Search so that messaging bus that is very often at the center of LLM typically Kafka is often used there but then you are extending it to Open Search which is again another solution on our platform So both of you we're both getting we're getting ready to pit a pin in 2023 I'd love to hear both of you just talk a little bit about more what you're expecting to see out of next year I know Jonathan you said there's some some things going on you can't quite talk about yet but what's most exciting to you shall I ask I'll start with you Jonathan about what you're most excited about in terms of the innovations and projects that you're working on at Globo I'm really excited not just for what we're working on to see what happens in the AI world right you're seeing this great kind of AI race where you have open AI you have Amazon you have Google you have you know, Anthropic you have all these different companies that are working on creating the best LLM out there to solve every problem and going back to what Elena was just saying about data really all we've seen in the last maybe 18 months is a slick interface and a great amount of data that's been collected to give us a really really exceptional LLM the technology and the algorithms that you're seeing have been around for years this is not really new to anyone who's worked in AI what we're seeing is just the amazing data that it can sort through very very quickly and come back with responses so I think what we're gonna see is how do we drive down costs in using use of AI how do we continue to build in protected manners you talked a minute ago about data and especially in healthcare how regulated data is really important how do we ensure that we're protecting people's data so how do we create off walled versions of LLMs that can run on a individual's data and not be exposed especially on the training side back to the parent company so I think there's gonna see a lot of things that are gonna happen in the AI space to make it more acceptable and more deployed and I think that's gonna enable people like us to use it more, to drive deeper into our use cases I just think I just see a lot of changes that are gonna evolve in this industry over the next, again the next 18 months and it's just really exciting it's gonna enable us to do so much more Really exciting times, Elena? Well, exactly remains to be seen I think there will be a lot of fast moving projects in this space and then I think at some point we will be more and more of us will be stopping and thinking wait a minute let's think about it for a second so what is actually going on? How reliable it is? I love there is one example where AI was used in one of the courts and then when George was asking like what is this reference case? I'm not sure I can find it and then I was like I made it up myself so I think there will be a lot of this stop, slow down before you speed up what I'm excited about for next year is actually some of the AI powered capabilities coming to our platform and I really want to see what that brings to our customers that are using the services of platform Excellent, well Jonathan, Elena thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE Thanks for having us today Thank you And I hope you will stay tuned for more of theCUBE's coverage of SuperCloud 5 I'm your host, Rebecca Knight you're watching theCUBE your leader in enterprise technology coverage