 Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of CrowdStrike Falcon 23 Live from Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We were covering the show yesterday. We've been talking with CrowdStrike executives with its ecosystem, with customers. We're going to be continuing to talk about its ecosystem next. We've got Tom Parker here, the CEO and founder of Hubble Technology. Tom, welcome to theCUBE, great to have you. Hey, great to be here. Thanks for inviting me. Give the audience an overview of Hubble. You are a COVID baby. Mission, vision, help us understand why. Yeah, absolutely. Well, first thing is, I think the pandemic was a great opportunity to build new companies. There was a lot of, at the time, the VC market was pretty good. There was a lot of talent becoming available and it was just a great time to be heads down. Everyone wanted to be at home anyway. Not going into the office and so, yeah, it was a really good time for us. You know, what really inspired me to build Hubble was the experiences I had as a security leader, both as a line of business Chief Information Security Officer, AIG Insurance, and as Chief Technology Officer at Accenture Security. I started my last business and exited that to Accenture and spent about six years with Accenture, serving some of the biggest brands in the world. Accenture Security is actually the world's largest cybersecurity consulting business. People don't realize that. Today, it's over six billion in revenue. We grew that out of a pretty small business when they acquired my company. And I like to say, you know, the nice thing about consulting is you get to be the customer's therapist. You kind of really sit down with them and understand what their big challenges are. What are the big programs? What are the big rocks they're trying to move internally? And I met a lot of different technology vendors, both startups, early stage companies, but also late stage companies as well. And I found that, you know, I was in this great position to matchmake between the supply of tech companies and the demand that was coming from the customers that I was working with. And I found that I was getting asked again and again about visibility. How do we get visibility on our environment? We use legacy technologies like ServiceNow for CMDB and Inventory. That's more of an IT thing. But as security practitioners, we need more. We need trust in the data. We need the ability to action the data. And we need context in the data. Security is very much a game of scale. And if you think about all of the busy work that is created by not having clarity around data in security operations, what is this asset making phone calls to try and figure out what this application does? Am I going to get fired if I take this system offline? Getting to a decision is extremely time-staking. You know, painstaking process and takes a lot of time if you don't have a product like Hubble. And so I just found that there was nothing in the market. And, you know, coupled with my experience at AIG where now it was my problem, I had operations in over 30 different countries. We had 17 what we called non-integrated businesses which generally existed because of acquisitions or for regulatory purposes. And the thing is with the big multinational company like that, you're going to have a lot of tech sprawl. You're going to have inconsistent tech environments. And at the end of the day, you're one brand. And I would talk to my teams internationally. I would say, guys, we get that you're different. We got that, you know, you might be doing things slightly differently. You have different regulations. The culture is different. The laws are different. But at the end of the day, you've got one brand. You've got one stock price. And if the headline of the New York Times says XYZ is being hacked, no one's going to care about reading like the subline that says, by the way, it was a two-person office in Botswana. Doesn't matter. The headline says that, you know, your company's being breached and that's what's going to cause your stock price to tank the next day. And so I decided, you know, listen, you know, I love working with, you know, I love being a security leader in an organization like AIG. But I felt the need that I had to go and build a platform to solve this industry-wide. So you have a 20-plus-year career of being able to observe the changing threat landscape. Yeah. And so you had sort of the built-in market analysis, right? Yeah. And then it's a matter of, okay, where's the problem that I can solve? What's missing from your practitioner perspective? And then it's funding and execution. So, now you could have probably taken a lot more money in. And, you know, but you chose not to. Yeah, we did, yeah. Which is interesting to me. We did, yeah. Well, how was that decision? Because so many companies were just kind of pinging out during that timeframe and are sort of now in trouble. Well, exactly. Yeah, I mean, that's an unexpected but great question. I think the reality is my philosophy, I mean, this is not my first start-up. I think first-time founders maybe get a little bit greedy, both on the check size and the valuation. Right. And I was very conscious about not wanting to set myself up for a down-round, especially with the uncertainty in the economy. And we did start the company in a period of uncertainty. There was a lot of dry powder in the VCs at the time to be deployed. But we were very thoughtful about valuation and what we actually needed. And with the support of our friends at CrowdStrike, who I think we were one of their first investments out of the Falcon Fund. Right. And our friends at Excel, we launched the company. And it's been a great journey. Good partners. Yeah. Talk about the partnership, the technology partnership with CrowdStrike. You mentioned they were one of the, you were one of the first they invested in. Yeah. What did the technology partnership look like and what's in it for customers? Yeah. So we have a really great, better together story, I think. If someone is using CrowdStrike already, they were one of our first technology integrations. And so because of that, some of our first customers were also CrowdStrike customers. And we're really able to leverage the power and data of the CrowdStrike Falcon platform, but also couple that with all of the existing investments, other investments a customer has made in security. I think, you know, I was actually a CrowdStrike customer when I was at AIG. And one of the things I loved was how well CrowdStrike works with other technologies. You know, it's not, you know, if you look at Microsoft, Cisco, you know, they only very work properly if you have, you know, Microsoft in the cloud, you're using, you know, Microsoft on the endpoint, you know, using their SIM technology. It's, you know, very much driven to force a monoculture of technology in order for it to work well. And so, you know, a CrowdStrike customer can expect really great integrations that really do unlock the power of, you know, not just Falcon, but the other technologies they've invested in as well. When I was at Accenture, I worked with an incredible leader, Omar Abash, who's now a leader at Microsoft, and he wrote a book called Pivot to the Future, and he talks a lot about unlocking trap value. And one of the stories he always talks about is how the automation of telephone switching for way to the internet. We already, we had all this trap value in copper that we put in the ground, right? And we had operators that were having to manually connect calls, right? When, you know, you make a phone call, it's the operator, you know, who do you want to talk to? The internet would never have happened if we hadn't figured a way to automate that. And so that really struck home with me. And so when we founded Hubble, we very much were thinking about not being dependent on the presence of any particular technology, but also unlocking the value of what the customer had already invested in and of course CrowdStrike was one of those investments that we were happy to integrate with. So what is NextGen asset discovery and how do you think about an asset? Yeah, well I think it's NextGen because we are operating in an era of next generation technologies as a whole. We have an IT stack that looks very, very different from what it looked like 15 years ago. It's not just a question of an asset being a device with an IP on the network. A single IP address could be hundreds of microservices. The complexity is just exploded in compute environments. And so because of that you need a modern approach to inventory your assets, to understand the assets and to have a high level of assurance that you have the correct security controls such as the presence or lack thereof of a technology like CrowdStrike Falcon. So let's talk about assets. I mean, I don't want to get too pedantic. Some people don't think data is an asset. Let's assume it is, right? Or it can be used to create assets. How do you sort of discover, do you consider data as an asset and how do you discover data as an asset? How do you treat that? Yeah, absolutely. Well to us anything that creates value to the organization is an asset. If you think it's interesting when I was first fundraising I met with some funds that weren't really in the IT space at all. And when I said asset management they thought financial instrument asset management and yachts and airplanes and so forth. But in actual fact it's not that different because you're trying to manage value, right? You're trying to protect the value. You're trying to understand the value. Trying to understand how that value might appreciate and depreciate over time. And so it's the same with Hubble. We're trying to understand, the board doesn't care about cyber really. They care about risk and value protection. And they have a fiduciary duty to do that. And so data is an asset. User identities are an asset. And we help customers map that. In terms of how we do it, is we live off the land. We integrate with technologies like CrowdStrike. In terms when it comes to data we integrate with some of the great technologies in the market such as Veronis. Big idea in some of the disruptors in the space like our new friends at Dick's Security. So we're really integrating with that stack to bring differentiated value to the customer. But doesn't an agent get me all that I need? What's missing and why does that need to be enriched? Yeah, so I think there's a recognition by even companies that do have agents that have discovery capabilities like CrowdStrike that the agent can only see what the agent can see it as a, what we call a self-defining universe. And actually there are other companies out there in the industry that are representing the fact that they have a complete inventory of the world, which actually I think is a bit dangerous to represent that this is your entire asset ecosystem. That's certainly not something that CrowdStrike does. Their investment in Hubble certainly is a tipping of the hat to that recognition. But I think you need a holistic, I like to think of it as like the senses, right? You have, you know, you're hearing and if something goes bang behind you, you turn your head and look to see what it is or you smell something and you look in the direction of where the smell's coming from. You need, and if you think about those different data domains, network, agent data, cloud data, user access data as domains as senses, it kind of gives you an idea of why those things are so intrinsically important to one another and why you need a holistic approach to really give you that complete view of the asset ecosystem. Can you share what, you talked about founding a company back in 2020 and why when you're in customer conversations or even partner ecosystem conversations, what is it that really differentiates Hubble in next-gen asset intelligence discovery? Yeah, so I think the first big thing is our approach to what an asset is and I think that really resonates with customers. The fact that we are a true platform that people can build on top of and leverage, you know, we have a lot of Fortune 500 customers that want to do new and different and interesting things that we haven't even imagined. And one of the most, I think, gratifying things for me as a founder when I see someone using our product is to find that someone is using a product in a way that we hadn't thought of ourselves, that they're being creative and innovating on top of the platform as well. And that really does help us set ourselves apart in the market. And then the third thing is a point that I made earlier which is about the actionability and insights that our data provides. We're not just giving you a list of assets, we're showing you how the assets interact with each other, how they relate to each other through a knowledge graph. And that really does enable security professionals to understand the relevance of an asset and why they should care about this asset versus perhaps this one over here that maybe isn't as important and why it's not as important. So knowledge graphs, interesting topic. Security's always been probably the best use case for data graphs and knowledge graphs. And I do think eventually they're going to find their way into broader use cases. But how are you using knowledge graphs? Tell us a little bit about the tech kind of behind Hubble. Yeah, so we have a multi-tiered approach. I would say that not every, something we learn is that not every problem is a graph problem. Sometimes you do just want flatten data in a normalized format, especially when you're, we integrate our data outbound as well into products like Splunk, security logging tools, and of course, MDR platforms. We released announced a partnership at Black Hat this year with an MSSP that is leveraging our data. And so, you know, they generally want the data in a simple to digest format. And so, yeah, we have a multifaceted approach that both uses graph technology. We also have a graph visualization which really allow, which brings the data to life. It really does allow operators to understand and visualize how assets relate and belong in a much bigger ecosystem of data, especially important when you're looking at things like the cloud, which is increasingly complex, highly ephemeral. And you have to ask quite complex questions if you want to find a way to ask them in a simple way. And we see a lot of opportunity in the future for AI on top of our knowledge graph to make it even easier for our customers to ask questions about our data. And you say, sometimes you want to flatten the data because presumably it's easier to query. Yeah, for sure. There will come a day, I think, when you'll get the expressiveness of a knowledge graph with the query flexibility of SQL. That day is coming, and that's going to make knowledge graphs explode. You've got another, we're at Cyberland, so you've got to have acronyms. I guess, chasm, cyber, asset, attack, surface management. What is that? And why do you need it? I wish I could answer that question for you. I think, you know, pick your security acronym and interview everyone here on the show floor, and you'll get a different answer, I think. I think, for us, chasm is the word that some of the early kind of next-genish players like Exonius were starting to use in the space. Gartner has been very intentional not to create a magic quadrant for chasm. They mentioned it in their hype cycle, which is why it's become kind of part of the lexicon. We feel that long-term, this is actually a capability that the entire organization, the entire enterprise can benefit from, not just cyber. We shouldn't be selfish with our asset data. We have an increasing number of CIOs that our customers are saying, hey, why does security have better data now than we do? And so we really do want to move the needle, not just in security as a cyber asset capability, but as an enterprise-wide play. Yeah, interesting. Security companies are treating cyber as a data problem, and we're seeing things like Falcon for IT, right? We can help you with our data. That makes a lot of sense, Tom, a lot of adjacencies. Last question, we have only about 30 seconds left for my producer, Gels, in my ear. I'd love to hear a customer story, even if you want to mention it by industry use case, but you think really shines the spotlight on those differentiators that you talked about. Yeah, absolutely. So we have a really fantastic local DC company, EAB, that we've been working with now for a couple of years. They're a reference for us. Amazing to work with. They were using some other technologies that tried to compete in this space. Those technologies were more focused on solving very specific problems, and they were based on agents, actually, discovery capabilities. And what happened, the pandemic happened, right? And all of a sudden, they had this great visibility because everyone's coming to the office and then everyone was working from home and the visibility just disappeared overnight. And so they realized they needed a product that had a much more holistic approach to data discovery. And now they're looking to us as well for cloud posture management. And so we've been able to grow with them as their needs have evolved. And I think that's really the essence of why a platform approach is so important and having that holistic approach. I'd like to have one more question. The inspiration behind the name. I'm seeing a very galactic theme on the website. Oh gosh, I'll see if I can give you a quick answer. So, you know, we've been involved with the World Economic Forum for a long time. We're a technology pioneer. We got that award last year from the forum. I was at a forum event maybe four years ago before I started the company. I was in Geneva and we were getting a tour of the Particle Collider and got a tour. They don't have tour guides. They have physicists that give you the tours. Wow. It was an expert in particle physics, dark matter, dark energy, and we were talking about the fact that we know about, you know, humans know about 20% of all matter in the universe. I said, well, how do we know it's 20%? If we can't see the 80%, how do we measure from, you know, A to B? Yeah. And it's because of course we can measure gravitational fields of the things that we can't see or don't necessarily understand, but we know there's something out there. And so I thought that was a really interesting metaphor for the security paradigm of measuring our assets, you know, where our IT environment begins and ends. And of course, Edwin Hubble was one of the first pioneers in that space of deep space exploration, discovering black holes and so forth. And that was the inspiration in the name. Amazing that you were able to get the name. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Tom, what a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for coming with us. What Hubble is doing, how you're partnering with CrowdStrike, really the benefits in it for customers across every industry. We really appreciate your insights. Yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you. All right, for our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live, day two of our coverage of CrowdStrike Falcon 23. Stick around. The CTO of CrowdStrike is up next with Dave and me. We'll see you in a minute.