 Good afternoon, guys and gals. Welcome back to the strip, Las Vegas. It's theCUBE live, day four of our coverage of AWS re-invent, Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante. Dave, we've had some awesome conversations the last four days. I can't believe how many people are still here. The AWS ecosystem seems stronger than ever. Yeah, last year we really noted the ecosystem, you know, coming out of the isolation economy because everybody had this old pent-up demand to get together, and the ecosystem, even last year we were like, wow, this year's like 10x wow. It really is 10x wow, it feels that way. We're going to have a 10x well conversation next. We're bringing back data stacks to theCUBE. Please welcome Thomas Bean, it's CMO. Thomas, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, thanks a lot, thanks a lot for having me. Great to have you. Talk to us about what's going on at Data Stacks. It's been a little while since we talked to you guys. Indeed, so Data Stacks, we are the real-time data company and we've always been involved in technology such as Apache Cassandra, who actually created to support and take this great technology to the market. And now we're taking it, combining it with all the technologies such as Apache Pulsar for streaming to provide a real-time data cloud, which helps our users, our customers, build applications faster, and help them scale without limits. So it's all about mobilizing all of this information that is going to drive the application, going to create the awesome experience when you have a customer waiting behind their mobile phone, when you need a decision to take place immediately, to that's the kind of data that we provide in the cloud, on any cloud, but especially with AWS, and providing the performance that technologies like Apache Cassandra are known for, but also with market-leading unit economics. So really empowering customers to operate at speed and scale. Speaking of customers, nobody wants less data slower. And one of the things I think we learned during the pandemic was that access to real-time data isn't nice to have anymore for any business. It is table stakes. It's competitive advantages. Somebody right behind in the rear-view mirror ready to take over. How has the business model of Datasux maybe evolved in the last couple of years with the fact that real-time data is so critical? Real-time data has been around for some time, but it used to be really niches. You needed a lot of people, a lot of funding actually to implement these applications. So we've adapted to really democratizing, making it super easy to access, not only to start developing, but also scaling. So this is why we've taken these great technologies, made them serverless, cloud-native on the cloud so that developers could really start easily and scale so that beyond project products could be taken to the market. Then in terms of customers, the patterns is we've seen enterprise customers, you were talking about the pandemic, the Home Depot as an example, was able to deliver a curbside pickup delivery in 30 days because they were already using Datasux and could adapt their business model with a real-time application that combines you were just driving by and you would get the delivery of what exactly you ordered without having to go into the other store. So they shifted their whole business model but we also see a real strong trend about customer experiences and increasingly a lot of tech companies coming because scale means success to them and building on our stack to build their applications. So it's interesting, Datastacks in theCUBE were started the same year, 2010 and that's when it was the beginning of the ascendancy of the big data era but of course back then there was very little cloud, I mean most of it was on-prem and so Datastacks, obviously you mentioned a number of things that you had to do to become cloud-friendly, a lot of companies didn't make it through, you guys just raised a bunch of dough as well last summer and so that's been quite a transformation both architecturally, bringing the customers through, I presume part of that was because you had such a great open-source community but also you have a unique value problem, maybe you could sort of describe that. Absolutely, so I'll start with the open-source community where we see a lot of traction at the moment, we were always very involved with Apache Cassandra but what we're seeing right now with Apache Cassandra is a lot of traction, beginning momentum, we actually, the open-source community just won an award, did an AMI, had a vote from their readers about the top open-source projects and Apache Cassandra and Apache Palsar were part of the top three, so which is great. We also run in collaboration with the Apache project, a series of events around the globe called Cassandra Days where we had tremendous attendance, some of them we had to change venue twice because there were more people coming, a lot of students, a lot of the big users of Cassandra like Apple, Netflix, we spoke at these events so we see this momentum actually picking up and that's why we're also super excited that the Linux Foundation is running the Cassandra Summit in March in San Jose, super happy to bring that even back with the rest of the community and we have big announcements to come. Apache Cassandra will see its next version with major advances such as the support of asset transactions which is going to make it even more suitable to more use cases so we'll bring that scale to more applications, a lot of momentum in terms of the open-source projects and to your point about the value proposition we take this great momentum to which we contribute a lot, it's not only about taking, it's about giving as well. Big committers, I mean. Exactly, big contributors and we also have a lot of expertise, we worked with all of the members of the community, many of them being our customers so going to the cloud, indeed it was architectural work making Cassandra cloud native, putting it on Kubernetes, having the right APIs for developers to easily develop on top of it but also becoming a cloud company, building customer success, our own platform engineering. It's interesting because actually we became like our partners in the community, we now operate Cassandra in the cloud so that all of our customers can benefit from all the power of Cassandra but really efficiently, super rapidly and also with the leading unit economics as I mentioned. How will the asset compliance affect your new markets, new use cases, expand your TAM, can you explain that? I think it will, more applications will be able to tap into the power of NoSQL. Today we see a lot on the customer experience as IoT gaming platform, a lot of SaaS companies but now with the ability to have transactions at the database level, we can, beyond providing information, we can go even deeper into the logic of the application so it makes Cassandra and therefore Astra which is our cloud service and even more suitable database we can address more even in terms of the transaction that the application itself will support. What are some of the business benefits that Cassandra delivers to customers in terms of business outcomes, helping businesses really transform? So Cassandra brings skill. When you have millions of customers, when you have millions of data points to go through to serve each of the customers, one of my favorite examples is PriceLine who runs entirely on our cloud service. You may see one offer but it's actually everything they know about you and everything they have to offer matched while you're refreshing your page. This is the kind of power that Cassandra provides but the thing to say about Apache Cassandra that used to be also a database that was a bit hard to manage and hard to develop with. This is why, as part of the cloud, we wanted to change these aspects, provide developers the API they like and need and what the application need, making it super simple to operate and super affordable, also cost effective to run. So the value to your point, it's time to market, you go faster, you don't have to worry when you choose the right database, you're not going to have to change horse in the middle of the river, like six months down the line and you know you have the guarantee that you're going to get the performance and also the best TCO, which matters a lot. I think the previous person talking was addressing it, that's also important, especially in the current context. As a managed service, you're saying that's the enabler there, right? Exactly. That is the model today. You have to really provide that for customers. They don't want to mess with all the plumbing, right? Absolutely, I don't think people want to manage databases anymore. We do that very well, we take SLAs and such and even at the developer level what they want is an API so they get all the power, all of this powered by Cassandra but now they get it and it's as simple as using as an API. How about the ecosystem? You mentioned the show in San Jose in March and the Linux foundation is saying hosting that, is that correct? Yes, absolutely. And what is it, Cassandra? Cassandra Summit. Cassandra Summit. What's the ecosystem like today in Cassandra? Can you just sort of describe that? Around Cassandra, you have actually the big hyperscalers. You have also a few other companies that are supporting Cassandra-like technologies and what's interesting and that's been something we've worked on but also the Apache project has worked on, working on a lot of the adjacent technologies, the data pipelines, all of the DevOps solutions to make sure that you can actually put Cassandra as part of your way to build these products and build these applications. So the ecosystem keeps on growing and actually the Cassandra community keeps on opening the database so that it's really easy to have it connect to the rest of the rest environment and we benefit from all of this in our Astra cloud service. So things like machine learning, governance tools, that's what you would expect in the ecosystem forming around it, right? So we'll see that in March. Machine learning is especially a very interesting use case. We see more and more of it. We recently did a nice video with one of our customers called Unifor who does exactly this using also our Astra cloud service. What they provide is they analyze videos of sales calls and they help actually the sellers telling them, okay, here's what happened, here was the customer sentiment because they have proof that the better the sentiment is, the shorter the cell cycle is going to be. So they teach the sellers on how to say the right things, how to control the thing. This is machine learning applied on video. Cassandra provides I think 200 data points per second that feeds this machine learning and we see more and more of these use cases, real time use cases. It happens on the fly when you're on your phone, when you have a fraud maybe to detect and to prevent. So there's going to be more and more and we see more and more of these integration at the open source level with technologies like even Feast or project like Apache Feast but also in the partners that we're working with integrating our service, Cassandra and our cloud service with. Where are customer conversations these days given that every company has to be a data company, they have to be able to democratize data, allow access to it deep into the organizations, not just IT or the data organization anymore but are you finding that the conversations are rising up the stack? Is this a C-suite priorities? Is this a board level conversation? So that's an excellent question. We actually ran a survey this summer called the state of the data race where we asked these tech leaders, okay what's the top of mind for you and real time actually was really one of the top priorities and they explained for the one that who call themselves digital leaders that for 71% of them they could correlate directly the use of real time data, the quality of their experience or their decision making with revenue and that's really where the discussion is and I think it's something we cannot relate to as users. We don't want the, I mean if the Starbucks apps take seconds to respond there will be a riot over there so that's something we can feel but it really now it's tangible in business terms and now then they take a look at their data strategy. Are we equipped? Very often they will see yeah we have pockets of real time data but we're not really able to leverage it for ML use cases et cetera so that's a big trend that we're seeing on one end on the other end what we're seeing and it's one of the things we discussed a lot at the event is that yeah cost is important, growth at all, at all costs does not exist so we see a lot of push on moving a lot of the workloads to the cloud to make them scale but at the best cost and we also see some organizations who are like okay let's not let a good crisis go to waste and let's accelerate our innovation not at all costs so that we see also a lot of new projects being pushed that are reasonable, starting small and growing and all of this fueled by real time data so interesting. The other big topic amongst the customer community is security, I presume it's coming up a lot what's the conversation like with data stacks? That's a topic we've been working on intensely since the creation of Astra less than two years ago and we keep on reinforcing as any cloud provider not only our own abilities in terms of making sure customers can manage their own keys et cetera but also integrating to the rest of the ecosystem when a lot of our customers are running on AWS how do we integrate with private link and such we fit exactly into their security environment on AWS and they use exactly the same management tool because this is also what used to cost a lot in the cloud services, how much do you have to do to wire them and manage and there are indeed compliance and governance challenges so that's why making sure that it's fully connected that they have full transparency on what's happening is a big part of the evolution. It's always security is always something you're working on but it's a major topic for us. Yep, we talk about that on pretty much every event security which we could dive into but we're out of time, last question for you. Yes. We're talking before we went live we're both big four in the one fans say data stacks has the opportunity to sponsor a team and you get the whole side pod to put like a phrase about data stacks on the side pod of this F1 car like a billboard, what does it say? Billboard, because an F1 car goes pretty fast will be hard to read but twice the performance I have to cost, try Astra, a cloud service. That's it. Awesome, Thomas, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. Pleasure having you guys on the program for our guest Thomas Bean and Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from day four of our coverage theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage.