 Welcome to theCUBE's virtual coverage of Data Citizens 2022. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Laura Sellers, who's the Chief Product Officer at Calibra, the host of Data Citizens. Laura, welcome, good to see you. Thank you, nice to be here. Yeah, your keynote at Data Citizens this year focused on your mission to drive ease of use and scale. Now, when I think about historically fast access to the right data at the right time in a form that's really easily consumable, it's been kind of challenging, especially for business users. Can you explain to our audience why this matters so much and what's actually different today in the data ecosystem to make this a reality? Yeah, definitely. So I think what we really need, and what I hear from customers every single day is that we need a new approach to data management. And our product teams, what inspired me to come to Calibra a little bit over a year ago, was really the fact that they were very focused on bringing trusted data to more users across more sources for more use cases. And so as we look at what we're announcing with these innovations of ease of use and scale, it's really about making teams more productive in getting started with and the ability to manage data across the entire organization. So we've been very focused on richer experiences, a broader ecosystem of partners, as well as a platform that delivers performance, scale and security that our users and teams need and demand. So as we look at, oh, go ahead. I was going to say, when I look back at like the last 10 years, it was all about getting the technology to work and it was just so complicated, but please carry on. I'd love to hear more about this. Yeah, really, Calibra is a system of engagement for data and we really are working on bringing that entire system of engagement to life for everyone to leverage here and now. So what we're announcing from our ease of use side of the world is first our data marketplace. This is the ability for all users to discover and access data quickly and easily shopped for it, if you will. The next thing that we're also introducing is a new homepage. It's really about the ability to drive adoption and have users find data more quickly. And then the two more areas of the ease of use side of the world is our world of usage analytics. And one of the big pushes and passions we have at Calibra is to help with this data driven culture that all companies are trying to create and also helping with data literacy. With something like usage analytics, it's really about driving adoption of the Calibra platform, understanding what's working, who's accessing it, what's not. And then finally, we're also introducing what's called workflow designer. And we love our workflows at Calibra. It's a big differentiator to be able to automate business processes. The designer is really about a way for more people to be able to create those workflows, collaborate on those workflow flows, as well as people to be able to easily interact with them. So a lot of exciting things when it comes to ease of use to make it easier for all users to find data. Yes, there's definitely a lot to unpack there. You've mentioned this idea of shopping for the data. That's interesting to me. Why this analogy, metaphor analogy, I always get those confused. Let's go with analogy. Why is it so important to data consumers? I think when you look at the world of data and I talked about this system of engagement, it's really about making it more accessible to the masses. And what users are used to is a shopping experience like your Amazon, if you will. And so having a consumer grade experience where users can quickly go in and find the data, trust that data, understand where the data is coming from and then be able to quickly access it is the idea of being able to shop for it. Just making it as simple as possible and really speeding the time to value for any of the business analysts, data analysts out there. Yeah, I think you see a lot of discussion about rethinking data architectures, putting data in the hands of the users and business people, decentralized data. And of course, that's awesome. I love that. But of course, then you have to have self-service infrastructure and you have to have governance. And those are really challenging. I think so many organizations, they're facing adoption challenges. When it comes to enabling teams, generally, especially domain experts, to adopt new data technologies. Like the tech comes fast and furious. You got all these open source projects and get really confusing. Of course, it risks security, governance and all that good stuff. You got all this jargon. So where do you see the friction in adopting new data technologies? What's your point of view and how can organizations overcome these challenges? You're dead on. There's so much technology and there's so much to stay on top of, which is part of the friction, right? Is just being able to stay ahead of and understand all the technologies that are coming. You also look at as there's so many more sources of data and people are migrating data to the cloud and they're migrating to new sources. Where the friction comes is really that ability to understand where the data came from, where it's moving to, and then also to be able to put the access controls on top of it. So people are only getting access to the data that they should be getting access to. So one of the other things we're announcing with all of the innovations that are coming is what we're doing around performance and scale. So with all of the data movement, with all of the data that's out there, the first thing we're launching in the world of performance and scale is our world of data quality. It's something that Calibra has been working on for the past year and a half, but we're launching the ability to have data quality in the cloud. So it's currently a non-premise offering, but we'll now be able to carry that over into the cloud for us to manage that way. We're also introducing the ability to push down data quality into snowflakes. So this is, again, one of those challenges is making sure that data that you have is high quality as you move forward. And so really another, we're just reducing friction. You already have snowflakes stood up. It's not another machine for you to manage. It's just push down capabilities into snowflake to be able to track that quality. Another thing that we're launching with that is what we call Calibra Protect. And this is that ability for users to be able to ingest metadata, understand where the PII data is, and then set policies up on top of it. So very quickly be able to set policies and have them enforced at the data level. So anybody in the organization is only getting access to the data they should have access to. There's topic of data quality is interesting. It's something that I've followed for a number of years. It used to be a back office function and really confined only to highly regulated industries like financial services and healthcare and government. You look back over a decade ago, you didn't have this worry about personal information, GDPR and California Consumer Privacy Act, all of it comes so much important. The cloud has really changed things in terms of performance and scale. And of course partnering with Snowflake, it's all about sharing data and monetization, anything but a back office function. So it was kind of smart that you guys were early on and of course attracting them as an investor as well was very strong validation. What can you tell us about the nature of the relationship with Snowflake? I'm specifically interested in sort of joint engineering and product innovation efforts, beyond the standard go to market stuff. Definitely. So you mentioned there were a strategic investor in Calibra about a year ago, a little less than that, I guess we've been working with them though for over a year really tightly with their product and engineering teams to make sure that Calibra is adding real value. Our unified platform is touching pieces of Snowflake and when I say that, what I mean is, we're first able to ingest data with Snowflake, which has always existed. We're able to profile and classify that data. We're announcing with Calibra Protect this week that you're now able to create those policies on top of Snowflake and have them enforced. So again, people can get more value out of their Snowflake more quickly as far as time to value with our policies for all business users to be able to create. We're also announcing Snowflake Linux We're also announcing Snowflake Lineage 2.0. So this is the ability to take stored procedures in Snowflake and understand the lineage of where did the data come from? How was it transformed within Snowflake as well as the data quality pushdown, as I mentioned. Data quality, you brought it up, it is a new, it is a big industry push. And one of the things I think Gartner mentioned is people are losing up to $15 million without having great data quality. So this pushdown capability for Snowflake really is again, a big ease of use push for us that Calibra of that ability to push it into Snowflake, take advantage of the data source and the engine that already lives there and make sure you have the right quality. I mean, the nice thing about Snowflake, if you play in the Snowflake sandbox, you can get sort of a high degree of confidence that the data sharing can be done in a safe way, bringing Calibra into the story allows me to have that data quality and that governance that I need. We've said many times on theCUBE that one of the notable differences in cloud this decade versus last decade, I mean, there are obvious differences just in terms of scale and scope, but it's shaping up to be about the strength of the ecosystems. That's really a hallmark of these big cloud players. I mean, it's a key factor for innovating, accelerating product delivery, filling gaps in the hyperscale offerings because you've got more mature stack capabilities and it creates this flywheel momentum as we often say. But so my question is, how do you work with the hyperscalers like whether it's AWS or Google, whomever? And what do you see as your role and what's the Calibra sweet spot? Yeah, definitely. So, one of the things I mentioned early on is the broader ecosystem of partners is what it's all about. And so we have that strong partnership with Snowflake. We also are doing more with Google around, you know, GCP and Calibra Protect there, but also tighter data flex integration. So similar to what you've seen with our strategic moves around Snowflake and really covering the broad ecosystem of what Calibra can do on top of that data source. We're extending that to the world of Google as well in the world of data flex. We also have great partners in SI's emphasis as somebody we spoke with at the conference who's done a lot of great work with Levi's as they're really important to help people with their whole data strategy and driving that data-driven culture and Calibra being the core of it. Hi, Laura, we're going to end it there, but I wonder if you could kind of put a bow on, you know, this year, the event, your perspectives and just give us your closing thoughts. Yeah, definitely. So I want to say this is one of the biggest releases Calibra's ever had, definitely the biggest one since I've been with the company a little over a year. We have all these great new product innovations coming to really drive the ease of use to make data more valuable for users everywhere and companies everywhere. And so it's all about everybody being able to easily find, understand and trust and get access to that data going forward. Well, congratulations on all the progress. It was great to have you on theCUBE first time, I believe, and really appreciate you taking the time with us. Yes, thank you for your time. You're very welcome. Okay, you're watching the coverage of Data Citizens 2022 on theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.