 Hi, this is Anupartya and today we have with us Steven Tan, Chair of the Soda Foundation. First of all, welcome to the show. Thank you. Tell us a bit about what is Soda Foundation and what is in the name, what does Soda stand for? So let me explain what Soda stands for. OK, Soda stands for something about open data autonomy. You get it? Open data autonomy, ODA. Actually, we couldn't quite decide on what S stands for. So we call it Soda, actually. So it's Soda Open Data Autonomy. It's just like GNU, you know. Oh yeah, GNU is not unique, so. Yeah, right. So this is what it stands for, right. Tell us about the foundation itself. OK, yeah, this is a more important thing. The foundation is actually a collaboration among vendors and users to focus on data management for autonomous data management. And the point of this whole thing is that how do we serve the users? Because a lot of our users actually have a lot of data challenges. And that's what this foundation is for, to get users and vendors together to help to address these data challenges. What kind of data are we talking about? The data that we're talking about is referring to anything like data protection, data governance, data replication, data copy management, and stuff like that. And also data integration, how to connect to the different data silos and stuff. Right, but are we talking about enterprise data, or are we talking consumer data? Like there is a lot of data with Facebook, Google, and Gmail, and then there are a lot of enterprise data, which companies, sorry, as an enterprise, I might put something on this cloud. I can put on this cloud. So can you please clarify what data are we talking about? Actually, the data that we're talking about is it depends on the users. There are all kinds of data. For example, in the keynote that I gave two days ago, the data, the example I gave was from Toyota. So Toyota use case is actually car data. So car data refers to things like the car sensor data, videos, Mac data, and stuff. And then we have users like China Unicom. I mean, they have enterprise companies going to the cloud and so on. So they have all kinds of enterprise data over there. And then we also have other users like Yahoo Japan. They have a website. So the data that they're talking about is web data, consumer data, and stuff like that. So it's across the board. Oh, so it's not specific to an industry or any space sector, OK? But why do you need it? What is the problem that you see in the market and in the current sphere that you're like, hey, we should create something like that? So the problem that actually the problem that came, I mean, the reason why all these companies came together is because they are building data centers, from small to big. But a lot of the challenges that they have is hard for a single project to address. We have a specific problem, and then we need this to be solved and so on. It's not like that. A lot of it is like, how do you connect the different pieces together in the data center together? So there's nothing like, oh, no organization like that that can help them solve this kind of problem. How do you address things like taking care of data protection and data privacy at the same time? And at the same time, you want to make sure that this data can be governed properly. So there isn't any single organization that can help to take care of this kind of stuff. So we're helping these users understand their problems and then come together, and then we plan projects and roadmaps based on their problems and try to address them to these projects in the foundation. And you gave example of data from the cart and all this. Does that also mean that open source has helped solving a lot of problems by breaking down a lot of silos so that there's a lot of interaction between different silos, which were earlier separated and isolated? Today, as you mentioned, we are living in a data-driven world. No matter what we do, all the way from the ring to what we are doing right now, talking to each other to the product that we'll create in the end. But most of this data is living in their own silos. There may be a lot of value in the data which cannot be extracted because, one, it is locked into the silos. The second problem that these days, since data is kind of becoming the next oil, companies are trying to capture all the data irrespective of the fact of what value do they see in that data today. And by leveraging machine learning and deep learning, they can, in future, so how do you look at that? And how is Soda Foundation going to break those silos and without compromising on our privacy, yet allow companies? Because the fact is, as much as I prepare my privacy, I also want Google Maps to tell me the fastest route where I want to go. Right. So I think there are different levels of privacy that we can take care of. And in terms of, first of all, there are all kinds of different countries or different states or different provinces in different countries. There are different kind of regulations and so on. So first of all, the data silos you talk about, yes, that's one of the key problems that we're trying to solve. How do you connect all the different data silos such to reduced fragmentation, and then try to minimize the so-called dark data that you talk about? And then extract all the values over there. So that's one of the things that we try to get here. I mean, we try to connect all the different pieces. The data may be sitting in the edge in the data center or different data centers and in the cloud. We try to connect all these pieces together. I mean, that's one of the first things that we try to do. And then we try to have data policies. I think this is a critical piece of thing that a lot of the solutions out there are not trying to address. You have data policies, but it may be the data policies just for a single random solution. But once the data gets out of that solution, then it's out of control. So what we're trying to do here is how do you have data policies across different solutions? So no matter where the data is, it's governed the same way consistently. That's the key. So then you can talk about how can you really protect the data in terms of the privacy, or govern the data, or control the data? And in terms of, I mentioned about the regions, because so you know where the data is. And you know what are the kind of regulations that needs to be taken care of. And you apply it right there. That's how it should work. When we look at the kind of scenario you talked about, I see it is too full. Like, one is there is a technology problem that should be platform or technical solutions. And then second is also, I don't think it's the cultural, but it's more or less like people. Policy and all those things are more government driven. So there are two aspects of data. So is Soda Foundation going to deal with both? Or are you going to just deal with the technology aspect of it? The technology part that we talk about, we try to define in terms of the APIs and so on, right? To all the data policies and so on. And try to get as many companies to support this as possible. And then the next thing that we try to do is actually try to work with standards organizations to try to make this into a standard. I mean, that's what we're trying to do here. Yeah. And then government expects, there are certain organizations they are talking to. Like, there's the CESI, it's China electronic standards organizations they were talking to. They try to work things into their, actually I'm not sure about China because it's, I mean, it's, we don't know about their sphere of influence. I mean, we've been to CESI and so on. And then like for the industry standards, like there's a SNEAR, you know, IEEE and so on, we will try to work with them and see, I mean, try to get that work. Can you talk about the ecosystem that you are trying to build around Soda Foundation? One would be the participants who are actually contributing either the code or the vision and then the users community who would actually be benefiting from it. So the ecosystem that we are trying to build, the core part, which is actually the framework. So the framework, I mean, this part will be more of the data vendors or the storage vendors that will be involved in building, trying to build this ecosystem. And then the outer part of the, what I call the outer part of the ecosystem will be things like the platforms, you know, like things like Kubernetes, you know, VMware and all these different vendors. And then, you know, like networking kind of stuff that you need to take care of, like the big data analytics and stuff. And then for the users actually, if you can see it like from Soda and user advisory committee, I mean, that's where most of our users are participating in the communication. So most of these users, I mean, they are from different regions and different countries and different industries. So we try to serve, I mean, whoever, whichever participant is interested in participating in this thing. But the main thing is that, because they may be from different industries, but actually most of the issues that they have is still the same thing, you know? So, yeah. So there are some commonalities among all these users. We are in the middle of 2020 because of COVID-19, everything has slowed down, things have changed. What does your roadmap, what does your plan look like, you know, that the structure, the governance and the plan for 2021 or end of the year? We are very, what do you call it, a very community driven or focused kind of organization. We hold a lot of actually meetups and events and so on. And where we get together with the users and the vendors and so on and the community in general. So with this COVID-19 thing, a lot of the plans has been, you know, upset. I mean, it's chaos right now. So most of the things are, like what everybody is doing, moving online. So we are having some webinars and so on. Like even as of right now, when we are talking, we are having a mini summit going on with the open source summit North America right now. So for the rest of this year, most of our events will be online. We're gonna have some webinars and some meetups, you can find it out from our website. And the other plans that we have is that we are gonna have, we just released the soda ferro release, which is the 1.0 release. And through the end of this year, we're gonna have two more releases, the G release and the H release at the end of this year. G release is gonna be in September and H is in end of the year, right? And we're trying to engage our users with things like the POC testing for the ferro cause they should release that we have, we try to get them to do testing. And then, so that's the way of them trying to provide feedback to us, whether that works for them or how can we improve to make them, make the code work for what they need. Yeah. Awesome, Stu. Thank you so much for taking your time out and explaining more about Soda Foundation. And I'll for talk to you again because I can see that you have very exciting pipeline ahead. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much.