 Welcome to the special CUBE conversation here in the Palo Alto studio. I'm excited to be with Jeff Jonas, who's the co-founder and CEO of Sensing, launching the killer product, the missing link in data, coming out of Stealth for the first time, announcing today on International Privacy Day, their product, their company, their opportunity. Jeff, this is what everyone's been waiting for. It is. So launch, launch, go. Okay, here's the deal. This new law in the EU, GDPR, affects not only every EU company, but every multinational company that have EU citizens in it. Companies are scrambling, this law goes into effect May 25th, companies are scrambling to put into place GDPR compliance processes. And let me just give you an example of what is involved in GDPR, just a taste. Citizens have rights to get access to the data. They can come to a company and go, hey, tell me what you know about me. Then they can say, we want you to rectify things and fix things. They can opt in and out of things, you know, preferences. And they have this right to be forgotten. They call it right to erasure in the law. It says, you have to not only flag me as, you don't want me, you have to actually take me out of the data. And so companies are preparing for this, but there's this one particular missing link that has been missed. And that is, they're not going to be able to reliably find the data about the people. And I'll just tell you why. So you get this request, right? Liz Reston, what do you know about me? So they've got to search the customer database or databases, the loyalty club database, the marketing database or databases. Maybe they were never a customer, but they were in the warranty database because they were gifted a product. Will they remember to search the human resources database because they had a job and were terminated three years ago? They remember to search that database. So there's so many databases. One of the challenges is, how will they remember to search every database? And then they've got to search for Liz and Elizabeth and Beth. Muhammad has a dozen or more name spellings included, including MUHD. How is somebody going to remember to search all these databases with all these variations? They're not going to find the data. All right, so let's back up. So for people who aren't tech savvy to the old school database training that we've been through one of my degrees is in database in the 80s and my CS degree, it doesn't work that easy. It sounds good on paper by just checking some boxes and opting out of things. But I mean, that's not how databases work. They're like, they're over here, they're over there. They don't talk to each other. There's no intelligence of any kind. And so the sprawl was what these companies have is sprawl. So we all know Facebook when you select settings. Not only my friends can see this, that makes sense for a user, but the backend complexity is off the charts and you know that. So this is the challenge that you're saying that how do I, one, get the data? Is the data available and can I find it? Can they find it? I mean, one example I would give you is it would be like going to the library and having somebody say, hey, what books do you have on me? And what they do is the person looking goes through every aisle looking at every shelf to find the book. Like how reliable would that be to locate it? And so this is really going to be the missing link because organizations aren't going to be able to comply if they can't find the record. Okay, so the market opportunity is obviously data. So you're sending things, bringing a data platform to it and you're launching it on International Privacy Day. That's important as we're talking about it because what does that relates to G2, your launch six years ago? Yeah, so I started the G2 Skunkworks Project on IBM nine years ago. Two and a half years after that in 2012, we announced to the world that it existed. We spent two and a half years building it secretly but we announced it on International Privacy Day six years ago to the day. So a little bit, Senator Dibbis, for you get back on the same day. What is the product called? What's the name? What's the business model? How are you going to get paid? Yeah. How does someone buy it? Yeah, it's G2 for GDPR. Organizations download the software, it's not a SaaS service. There's no, it doesn't run in the cloud. No more data is flowing to us. They instantly can go extract data from Salesforce.com, MailChimp, WooCommerce, Stripe, from their contact list. I did this myself for Sensing. I took all these different source systems and exported all my customer data and then ingested it into my G2 for GDPR that I've been beta testing and it gives you instant single subject search. It's like now going to the library and say what do we know about Jeff Jonas? And it's also checking Jeffrey Jonas, Jeff Jonas transposed, various spellings, you know. And it gives you a little directory. So what does it run on? Does it run on, obviously hardware, it needs a server? That's run on hardware. It needs compute power. What are the requirements? Yeah, we have two additions. We have an enterprise edition Linux or Windows. It's meant for, if you have a lot of records, it's APIs, it's for programmers and you integrate it with your existing systems. That's really for bigger businesses and that'll be a good part of our business but we're really trying to democratize the capability and so we've been working really hard building a workbench around our G2 APIs for the small and medium business that have 10 to 250 employees. That runs on Windows, 10 million records or less, CSV files, you just export data from CSVs and in minutes you end up with single subject search right on as a single user desktop app and we are pricing this to be affordable. What does that mean, million? Download, click a button, swipe a credit card and pay at starting price of 399 a month. So it's a recurring model, not the big upfront license. That's right. No professional services are involved. That's right. Can you do professional service or are you not even going to offer that? Right now we are servicing everybody at no fee, for no fee. So that's early adopters. But how many customers do you think you're going to be getting out of this? It's really hard to say. I've run some numbers. If you look at the European market, just five largest EU countries, there are 17, there's about 15 million, 16 million small and medium business companies under 250 employees. And is this GDPR applied to all businesses or certain kinds of businesses? Every business that would have data about a citizen. So if you have one employee or one customer in Europe, then GDPR would read on you. And the penalties are pretty significant, weren't they? I don't even remember if it's like a percentage of your revenue. Yeah, it's like 4% of revenue is insane. It's really serious. And we are hearing from at least former privacy commissioners who are talking to the regulators that they're really going to make sure companies comply. And what they're doing is they're going to these companies and they're saying you had a lot of time. You knew this was coming. What have you done? And we actually hope to approve to be, not just a checkbox, but allow a company to literally in the day they visit our website and download our software, they literally can prove they're actually doing something towards high quality compliance. You're also a hedge for them. Look, we hired sensing. We're good. Yeah, we've done something. Next hurdle? It will really be one of the most affordable things they can do to improve the quality of their outcomes. Talk about the technology impact of this GDPR. Basically, it's a fancy word for saying I wanted to have the rights as a citizen to know about my data and do things with it and change it around. Talk about the challenging, why it's so hard to make it happen. Just on the front end, you think everything's a user interface, looks beautiful. It must be so easy in the back end just to throw a switch and all my data is gone. It's because one big database of all things, it's just, it's all there. But that's not really how it works. Talk about why it's so freaking hard to comply. What's the real reasons? The technical reason, what are the technology reasons, product reasons, culture reasons? Well, one of the hardest things to comply with GDPR is you have to be able to find the data that you have. And as you get to a larger company, it's difficult to even discover all the sources. My company running in stealth. While we've had real customers up till now, we've been stealth, as small as the company is, we are shocked every now and then, I go, oh, there's another data source where I've got customer data. Just imagine a company that's been around 15 years. Someone comes in, builds a department, a new guy comes in, they go to a new database vendor. Just there's all kinds of reasons. So it's really a hard problem. It is a hard problem. Problem one is like radar, you're trying to find where the data lives. But once you find where the data lives and you realize there's so many places, how on earth is somebody going to go actually search it all? Now, is the GDPR about this data request a app-specific question or company? You're making it sound like it's a company thing. So I'm a user, I say, hey, evil corporation, what do you know about me? Is that a legit query? Or is it more of I use your app, and so? No, that's a legit query. You can go to a company and just say, what do you know about me? Like, do they file a claim? Is it like, oh, is it an app-specific thing? Well, how organizations present it to people is going to vary. They're going to vary it. They're going to make it hard as hell because they don't want people filing claims. Well, they have to accept those claims. Some of them might just email it to a support line and they're probably going to have to deal with it, you know? But certainly larger, more mature companies will have webpages that say, here's a way to make your requests. So companies are going to be scrambling. They're going to be looking for the aspirin. You're going to be there. What's the tech under the covers? What's, why is this so powerful? Obviously G2, you've been doing it for years at IBM, your Trek rigging and the product side's obviously impeccable. But what's specifically about this product with respect to the problem you're solving? Why is it so strong? Yeah, what's unique is that the core technology is known as entity resolution. It's figuring out who is who in your data. Traditionally, with all the other products that we can see on the market and the products that I've been working on over the years, you need an expert to help you get it going. You've got to load some data, train it, tune it, reload it, train it, tune it. And it takes a few, it can take a few months and you have to have an expert. With a specialist? Yeah, with an expert. And what we've really been working on in one of the goals of G2 is to allow the system to be self-tuning and self-correcting. It's a form of real-time machine learning. As it's loading and learn stuff, it instantly fixes the path. So you don't have to reload it. And there's no need for an expert. It's, the expert is built in the box. So you basically import data in through APIs or downloads? On our enterprise edition, you connected on APIs. On our workbench edition, you just pointed to CSV file. Got it, and brings it in. Yeah, just brings it in. It automaps a whole bunch of really popular applications. So what's the plans on the launch? Obviously, May is the big deadline for the GDPR compliance. Competition, who's out there? What do you see? Well, as of the moment, we are told by folks who have been tracking the space that were the first to be out there talking about the missing link and figuring out who is who. I don't think we're going to see anytime soon. I'll make a claim. I don't think we're going to see anytime soon people doing kind of real-time entity resolution without an expert. It's just really, really hard to do that. We had to start completely over nine years ago and it's taken years to get it really scalable to be that easy to use. And if you can't make it this easy to use, you can't democratize the price. And that's the key. What are some competitive prices would be if this was like a normal company that went on a maximize? It's very difficult to get something like this quality of technology for less than a quarter of a million. And typically you will spend closer to a million for the software not counting the experts. And the special services will be off the charts as well? Off the charts, yeah. And I've been doing that over the years. We've been part of that. We've been selling systems and it was hard and it just took a complete fresh rewrite ground up. New patents that I built for IBM around this. So it didn't have to have the experts. Is IBM going to be a go-to-market partner for you? Absolutely. They're going to be selling it? Yeah, we have all kinds of great partnership things that we're doing with IBM. Is it exclusive? No, we don't do any exclusives. We're going to be like number two pencil salesman, right? So we're really going to let the world, you can't democratize, you can't do what we're doing with price and then give somebody an exclusive. But we've got great partnerships with IBM. We're already selling. And you know everyone there, sales channels are phenomenal. It's just fantastic. I'm just recently, last few weeks on their last earnings call, announced the first quarter of great revenue growth. So IBM is great. Okay, so what's up for you? What's the, you know, do the world tour on this thing? What's happening? Yeah, you know, we're going to start telling the world that we exist. Up to now we've been working really hard to keep it under wraps. And now we're going to really tell the world what we're doing and people are going to find out they have access to entity resolution, easy and affordable and GDPRs first. Customer onboarding, sales. How's that going to happen? We're going to tell people where we are on the web. We think we're going to get a lot of our businesses going to be organic. They're going to download it and try it. And they're going to get- So word of mouth marketing and just kind of just- Social media. Social media. You know, we're going to pay for advertising. I got a nice advertising budget to really pay to make sure people know about us. We're going to do a lot of media work. There's a lot of folks in the privacy community. I've been really working with the privacy community for years now, building privacy enhancing technology. And this is our showcase product around- And you got the window right now to May. So this is a, you know, not to sound the wrong way, but I mean, in this case, the better mousetrap is perfect for this deal. I mean, the GDPR needs the missing link. You are the missing link to the GDPR for a lot of companies. Yeah, we really are the missing link. It's a great tagline, but it's also totally true. Yeah, evolution of data, missing link. You can really kind of make some good themes with that. Yeah, yeah, you think, right? What about monkeys? I won't go there. Jeff, great to see you. Thanks for sharing on theCUBE here, the launch of your company and product and G2 for GDPR. Yeah, you got it, man. All right. Special CUBE coverage announcing the launch of Sensing with Jeff Jonas, co-founder and CEO, missing link in GDPR. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.