 Good afternoon everybody, I'm John Walls, and welcome back to our coverage here on the Cube of AWS ReInvent 22. We are bringing you another segment with the Global Startup Program, which is part of the AWS Startup Showcase, and it's a pleasure to welcome two new guests here to the showcase. First, immediately to my right, Han Nguyen-Lokvin, good to see you, Han. Good to see you. The leader of the Enterprise Solutions Architecture at AWS, and on the far right, Roland Lee, who was the co-founder and CEO of Heimdall Data. Roland, good to see you. Great to be here. All right, good, thanks for joining us. Well, first off, for those at home that might not be familiar with Heimdall, what do you do? Why are you here? But I'll let you take it from there. Well, we're one of the sponsors here at AWS, and great to be here. We offer a data access layer in the form of a proxy, and what it does is it provides complete visibility and the capability to enhance the interaction between the application and one's current database. And as a result, the customer will improve database scale, database security, and availability. And all these features don't require any application changes. So that's sort of our marketing pitch, if you will. All these types of features to improve the experience of managing a database without any application changes. And where's the cloud come into play then for you then? Where did it come into play for you? So we started out actually helping out customers on-premise, and a lot of enterprise customers are moving over to the cloud, and it was just a natural progression to do that. And so AWS, which is a key part of ours, partners with us to help solve customer problems, especially on the database side, as the application performance tends to have issues between the interaction between the application database, and we're solving that issue. So, Han, I mean, Roland just touched on it, that on-prem, right? There's still some kickers and screamers out there that haven't bought in, or they're about to, but you're about to get them, I'm sure. But talk about that conversion or that transition if you were going on-prem into a hybrid environment or into the bigger cloud environment, and how difficult that is sometimes, maybe to get people to make that kind of a leap. Well, I would say that a lot of customers are wanting to focus more on product innovation, experimentation, and also in terms of having to manage servers and patching, it's to take away from that initiative that they're trying to do. So with AWS, we provide under differentiated, heavy lifting so that they can focus on product innovation, and one of the areas we're talking about Heimdall is that from the database side, we do provide Amazon RDS, which is the relational database, and also Aurora to give them that lift, so they don't have to worry about patching servers and setting up provisioning servers as well. So, Roland, can you get the idea across to people very simply, let us take care of the hard stuff, and that will free you up to do your product innovations, to do your experimentations, to really free up your team, basically, to do the fun stuff, and let us sweat over the details, basically, right? Exactly. Our motto is not only why build when you can buy, so a lot of it has to do with offering the value in terms of price and the features, such as going to benefit a team. Large companies like Amazon.com, Google, they have huge teams that can build data access layers and proxies, and what we're trying to do here is commercialize those, because those are built in-house, and it's not readily available for customers to use, and you need some type of interface between the application and the database, and we provide that sort of why build when you can buy. Well, I was going to say why handle, right? I mean, what's your special sauce? Because everybody's got something, obviously a market differentiator that you're bringing into place here, so you start to touch on a little bit there for me, but dive a little deeper there. I mean, what is it that you're bringing to the table with AWS that you think puts you above the crowd? Well, let me give you a use case here. In typical events like, let's say, Black Friday, where there's a surge in traffic that can overwhelm the database, the Heimdall data access layer database proxy provides an auto-scaling distributed architecture such that it can absorb those surges in traffic and helps scale the database while keeping the data fresh and up to date, and so basically traffic based on season, time of day, we can adjust automatically, and all these types of features that we offer, most notably automated query caching, read, write, split for asset compliance, don't require any code changes, which typically requires the application developer to make those changes, so we're saving months, maybe years of development and maintenance. Yeah, a lot of gray hairs too, right? Yeah, you're solving a lot of problems there. What about database trends just in general, Han, if you went, I mean, this is your space, right? I mean, what we're hearing about from Heimdall in terms of solutions they're providing, but what are you seeing just from the macro level in terms of what people are doing and thinking about the database and how it relates to the cloud? Right, and some of the things that we're seeing is that we're seeing an explosion of data, relevant data that customers need to be able to consume and also process as well, so with the explosion of data, there's also, we see customers trying to modernize their application as well through microservices, which does change the design patterns of, like the applications we call the access data patterns as well, so again, going back to that and differentiated heavy lifting, we do have something called purpose built databases, right, it's the right tool for the right purpose, and so it depends on what they're like, RPO, RTO, their access data pattern, is it a base, is it an asset, so we want to be able to provide them the options to build and also innovate, so with that, that's why we have the Amazon RDS, the, also the, we also have Redshift, we also have Aurora and et cetera, the Redshift is more of the BI side, but usually when you ingest the data, you have some level of processing to get more insight, so with that, that's why customers are moving more towards the managed service, so that they can give that lift and then focusing on that product innovation. Yeah, and we kind of caught up, or are we catching up to this, just this tsunami of data to begin with, right, because that was it, you know, what, seven, eight years ago, when that data became kind of, or becoming king, and reams and reams and reams and all, you know, can't handle it, right, and are we now able to manage that process and manage that flow and get the right data into the right hands at the right time? We're doing better with that. I would say that it actually has grown in size of the amount of data that we're ingesting, and so with the scalability and agility of the cloud, we're able to, I would say, adapt to the rapid changes and ingestions of the data, so that's why we have things like Aurora Serverless to have that, or AutoScale, so they can do, like, MySQL or Postgres, and then they can still, like, what, you know, what we're trying to do, is basically they don't have to do any code changes, it would be a data migration, they still use the same underlying database and also mechanisms, but here we're providing them at scale on the cloud. Yeah, our proxies they must have for all databases, I mean, is that essential these days? Well, good question, John, I would say yes, and this is often built in-house, as I mentioned, for large companies, they do build some type of data access layer or proxy, and or some, utilize some ORM, some object relational mapper to do it, and again, what we're trying to do is offer this, put this out into the market commercially speaking, such that it can be readily used for all the customers to use, rather than building it from scratch all the time. You know what I didn't ask you, how does AWS come into play for you, then and as in the startup mode, the focus that they've had in startups in general, but in you in particular, I mean, talk about that partnership or that relationship and the value that you're extracting from that. The AWS partnership has been absolutely wonderful, the collaboration, they have one of the best managed service databases, the value that it adds in terms of the durability, the manageability, what the Heimdall data does is it complements Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift very well, in the sense that we're not replacing the database, what we're doing is we're allowing the customer to get the most out of the managed service database, whether it be Redshift or Aurora, serverless, RDS, all without code changes, and the analogy that I would give, John, is a race car may be very fast, but it takes a driver to get to those fast speeds. We're the driver. The Heimdall proxy provides that intelligence so that you can get the most out of that database engine. And Han, if you would then touch on, first off, AWS and the emphasis that you have put on startups and are obviously kind of putting your money where your mouth is, right? With the way you've encouraged and nurtured that environment, and they would be about Heimdall in general about where you see this going or what you would like to have, where you want to take this in the next, say, 12 months, 18 months. Well, I think it's more of a better together story of how we can basically co-build with our partners, right? And basically in focusing on helping our customers drive that innovation and collaboration. So as Heimdall as an independent service vendor, ISV, most customers can leverage that through a marketplace where it basically integrates very nicely with AWS so that gives them that lift. And it goes back to the undifferentiated heavy lifting on the Heimdall proxy side, if you will, because then you have this proxy in the middle where then it helps them with their SQL performance. And I've seen use cases where customers will have some legacy system that they may not have time to modernize the application. So they use this as a lift to keep going as they try to modernize. But also I've seen customers who use, are trying to use it as a way to give that performance lift because they may have a third party software that they cannot change the code by putting this in there that helps optimize their aligns of business or whatever that is, maybe it can be online store or whatever. So I would say it was a better together type of story. Yeah, which is, there's got to be a song in there somewhere. So peek around the corner, and if you want to be headlights here right now, in terms of 12, 18 months, I mean what next to solve, right? You've slayed a few dragons all in the way, but there are others I'm sure as it always happens in innovation in this space. Just when you solve a problem, you just dealt or you have to deal with others that pop up as maybe unintended consequences or at least a new challenge. So what would that be in your world right now? What do you see occupying your sleepless nights here for the next year or so? Well for Heimdall data, it's all about improving database performance and scale. And those workloads change. We have OLTP, we have OLAP with the Art of Industrial Intelligence, ML. There's different type of traffic profiles and we're focused on improving those data profiles. It could be unstructured, structured. Right now we're focused on structured data, which is relational databases, but there's a lot of opportunity to improve the performance of data. Well you're driving the car, you got a good navigator. I think the GPS is working. So keep up the good work and thank you for sharing the time today. Thank you, Joey. You appreciate it. All right, you are watching theCUBE. We continue our coverage here from AWS, Rain Event 22, theCUBE of course, the leader in high tech coverage.