 Welcome back to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re-invent 2021. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. We are running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events of the year with AWS and its ecosystem partners. We have two live sets, two remote sets and over a hundred guests on the program talking about the next decade in cloud innovation. I'm pleased to welcome John Baki, Chief Revenue Officer for MariaDB as my next guest. John, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me, Lisa. Talk to me a little bit about MariaDB. What makes it unique? What differentiates it? What gaps in the market does it address? Yeah, so we have a lot of passion here at MariaDB because we are at the end of the day with a backbone of services used by people every day all over the world. In fact, you might not realize that but you've probably hit a MariaDB database in the past 60 minutes, it's true. For example, if you're using a Samsung mobile phone we provide data services for the Samsung cloud. In fact, we've provided services for 5G networks all over the globe. And so at the end of the day we actually process trillions of transactions per day and I think that's really cool. Awesome, talk to me a little bit about the key problems. You mentioned Samsung, big fan, lots of Samsung devices in the house. Talk to me about some of the key problems that MariaDB SkySQL specifically solves for customers. What are they coming to you looking for them, looking for help for? Yeah, so we launched SkySQL and AWS earlier this year it's become wildly popular. And so SkySQL overcome some of the limitations of the cloud, 1.0, 2.0 era. In fact, we went from having zero customers to a slew of customers in just a short period of time. There are a ton of pent up demand from MariaDB and distributed SQL in particular and that's our expand product. And where Samsung uses expand use it to store data for the phones just like you might if you're an iPhone user on the iCloud they have the Samsung Cloud. So what we do is we provide expanding database services for them for a large user base across the globe. And they do that because they just can't get the scale out of some of the community databases that are offered by the major CSPs. And obviously that scale is critical. We've seen so much change in the last year and a half, two years with growth with acceleration to cloud acceleration of digital. Talk to me about what you've seen as the CRO of the company from a customer lens perspective. How has the last 20 months really affected acceleration adoption of Maria's technologies? Yeah, so, you know, I'm a geek at heart. I grew up in the database business. In fact, I've been in the database business for 30 years and during the last 20 months during the pandemic and even before that really, you know companies like MariaDB strive to create a beautiful database and what it really is a beautiful database. It's a database that is flush with features that make applications work lightweight, portable and fast for the cloud, but still reliable and familiar so that application developers can use it for multiple workloads. So when it comes to, you know, the database industry we're still going after those characteristics and we provide world-class support. My team just rocks it for our customers and it's really important to them to get that. And at the end of the day, our costs while at the end of the day, we're the least expensive. So it really is a beautiful database and we're very proud of it. Beautiful databases. That's the least expensive. That sounds like music to probably a lot of companies ears. Talk to me about where it runs. Obviously AWS, you mentioned SkySQL was launched earlier this year on AWS. That's correct, yeah. Talk to me a little bit more about the capabilities there, the partnership that Maria and AWS have, what you bring to your customers. Yeah, so we have a great partnership with AWS. They provide the tremendous levels of support to help startups like MariaDB get going, the SaaS factory and everything about their go-to-market strategy to enable partners like us. But you know, we have a customer that is, well, it's their major trading application on the internet and they were an AWS customer, right? So they were an existing AWS customer but they were struggling with some of the community databases in AWS to find that scale and that elasticity that they were looking for on their platform. So enter MariaDB expand where we can scale a relational database out far and wide to make it possible for a customer like that who's really pushing the limits of what a database needs to do to remain an AWS customer. So in this particular case, we worked with AWS to land them on SkySQL and use expand the distributed database technology. So we went together and that's a really great story for everybody. Talk to me about some of the technical requirements as we've seen so much change in the last 20 months, as I said, but so much growth and scale and needs are changing so dynamically. What are some of the key technical requirements of a database to keep up with that? And how does MariaDB exhibit those? Yeah, that's a great question. So in distributed SQL in particular which I see is sort of the next wave of database particularly in the cloud, right? The database needs to leverage familiar application paradigms like relational and document databases do and connection protocols so that existing applications connect to those. But at the end, they have to be highly scalable for the cloud by design and highly available in the cloud by design. Expand just screens. It's really fast. It's really reliable and transactional integrity is inherent to the architecture. So our customers love it. And so really what's not to love about a database that does all of those things. What's not to love about a beautiful database, that speed, I mean, the speed is critical. I think one of the many things that we've learned in the last interesting couple of years of our lives is that real time is no longer a nice to have, right? Nobody wants less data slower. That ability to deliver real time data, real time analytics is critical for businesses in any company as we're seeing and you're probably seeing this as a Sierra every company becoming a software company. Or you too. Absolutely, in fact, yeah. So some of our biggest customers are major SaaS providers. So if you work for a business that is using ServiceNow, one of the largest SaaS companies in the world, you're using MariaDB every day. Billions and billions of transactions by ServiceNow on an hourly basis. And it's all in the cloud. So when we look at how we've evolved to this point, we're offering services to companies big and small. We're being tested by companies like ServiceNow in their infrastructure on a regular basis. What are some of the trends that you're seeing as we end 22 months or so in this pandemic? What are some of the market trends that you're seeing from a scalability perspective? And what is it that a distributed SQL database can deliver to help customers meet those trends? Well, certainly, I think when you look at what is a good database for the cloud and the future, it really does need to have the features that make applications work. So you had mentioned, analytical databases and transactional databases. One thing that is inherent to our strategy is the ability to use hybrid approach to transactional and analytical. Because a lot of applications are both at the end of the day and why use two different databases in order to get there, right? Our databases lightweight and fast, it's portable, it's reliable and familiar to the customer and versatile in the workload. So those are the things that are trending at the conclusion of sort of this year going into next year as we roll out more technology in subsequent versions, we'll just enhance those capabilities, make it possible for even more and more workloads to find their way into SkySQL. And talk about the adoption of cloud, the acceleration. We've been talking about that a lot in the last year and a half about the acceleration of digital transformation, the acceleration to cloud. I mean, it was so critical for so many businesses, especially if you think of the SaaS adoption, the collaboration tools. But what are some of the things that you're saying? How are you helping customers on that migration journey? Yeah, so migration is a key element there. I mean, there are customers leading older proprietary database technology. There are customers trying to enhance their cloud experience and go from the early cloud databases up to more modern architectures. And so migration is a constant activity that we work with our customers on. And so over the years, just as a matter of course, we've become better and better at getting database workloads from proprietary older databases, and even other open source databases on-term radioDB so that we can consume those workloads and get those in the cloud and make them work for customers better than they ever have before. And I'm curious as the Chief Revenue Officer, how your customer conversations have evolved in the last year or so. Where is cloud database security? Where are those things with respect to the level of conversations that you're having with customers? And is that conversation going up the stack? Yeah, so, I mean, security has always been a key cornerstone of the database industry. Really, when you think about it, databases, information assurance and confidentiality is a key tenant to information security and information assurance in general. So it's always an ever-present in the discussion. MariaDB is enhancing its list of compliance that we've gone through like SOC2. We're on the precipice of that. We've got ISO certifications and we have US Department of Defense install guides that are secure for MariaDB, all sorts of activity around that to make it possible for customers to standardize on MariaDB. We have customers that have taken out every ounce of their legacy relational database, the older incumbents and replace that with lighter weight MariaDB because we have the security qualifications. But we also meet their functional needs and their information assurance needs. And so that's what's made us really successful. In addition to compliance, you talked about this database being beautiful. You described what you meant by that, but also you said it's least expensive. So I'm wondering from a business outcome perspective, are customers all across the board reducing TCO, leveraging MariaDB? Absolutely. And in cases where we displace a proprietary database, the TCO can reduce by as much as 90%. And so it's very attractive to customers that are looking for the next wave. Not only do we take them to a lower cost, but we bring them to a more modern multi-cloud architecture. So AWS is our primary focus for certain in this conversation, but also just generally because they're such in a huge install base. But they do like the option of being able to say, hey, I can use this database on any cloud. It works everywhere. And the vendor that makes it is supporting it in all environments. So for us, that's a huge strong point in terms of what makes our business strong. And we're seeing so much, we're talking so much about hybrid, hybrid IT, hybrid cloud, hybrid work from anywhere environments. So I imagine MariaDB runs on, we obviously AWS Azure Google Cloud Platform so that customers that are in that multi-cloud world and those that will be can take advantage of the services. That's correct. That enters in our near-term pipeline, our roadmap for the cloud, but we're already present in GCP and we're available on other clouds as well. Excellent. So talk to me a little bit about what customers can do. Can they test out MariaDB? Can they test out SkySQL, expand? If so, where do they go? How do they get their hands on it? Right, so existing AWS customers, they can get to SkySQL on the AWS Marketplace. That's incredibly easy. AWS customers go to the Marketplace. They can find us by doing a search, but not to be outdone. There are customers that aren't on AWS and they can come to MariaDB.com. You can start SkySQL there and select AWS as the deployment cloud and try it for free. It's super cool. It's really easy. What's the, I'm just curious, what's the typical deployment time from doing that from the free trial POC to deployment? What do you normally see from a time span perspective? Yeah, customers are up and running with a live database in just a few minutes. Minutes, minutes up to 90% TCO, big business outcomes there that affects every business in every industry. John, we appreciate you coming on, talking to us about MariaDB, the solutions that you offer and how you're partnering with AWS and where folks can go to get started. Thank you. For John Bakke, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re-invent 2021. Stick around, more coverage coming up next.