Hi, this is Sapil Bhatia and we are here at the DataWorks Summit in San Jose and today we have with us Kunal from Unravel. Just tell us a bit about what does the company do? Yeah, so we help big data applications work well. Everybody's using Big Data Tech, all the companies in different industries. But running big data applications on any system, whether that's Kafka, Spark, Hadoop, NoSQL, MPP platforms is very, very hard. Let alone run them well. And what we see is all these companies spend 70% of their time trying to firefight these issues. Which is how do I make these applications run? How do I make these applications run fast? Or how do I make these applications run efficiently? And debugging these issues today is a very manual, painstaking exercise. What we've done is we've automated performance management for Big Data so that these companies can focus on driving value from Big Data rather than spending most of their time firefighting these issues. So we've automated problem discovery, root cause analysis and resolution for all these common kinds of problems that happen on these Big Data Sacks. I'm curious that when I look at the ecosystem, when I come to these conferences, I look at the ecosystem. Is it because the base technologies are open source? So that allows for an ecosystem? Or there has always been an ecosystem around even proprietary technologies? Yeah, very good question. Enterprise software itself is one of the major transformations that's happening. Is the switch towards open source technologies over the last decade, I would say. Open source technologies are great because it provides you a big community behind it to help you accelerate innovation. Open source is also great for people who want to experiment on new technologies because it allows for a lot of flexibility and a lot of power. Now Hadoop, Spark, Kafka all have very fanatic communities behind it and for good reason. The technology is very flexible, very powerful, it can do a lot of different things. However, what happens with great power is great complexity. And when people are running anything using these systems, they fall into these common problems. And our place in the world is to make sure that while they're adopting Big Data and open source technologies in general, that they can actually depend on it. A lot of proprietary systems cost about 20 times 30 times more money than these open source technologies if you look at them at a per unit cost. But those things work and companies can depend on them. Open source technologies are rough around the edges. They may have certain shortcomings in security, integration, in our case, performance management. And that inhibits or slows down consumers who want to actually use that technology. So we say, listen, don't be scared of open source technology, right? We will make sure and guarantee performance and reliability so that you guys can actually depend on this and reliably run any type of workload that you want on these Big Data technologies, I'd say. But you're absolutely right. The community is huge. Spark Summit this time around had about 4,000, 5,000 people. I'm very fascinated whenever I go around the country or even the globe. I was in London for Strata London and London is adopting all of these Big Data technologies also. So it's not just the US phenomenon, it's a world phenomenon now. And any company that I speak with will have a lot of open source components in their period. There's no more of a discussion of do we need open source or not. There's a lot of good technologies out there today which companies are exploiting for a variety of different reasons. And they just see that power and they can't be left behind with their competition. So everybody else is adopting to it as well. I'll give you some use cases just to help you highlight this a little better. If you look at banks and financial institutions, they've got tremendous amount of data and they need to process this data in a fast, efficient, quick manner. So you may have some of the biggest banks doing fraud prevention applications, for example. Now with open source technology, they get the power to process more data in a faster fashion and also use data that's in different varieties to do this fraud prevention application, for example. And we help them make sure that these applications run. Now fraud prevention is good both for the company itself as well as the consumers. So if you use a credit card, now you know for yourself that if you swipe your credit card, companies are very good at spotting whether it's a fraudulent transaction or it's a legitimate transaction.  Healthcare is using it in a lot of fascinating ways. Today, you know, you're wearing an Apple watch, right?  So dangerous that they don't understand. No, it's not. It's not because that way they get to understand you better in ways that they would never have understood you before. So if you allow them to get this data and use this data, then it can be incredible in helping understand from an insurance company that, hey, Swapnil should not be spending $2,000 a month on insurance. He's a healthy person. He should be spending $200 on insurance every month, right? Or helping identify problems and diseases before they happen. So there's a lot of fascinating uses of big data technology, what we call big data, but using machine learning, artificial intelligence, IoT, etc. And I'm very excited personally about it, just seeing all of these different use cases that we get to see working with different classes of customers. I'm also a science fiction writer. So there are a lot of new use cases which are emerging. IoT is becoming popular and all those things. So from your perspective, what are the potential new use cases that you see beyond what you already have? Well, every industry that we work with, every company that I walk into, the first question we ask them is, what are you doing with big data today that you weren't able to do yesterday? And it depends on the maturity cycle of that company. They'll say, for example, the first step is, we're doing the exact same thing that we used to do yesterday, but we're doing it with much more data. So if I wanted to do my sales analysis based on regions, how well is my sales team doing in California versus Florida, I would be able to do it on six months data or one year data. Now with big data stacks, I'm able to do this on five years, ten years of data, for example. So the first step is always, can we enrich some of the activities that we're already doing with these new systems? Once companies get comfortable with that system, then they start to open it up and create new products and what we call true data-driven products. So a lot of examples already exist in the world today. They may be mundane, like giving you personalized ads to Spotify, understanding what kind of music you like and hooking you on to their radios. You listen to more songs and they get paid more. So it's a vicious cycle like that. Those are the things we've already experienced. Now, there's a lot of other cool things that are coming out that we'll start to see in every industry. You spoke about IoT. Being in Silicon Valley, this is very common for us to see driverless cars now. But driverless cars for the rest of the world is still, wow, will this actually happen? I call it IoT on wheels. There you go. So every car manufacturer, if you look at Toyota, GM, Ford, Tesla, of course, Mercedes, BMW, everybody is getting into what we now call connected cars. Now, imagine a state in the future in Silicon Valley is probably next year, but in the rest of the world it's probably going to take a decade or so that all these cars are driverless and they're talking to each other. So you don't need signals to stop these cars. These cars are actually emitting signals to each other talking about finding the more sufficient path, avoiding accidents, avoiding problems, right? So not in the not very distant future we'll have data running all of these different things. And that's why I'm a firm believer that in the last decade, every business became a technology business. In the next decade, every business will become a data business. So what opportunity does it create for you, for your company? So the task that we've taken on is to make sure that all the stuff works. And it's a very core, important piece that needs to happen. Somebody's got to take care of all the unsexy side, right? Somebody's got to make these things work. And what we do is we get the focus of the companies and their people. So data scientists and business analysts and data engineers are probably the hardest roles to fill. And there's a huge shortage of this talent here.  So we are providing the company that insurance policy, if you may, that you can have your people focus on business objectives and values and we'll take care of any mess that's created. So if your applications are not working, your infrastructure is not working, if you're not getting reliable performance, out of your entire application set, we will help you with those problems. Now, this fraud prevention program, to come back to that example, if that fraud prevention program does not catch that fraud in seconds, the money is out of the bank. So we make sure that that application runs on time every time for that bank, for example. And only when people have reliability will they actually depend on that application or their product. So that's our place in the market, which is we will make sure that the stuff that you're promising to your customers work. Right. So do you have a stock solution that people can go and use their credit card and buy, or do you customize it on case-by-case basis? No, it's completely out of the box.  But customers may have, you know, a lot of customized workloads, maybe, or maybe they're using a lot of many different components. So what we've seen is customers choose a particular vendor or a particular system to run these workloads. Now, they may be doing different types of applications, but say, for example, if they're running their applications using Spark or on Hadoop, then an application is an application for us and we can provide the same benefits to one customer that we provide to another one. We built Unraveled by working very closely with people who are running big data at scale. Some of our early advisors in the companies were people who were running analytics at Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Riot Games, Zynga. You know, there were a few handful companies five years, six years ago that was actually running big data at scale. And we worked with them really closely to understand what are the challenges you face when you're running big data at this scale. Thousands of machines, hundreds of users, hundreds of thousands of applications running every day. And we took those learnings and put that in our product to understand how do you make an agile, data ops, you know, work environment within your company that you're able to experiment and iterate quickly and you're able to guarantee that performance and you're making sure that stuff actually works. So absolutely, it is out of the box, no customizations needed and should be able to cover the big data stack that you're running today. Right. Almost all the components that you talked about that your customers are using are open source components. Yes, yes. But I'm pretty sure that, you know, you are not releasing any of your own code but you work closely with the open source communities and open source projects. Yes. So how do you see open source, you know, what is open source to you? Wow, that's a very loaded question. Open source to me at the fundamental level is a change that is driven by community because open source has to have a community at its heart, not just for adoption but for actual development and change. And an open source project usually comes out of a need. In this case, we've all created this amazing community like Hadoop and Spark. Hadoop came around as you all know famously from works at Google, works at Yahoo, Spark from, you know, the UC Berkeley group, for example, all of these came out of a need for being able to process data at a scale that nobody had ever seen before and in a cheap, fast fashion, right? That's what open source to me is. It's a catalyst for change driven through a community. Right. Earlier when you're talking about and you mentioned that, you know, open source does solve some problem but, you know, it's more about, you know, so open source is more or less like development model, you know, where you bring all the people to build. It's not a business model. But then it enables, you know, you know, Kunal's and Arun's to build business around it. So you take a lot of things from open source. Yeah. But how do you give back? Very good question. So we have components within our proprietary software that is also open source. Just before you interrupt. It's two folded questions. One is that you give back in terms of code and other is that you give back in terms of practicing, you know, building a commercial business model around because technology in itself is useless if nobody's using it. Absolutely. So you're also building a business around those open source. Absolutely. And that's exactly what it's going to work for. So you can touch them on the code part and then the business part. So we do actually use open source components within Unravel itself. We use Kafka for data ingestion. We have Elasticsearch for one type of data storage in our data tier. Our instrumentation technology is also open source and we've actually given back in a lot of these different areas back to the community around things that we do, especially on scale and size that we have seen because we get a preview into a lot of companies that are running things as thousands and tens of thousands of nodes that maybe a lot of people in the open source community do not have access to. That's one way. The second way, as you rightly pointed out is we are making these open source technologies work. A lot of the companies are now depending and relying on Spark, on Hadoop, on Kafka and not just paying the proprietary companies 20 times more money to run that similar kind of workload because they know that there's companies like Unravel and Databricks and Cloudera and Hortonworks making this work for them. And you're right. If there's no usage of it, what's the point of having that open source technology? And now we're seeing every Fortune 500 company using these big data technologies within their line and very soon in the next five years or so we'll start to see this trickle down to all of the SMBs. This will be commonplace. Now we call it big data. Tomorrow will just be data because data is going to be the size and every company is going to be using it in some shape or form. I met somebody from Hortonworks yesterday because when people think about big data we also think about being used and developed in advance and he mentioned that a lot of work is going on in Africa because insurance companies in developing and emerging economies also they are using because the funny thing is that these countries they have skipped the whole early age of technology suddenly they are in this phase where everything is you know No landlines, right? Street mobile phones. Exactly. Exactly. And it's more efficient and cheap and more accessible. I agree. So what kind of markets do you cater to or regions? Today we're in the US market because we're a small company. We needed a focus approach to figure out where do people face these problems and let's go after a market that's huge enough to sustain our growth. We do have customers now in Europe like I was pointing out Europe is ripe and Europe by itself is you know a number of different countries and every country we've seen big data adoption grow. Asia is not far behind at all. Some of the biggest banks in Singapore and the Philippines and India already use our product which means that they've been using big data for a while. We both are from India. The entire Aadhar project is actually running on big data, right? And I think Mapart did the implementation for the entire infrastructure of Hadoop and Spark that's running on this. So as you can see big data is powering and systems and applications is powering some of the most you know groundbreaking big changes in the world. Aadhar as you know is our social security you know information that every Indian 1.3 billion people now have an ID number. You need that for opening a bank account. You need that for getting a house. You need that for buying a car. You need that for everything now. And that's a big change that Modi and the next government and everybody else got together to do. So for this kind of a big undertaking it would not be possible if you were still relying on technologies of yesterday. Those databases are not capable of handling this out of data, right? So because we have these new databases because we have these new technologies adopting and getting this change to happen can be done much, much quickly. Now we're seeing like you pointed out the second phase of big data now that the usual suspects if you may have started exploiting this technology it's now becoming more out of the box. It's easier to deploy, easier to run and that's where we're seeing people not just in different countries all over the world in South America in Africa like you pointed out but even smaller companies are to use this because you know they don't have an army of engineers to make it work but now that it's simple to work even these guys are jumping into it and that provides them a level playing field, right? You don't need to be the biggest bank in the world you can be a regional bank and still provide your customers that same benefit that the big banks do because this technology is accessible it's open source, anybody can use it anybody can contribute to it and all these people are now exploring these technologies for serving their customers better.  Wow, I got, I married recently so I could spend some time at home Congratulations Thank you Starting a company is taxing Which one was more difficult getting married or studying? That's why I had to do one thing at a time Don't worry, we will not show this video to your wife Thank you We should hide this video from her No, but it's been rewarding, it's been great I think starting a company requires 200% of your time 200% of your energy and your mind Exactly And it's been exciting I loved growing this company but in my free time I like to go now become a California guy I used to live in New York for 8 to 10 years so we didn't know what hiking was we didn't know what green things are we didn't know that you're supposed to put broccoli on things and I started going to the farmer's market in California living healthier, going out for hikes and bike rides but I still enjoy my cars so you'll see me doing racing on some weekends I like to take my sports cars out and take them around the track and race responsibly so whenever I do get a chance to do that or the bay area presents itself with amazing sailing opportunities so I've learned to sail over the last couple of months and then we'll take the boat around the bay area there's a lot of little towns over here Marine, Sausalito, Richmond, of course San Francisco so it's good to sail for one or two hours dock at one place go and see that little town come back on and sail around I find that very relaxing as well just to be in the bay in the nice water for two to three hours on a Sunday can be it so have you hooked up to your sports car with all those machine learning and big data? I should, I should so it's interesting on that point so Porsche is a very driver-centric car and when this entire autonomous driving comes around it was interesting what a take of a company like Porsche is on autonomous driving so they still want their customers to drive cars because that's what the car is all about so I like their take where they're using this technology now in one of their models where using big data technology and getting sensor data and GPS data they find the road ahead of you and they know what traffic is on that road or there isn't what the curves are on that road elevation changes, all those things and so it's looking one mile ahead for you and then when you're in the car it's actually giving you feedback on how you should be driving your car better so how can you go and do that corner faster can you brake later which gear should you be on so they're using big data technology to actually make you a better race car driver which I love so what is the latency between the decision you made versus the car wheel? so they've got models and they've got some of the best it's really useless to talk to technologists because we're talking about hobbies we are back to talking about work and there's a problem when your hobby is your work I think I guess that's true you're always thinking about it in that way my wife always complains you're always working and she doesn't know that no I'm never working I'm just having fun, somebody's paying me to do I'm starting my own companies and now I'm paying but when you're having fun it does feel like work exactly, so you're talking about so are they your customers as well? not yet we cannot name our customers but those ones are not our customers just yet so if they do become your customers and you do know the car you're driving is your customer so can you just like even take it more? I wish those Germans are great at engineering I'm sure they'll figure some of these things out and make every car exciting to drive I love Tesla as well so don't get me wrong, they're super fast and Porsche I think came over there first all electric car as well Tesla is changing the market in a different way we always often get to know about we talk about solar and power and everything but it's the same story open source you know they brought a product which is so you're tempting they're doing both things energy efficient but they're not talking about that they're talking about the next generation of cars they're talking about excitement exactly so when we talk about climate change all those things instead of focusing on we should actually that's how community is driven what do I get out of it as well the same thing Tesla is faster than a Ferrari in a 0-60 straight line and Elon Musk that was his mission statement I want to make a car that's faster than a Porsche 911 that's electric so it wasn't let's make something boring that people eco-friendly environmental conscious people drive he made a car that people who like driving will drive and the entire community would follow so Aaron drives Tesla so you guys should have a race he beat me we just spoke about the Tesla is faster every data work contest should start with a real race I agree I think that's a great idea whichever company wins gets the free key that's a great idea anyway it was fun talking to you today likewise and hopefully we'll see you again in the next conference thank you so much for having me


If you're looking for expert legal answers to all your property related questions, then stay tuned. Hello, greetings and a very warm welcome. This is your very first episode of your Property Rights podcast. Lovely to be here. I'm Paul Rotherham and this show proudly brought to you by Private Property. Now over the course of the next few weeks, we're going to be bringing you some incredibly interesting episodes, getting expert legal advice, answering your questions and joining me in studio will be an expert on property law. She is a property lawyer. Her specific focus is on rentals and evictions. Who is said person while she's joining me in the studio today? Silna Stain. Hello, Silna. Hey, Paul. How are you doing? I am doing fabulously well. I'm going to be a better educated man at the end of the show because as our first program, I would love to know why it is that we're chatting with you because you are not only the MD of SSLR Incorporated Attorneys. That's an attorney firm with a national footprint across South Africa, but you've done many incredible things in the world of law. You've been involved with the Law Society. You are an expert on, among other things, rental law, evictions, and I think this is something that won't be our only focus, but this is something that is probably going to take some of our time in future episodes. So who is Silna? I think that's a great place to start. Well, Paul, the truth is, I think let me first tell you who I am as Silna and then I will move into what I do as an attorney. So I'm Silna Stain, I'm the Managing Director of SSLR Incorporated. SSLR is a law firm specializing in property law. Now usually when you talk to somebody and they say they specialize in property law, it means it's a conveyancing firm, so they do transfer properties and bond registrations. SSLR is unique in that even though we do have a very strong conveyancing component, we actually focus more on evictions. And if you look at the firm's setup and makeup and you see a majority female firm, it might be a very weird thing to imagine us going out with baseball bats evicting people. That's not what we're doing. What we're doing is we specialize in this particular very complex part of the law. So evictions isn't complex because of the specifics around evictions per se, but it's a very complex part of the law simply because there are so many pieces of legislation that find application on rentals and then obviously on evictions as well. So the last time I counted, and this was before the Property Practitioners Act came onto the scene, we sat with about 65 pieces of legislation that finds application in the context of rentals. So how this all started was actually massively accidentally. When I was 24, I decided maybe going from articles into a bigger law firm is not really going to make me happy for the rest of my life. So I think it was more stupidity that led to bravery and then bravery led to me starting the firm with another founding partner. And that was 13 years ago at this stage. Now I obviously gave my age away, but it's a pleasure. It's a good story simply because when you start a law firm, and now I apologize to all the attorneys out there, I'm giving our secrets away now, but when you start a practice every time the phone rings, you're an expert in that particular part of the law. So if somebody calls you and they want a divorce, you say, I have been doing divorces for years, I am more than happy to help you. If the next thing comes in and it's a decision of judgement, you do that and you're an expert in that. So what happened is about two years from starting the firm, there was a few evictions that came in and at the time in 2008, evictions were still very, not really something that we saw on a regular basis in practices because the prevention of illegal evictions act was only promulgated in 1999 and then we had a very big, very relevant appeal court case, the Cape Killani matter, and that was only handed down in 2001. So by 2008, people were sort of still in the dark about evictions and luckily I was young and silly and brave, so I said, let me try and figure this out. And in about two years, the law society realized, oh my goodness, there is an attorney who sort of gets evictions and little did I know, it was thanks to my trial and error and I started presenting the eviction seminar on behalf of the Law Society of South Africa to all the attorneys in the country. I've been doing that ever since and you can imagine training attorneys on a topic means you need to be on top of your game constantly. For sure. And that forced me into a situation where SSLR was started to be seen as one of the foremost expert firms in the country and obviously one thing leads to another and 13 years later, I look back and I'm massively proud of the team I'm working with and what we are doing for the property industry in South Africa. And here you are, the pinnacle of your career, Silne. You are doing your property rights podcast with Paul Rotherham and private property. This is without a doubt going to be the event that takes the cake, I think. I think so too. And I must say, it's just because you're much more entertaining to chat to than attorneys and I say that collegially. I'm not so sure that I should be feeling that that's a compliment. Just to touch on something very briefly, we have been interacting with you as private property across our socials, our Facebook page, which as you know is particularly busy and thank you very much. If you're listening to this now on our Facebook page, you are welcome to comment, of course, with some really exciting episodes coming up over the next few weeks. But something to just keep in mind is that our property rights podcast series is not going to be focusing specifically on evictions, neither is it going to be focusing specifically on matters that pertain to you. If you are a tenant or a landlord in terms of rental, it's going to be quite widespread, isn't it, this conversation? Yes, very much so. I think property law is such an important part of any society. How we own property, how we rent property, how we take care of of immovable properties is absolutely crucial. And definitely, I think we're going to be covering a broad spectrum of potential property law related questions and queries and things people wonder about. And the other thing is, I think you will have already heard from Solna, who's a lovely lady, and I'm so glad you could join us for this Solna stain. Solna, albeit she comes with a high pedigree and plenty of qualifications, we're going to make this colloquial. We are going to talk to you in layman's terms because I find that when it comes to law and specifically property law, the average person, myself included, is so easily confused. Yes, and you have my commitment on that as well. I believe if I do training or if I answer a question, if my nine year old daughter can't understand what I'm explaining, then I clearly don't understand the topic well enough. So I'm committed on this one. Well, let me tell you, your nine year old is going to be able to enjoy this series as much as we know you will enjoy this series. So thank you very much for being here. Our first episode of your property rights podcast, what we're going to do is involve you and engage with you and get you to be part of our conversation across our socials, across the private property platforms. And we would love for this to be a start for you as a conversation and something that gets you talking, something that gets you around the bride or at the dinner table, going, hey, did you hear what Paul was chatting about with Solna on the show today? This is really insightful. This is so interesting. And with that in mind, we have a whole load of questions that have come in over the last few weeks and months, in fact, since we've been chatting about doing the show, because this isn't something that's just happened overnight. We've been working on this for many months. And so all of the questions that we are going to be using to start each episode of your property rights podcast, each of those questions will have come from you. So there's going to be a whole host of topics. And Solna, I thank you for joining us. And I really look forward to fleshing out these matters with you in our future episodes. So do I, Paul. I'm really looking forward to it. And I think this is going to add massive value to all consumers, sellers, purchases, homeowners, landlords, tenants, estate agents, everybody. And thank you so much for including me in this. And as a close, where can we find you? Obviously, you will be part of each of our podcasts. But just in terms of how we can find you, if we do have any questions specific to legal matters and law related matters, what's the best place to connect with Solna Stain, who is with SSLR Incorporated Attorneys? Easiest way would be through our website, which is www.SSLR.CO.SA, or on SSLR's Facebook page. More than welcome to interact with me, Zee. And obviously I am on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn everywhere else. So it's relatively easy to find me also with a name like Solna Stain. I am, in fact, the only person in the country by that name. I actually checked. So it's not really tricky to find me, as long as you remember to spell my name with a C. Wonderful. Well, that has been our very first episode. Thank you, Solna, your Property Rights podcast hosted by me, Paul Rotherham. We look forward to the next episode, where we're going to feature just one of the questions, one of the many questions that has come in from you. And I'm really looking forward to that. I do hope you'll join us for our next episode.  Leave a comment or ask a question to join the conversation.