From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to theCUBE Conversation here in our Boston area studio. Happy to welcome back to the program Paul Barth, who's the CEO of Podium Data, also a Boston area company, Paul. Great to see you. Great to see you Stu. All right, so we last caught up with you. It was a fun event that we do at MIT talking about information, data quality, to kind of understand why your company would be there. For our audience that doesn't know, just give us a quick summary, your background, what was kind of the why of Podium Data back when it was founded in 2014? Oh, that's great, Stu, thank you. And I've spent most of my career in helping large companies with their data and analytics strategies, next generation architectures, new technologies, et cetera. And in doing this work, we kept stumbling across the complexity of adopting new technologies. And around the time that big data in Hadoop was getting popular and lots of hype in the marketplace, we realized that traditional large businesses couldn't manage data on this because the technology was so new and different. So we decided to form a software company that would automate a lot of the processing, manage a catalog of the data and make it easy for non-technical users to access their data. Yeah, that's great. And I think back to when we were trying to help people understand this whole big data wave, one of the pithy things we did, it was turning all this glut of data from a problem to an opportunity. How do we put this into the users? But a lot of things kind of, we hit bumps in the road as an industry. Did studies, it was like, more than 50% of these projects fail. You brought up a great point. Tooling is tough. Changing processes is really challenging. But that focus on data is quarter our research, what we talk about all the time. But now it's like, oh, well, automation in AIML, choose your favorite acronym today. This is going to solve all the ills that the big data wave didn't do. Right, Paul? So maybe you can help us connect the dots a little bit because I hear a lot into the foundation that trends from the big data to kind of the automation and AI thing. So you're maybe just a little ahead of your time. Well, thanks. I saw an opportunity before there was anything in the marketplace that could help companies really corral their data, get some of the benefits of consolidation, some oversight and management through an automated catalog and the like. As AI has started to emerge as the next type wave, what we're seeing consistently from our partners like DataRobot and others who have great AI technology is they're starved for good information. You can't learn automatically or even human learning if you're given inconsistent information, data that's not conformed or ready or consistent once you can look at a lot of different events and start to build correlations. So we believe that we're still a central part of large companies building out their analytics infrastructure. Okay, help us kind of look at, I'd like to see kind of how your users and how you fit into this kind of changing ecosystem. We all know things are just changing so fast. From 2014 to today, cloud is so much bigger. The big waves of IoT, keep talking, everybody's got some kind of machine learning initiatives. So what are the customers looking for? How do you fit in some of those different environments? Yeah, I think when we formed the company we recognized that the cost performance differential between the open source data management platforms like Hadoop and now Spark were so dramatically better than the traditional databases and data warehouses that we could transform the business process of how do you get data from Rota ready, right? And that's a consistent problem for large companies. They have data in legacy formats on mainframes, they have them in relational databases, they have them in flat files in the cloud behind the firewall and these silos continue to grow. And this view of a consistent, or a consistent view of your business, your customers, your processes, your operations is central to optimizing and automating the business today. So our business users are looking for a couple of things. One thing they're looking for is some manageability and a consistent view of their data no matter where it lives. And our catalog can create that automatically in days or weeks depending on how big we go or broadly we go. They're looking for that visibility but also they're looking for productivity enhancements which means that they can start leveraging that data without a big IT project. And finally they're looking for agility which means there's self-service, there's an ability to access data that you know is trusted and secured and safe for the end users to use without having to call IT and have a program spin something up. And so they're really looking for a totally new paradigm of data delivery. I tell you that hits on so many things we've been seeing and a challenge we've seen in the marketplace. My world, talk about people, they had their data centers and if I look at my data and I look at my applications it's this heterogeneous nightmare. We call it hybrid or multi-cloud these days and it shows the promise of making me faster and all this stuff but as you said my data is all over the place. My applications are getting spun up and maybe I'm moving them and federating things and all that but my data is one of the most critical components of my business. Maybe explain a little bit how that works. Where do the customers come in and say oh my gosh I've got a challenge and podium data is helping in the marketplace and all that to fix it. Sure, I mean first of all we targeted from the start large regulated businesses, financial services, pharmaceutical healthcare and we've broadened since then but these companies data issues were really pressure from both ends. One was a compliance pressure. They needed to develop regulatory reports that could be audited and proven correct. And if your data is in many silos and it's compiled manually using spreadsheets that's not only incredibly expensive but and non reproducible it's really not auditable and so a lot of these folks were pressured to prove that the data they were reporting was accurate. And on the other side it's the opportunity cost. The FinTech companies are coming into their space offering loans and financial products without any human interaction, without any branches and they knew the data was the center to that. The only way you can make an offer to someone for a financial product is if you know enough about them that you understand the risk. So the use and leverage of data was a very critical mass. There was good money to invest in it and they also saw that the old ways of doing this just weren't working. So Paul, does your company help with kind of the incoming GDPR challenges that are being faced? Sure, last year we introduced a PII detector and protection scheme and that may not sound like such a big deal but in the Hadoop open source world it is at the end of the day this technology while cheap and powerful is incredibly immature. So when you land data for example into these open data platforms like S3 out on the cloud podium takes the time to analyze that data and tell you what the structures of the data are where you might have issues with sensitive data and has the tooling like obfuscation and encryption to protect the data so you can create safety used data and I'd say our customers right now they started out behind the firewall. Again these regulated businesses were very nervous about breaches. They're looking and realizing they need to get to the cloud cause frankly not only is it a better platform for them from a cost basis and scalability it's actually where the data comes from these days their data suppliers are in the cloud. So we're helping them catalog their data and identify the sensitive data and prepare data sets to move to the cloud and then migrate it to the cloud and manage it there. Yeah such a critical piece. I lived in the storage world for about a decade. There was a little acquisition that they made of a company called Pi, PI it was Paul Merrittz who a lot of people know, Paul had a great career at Microsoft went on to run VMware for a bunch but it was the vision you talk about reminds me of what I heard Paul Merrittz talking to gosh that was a decade ago. So information, so much sensitivity expand a little bit the security aspect there. When I look through your website you're not a security company per se but are there partnerships? How do you help customers with, I want to leverage data but it needs to be secure and all the GRC and security things is super challenging. And in this space to achieve agility and scale on a new technology you have to be enterprise ready. So in version one of our product we had security features that included field level encryption and protection but also integration with LDAP and Kerberos and other enterprise standard mechanisms and systems that would protect data. We can interoperate with protégories and other kinds of encryption and protection algorithms with our open architecture but it's kind of table stakes to get your data in a secured monitorable infrastructure if you're going to enable this agility and self service. Otherwise you restrict the use of the new data technologies to sandboxes which really make the failures you hear about are not in the sandboxes and the exploration they're in getting those to production. I had one of my customers talk about how before podium they had 50 different projects on Hadoop and all of them were in code red and none of them could go to production. Paul, you mentioned catalogs. Give us the update. What's the newest from podium data? You know, help explain that a little bit more. So we believe that the catalog has to help operationalize the data delivery process. So one of the things we did from the very start was say let's use the analytical power of big data technologies, Spark, Hadoop and others to analyze the data on its way into the platform and build a metadata catalog out of that. So we have over a hundred profiling statistics that we automatically calculate and maintain for every field of every file we ever load. It's not something you do as an afterthought or selectively. We knew from our experience that we needed to do that, data validation, and then bring in inferences such as this field looks like PII data and tag that in the metadata. And that process of taking in data and this even applies to legacy mainframe data coming in in a VSAM format. It gets converted and landed to a usable format automatically, but the most important part is the catalog gets enriched with all this statistical profiling information, validation, all of the technical information and we interoperate as well as have a GUI to help with business tagging, business definitions and the like. Yeah, Paul, just a little bit of a broader industry question. We talked the value of data, I think everybody understands how important is it? How are we doing an understanding really the value of that data though? Was that a monetization thing? We've got academia in your background. There's debates, we've talked to some people at MIT about this. How do you look at data value as an industry in general? Is there anything from podium data that you help people identify? Are we leveraging it? Are we doing the most? What are your thoughts around that? So I'd say for someone who's looking for a good framework to think about this, I'd recommend Doug Lenny's book on infonomics. He's doing, we've collaborated for a while, he's doing a great job there. But there's also just a blocking and tackling, which is what data is getting used? Or a common one for our customers is where do I have data that's duplicate or comes from the same source, but it's not exactly the same? That often causes reconciliation issues in finance or in forecasting and sales analysis. So what we've done with our data catalog, with all these profiling statistics is start to build some analytics that identify similar data sets that don't have to be exactly the same to say you may have a version of the data that you're trying to load here already available. Why don't you look at that data set and see if that one is preferred? And the data governance community really likes this. It's for one of our customers, there were literally millions of dollars in savings of eliminating duplication, but the more important thing is the inconsistency when people are using similar, but not the same data sets. So we're seeing that as a real driver. Okay, I want to give you the final word, just what are you seeing out in the industry these days, biggest opportunities, biggest challenges from the users you're talking to? Well, what I'd say is when we started this, it was very difficult for a traditional business to use Hadoop in production and they needed an army of programmers. I think we solved that. Last year we started on our work to move to a post-Hadoop world. So the first thing we've done is open up our cataloging tool so we can catalog any data set in any source and allow the data to be brought into an analytical environment or production environment more on demand than the idea that you're going to build a giant data lake with everything in it and replicate everything. That's become really interesting because you can build the catalog in a few weeks and then actually use the analysis and all the contents to drive the strategy. What do I prioritize? Where do I put things? The other big initiative is of course cloud. That is, as I mentioned earlier, you have to protect and make cloud ready data behind your firewall and then you have to know where it's used and how it's used externally. We automate a lot of that process and make that transition something that you can manage over time. And that is now going to be extended into multi-cloud, multi-lake type of technologies. Multi-cloud, multi-lake. All right, well, Paul Barth, appreciate getting the update, everything happening with podium data. Well, theCUBE, it's so many events this year. Be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all the upcoming events and all the existing interviews. I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching theCUBE.


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They began reporting That cephalobots had actually come from outer space today I learned that there's a Batman mini-series called the white to reverses the roles of Batman and the Joker Explace in a world where Joker has been rehabilitated And now has to save Gotham City from the Batman and these honeybees defend themselves against wasps by swarming them and Baking them by vibrating their wing 47 degrees Celsius Just one degree above the wasps max in 16.6 degrees Listening to the one Stein and and his wife. What's it a from aphrodite? Basically, they seem to think that I guess that wasn't contained at a zoo seem to think that have actually Switched that some gene emotional distress caused by loneliness If it had more resources, but had no one that they espouse Civilizations civilization wasn't a a linear series of gradual improvements incremental improvements, but in fact might be cyclical natural disasters such as Terrestrial, you know volcanoes Tsunamis hurricane well not hurricanes. That's not gonna wipe out a civilization. Um, so maybe extra terrestrial astrophies such as Cultures have a version of in their myths cause the sea level to rise. So I Think it's very Something Francisco to New York using only a connection of dirt road 63 days national sensation for a system of long distance So this one's pretty interesting if it's true had a gravel path installed at his home each day As he thought about problems, he would stack stones at the heart of his walk and then knock Sorry at the start of his walk and then knock them down one by one as he went round describing the difficulty of the problem as a Three four or five flint problem. It's cool concept Nietzsche I think always Are espoused the idea that we be sedentary through ideas. He thought we should always Be moving around or walking seems to make sense and up your spine ideas that Your stomach even has a he's for surviving seven days Without nourishment certain mammals such as the red Unfavorable and maybe I'll just do a Maybe there's a subreddit just about evolutionary biology a single fungal colony dredges across 37 acres they just do some math or something 1500 years old as a stew Constantly stewing in a pot constantly replenished with whatever item steak places They have years or something crazy long like that with a ladle all the cheese out of it And you still have the little bit at the bottom still some molecules of cheese in there that are 40 years old because it's always Mostly empty down That it doesn't so I guess that makes me wonder fuels of cheese Does it take designed in my mistakenly thought to searchers in the 1950s? found the stone With a symbol carved on it in Delphi But the stone turned out to be a leftover From a ceremony held there for the 1936 Berlin Olympics Except Spain who is neutral Thus more reports came out about the flu From Spain think it was just happening there history Names nomenclature Well-known the suppressing of the press I guess you would say and that's that's why history is so interesting to me it's like history is just a series of accidents and unintended Intended consequences probably lost a lot of income due to that People thinking that somehow infected with the flu was in the Civil War used hypnosis soldiers before surgery So before surgery They soldiers in a trance from hypnosis So goes to show you the power of ASMR wish you all a very very relaxing night sleep well you


أنا بسيارة بعض الأشياء التي يجب أن يتكلم فإن شاء الله هذا سيكون لدينا أحسناء الله ألخمي كل فقير، التي تقوم بأخذ كل واحدة now when we see this line seems pretty clear I don't think it, you know on the surface level needs a genius to work it out okay so anyone who is poor the guy that maybe I see when I'm walking from the station to my office in central London I'm like okay yeah he's sleeping on the street he is what I define as poor you know when I do this I'm thinking yeah may Allah give him some extra wealth some money so you can look off for each other it doesn't seem particularly challenging to the mind and this is the whole goal of these sessions I think this is the goal of sheikh al-fahm's book which is for us to be able to actually dig deeper into this answer okay fine that translation is there given that outward meaning is there given but there's probably something a bit more depth that we can realise and actualise when we analyse this and inshallah that's what we're going to dig into today so let's dive in a bit deeper my first question is when we say the poor person in this verse what is the definition of poor? like who is poor? I've given my simplistic definition as the guy who all the people that I see when I have gone from the station to the office in central London and I see many people unfortunately nowadays who are on the streets and not even central London now it's even further across but that's you know in my simplistic mindset someone that comes across to me as poor and therefore I'm praying for them but of course there's a deeper meaning so I'm asking you what do you think this definition of poor could actually be who could poor in compass and to answer this we'll look to the Quran I'm sorry I'm at 35 my number 15 الله سبحانه وتعالى وسلم بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم يا أيها الناس أنتم الفقراء أنتم الفقراء إلى الله والله هو الغني الحنيد oh human beings you are needy to Allah and it is Allah who is affluent the praised one oh maybe poor includes me so whilst I have this Alhamdulillah a lovely house and garden and furniture and this and that whilst I probably won't describe myself as poor actually Allah سبحانه وتعالى is making it very clear يا أيها الناس not specific types of people no no no oh human beings all of you no conditions يا أيها الناس whether you are a believer or a non-believer أنتم الفقراء you are needy to Allah okay so then who's the rich one if you're all poor who's the rich one والله هو الغني الحنيد and it is Allah who is affluent the praise one of course that versus أنتم الفقراء إلى الله you are needy to Allah Allah alone is the rich one and every single one of us regardless of our wealth our status our race our creed we all recognize and must recognize that we are dependent we are dependent and we are infinitely dependent upon أنتم الفقراء إلى الله to Allah سبحانه وتعالى we are all dependent to Allah سبحانه وتعالى regardless of who we are evidence by what you can drop tomorrow morning and be buried and no one could have done anything to you no one you could have done nothing to yourself you are needy to Allah he is the rich he is the all-powerful we are all poor and this source that we are dependent upon which is Allah سبحانه وتعالى must therefore be independent and again we are coming back to a very core principle belief of ours which is that if we are dependent on something then that thing we are dependent on must be completely independent and whose existence must be necessary and essential but completely reliant on Allah سبحانه وتعالى we owe nothing this chair this plant this laptop this lamp this camera enough of it ultimately is Allah سبحانه وتعالى thus we are all poor thus we are all needy thus we are all in need of Allah's grace and mercy we should never take it for granted and we are actually fortunate that our Lord is that merciful and that bountiful that he doesn't forget about us he is always continuously bestowing his grace upon his creation and of course we pray or at least hopefully we do pray to be continued to be bestowed with this grace from Allah سبحانه وتعالى and that actually that we can that we can receive it because actually we're poor when we don't realise that it comes from Allah سبحانه وتعالى from his grace and his blessings because they can be taken away at any given time and that's what we do and that's what we do and that's what we do and that's what we do and that's what we do and that's what we do and that's what we do and that's what we do and that's what we do and that's what we do and that's what we do and that's what we do and that's what we do and that's what we do and that's what we do and that's what we do and that's what we do and that's what we do and that's what we do and that's what we do and that's what we do and that's what we do and that's what we do and that's what we do and that's what we do and that's what we do and that's what we do and that's what we do and that's what we do and that's what we do and that's what we do and that's what we do and that's what we do and that's what we do and that's what we do myself and it's a doubt for me to recognize actually do I recognize that I am poor that I am nothing without the risk from Allah سبحانه وتعالى or have I completely taken it for granted have I always thought all the poor one is there and there and there because I have I have I have asked how many people have been in an affluent job in just the day later there's nothing left and the struggling and it's not just wealth it's health how many of us with this virus that's been going around we know of people who just the very next day that's it off to hospital one event later that health is their wealth we're completely dependent on Allah سبحانه وتعالى so we pray that الله continues to enrich us as the poor ones as well as those in his literal understanding that we see it as well so it's a very important point for us to recognize and hopefully changes the way in the dimension by which we see this line and it's a reminder to ourselves to say have I done my شكرا to Allah سبحانه وتعالى and have I humbled myself to remember that all of this can be taken away within a blink of an eye because I'm completely dependent on him and the moment I think I'm dependent on someone else or something else when I need to recalibrate myself because it can happen it can happen but you have to recalibrate and let this be a line that helps you recalibrate so that's slightly you know new dimension that we can now see this line in on a more you know uh obvious translation of the of this line of the dial which is you know enrich all of the poor from there yes there is actually something to derive from as well as a lesson to derive from from there as well and we are not short of initiatives for those who are in need and giving to the needy and the destitute you know there are many initiatives be they locally or internationally and Alhamdulillah may they continue and may they receive the blessings and guidance from Allah سبحانه وتعالى but the question becomes is okay if I'm giving to this cause if I've you know been showing these um been been explained through these descriptions of what's happening that these families living here here in here require extra money to help them survive and yeah I want to react and I want to give but that's that's good but that's not the end of it and the question is how can I increase that level of my giving how can I go to that extra point and there's something quite quite deep here which we can uh take from this line of the start and it resides actually within our motivation our intention so what do I mean let me give you an example right so we've just get we've just said you know yes there are these initiatives and I read this and I'm like okay cool maybe I should give call I give and you know cool that that that that's it maybe someone says well done whatever I don't know you know so I don't know I've just given I'm prompted in that situation if you like whereas if we give this example when I'm hungry I'm hungry I want to satisfy myself I want to satiate myself so I'm going to go to the fridge and I'm going to go make myself a sandwich I'm going to you know make myself something to eat I don't do it to seek some kind of reward or recognition for it no I'm just doing it because I'm really hungry and actually innately within me I'm like you know what it's it's bad if I'm hungry I should you know not bad but at some point I need to look after myself and feed myself so at that point if I believe that's the right time I have the yearning to go and satiate myself so I go make myself a sandwich and no big deal I'm not expecting anything else from it it's normal it's natural it's part of who I am it's part of me similarly I should have this mindset when it comes to this charity when I ask a lot to enrich the poor I don't just see it as something else put to the side no I should do it with a mindset where I truly innately desire for it to be the case that every single person who is financially poor is no longer that I innately want that that I have a yearning for it the same I have a yearning to satiate myself I also have a yearning to ensure that everyone has the right amount of money to sustain themselves and you saw this within them I want to tell you some of the way that he governed it was so important to him إنcredibly important to him that everyone had a good amount of income such that they could live in a decent manner it meant so much to him and it means that you know we have narrations from so many the way that they thought about charity that it just seemed innate they would go forget the extra mile the extra hundreds of thousands of miles it was it was important to them they strived for it for zero reward in the night in the darkness and it's a next step for me first than anyone else but for us to learn and go you know what's that next step that I can take that that that that intention to I feel actually it's my concern and my burden that I need to go and solve and إن شو that those who are financially poor that I have looked after them so to summarize this line of اللهم أغني كل فقير we started with quite a different way of thinking about the style a different dimension which is that who is the poor and we said we're actually as seen in the Quran that we are all as creations of الله completely reliant upon him and he is ultimately independent and he is a necessary existence for us actually we are poor and it reminds us of our state that we should be in that we're completely dependent upon him and that anything that we have comes from him and anything can be taken away in a blink of an eye from so we should seek out attitude it's الله سبحانه وتعالى it's نعم and his blessings that he's given on to us and that we should never become fixated by something that we think is giving our sustenance because in the background actually it's always الله سبحانه وتعالى so it's addressing us as those who are poor to recognize that we are dependent upon him and that we should never take it for granted and the second thing that we mentioned is that with all of these amazing initiatives that happen in شهر المبان with giving charity to those who are in financial need that actually we can take this giving that in شهور that we do and that I highly encourage that we do that we can take it to the next level that we should feel it's actually our necessity that we want to do it that we have a yearning to do it just like اهر بيض عليه وسلم did the same way that we want to satiate ourselves when we get hungry and it's not questionable there's no challenge to it no one is able to take you off that task of you saying i'm hungry and i want to eat of course unless you're fasting and decreed while lying there's certain hours but in that time no one's getting away i'm gonna go eat there's no question the same way we should have that same yearning that same flame to go out and to ensure جسايمة معني عليه السلام دين that everyone is able from a financial perspective as well it's difficult but we should try and graduate ourselves that mindset again so that when we are saying this it's not just a lip service but actually it's coming from within and it's something that we truly believe in so that's the conclusion of this part of the دعاء اللهم اغني كل فقير الهيامين ان شاء الله you'll be able to join us for the next line of this دعاء والسلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته