Episode #17 - Talking Data with Mike Capone

Great. It's a great pleasure.

Yeah. Well, it's a great question as you pointed out. I mean, we're here in Lund, which is where it all began. And what was great back then is still great today. So what stayed the same is our core technology, the associative engine, the one, our patented super unique ability to actually ingest lots of data into an in-memory engine and find patterns in that data that nobody else can find, no other tool can find. That still is a big differentiator for us today. What really changed that served us well for 15 years is what really changed was the world changed. So when I joined Click eight years ago, customers were asking a much bigger question: your analytics are great, but more and more my problem is harnessing data, it's getting data into analytics, finding it, it's all over the place, it's in the cloud, it's on premises and mainframes, it's here, it's there. And then the second thing was the frustration around dashboards. I see all these dashboards. I know what's wrong, but nobody ever does anything about it. So I have all this information, but nobody takes action. And so what's different is that we wanted to address that problem for our customers. And so that's what set us on this journey of 14 acquisitions as well as a lot of organic R&D investment to build this end to end data analytics and AI platform that you see today.

Yeah, the main thing is you got to stay close to your customers. We're here this week meeting with our luminaries who are our favorite customers. These are passionate Click customers who really care about us and the technology, and we listen to what they say and what their needs are and how their needs are changing and how their company's needs are changing. Last week or two weeks ago actually I was in New York with our executive advisory board. Those are CEOs and CIOs of top 100 companies in the world giving us advice. So I think first and foremost to stay relevant, you have to be close to your customers. And then the second is you have to be bold. You have to be willing to take risks in this world. And when we went out and bought Atunity, people thought we're crazy. They're like, you're a visual analytics company. What are you doing? You've never done anything outside of this. You've never done a big acquisition. But we knew that in order to stay relevant, we needed to look at the world a little differently and take bold steps. And so the Atunity acquisition, which is a public company that we bought, was the first step in really changing the profile of the company.

Yeah.

Yeah. Look, it's like everything else in the world. We were doing AI before it became fashionable. I mean, you both know Insight Advisor has been in our product for a number of years now, which is AI capability. We've had AutoML in our platform for quite some time. The fact that they crossed the chasm to more consumer-friendly AI, which is what ChatGPT tools did, has really brought the conversation much more mainstream. But really, AI is nothing more than pattern recognition. We know this, that's what it's always been. I think two things make Click unique in the space. One again is our engine, like we've already had the ability to bring disparate data together and see patterns in it. And then second is a focus on data quality and data governance and data harnessing. So a few years back when GPT came out, there was a lot of hype about the fact that this is going to solve the world's problems. I have a company. I'm going to plug in an LLM and magic, it's just my company's going to be transformed. You know what? Two years later, here we sit. And there's a lot of disillusionment around AI. And it's because people didn't do the work. They didn't do the hard work to get their data in a trustable format to be able to use AI on it in a meaningful way. So there was a lot of hallucinations, whatever you want to call it. And so what we do is we solve both. We solve the AI problem if you want us to solve it, but more importantly, we solve the underpinning, the foundational problem of data quality, data governance, data harnessing. We have a trust score for AI inside of our data products that allows customers to actually say, should I even be using AI on this data or is it really not trustworthy and I'm just going to get a bunch of silly answers from it? And so that's what makes us special. And then the last thing I'll say is that we're completely independent. I think a lot of vendors today, they want to own the entire conversation and they start with just, hey, just give us all of your data and we'll help you with AI. We don't believe in that model. Your data is your data. We do business with you the way you want to do business with us. So if you want to use Snowflake, you want to use Databricks, if you want to use GCP or AWS, it's fine. We'll take data from anywhere, we'll put it anywhere. Our tools work with everybody. We're quite happy. And if you want to switch, we're very portable. I had one customer who was all in on one hyperscaler. They got a new CIO. He had a fight with that hyperscaler sometime in his past life. It didn't go well. He immediately wanted to switch. That was a few weeks worth of work for us. So that makes us very unique.

Well, we always knew this day was coming. The decision to build Insight Advisor was okay we need to put AI capabilities. The decision to acquire an AutoML capability and build that into our platform was along these lines. But it was really in 2019 when we sat down and Drew Clark, who's here with me who was presenting downstairs, was our chief strategy officer at the time. Drew and I basically took a blank sheet of paper and said what's the world going to look like in a bunch of years and it was super clear that AI was going to be dominant. We knew this day was coming and what do we need to do to be relevant? And it's like oh boy, there's a lot more stuff we need to do. And that's when the first step was buying Atunity. We knew that harnessing data was going to be a big part of feeding AI. And then as you know, I was chasing Talend for a number of years. I didn't have the resources or the capital to go get it at the time, but patience is important. So I kept my private equity investors had separately invested in Talend and I just kept after them and said, this is the last piece for me. I have data integration, I've got catalog, I've got lineage, I've got NLP, what I don't have is the transformation, the data quality, and Talend had that. So we did a huge acquisition, brought Talend in and the rest is history.