All these devices, sensors, etc. that go in the IoT framework pump out a boatload of data. What are you seeing in IoT devices, and how are you absorbing all that data?

One of our customers is a company in Africa that actually uses our product to deliver blood using drones. There's no roads where they are, so drones are the only way to get blood out there.   The general concept is:  you're streaming it into the central repo and then you're leveraging your data science and your AI/ML to get it working and get some insights out of it. That’s why I joined DataBricks quite frankly.  The need is pretty clear: having all the data is a big part of making good decisions around the signal to noise ratio… and pulling out what's different, what's important about this particular data point that's coming out of this, etc. I think that's critical. It'll be interesting to see if data itself becomes an indicator of whether the device is still considered secure. I think there's a lot of different ways we'll have to look at security in the IoT world, since it's hard to patch billions of devices that weren't designed to be patched in the first place.

There's a company called hunters.ai that’s partnering with Snowflake.  They're taking the unlimited compute and storage power of Snowflake and creating a new, modern day SIM. To your point about the signal/noise ratio, there's no way you can look at that volume of data.  You need smart intelligence to surface that information. It's always been true with some tools, but it's just that much worse now. The technology is there:  DataBricks with their fast compute power and AI layer that can understand the data before you do. You won't be able to tune anything anymore. You need products that can self-tune. I do think it's a blossoming area.