Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

Qubole, the data platform founded by Apache Hive creator and former head of Facebook’s Data Infrastructure team Ashish Thusoo, today announced the launch of Quantum, its first serverless offering.

Qubole may not necessarily be a household name, but its customers include the likes of Autodesk, Comcast, Lyft, Nextdoor and Zillow . For these users, Qubole has long offered a self-service platform that allowed their data scientists and engineers to build their AI, machine learning and analytics workflows on the public cloud of their choice. The platform sits on top of open-source technologies like Apache Spark, Presto and Kafka, for example.

Typically, enterprises have to provision a considerable amount of resources to give these platforms the resources they need. These resources often go unused and the infrastructure can quickly become complex.

Qubole already abstracts most of this away, offering what is essentially a serverless platform. With Quantum, however, it is going a step further by launching a high-performance serverless SQL engine that allows users to query petabytes of data with nothing else but ANSI-SQL, giving them the choice between using a Presto cluster or a serverless SQL engine to run their queries, for example.

The data can be stored on AWS and users won’t have to set up a second data lake or move their data to another platform to use the SQL engine. Quantum automatically scales up or down as needed, of course, and users can still work with the same metastore for their data, no matter whether they choose the clustered or serverless option. Indeed, Quantum is essentially just another SQL engine without Qubole’s overall suite of engines.

Typically, Qubole charges enterprises by compute minutes. When using Quantum, the company uses the same metric, but enterprises pay for the execution time of the query. “So instead of the Qubole compute units being associated with the number of minutes the cluster was up and running, it is associated with the Qubole compute units consumed by that particular query or that particular workload, which is even more fine-grained,” Thusoo explained. “This works really well when you have to do interactive workloads.”

Thusoo notes that Quantum is targeted at analysts who often need to perform interactive queries on data stored in object stores. Qubole integrates with services like Tableau and Looker (which Google is now in the process of acquiring). “They suddenly get access to very elastic compute capacity, but they are able to come through a very familiar user interface,” Thusoo noted.

Earlier this year we reported that Twilio was going to launch a full contact center solution called Flex on March 12 — lo and behold, today is March 12 and Twilio today announced the launch of Flex at the Enterprise Connect conference in Orlando. Flex brings together virtually every part of the existing Twilio infrastructure and platform for developers that already power nearly 40 billion interactions a year and bundles it with a rather slick user interface for companies that want to set up an out-of-the-box contact center or update their existing deployments.

Twilio’s expertise has long been in providing backend communications services and its design expertise is mostly in building APIs, not user interfaces. With this move, though, the company is giving enterprises (and this product is meant for the kind of companies that have hundreds or thousands of people in a contact center) a full stack contact center with a full graphical user interface.

As the company’s head of its contact center business Al Cook told me, though, the main design philosophy behind Flex is to give users maximum flexibility. He argues that business today have to choose between going with products that they can’t customize themselves, so that they have to rely on expensive outside vendors that will do the customization for them (which also tends to take a lot of time), or a SaaS contact center that can be quickly deployed but is hard to scale and lacks customization options. “Think of Flex as an application platform,” Cook told me. It takes its cues from Twilio’s experience in working with developers and gives enterprises an easy API interface for customizing the service to their liking, but also provides all of the necessary tools out of the box.

“The reason why APIs were very transformative to the industry is because you are unconstrained in what you can do,” Cook explained. “Once you put a user interface on that, you constrain users.” So for Flex, the team had to ask itself some new questions. “How do you build user interfaces in a fundamentally different way that gives people the best features they want without constraining them?”

Out of the box, Flex supports all of the standard messaging channels that contact centers are now expected to support. These include Voice, video, text, picture messaging, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, LINE and WeChat. The service also supports screen sharing and co-browsing. Twilio is also integrating its own intelligent TaskRouter service into Flex to automatically route questions to the right agent. A single Flex deployment can support up to 50,000 agents.

Cook argues that getting started with Flex is a one-click affair, though once it’s up and running, most users will surely need to customize the service a bit for their own needs and embed chat widgets and other functions on their websites and into their apps (think click-to-call, for example). Some of the more in-depth customization can be done in Twilio Studio, the company’s drag and drop application builder, too.

Most large enterprises already have contact centers, though, so it’s maybe no surprise that some of the thinking behind making Flex as… well… flexible as possible is about giving those users the ability to mix and match features from Flex with their existing tools to allow for a slow and steady migration.

As we reported last month, Flex will also integrate with all the standard CRM tools like Salesforce and Zendesk, as well as workforce management and optimization tools that are currently in use in most contact centers.

Before launching the product today, Twilio already worked with ING, Zillow, National Debt Relief and RealPage to test Flex. In addition, it lined up a number of tech and consulting partners to support new users.