(intense orchestral music) >> Hi I'm Peter Burris, welcome to another CUBEConversation. Today we've got a special guest from WANdisco, Jagane Sundar, who's the CTO, Jagane, welcome to theCUBE again! >> Thanks Peter, happy to be here! >> So Jagane, we've got a lot to talk about today, WANdisco's doing a lot of new things, but clearly the industry is, itself, in the midst of a relatively important evolution. Now we at Wikibon and SiliconANGLE have been calling it the transformation to digital business. Everybody talks about this, but we've been pretty specific, we think that it boils down to how a company uses data as an asset, and the degree to which it's institutionalizing, or re-institutionalizing work around those assets. How does WANdisco see this big transformation that we're in the midst of right now? >> So, you're exactly right, businesses are transforming from traditional means to a digital based business, and the most important thing about that is the data. WANdisco is at the forefront of making your data available for your innovation. We start off with the basic use-cases, disaster recovery, that's a traditional problem that people have half-solved in many different ways, but we have the ability to solve that problem, take you to the next stage, which is what we call live data, where you don't worry about the availability or the location of your data anymore. Finally, we take you from that live data platform to a place where you can invent with your data, the freedom to invent phase of our--of what we call. Now, that's what you're calling the digital transformation and there's great synergy between our two terminologies, that's an important aspect here. >> So let me impact that a little bit, if I can. So the core notion is: that every business has to start acknowledging that data is something more than the exhaust that comes out of applications, it really is a core data asset. So let's start with this notion of backup and restore, or disaster recovery, the historical orientation is: I have these very expensive assets, typically in the form of hardware, or maybe applications, and I have to ensure that I can back those assets up. So backup restore used to be back up a device, backup a volume, backup whatever else it might be, and now it's moved to more of a backup of a virtual machine. I think we're talking about something different when we talk about your approach to backup and restore we're really talking about backing up data assets, do I have that right? >> That is correct. You have gone from a place where you are backing up PC's and Macintosh's and cellphones, to a place where the digital assets of your company, that are useful analytics, are far more important. Now, a simple backup, where you take the contents in one data center, push it to another data center, are a half-solution to the problem. What we've come up with is this notion called live data. You have multiple data centers, some of them you own, they're on premise, some of them are Cloud vendor data centers, they definitely reside in different parts of the world. Your data also is generated in different parts of the world, now all of this data goes into this data system, this platform that we've built for you, and it's available under all circumstances. If a region of a Cloud vendor goes down or if your own data center goes down, that's a non-event, because that data is available in other data centers around the world. This gives you the flexibility to treat this as a live data platform. You can write data where you want, you can read and run analytics wherever you want. You've gone from backing up PC's and phones, to actually using your digital assets in a manner such that you can make critical business decisions based on that. Imagine that insurance company that's making-- underwriting policies based on this digital data. If the data's not available, you've got a full halt on the business, that's not acceptable. If the data is not available because a specific data center went down, you can't call a full-stop to your business, you've got to make it available. Those are simple examples of how digital transformation is happening, and regular backup and DR are really inadequate to fuel your digital transformation. >> In fact, we like to think, we're advising our clients, that as they think about digital transformation, the role that data's playing, a digital business is not just backing up and restoring or sustaining or avoiding disasters associated with the data, they're really talking about backing up and restoring their entire business. That's kind of what we mean when we talk about DR in the digital business sense, disaster recovery, or backup and recovery, restore, in a digital business sense. And as you said, this notion of live data increases our ability to do that, but partly that requires a second kind of a step. By that I mean, most people think about storage, they think about where data's located in terms of persisting the data. When we talk about this new approach, we're talking about ensuring that we can deliver the data. Restore takes on more importance than backup than it has before, would you agree with that? That really talking about live data is really about being able to restore data wherever it's needed. >> It's an interesting new approach where we don't really define a primary and a backup. One of the important things about our Paxos-based replication system is that each location, or each instance, replica of your data, is exactly equal. So if you have a West Coast data center, and an East Coast data center, and a Midwest data center, and your West Coast data center happens to go down, none of the activities that you perform on your data will stop, you can continue writing your data to your Midwest and your East Coast data center, you continue writing and reading, running your applications against this data set. Now there wasn't a definition that the West Coast is primary and East Coast is backup. When a disaster strikes, we will cut over to the backup, we'll start using that, when the primary comes back, now we have to reconcile it, that's the traditional way of doing things, and it brings about some really bad attributes. Such as you need to have all your data pumped into one data center, that's counter to our philosophy. We believe that live data is where each of these replicas is equal, we build a platform for you where you can write to any of these, you can run your analytics against any of those. Once you get past that mental hurdle, what you've got is the freedom to innovate. You can look at it and go: I've got my data available everywhere, I can write to it, I can read from it, what can I do with this data? How can I quickly iterate so I can make more interesting business decisions, more relevant business decisions that will result in better business, profits and revenue. This interesting outcome is because you're now, not concerned about the availability of data or the primary, backup, and failover and failback, all those disappear from your radar. >> So let me build on that a little bit too, Jagane. So the way we would describe that is that a digital business, most have those data assets, those crucial data assets available, so that they can be delivered to applications and new activities, so we think in terms, what we call data zones, where the idea, you take a look at what your digital business value proposition is, what activities are essential to delivering on that value proposition, and then, whether or not the data is in a zone approximate to that activity, so that activity can actually be executed. So that means, from a physical standpoint, it needs to be there, from a legal standpoint, from a intellectual property control, from cost, but also from a consistency standpoint, you don't want dramatically different behaviors in your business just because the data that's over there is not consistent with the data that's over here, that's kind of what you guys are looking at. Now, ultimately that means, going out a little bit, but ultimately that means that this notion of deploying data so it serves your business now, has to also include a futures orientation. That we want to choose technologies that give us high value options on data futures as well. Is that what you mean by effectively, freedom to invent? >> It's definitely one aspect of our definition of freedom to invent. We are focused fully on complying with some of these requirements that you talked about. Regions of data, for example, there are parts of the world where you cannot take the data from that part of the world outside but often you need to do analytics in a global manner, such that if you detect a flaw or a problem that is surfaced by data in one part of the world, the chances are very good that that'll apply to this restricted zone as well. You want to be able to apply your analytics against that. Critical business decisions may need to be made, yet you cannot export that data out of that country, we facilitate such capabilities. So we've gone from a simpler primary backup type of system to a live data platform. And finally, we've given you the freedom to invent because you can now take a look at it and go I can start building applications that are in the critical business path because I'm confident of the availability of my data, the fact that we comply with all regulatory consilience things like aging out data after a certain number of months or days, we can help you do that really well with our platform. So yes, in fact the notion that data resides in different pools, in different areas, replicated consistently, available under all circumstances, enables business to think about their data in a completely different manner, up-level it. >> And satisfying physical, legal, intellectual property, and cost realities. >> Exactly. Those are all consilience that need to be addressed by this replication platform. >> So as we think about where customers are going with this clearly they've started around this backup and restore, but it sounds like you guys are helping them today conceive of what it means to do backup and restore and analytics, that is a particularly sensitive issue for a lot of businesses right now that are trying to marry together data science and good practices associated with IT. How is that playing out, can you give us some insight into how customers are doing a better job of that? >> Sure. A global auto maker that has acquired our software can do replication started off by using it for two very simple use-cases. They were looking at migrating from an older version of a data system to a newer version, we enabled them to do that without downtime, that was a clear win for us. The second thing they wanted to do was enable a disaster recovery type scenario. Once we got to that stage, we showed them how easy it was for them to continue writing to what was originally notionally the backup system, that made about twice as much compute resources available for them, because their original notion was that the backup system would just be a backup system, nothing could be done on it. Light bulbs went off in our customers head, they looked at it and went I can continue writing here, even if my primary goes down, there's no real notion of a backup, there's no real notion of failover and failback, that opened their minds to a whole bunch of new ideas. Now, they are in a position to build some business critical applications. Gone are the days when an analytics thing meant you run a report once a week and send it off to the CIO, it's not that anymore, it's up to minute accuracy, people are making things like insurance companies making underwriting decisions, and healthcare companies tracking the spread of diseases based on up to the minute information that they're getting. These are not weekly once analytics applications anymore, these are truly businesses that are based on their digital data. >> So a fundamental promise of live data is that wherever the data is, the application is live? >> Jagane: Yes, absolutely. >> Alright one more thing I think we want to talk about very quickly Jagane is there is some differences in mindset that a CIO has to apply here, again the CIO used to look at the assets and say machines, the hardware, yes, and maybe the applications, and now, to really see the value of this, they have to think of this in terms of data being the asset. How are your customers starting to evolve that notion so that they see the problem differently? >> So, I think the first thing that happened was the Cloud, we can't take credit for that, of course, but it helped our costs a great deal because people looked at infrastructure with a completely different viewpoint. They don't look at it as I'm going to buy a server with this size to run my Oracle, that mentality went away, and people started looking at, I have to store my data here and I can run an elastic application on this, I can grow our resources on demand and surrender those resources back to the Cloud when I don't need that. We take that to the next step, we enable them to have consistent replicas of their data across multiple regions of Cloud vendors, across different Cloud vendors. Suddenly they have the ability to do things like, I can run this analytics on Redshift here in Amazon really well, I can use this same data to run it on Azure SQL DW here, which is a better application for this specific use-case. We've opened up the possibilities to them, such that, they don't worry about what data they're going to use, how much resources they're going to get, resources are truly elastic now, you can buy and surrender resources, as per your demand, so it's opening up possibilities that they never had before. >> Excellent! Jagane Sundar, CTO of WANdisco, talking about live data, and the journey the customers are on to make themselves more fully digital businesses. >> Thanks, Peter. >> Once again this is Peter Burris from theCUBE, CUBEConversation with Jagane Sundar of WANdisco. (intense orchestral music)