(soaring orchestral music) >> Everyone, welcome to this CUBE Conversation here at Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are here with Joel Horwitz, who's the CMO of WANdisco, Joel, great to see you, formerly of IBM, we've known you for many years, we've had great conversations when you were at IBM, rising star, now at WANdisco, congratulations. >> Thank you, yeah, it's really great to be at WANdisco, and great to be here with theCUBE. So we've had many conversations, again, goin' back, you were a rising star in data, you know the cloud real well, why WANdisco, why leave IBM for WANdisco, what attracted you to the opportunity? >> Yeah, really three things. First and foremost, the people. I've known the WANdisco team now for years. Back in my Hadoop days, when I was at Datamere, I used to, hang out with the WANdisco team at Data After Dark, in New York, which was great, and they had the best marketing there at the time. Two, the product, I mean I won't join a company unless the product is really legit, and they have an absolutely great technology, and they are applying it to some really tough problems. And third is just the potential, really, the potential of this company is not even close to being tapped. So there's a ton of runway there, and so, for me, I'm just totally grateful, and totally honored, to be a part of WANdisco. >> What's the tailwind for them, that wave that they're on, if you will, because you mentioned, there's a lot of runway or headroom, a lot of market growth. Certainly cloud, David Richards will talk about that. But what attracted you, 'cause you knew the cloud game too. >> Yeah, yeah. >> IBM made a big run at the cloud. >> Yeah well, I came in, at IBM, through the data door, so to speak, and then I walked through the cloud door, as well, while I was there. And the reality is that data continues to be the lifeblood of an enterprise, no matter what. And so, what I saw in WANdisco was that they had technology that allowed people to enlarge enterprise to, frankly replicate or manage their data across Hadoop clusters from cluster to cluster. And then we ended up, when I spoke with you last, with David here, we also recognize the opportunity that just how copying data, large-scale data from one Hadoop cluster to another, is challenging, copying data, it's really not that different of copying data from, say, HDFS to an object storage or S3, as pretty similar problem. And so that's why, just this past week, we announced live data for multicloud. >> Explain live data for multicloud, I've read it in the news, got some buzz, it's this great trend, live. We're doing you a lot of live videos on theCUBE, live implies real time. Data's data. Multicloud is clearly becoming one of those enterprise categories. >> Yeah. >> First it was public cloud, then hybrid cloud. >> Yeah. >> Now it's multicloud. How does live data fit into multicloud? >> Yeah, so multicloud, and live data, as I just mentioned, we have live data for Hadoop, so that's fairly obvious, so if you're going multi-cluster you can do that. As well as from, even on-prem, data center to data center, so, multi-site if you will. But multicloud is a really interesting phrase that's kind of cropped up this year. We're seeing it used quite a lot. The focus in multicloud has been mainly focus on applications. And so, talking about, how do you have a container strategy? Or a virtualization strategy, for your applications? And so, I think of it really as a multicloud strategy, as opposed to a multicloud architecture. So we're helping our enterprise clients think about their multicloud strategy. So they're not locked in to any one vendor, so they're able to take advantage of all the great innovations that are happening, if you ask me, on the cloud first, and then ultimately comes down to, at times, on-prem. >> What's the pitfalls between multicloud strategy and multicloud architecture, you just said, customers don't want to get locked in, obviously, no-one wants to get locked in, multi-vendor used to be a big buzzword, during that last wave of computer-to-client server. >> Yeah. >> Now multicloud seems like multi-vendor, what do you mean by architecture versus strategy, how do you parse that? Yeah, so like I said, in terms of your data, right, and it all comes back to your data. If you go all in on, say, one vendor, and you're architecting for that vendor only and you're choosing your migration, your data management tools, for a particular cloud vendor, and, said a different way, if you're only using the native tools from that vendor, then it's very difficult to ever move off of that cloud, or to take advantage of other clouds as they, for example, maybe have new IOT offerings, or have new blockchain offerings, or have new AI offerings, as many others come on the scene. And so, that's what I mean by strategy, is if you choose one vendor for, your certain toolset, then it's going to be very difficult to maintain arbitrage between the different vendors. >> Talk about how you guys are attacking the market, obviously, it's clear that data, has been a fundamental part of WANdisco's value proposition. Moving data around has been a top concern, even back in the Hadoop days, now it's in the cloud. >> Yeah. >> Moving data across the network, whether it's cloud to cloud, or cloud to data center, or to the edge of the network-- >> Yep. Yep. >> Is a challenge. >> You know at IBM, when I was there in 2016, and we're coming up with our strategy when I was in Corp Dev. We talked about four different areas of data, we talked about data gravity, so data has gravity. We talked about data movement, and we talked about data science. And we talked about data governance. And I still think those are still relatively the four major themes around this topic of data. And so, absolutely data has gravity, and not just in terms of the absolute size and weight, if you will. But it also has applications that depend on it, the business itself depends on it, and so, the types of strategies that we've seen to migrate data, say, to the cloud, or have a hybrid data management strategy, has been lift and shift, or to load it on to the back of, I always picture that image of the forklift lifting all those tape drives onto the airplane, you know, the IBM version of that. And that's like a century old at this point, so, we have a way to replicate data continuously, using our patented consensus technology, that's in the lifeblood of our company, which is distributed computing. And so having a way, to migrate data to the cloud, without disrupting your business, is not just marketing speak, but it's really what we are able to do for our clients. How do you guys go to market, how do you guys serve customers, what's the strategy? >> So, primarily we've formed a number of strategic partnerships, obviously one with IBM that I helped spearhead while I was there, we actually just recently announced that we now support Big SQL, so it's actually the first opportunity where, if you are using a database, provided by IBM, you can actually replicate across different databases and still query it with Big SQL. Which is a big deal, right, it means you can still have access to your data while it's in motion, right, that's pretty cool. And then so IBM is there, and then secondly, we've formed a number of other strategic partnerships with the other cloud vendors, of course, Alibaba we have an OEM, Microsoft, we have preferred selling motion with them, AWS, of course, we're in their marketplace. So primarily, we sell through a number of our key partnerships, because, we are, fairly integrated, like I said, into the architecture of these platforms, and, just to comment more deeply on that, when you look at, object storage, on each of these various public cloud vendors. They may look similar on the surface, maybe they all use the same APIs or have some level of, similar interaction, they look like they're the same, the pricing might be the same. We go like one level deeper, and they're all very different, they're all very different flavors of object storage. And so while it might seem like, "Oh, that's trivial to work with," it really isn't, it's extremely non-trivial, so, we help, not only our customers solve that, but we also help our partners significantly, help their clients move to the cloud, to their cloud, faster. >> So you basically work through people who sell your product, to the end user customer, or through their application or service. >> Yeah, that's our main route to market, I would say, the other, obviously, the main, we have a direct sales force, who's out there, working with the best clients in the world. AMD is a great customer of ours, who we recently helped migrate to Microsoft Azure. And we have a number of other large enterprise customers, in retail, and finance, and media. And so really, when it comes down to it, yeah it's those two majors motions, one through the cloud vendors themselves, 'cause frankly, in most cases, they don't have this technology to do it, you know, they're trying to basically take snapshots of data, and they're struggling to convince their customers to move to their cloud. >> It becomes a key feature in platforms. >> Yes it does. >> So that's obviously what attracts sellers, what other things would attract sellers or partners, for you, what motivates them, obviously the IP, clearly, is the number one, economics, what's the other value proposition? >> The end goal isn't to move data to the cloud, the end goal is to move business processes to the cloud, and then be able to take advantage of the other value adds that already exist in the cloud. And so if you're saying, what's the benefit there, well, once you do that move, then you can sell into, clients with all your additional value adds. So that's really powerful, if you are stuck with this stage of "Eh, how do we actually migrate data to the cloud?" >> So IBM Think is coming up, what's your view of what's happening there, what are you guys going to be doing there, as are you, on the IBM side-- >> Yeah. >> Now you're on the other side of the table. You've been on both sides of the table. >> Yeah. >> So what's goin' on at Think, and how does WANdisco, vector, and certainly CUBE will be there. >> Yeah, we'll be there, so WANdisco is a sponsor of IBM Think as well, clearly, as I mentioned, we'll be talking about Big Replicate, which is our Hadoop replication offering, that's sold with IBM. The other one, as I mentioned, is Big SQL, so that's a new offering that we just announced this past month. So we'll be talking about that, and showing a number of great examples of how that actually works, so if you're going to be at Think, come by our booth, and check that out. In addition to that, I mean, clearly, IBM is also talking about multicloud and hybrid cloud, so hybrid data management, hybrid cloud is a big topic. You can expect to see, at IBM Think, a lot of conversations on the application side. In terms of, obviously with their acquisition of Red Hat, you can well imagine they're going to be talking a lot about the software stack, there. But I would say that, we'll be talking, and spending most of our time talking about, how to manage your data across different environments. >> Where's the product roadmap heading, I know you guys don't like to go into specifics in public- >> Yeah. >> Sensitive information, but, generally speaking, where's the main trendlines that you guys are going to be building on, obviously, cloud data, they'll come in together, good core competency there for WANdisco, what's next, what's the next level for you guys? >> So what's really fascinating, and I actually didn't realize this when I joined WANdisco, just to be completely transparent. WANdisco has a core piece of technology called DConE, Distributed Coordination Engine. It essentially is a form of blockchain, really, it's a consensus technology, it's an algorithm. And that's been their secret sauce since the founding of the company. And so they originally applied that to code, through source code management, and then only in this last few years they've applied it to data. So you can guess, at other areas that we might apply it to, and already this past year, we actually filed two patents, in the area of blockchain, or really, distributed ledger technology, as we're starting to hear it called in the actual enterprise that's using it. But you can expand that to any other enterprise asset, really. That's big, right, that has value, and that you want to manage across different environments, so you can imagine, lots of other assets that we could apply this to, not only code, not only data, not only ledgers, but what are the other assets? And so that's essentially what we're working on. >> Is that protectable IP the patents, so those are filed on the blockchain? >> Yeah, yeah. >> For instance? >> So DConE is certainly patented, I'm sure Jagane'll talk more about this. >> Yeah, we'll get into it. >> There's probably a handful of people in the world, and they might all be working at WANdisco at this point. (chuckles) Who actually know how that works, and it's essentially Paxos, which is a really gnarly problem to solve, a really difficult math problem. And as David mentioned earlier, Google, the other smartest company in the world, published their paper on Spanner, and as you said, they used brute force, really, to solve the problem. Where we have a very elegant solution, using software, right? So it's a really great time to be at WANdisco, because I just see that there's so many applications of our technology, but, right now, we're mainly focused on what our customers are asking for. >> You've said a great quote, thanks Joe, final question for you, where do you see it going, WANdisco, what are your plans, do you have anything in mind, do you want to share anything notable, around what you're doing, and what you think WANdisco will be in a few years. >> We have an incredible team, as I mentioned, the people that are joining WANdisco, as David mentioned, I myself, not to say too much there, but, the new folks that have joined our Research and Development Team, but we've been making some great hires, to WANdisco. So I'm really excited about the team, I'm going, actually, to visit, we have a great team in Europe, in the UK, in the United Kingdom, so I'm going to go see them next week. But we have just the company culture is what drives me, I think that's just one of those hard things, really, to find. And so that's what I'm really excited about, so there's a lot of cool stuff happening there. You know, on that note, it's actually kind of funny, because on one of the articles that talked about live data for multicloud, asked the question, and her headline was "Are You Down to Boogie?" So, disco continues to be a great meme for us, with our name. (John chuckles) Unintentional, so, as a marketer, it's a pretty fun time to be at WANdisco. >> Seventies and eighties were great times, certainly I'm an eighties guy, Joel, thanks for comin' on, appreciate the update, Joel Horowitz, CMO, Chief Marketing Officer, WANdisco, really on a nice wave right now, cloud growth, data growth, all comin' together, real IP, lookin' forward to hearing more, what comes down the pipe for those guys, you'll see him at IBM Think. I'm John Furrier here, in the studios at Palo Alto, thanks for watching. (soaring orchestral music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, Nevada. It's the CUBE, covering AWS re:Invent 2016. Brought to you by AWS and its ecosystem partners. (light techno music) Now, here's your host. >> And we're back, happy to welcome back to the program, regular guest on our program, David Richards, who is the founder and CEO of WANdisco. David, anything interesting happen since last time, you know, we've talked to you? >> David: Well I kind of got, you guys are a bad omen for me. Kind of left the CUBE in New York, got off a plane, got fired, and then four days later got reinstated. Apart from that, virtually nothing's happened actually. >> Hey, you know it's good coverage in The Financial Times, and then lots of press and everything, so lots more people know about WANdisco now, right? >> David: That's right, and I don't have Tourette's, I promise. (laughs) >> Alright, David, AWS re:Invent, I mean, pretty impressive show, you know we see you in a lot of shows, many of them interesting, lots of smart people but I mean, wow this is pretty impressive. They got up on stage lots of things that I'm sure interest you, give us your take of the show so far. >> It's fascinating, I mean, this sort of must have been, I wasn't there when, you know, Steve Jobs was launching the first Mac and so on, but this kind of feels, more than just a small movement. This is a large shift in enterprise, moving from On-premises to Cloud, I think it's unquestionable that's happening. I mean, I'm sure you've covered it this week on The Cube. I've not seen it, but 32,000 people are here. Virtually every single vendor that you could ever think of is exhibiting in this exhibit hall. You can barely move about the people. Our booth traffic has just been phenomenal this week, and it really feels like this is a seismic shift in the marketplace. I know we've been saying that for a while, but it really does feel that way. >> Why do you think now, is it just, we just got here, and it's the overnight success that's been ten years in the making, or was there an event or something that really, kind of, tipped it over to where we are, because clearly, it's very different than last year. >> It, sort of, Cloud V1, and you guys have been covering this for a long time, was really companies that were born in the Cloud, it was the Airbnbs, it was the Tinders, it was the Facebooks and so on. Those companies were actually made, born in the Cloud. What's now happening, clearly, is enterprise is moving to the Cloud, and Cloud 2.0 really is about a different set of requirements, a different set of customers. There are customers with massive petabyte-scale data sets that they really can't take advantage of, they can't really scale out, it's too complex for them to build many of the applications they need to build, they now have to move to Cloud, and, you know, 32,000 people are not here just for the sake of it, they're here because they have to be here, because they're moving, obviously, to Cloud, and AWS have such a massive lead, I think, in the Cloud at the moment and Enterprise Cloud, and that's probably why so many people are here. >> David, one of the interesting things to look at at this show is, Amazon has some opinions about where data lives, how it moves, where you process it, you know, all of those kind of things. You guys are kind of opinionated on those kind of things too so, you know, give us your view on those kind of, those guys. I mean, I made a comment on Twitter, it was like, "Hey, what do we call a data lake when it's in the Cloud now?" >> Jeff: Well look, that's what happens to Clouds, they-- >> One of the big reveals in Andy Jassy's talk this morning was a truck coming across the front of the stage, and I've had so many emails saying, is this real, is this a joke, are we now really moving data in a semi from On-premises into the Cloud? And, it's kind of interesting, I think it's a little bit of a gimmick to be honest with you, I think Amazon do lots of great things, there were lots of wonderful announcements today, like opening up Alexa and allowing, you know, and some of the things they're doing with serverless computers, just phenomenal, but I think a truck to move data from On-premises to Cloud, kind of feels like we're back in the 1970s to me, whereas I was talking to a, the CIO of an automotive company a couple of weeks ago. They have a problem where, you know, to move data causes an outage in their organization today of about 30 hours. Their data growth is going to be so vast, the velocity is going to be so great in the next 12 months, that if they use the existing technology today, that they have today, would take them in the region of a month to move that data. So, trucks are great for cold, archival data, well they might be great for cold, archival data, I'm sure you could figure out a better way, like the internet to move it, but for our active transactional data, data that changes and moves, that's critical to the organization, you simply can't put it on the back of a truck and basically mail it to Amazon with a Snowball, that really doesn't work, and I think the market really needs to be educated a little bit about what's possible. >> Well, and I don't know that Amazon would necessarily disagree with you. I mean, if you look at the Snowball family, they had the Snowball Edge out there, which was realization, hey I might want compute, and even, we're going to give you that new green grass Lambda, serverless type stuff, so that you can do processing where there's no network, or I can't do anything, but, I guess, we know from a physics standpoint, I understand, you know, the internet is great, but, you know, if I want to move, you know, 100 petabytes or more of data, you know, even if I'm a Telco, that's a ton of data that I need to move. So, tell me where there's this connect. >> So, the way that WANdisco's technology works, is we continually replicate data, so where every other form of data replication is time based, it requires the concept of a clock, like, even Google, who've got Google Spanner, which is kind of active/active replication, but relies on a satellite in the sky, on atomic clocks, GPS clocks on every single server. We don't have any of that reliance, we're transactional data replication, which means if something changes, it gets replicated, and that process is continuous, which means that you can basically move data applications without any downtime or interruption to service. And that's absolutely critical for what I called earlier Cloud V2, which is the enterprises moving to Cloud, they have to be able to get there without any interruption to service. Small data, yeah, you can use that kind of technology, or non-strategic data, yeah, you can use this kind of technology. Strategic data and strategic applications, trading systems, you know, you can't be 99.99% correct if somebody's got cancer or not, right? If you're using the Cloud, or machine learning technology to figure that out, you can't be, you know, almost certain, you need to be completely certain, and that requires data to be where it's supposed to be. >> So, Amazon's a partner of yours. What's it like being a partner of Amazon's these days? Give us your point on that. >> Amazon are a phenomenal company. They have to be, right, they've just built, probably the world's most valuable enterprise technology business by a country mile in ten years. I mean, it's just, you know, zero to 10 billion in (snaps fingers) the blink of an eye is just incredible. And part of their secret is, they base everything on data, and I've learned a lot from dealing with Amazon actually, everything is data driven. You know, they have this Five Why's, I'm sure you've read about it in the media, where you have to prove, through facts and figures, not sentiment, that something is so, and that's pretty uncomfortable for a lot of people. For us, it's not, and it's, working with Amazon, their requirements, the bar is so high it's made our products much much much better. They have a well-architectured review that they go through with all their partners. They're actually great to partner with, if you're not a very good company, I would, daresay, don't bother because they'll find you out very quickly. But they're a great set of guys, very very good to partner with, it's very black and white, it's very quantitative, but, yeah, they've obviously got a huge market. >> Yeah. One of the things I love about this show is that the quality of people, you know, is phenomenal, and you get such a, I mean, a huge cross-section, not only location, size, industry, but one of the things I think that is across everybody that comes here, is they're trying new things, they're open to, you know, moving forward, iterating, learning, which has been one of the things that, you know, we kind of say what holds companies back is like, oh I'm doing it the old way. So, what's your experience been with the users? Any stories you can tell from that standpoint? >> So, right down to the bottom of the organization, they're prepared to take any idea. I mean, Amazon Web Services, for goodness' sake was basically a paper that was written and presented to Jeff Bezos, right, who said, yeah that's a good idea to Jassy and said yeah, let's go off and do it. But they, virtually every innovation in their organization is somebody coming up with an idea. They have the mechanics and machinery to listen to that idea. We do it ourselves, so, we're looking at serverless compute and using Lambda so we can have replication literally as a service that you can just call, you can call Paxos, which is our core IP, it's based on Paxos, it's called DConE, so you can call that algorithm and get a replication service. So these concepts, some of the concepts that Amazon are introducing, their ability to move so quickly to introduce new products is because they have this innovative approach where they allow people, right down to the very bottom of the organization, to come up with new ideas and approaches to doing things. And it's perfectly fine for somebody at the bottom of their organization to challenge somebody at the top of the organization. In fact, they expect it. And again, that's not comfortable for a lot of people, but I like the way that they go around their business. >> I'm looking forward to, Alexa, how's my replication doing? (laughs loudly) >> Wouldn't that be great? >> Well, it's interesting you say that, we had Malcolm Gladwell on a month or two ago, and he talked about, the most powerful organizations are the ones that let the fresh ideas bubble up from the bottom because it's the people that have not been tainted by being in part of the company, that had new and creative and innovative, and a different way of looking at it, and oftentimes they get squelched, so the fact that they let those ideas come up, and also driven by data, pretty powerful. >> It's interesting being at the show this week, and I have two types of meetings, I have meetings with companies at the forefront of this Cloud revolution, companies at the forefront of building new, innovative applications that were designed for the Cloud, and then I have other meetings with companies, vendors, who have been caught out by this. They didn't see this coming, they didn't expect, you know, this sea change to happen as quickly as it's happening and they really are fighting and scrambling to know what to do, and this is everything from, you know, the big services companies, the big traditional enterprise storage companies are really struggling to understand what they're going to do with the Cloud, and they don't have those processes and procedures inside their businesses like we do. Like, they can't change and be agile and nimble and take advantage of these new products and markets that are suddenly appearing overnight. >> Yeah, it's funny, the guy from (mumbles) was talking about, they don't want to be a system integrator anymore, right now it's services integration and really changing the way you think about putting this stuff together, it's very different. >> It is very different, and, it used to be the case that you'd get, and I know we've all lived through this, you get the enterprise sales guy that turns up in the $2,000 suit and the Porsche parked outside, and comes in and sells you, you know, a piece of software, and asks you how your wife and kids are doing and all the rest of it. Look at the audience here today. They're not going to put up with, you know, that style of enterprise sales moving forward. People are buying stuff from a marketplace. The expectation is you can choose, select, deploy, and build applications yourself, and that's how many of these companies are operating today. So it's not just the sea change in the technology, the technology's facilitating completely different and new markets. >> Jeff: Behaviors, yeah. >> David, want to give you the final word on, as you leave this show, you know, your takeaways, what you want people to know. >> Clearly we're in an era where, this is going to be an Enterprise Cloud. Cloud 2.0 is all about enterprises that are taking their data from On-premises into the Cloud. It's happening very quickly. 32,000 people are here this week, they're here for a reason, because they have to be. This is a sea change in the marketplace, and I hope, well I know WANdisco's the vanguard of moving many of those enterprises from On-premises into the Cloud very quickly. >> Alright, absolutely, definitely agree with the sea change there. David Richards, founder and still CEO of WANdisco, really appreciate you joining us again. We'll be back to wrap up our coverage of today at AWS re:Invent 2016. You're watching the CUBE. (light techno music)