(silence) (upbeat techno music) >> Narrator: Live from New York, it's theCUBE, covering Big Data NYC 2016, brought to you by headline sponsors: Cisco... IBM... Nvidia, and our ecosystem sponsors. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Peter Burris. >> Welcome back to New York City, everybody. This is theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. David Richards is here. He's the CEO of WANdisco, a long time CUBE alum. Great to see you again. >> Great to be back. >> It was good fun hanging out with last night and a good surprise at the IBM event. There was good action across the street. >> Yeah, you're both looking surprisingly well, actually. >> (Dave laughs) Yes. >> Well, we also heard about the WANdisco versus theCUBE golf tournament, that apparently theCUBE just did really, really well in it and WANdisco went running away with their tail between their legs. >> Well, I talked to Furrier last night. I said, "David Richards was telling me "that he kicked your butt on the golf course." He goes, "Yeah, that's true, actually." (laughter) >> I think I've got some video proof that he actually gave me $20 live on air because, of course, his wallet was empty. (laughter) He was blowing the dust off it, you know? >> Of course, yeah, the body swerve. >> Alligator arms. >> So David, it's, again, great to see you again. You guys have been in this business since day one, and things are evolving. How are things changing for WANdisco? >> So, when we first came into this market, back in the mid-2006, 2007, and then we obviously made a bunch of acquisitions around 2011 and 2012 that took us headlong into the big data marketplace. We pretty much had a completely different business model to our business model now. Then, we had a product called Non-Stop NameNode... My God, can you imagine that? (Dave laughs) That was very focused on the Hadoop marketplace because, at that time, we believed, like everybody else, that Hadoop was going to take over the world, people were going to move to commoditized servers, open-source software, and solve the huge storage problems that they were going to have from both a cost and efficiency perspective. What I think has happened, or is happening right now, is this evolution, and it really is more of a revolution than an evolution is taking place, where workloads, and we were discussing this last night, are moving at massive scale to cloud, and people are really skipping that step, where we thought they were going to have 5, 10,000 sort of clusters on-premise, but now they have some clusters on-prem, but the bulk of the workloads are actually moving into cloud. I was just discussing with George, off-camera a few minutes ago, why that is happening, and there's a lot of applications that are very efficient. The cloud packs are up there ready to use, off the shelf, and it becomes very simplistic, and to be quite frank, do we really care anymore about all these different open-source components? Is the CIO waking up in the middle of the night thinking, oh, my God, am I going to use Ignite, am I going to use Spark, am I going to use Pig, am I going to use Hive, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? Of course they're not. They really just want to-- Let's inverse the question to ourselves. If you were going to start a competitor to Uber tomorrow, would you go and build a data center (Dave laughs) or would you just throw up a thousand servers up in the cloud and have done with it, and use all the apps that are up there? Of course, the answer's simple, so that's really what's happening. >> Well, one of the things that I... I wrote a piece of research a million years ago in which I prognosticated, the Dictionary Word of the Day, that the value of middleware was inversely proportional to the degree to which anybody knew anything about it. (Dave laughs) CIOs are waking up and asking those questions today, which is an indication that they're creating a problem. >> Yep. >> Infrastructure has to do no harm in the organization. I had a CIO friend for years who still asks his chief CTO, "To what degree is infrastructure creating a problem "for me today?" >> Yeah. >> And if it's creating a problem, it's a problem. >> Mm-hmm. >> You don't want to have to know about this stuff, and so what degree are you helping companies mask some of those... that visibility, so that people can spend less time worrying about the infrastructure? >> So, what we're focused on is a business model that has gone from direct, where we were hiring out a very large direct sales force enterprise, the classic enterprise sales guys that would go knock on doors, knock deals down, go and sell to the Global 1000s, to an indirect model, and we announced that OAM, recently with IBM, IBM Big Replicate, that is under the covers, is WANdisco Fusion, which is a great deal for us. So, our focus very much is on data movement, and data movement between data centers, for companies that want to stay on-prem, and between data centers and in and out of cloud seamlessly, and the word there is seamlessly. So, we worked very hard for the past 18 months on our product such that anybody can go to, if you want to go to the AWS Marketplace, you can, in a few clicks, begin to replicate petabyte-scale in and out of cloud, and we think, and we were discussing this last night, that the hybrid-cloud model is really fascinating, so the ability to take data on-premise, query it in cloud, get complete consistency between on-prem and cloud, but also have all the efficiency in the cloud economics, the elasticity, all the applications that exist in cloud, and I think that model is really interesting, and what's interesting is, I'm not sure that the little guys can execute in that model other than, like we're doing, veer on OAM, an indirect model. So, I'm not sure whether or not, just to go back to the conversation, CIOs are as concerned as they used to be about which Hadoop distribution, for example, they're using. I never hear that question anymore. That question was a 2012, 2013 question. What the CIOs are now concerned about is the economics of cloud, and how do I get that less than $5 per terabyte of data economics that I get in a cloud environment. >> Well, but also increasingly, they're talking about the use cases. >> David: Yeah. >> They want to get their people... They don't want to replicate the Linux or Unix versus NT wars of the 1990s, which was made possible because they were focused on what accounting package am I going to run? Am I going to run it-- >> Yeah. >> on this or that? You know, it was known process, unknown technology. In today's universe, it's unknown process, and they don't want to know as much about the technology, so they're focused on how do I get my men and women focused on use cases that are delivering value for their business. >> Exactly, and the economics question is really simple. Am I going to build a massive, partially used, elastic infrastructure on-premise or am I just going to go and use the elastic infrastructure that already exists in the cloud? That's a no-brainer. That's already happening, and the good news for us, the good news for WANdisco, is it's precisely what we do. It's a data movement problem. Now, I'm bound to say that, but it is actually a data movement problem. In this idea that you have data that changes, active transactional data, as we call it, so the active transactional data movement is a really hard problem. You can't just take a snapshot, right? A file scan and then a snapshot and then move the data, and that's the problem that all the other data replication guys have got. That's what IBM, OAM, that's why we've got strategic partnerships with companies like Oracle, like Amazon, and why I'm sure we'll be announcing things in due course with the other cloud vendors, like Google, for example, and Microsoft with their Azure products. They all have that problem, so data movement, in and out of cloud, if it's batch, if it's static, if it's archival data, easy problem to solve. There's a million and one different replication products. >> Dave: Right. >> You can use rsync if you really wanted to do that, but active transactional data, data that changes, data that moves, you know, at petabyte scale, hard problem. That's the problem that we solve. >> Because you've got speed of light problems and you're exposing yourself to data loss-- >> Yep. >> if something goes wrong. >> Peter: Fidelity is a problem. >> An eventual consistency replication model-- >> Yeah, it... >> doesn't work. You can't... If I'm query... We've got a customer that's trying to look at cardiographs, right, in and out of cloud. I mean, would you really feel comfortable in your cardiograph eventually getting into the cloud and being analyzed? You know, would you? You've got to be absolutely crystal clear that the data is completely consistent from the stuff that I'm generating on-premise versus the models that I'm building in cloud. It's vitally important. >> Well, I would imagine there's regulations, in certain industries anyway, that-- >> Oh, yeah, absolutely. >> require that eventual consistency doesn't fit, right? >> Yeah. Well, I mean, at the moment, without us, that's all you got, I'm afraid... >> Okay. >> Well, so, I'm on a mission, let me and I want to get your take on it, that we always talk about elastic infrastructure, which is a given workload, being able to scale up and scale down. >> David: Yeah. >> I think it's time to start talking about plastic infrastructure-- >> David: Oh, yeah, I like it. >> where a given workload, but a reconfiguration of how that workload is applied because of the value of data, because of integration, because of the need to be able to move in response to business needs. So we talk about plastic infrastructure, where we are reconfiguring based on policy and rules and some other things. What do you think about that? >> I love it, and the reason I love it is because, just to take a step back, the definition of hybrid cloud is... You would imagine it would be relatively simple, but to me, a hybrid means that you have... You know, it's a bit like a hybrid golf club. It's neither a driver nor an iron. It's somewhere in between. So, you have the same workload that can exist both on-premise and in the cloud. I can use both the cloud and on-premise interchangeably. What hybrid cloud actually means, for all the vendors, and this is their dirty little secret, it means that you have some workloads running against some data in the cloud and others that will run against some data on-premise. Now, why do they do that? Because they have to. Because they can't guarantee complete consistency between on-premise and cloud. Our definition of hybrid cloud is exactly the same data, if you want, between on-premise and cloud, and I love this plastic phrase, the idea of repurposing all of those applications, and they can live anywhere. It doesn't matter 'cause it's the same data. >> Yeah, so we have two terms we have to copyright here, plastic infrastructure. >> Plastic... >> What was the other one we heard? >> Data portfolio. >> Data portfolio, yeah. We'll run the tape back >> Plastic infrastructure. (laughter) >> Plastic infrastructure. >> I'm going to steal it (laughs). >> Please do, you know? But the key thing is, as these technologies get more deeply embedded within business and how the business runs, it's incumbent upon the technology leadership to be able to rapidly be able to reconfigure the infrastructure in response to what the business needs. That's not elasticity. >> Yeah. >> That's plasticity. >> I love it, absolutely. (Peter laughs) And I think you're touching on something that's changing, and what we discussed earlier, which is that CIOs aren't waking up in the middle of the night thinking, am I going to use Pig or Hive or any of those other open source components. They're thinking about the applications that they're going to build. How am I actually going to start using this data? And I think the agenda's kind of moved on, and walking around the whole... There's still a little bit of confusion. You still have people talking about infrastructure like it really still matters. I'm not absolutely sure it does. >> Well, so let's talk about that. We got a few minutes or something like that. >> Dave: It matters when it breaks, you know? >> What's that? >> It matters when it breaks. >> It sure does matter when it breaks. >> You know, but otherwise, nobody wants to think about it. >> No, yeah, because like I said earlier, it's the degree to which-- >> We have time, but I want to explore the new distribution model as well. >> Yeah, go ahead. >> Let me do that, get that out, tick that box, if I can. Help me understand, David, how it all works. So you, the partnership with IBM and others, you mentioned Amazon, how does it work? You are in the IBM cloud offering? IBM is actually selling that offering? Is it a branded IBM product? >> So, it's in the big data analytics and cloud offerings. So, at the moment, IBM are very focused, as you know, on owning the platform. IBM, as a company, have the own the platform. >> Dave: Yeah, absolutely. >> So, I'm delighted to say that we're embedded into their platform. Now, they had a big launch of some products last night. >> Yeah. >> I know that they were talking about IBM Big Replicate, which is 100% white label OAM of WANdisco Fusion to solve some very specific problems, primarily around data movement. So, at the hybrid cloud, how do I punch data out into clouds, run the analytics against it, and be sure that I'm going to get the right results? That's what Big Replicate solves, and also, they're moving into mixed environments, whether they're NetApp, just kind of Teradata environment, SAS-based environments, or whether a customer already has an existing distribution of, say, Cloudera or Hortonworks, so they can live alongside that, so we can replicate data between existing deployments, where they may have already made a strategic decision to go with one of those distributions, and also be able to migrate not just into IBM Big Insights, but also into their cloud offering, so that's a great deal for us. We're not... They're selling it themselves. I mean, obviously we've done a lot of field enablement, trained 5,000 or so IBM sales rep, and, you know, if a small company like WANdisco, or a small company like virtually any of the vendors in there that are not in the Global 1000 list, the go-to market has to be indirect. >> And so you're... Totally agree, and so you're basically, if I understand it correctly, you're moving what are conventional filers into the cloud. Customers are doing that. >> Oh. >> How fast is that happening and why are they doing that? >> My, God. I mean, we have not announced this product yet, but we're in the middle of launching it. It's, at scale, moving petabyte-scale data from, and this is transactional data, so it's a hard problem to solve, right, so it's an active data... It's an active transactional data replication problem. So, a lot of... The dirty little secret in the cloud is that a lot of those NFS filers have not moved yet-- >> Right. >> And why haven't they moved? 'Cause they can't. Because you can't just... You know, if you were to travel, one of the customaries of banks and travel companies is they can't press pause in their organization, do a file scan that's going to take six months, and then turn it back on again, and hey, presto, it's in the cloud. You can't do that. So, you kind of have to... At every single migration of those filers, of any sort of data, is a hybrid model, so you have to be able to run both on-prem and cloud while that migration is happening, and there, I can tell you, are a lot, a hell of a lot of NetApp filers that are going to move very soon here, in time. >> Dave: Oh, 'cause that's the problem that you solve. Otherwise, you'd have to freeze everything, which would kill your business, so you can't do it. >> Yeah, so when human beings imagine things, we're always imagining small use cases, small sets, like moving a few files into Dropbox or something, and that's okay that I can't edit those files for the few seconds it takes to move. I took a look at a deal the other day that was 3 billion files. (Dave laughs) Right, 3 billion. You can't even... My brain can't even calculate that, right? That's a three to six month data movement, and Amazon, for example, thought of this product called Snowball, which-- >> Yeah. >> You know, no techy ever believes this story, but, of course, they FedEx a box, a ruggedized hard drive to you essentially, a ruggedized server that you pour your data into it and then you mail it back to them and they can put it there. That doesn't work, of course, for transactional data, for data that changes all the time. >> These are hard problems to solve, and I go to market, getting back to your question, it is all about indirect, you know? So, AWS, a strategic partnership, that, Oracle, a strategic partnership, that, IBM... And as I said, I'm sure that we'll be doing things with Google and Microsoft soon, and they're the five partnerships that I really care about, to be quite frank with you. >> Mm-hmm. and this comes back to this notion of infrastructure, the value of infrastructure, and just to touch on it for a second, so many years ago, when we were doing client-server, >> David: Mm-hmm. >> We would test it on a local area network and deploy it on a WAN (David laughs) and wonder why it blew up. >> David: Yeah. >> The realities of the speed of light and the practical limitations have a real impact on design, and so where infrastructure still matters is we still have to worry about design, we still have to worry about legacy financial assets, how we're deploying those assets, and I want to come back to this because we were talking earlier about data as an asset, the value of data within the business, and you don't want to be limited by the legacy as you try to find new ways of generating value out of your data, and what you guys are trying to allow is that the data can be moved in response to the use case as opposed to the use case not being made possible because of the legacy decisions about where to put your data. >> David: That's precisely it, and I don't think that any CIO, in their right mind, wants to continue with the huge maintenance costs, maintenance payments they have to make to some of those vendors, some of those NFS-based vendors. They need to shut them down. They have to figure out a way to move them into cloud so you get cloud economics, and also be able to query the data in a massively efficient way. You simply cannot do that at the moment. They simply cannot do that at the moment, so, as I said, as we continue to launch these products in the marketplace, I'm sure you'll see, at scale, some pretty large companies surprising-- You know, the two that spring to my mind are that the regulators in the US and the UK, Fenero and the FCA, are both in the process of their moving all into cloud, 100% into cloud, and I would expect to see that trend continue. I mean, the re:Invent... I don't want to talk about another-- and we're here at Strata, but the AWS re:Invent, I would expect to see several major financial service companies announcing cloud strategy. >> Yeah, and Fenero's a big user of the AWS cloud. They talk about it pretty aggressively, and really interesting use case there. So, yeah, so we got to end. What's next for you guys? You've mentioned you're going to be at re:Invent, you're going to be at World of Watson (laughs)? Where are we going to find you next? >> Both of those. Obviously, the white label with IBM is a really interesting deal for us. I can't talk about deal flow yet 'cause it's our end of quarter at the moment, but I can tell you that they're doing a pretty damn good job of selling, so we're in execution mode at the moment, where we've already announced some key partnerships. There'll be more key partnerships to come, I'm sure. We're obviously chasing deals down with some of the other cloud vendors, and I'd expect to see us announcing some interesting new customer wins in the coming days and weeks. >> Dave: Great. Well, congratulations on the momentum and the renewed strategy. I love it, and I appreciate you coming to theCUBE. >> Always a pleasure. >> All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live at Big Data NYC, Strata and Hadoop World. Be right back. (spacey electronica music)