(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)

(techno music) >> Announcer: Live, from downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to San Francisco everybody, this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here at the Parc 55 in San Francisco covering the IBM CDO Strategy Summit. I'm here with Joel Horwitz who's the Vice President of Digital Partnerships & Offerings at IBM. Good to see you again Joel. >> Thanks, great to be here, thanks for having me. >> So I was just, you're very welcome- It was just, let's see, was it last month, at Think? >> Yeah, it's hard to keep track, right. >> And we were talking about your new role- >> It's been a busy year. >> the importance of partnerships. One of the things I want to, well let's talk about your role, but I really want to get into, it's innovation. And we talked about this at Think, because it's so critical, in my opinion anyway, that you can attract partnerships, innovation partnerships, startups, established companies, et cetera. >> Joel: Yeah. >> To really help drive that innovation, it takes a team of people, IBM can't do it on its own. >> Yeah, I mean look, IBM is the leader in innovation, as we all know. We're the market leader for patents, that we put out each year, and how you get that technology in the hands of the real innovators, the developers, the longtail ISVs, our partners out there, that's the challenging part at times, and so what we've been up to is really looking at how we make it easier for partners to partner with IBM. How we make it easier for developers to work with IBM. So we have a number of areas that we've been adding, so for example, we've added a whole IBM Code portal, so if you go to developer.ibm.com/code you can actually see hundreds of code patterns that we've created to help really any client, any partner, get started using IBM's technology, and to innovate. >> Yeah, and that's critical, I mean you're right, because to me innovation is a combination of invention, which is what you guys do really, and then it's adoption, which is what your customers are all about. You come from the data science world. We're here at the Chief Data Officer Summit, what's the intersection between data science and CDOs? What are you seeing there? >> Yeah, so when I was here last, it was about two years ago in 2015, actually, maybe three years ago, man, time flies when you're having fun. >> Dave: Yeah, the Spark Summit- >> Yeah Spark Technology Center and the Spark Summit, and we were here, I was here at the Chief Data Officer Summit. And it was great, and at that time, I think a lot of the conversation was really not that different than what I'm seeing today. Which is, how do you manage all of your data assets? I think a big part of doing good data science, which is my kind of background, is really having a good understanding of what your data governance is, what your data catalog is, so, you know we introduced the Watson Studio at Think, and actually, what's nice about that, is it brings a lot of this together. So if you look in the market, in the data market, today, you know we used to segment it by a few things, like data gravity, data movement, data science, and data governance. And those are kind of the four themes that I continue to see. And so outside of IBM, I would contend that those are relatively separate kind of tools that are disconnected, in fact Dinesh Nirmal, who's our engineer on the analytic side, Head of Development there, he wrote a great blog just recently, about how you can have some great machine learning, you have some great data, but if you can't operationalize that, then really you can't put it to use. And so it's funny to me because we've been focused on this challenge, and IBM is making the right steps, in my, I'm obviously biased, but we're making some great strides toward unifying the, this tool chain. Which is data management, to data science, to operationalizing, you know, machine learning. So that's what we're starting to see with Watson Studio. >> Well, I always push Dinesh on this and like okay, you've got a collection of tools, but are you bringing those together? And he flat-out says no, we developed this, a lot of this from scratch. Yes, we bring in the best of the knowledge that we have there, but we're not trying to just cobble together a bunch of disparate tools with a UI layer. >> Right, right. >> It's really a fundamental foundation that you're trying to build. >> Well, what's really interesting about that, that piece, is that yeah, I think a lot of folks have cobbled together a UI layer, so we formed a partnership, coming back to the partnership view, with a company called Lightbend, who's based here in San Francisco, as well as in Europe, and the reason why we did that, wasn't just because of the fact that Reactive development, if you're not familiar with Reactive, it's essentially Scala, Akka, Play, this whole framework, that basically allows developers to write once, and it kind of scales up with demand. In fact, Verizon actually used our platform with Lightbend to launch the iPhone 10. And they show dramatic improvements. Now what's exciting about Lightbend, is the fact that application developers are developing with Reactive, but if you turn around, you'll also now be able to operationalize models with Reactive as well. Because it's basically a single platform to move between these two worlds. So what we've continued to see is data science kind of separate from the application world. Really kind of, AI and cloud as different universes. The reality is that for any enterprise, or any company, to really innovate, you have to find a way to bring those two worlds together, to get the most use out of it. >> Fourier always says "Data is the new development kit". He said this I think five or six years ago, and it's barely becoming true. You guys have tried to make an attempt, and have done a pretty good job, of trying to bring those worlds together in a single platform, what do you call it? The Watson Data Platform? >> Yeah, Watson Data Platform, now Watson Studio, and I think the other, so one side of it is, us trying to, not really trying, but us actually bringing together these disparate systems. I mean we are kind of a systems company, we're IT. But not only that, but bringing our trained algorithms, and our trained models to the developers. So for example, we also did a partnership with Unity, at the end of last year, that's now just reaching some pretty good growth, in terms of bringing the Watson SDK to game developers on the Unity platform. So again, it's this idea of bringing the game developer, the application developer, in closer contact with these trained models, and these trained algorithms. And that's where you're seeing incredible things happen. So for example, Star Trek Bridge Crew, which I don't know how many Trekkies we have here at the CDO Summit. >> A few over here probably. >> Yeah, a couple? They're using our SDK in Unity, to basically allow a gamer to use voice commands through the headset, through a VR headset, to talk to other players in the virtual game. So we're going to see more, I can't really disclose too much what we're doing there, but there's some cool stuff coming out of that partnership. >> Real immersive experience driving a lot of data. Now you're part of the Digital Business Group. I like the term digital business, because we talk about it all the time. Digital business, what's the difference between a digital business and a business? What's the, how they use data. >> Joel: Yeah. >> You're a data person, what does that mean? That you're part of the Digital Business Group? Is that an internal facing thing? An external facing thing? Both? >> It's really both. So our Chief Digital Officer, Bob Lord, he has a presentation that he'll give, where he starts out, and he goes, when I tell people I'm the Chief Digital Officer they usually think I just manage the website. You know, if I tell people I'm a Chief Data Officer, it means I manage our data, in governance over here. The reality is that I think these Chief Digital Officer, Chief Data Officer, they're really responsible for business transformation. And so, if you actually look at what we're doing, I think on both sides is we're using data, we're using marketing technology, martech, like Optimizely, like Segment, like some of these great partners of ours, to really look at how we can quickly A/B test, get user feedback, to look at how we actually test different offerings and market. And so really what we're doing is we're setting up a testing platform, to bring not only our traditional offers to market, like DB2, Mainframe, et cetera, but also bring new offers to market, like blockchain, and quantum, and others, and actually figure out how we get better product-market fit. What actually, one thing, one story that comes to mind, is if you've seen the movie Hidden Figures- >> Oh yeah. >> There's this scene where Kevin Costner, I know this is going to look not great for IBM, but I'm going to say it anyways, which is Kevin Costner has like a sledgehammer, and he's like trying to break down the wall to get the mainframe in the room. That's what it feels like sometimes, 'cause we create the best technology, but we forget sometimes about the last mile. You know like, we got to break down the wall. >> Where am I going to put it? >> You know, to get it in the room! So, honestly I think that's a lot of what we're doing. We're bridging that last mile, between these different audiences. So between developers, between ISVs, between commercial buyers. Like how do we actually make this technology, not just accessible to large enterprise, which are our main clients, but also to the other ecosystems, and other audiences out there. >> Well so that's interesting Joel, because as a potential partner of IBM, they want, obviously your go-to-market, your massive company, and great distribution channel. But at the same time, you want more than that. You know you want to have a closer, IBM always focuses on partnerships that have intrinsic value. So you talked about offerings, you talked about quantum, blockchain, off-camera talking about cloud containers. >> Joel: Yeah. >> I'd say cloud and containers may be a little closer than those others, but those others are going to take a lot of market development. So what are the offerings that you guys are bringing? How do they get into the hands of your partners? >> I mean, the commonality with all of these, all the emerging offerings, if you ask me, is the distributed nature of the offering. So if you look at blockchain, it's a distributed ledger. It's a distributed transaction chain that's secure. If you look at data, really and we can hark back to say, Hadoop, right before object storage, it's distributed storage, so it's not just storing on your hard drive locally, it's storing on a distributed network of servers that are all over the world and data centers. If you look at cloud, and containers, what you're really doing is not running your application on an individual server that can go down. You're using containers because you want to distribute that application over a large network of servers, so that if one server goes down, you're not going to be hosed. And so I think the fundamental shift that you're seeing is this distributed nature, which in essence is cloud. So I think cloud is just kind of a synonym, in my opinion, for distributed nature of our business. >> That's interesting and that brings up, you're right, cloud and Big Data/Hadoop, we don't talk about Hadoop much anymore, but it kind of got it all started, with that notion of leave the data where it is. And it's the same thing with cloud. You can't just stuff your business into the public cloud. You got to bring the cloud to your data. >> Joel: That's right. >> But that brings up a whole new set of challenges, which obviously, you're in a position just to help solve. Performance, latency, physics come into play. >> Physics is a rough one. It's kind of hard to avoid that one. >> I hear your best people are working on it though. Some other partnerships that you want to sort of, elucidate. >> Yeah, no, I mean we have some really great, so I think the key kind of partnership, I would say area, that I would allude to is, one of the things, and you kind of referenced this, is a lot of our partners, big or small, want to work with our top clients. So they want to work with our top banking clients. They want, 'cause these are, if you look at for example, MaRisk and what we're doing with them around blockchain, and frankly, talk about innovation, they're innovating containers for real, not virtual containers- >> And that's a joint venture right? >> Yeah, it is, and so it's exciting because, what we're bringing to market is, I also lead our startup programs, called the Global Entrepreneurship Program, and so what I'm focused on doing, and you'll probably see more to come this quarter, is how do we actually bridge that end-to-end? How do you, if you're startup or a small business, ultimately reach that kind of global business partner level? And so kind of bridging that, that end-to-end. So we're starting to bring out a number of different incentives for partners, like co-marketing, so I'll help startups when they're early, figure out product-market fit. We'll give you free credits to use our innovative technology, and we'll also bring you into a number of clients, to basically help you not burn all of your cash on creating your own marketing channel. God knows I did that when I was at a start-up. So I think we're doing a lot to kind of bridge that end-to-end, and help any partner kind of come in, and then grow with IBM. I think that's where we're headed. >> I think that's a critical part of your job. Because I mean, obviously IBM is known for its Global 2000, big enterprise presence, but startups, again, fuel that innovation fire. So being able to attract them, which you're proving you can, providing whatever it is, access, early access to cloud services, or like you say, these other offerings that you're producing, in addition to that go-to-market, 'cause it's funny, we always talk about how efficient, capital efficient, software is, but then you have these companies raising hundreds of millions of dollars, why? Because they got to do promotion, marketing, sales, you know, go-to-market. >> Yeah, it's really expensive. I mean, you look at most startups, like their biggest ticket item is usually marketing and sales. And building channels, and so yeah, if you're, you know we're talking to a number of partners who want to work with us because of the fact that, it's not just like, the direct kind of channel, it's also, as you kind of mentioned, there's other challenges that you have to overcome when you're working with a larger company. for example, security is a big one, GDPR compliance now, is a big one, and just making sure that things don't fall over, is a big one. And so a lot of partners work with us because ultimately, a number of the decision makers in these larger enterprises are going, well, I trust IBM, and if IBM says you're good, then I believe you. And so that's where we're kind of starting to pull partners in, and pull an ecosystem towards us. Because of the fact that we can take them through that level of certification. So we have a number of free online courses. So if you go to partners, excuse me, ibm.com/partners/learn there's a number of blockchain courses that you can learn today, and will actually give you a digital certificate, that's actually certified on our own blockchain, which we're actually a first of a kind to do that, which I think is pretty slick, and it's accredited at some of the universities. So I think that's where people are looking to IBM, and other leaders in this industry, is to help them become experts in their, in this technology, and especially in this emerging technology. >> I love that blockchain actually, because it's such a growing, and interesting, and innovative field. But it needs players like IBM, that can bring credibility, enterprise-grade, whether it's security, or just, as I say, credibility. 'Cause you know, this is, so much of negative connotations associated with blockchain and crypto, but companies like IBM coming to the table, enterprise companies, and building that ecosystem out is in my view, crucial. >> Yeah, no, it takes a village. I mean, there's a lot of folks, I mean that's a big reason why I came to IBM, three, four years ago, was because when I was in start-up land, I used to work for H20, I worked for Alpine Data Labs, Datameer, back in the Hadoop days, and what I realized was that, it's an opportunity cost. So you can't really drive true global innovation, transformation, in some of these bigger companies because there's only so much that you can really kind of bite off. And so you know at IBM it's been a really rewarding experience because we have done things like for example, we partnered with Girls Who Code, Treehouse, Udacity. So there's a number of early educators that we've partnered with, to bring code to, to bring technology to, that frankly, would never have access to some of this stuff. Some of this technology, if we didn't form these alliances, and if we didn't join these partnerships. So I'm very excited about the future of IBM, and I'm very excited about the future of what our partners are doing with IBM, because, geez, you know the cloud, and everything that we're doing to make this accessible, is bar none, I mean, it's great. >> I can tell you're excited. You know, spring in your step. Always a lot of energy Joel, really appreciate you coming onto theCUBE. >> Joel: My pleasure. >> Great to see you again. >> Yeah, thanks Dave. >> You're welcome. Alright keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back. We're at the IBM CDO Strategy Summit in San Francisco. You're watching theCUBE. (techno music) (touch-tone phone beeps)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive, three days of coverage here at IBM Think 2018. I'm John Furrier co-host with Dave Vellante, hosting three days and next is Joel Horowitz, Vice President Strategic Partnerships and Offering, of The Digital Business Group. >> Thanks. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Good to see you guys. Thanks for having me here. >> Thanks for coming on. >> You've been on theCUBE, probably so many times, talking big data, talking analytics, now, in your new role in The Digital Group, the digital transformation. I really want to just ask you right off the bat about your new role, and how it relates to the changing ecosystem. >> Joel: Yeah. >> All of these markets are changing big time, the role of the ecosystem, the leverage that they have with technology and the value propositions, whether it's decentralized applications in Blockchain to storage and infrastructure, and big data. What is your role, take a minute to explain what you're doing, because you have a unique position, because this demand for partnerships, this demand for collaboration at many levels. What's the latest? >> So I would describe my role as being a champion of our partners, for sure. I look at, you know, I take, a very outside in perspective on IBM. Joining just over three years ago now, I came in, really through analytics, as you know, focused on machine learning, data science, and the growth of A.I. at that time. Last year I was part of the corporate development team over there. So looking, really, at a lot of the industry trends and what's going on, as well, in analytics, data, and A.I. This year, you know, we recognize that we're only going to do so many strategic partnerships a year, right, where there's probably a handful that we're going to work with. For example, last year we did a great partnership with Lightbend to bring their reactive platform to IBM, and we launched the iPhone 10, with Verizon on Lightbend's platform. But, these days, my team, can't be everywhere, obviously, and part of the value of digital, and that route to market is really the idea that partner should be able to self service. So, you know, my job this year, is frankly to put myself out of a job, right. Meaning, if I can get, you know, 70% of the work my team does, right, contracting, legal, setting up, provisioning, all of that on our cloud, and partners can just do that themselves. Then we'll capture a much larger swath of the emerging A.I., data, and cloud market. >> I want to talk about the killer app creating value and then the role the market place is playing. You mentioned self service. I want to kind of go down that. Before we get there, I want to get your thoughts on this because I noticed, in your role you're covering, it's cutting across a lot of different things, and you know we've been talking about cloud, as a horizontally disrupting technology, >> Joel: Yeah. >> Certainly in the data space you saw that. And stacks will be horizontally scalable with the cloud. >> Yeah. >> But you could be vertical specialization in the applications. So I noticed you're covering analytics, Watson, Cloud, hybrid cloud, emerging technologies. >> Yeah. >> Blockchain, and many others. >> Yeah. >> So talk about, it's obvious you guys are now cutting across, horizontally, across the different IBM divisions. Is that by design? >> Yeah. >> What's the impact of the ecosystem and partners for that horizontally cut over? >> Yeah, I know, I mean it's a great question, I think. Look, there are some specific design patterns that we see across every technology, across every, you know, business at IBM. One design pattern is pretty obvious, you saw it with the launch of the IBM cloud private data. Following up on last years IBM Cloud Private. And that design pattern is really about people containerizing applications. And so, at the end of the week, we have the business partner, or PartnerWorld Leadership conference. Excuse me. Where a number of our partners really are looking at how do I bring that work load to the cloud. And it's not so much the cloud is the end point. That's really the starting off point to A; Get much wider distribution and B; Be able to take advantage of a lot of these emerging technologies, like Blockchain, like A.I. Like IOT, and numerous others, Quantum, et cetera, they'll just keep coming. So really cloud to me is just a way for us to open the door to a lot of the technology that's flooding the market. >> Dave: Joel, can you talk about partnership, you mentioned before that you guys are kind of selective, John calls them Barney deals, ya know. I love you, you love me. You guys sound like you don't look for those, not volume, it's quality. >> Yeah. >> What are the criteria that you're looking for? How do you get value out of those? How do you measure that value out of the partnerships? If someone is a prospective partner out there, how should I be interacting with you? >> Yeah, I think, there's probably two steps. I think one is really recognizing that, in my own personal view, is that we really want to partner with folks who embrace open standards. Now I'm not going to like go as far to say open source, 'cause I think there is a lot that goes into that. But I will say open standards, meaning, not these like large monolithic applications, but can you actually integrate with us in some meaningful way? And to do that, that's why we actually started on this new platform that we are launching today. Called IBM Partner Self-service. Is the ability to first integrate with IBM. So, if you can demonstrate that you can build with IBM first, whether that's a startup, an ISV, a business partner. Like that's criteria number one. Criteria number two is are you a trusted partner? So, do you actually have the same level of competency that we would expect from, frankly, our own sellers, and our own people. And so, to do that, we've also launched new competency paths for business partners and partners as well. So, those are the two major criterias. And then the third one, which I think is kind of the holy grail, is selling with IBM. So we also launched a sell with path today where you can actually list in our marketplace. And then we will actually help you reach new markets. And then demonstrate there's clients, there's a client need that really wants our joint solution, right? And so, to me, those are the three things, to re-state. Like, you know, building with us, having a level of competency with us, and then demonstrating client success with us. >> Okay, so, integrate, you really don't need you guys to do that. I can just dive in and do that. Bake it out a little bit, and then approach you. What kind of help do you give? Do you have programs once you get by those gates? >> So, you know, I would categorize into two groups, I think we have a ton of online support. So, you know, we even embrace Slack at IBM. If you're not aware of that, we have Slack everywhere. And, so, for a self service, I want to say, look, what does zero touch mean, right, in this day and age, for a partner. And so, they can go to our site today, and actually get, you know, sign up for Slack, and talk directly to our technical specialist as well as to our developer advocates. And so, on the enablement and integration side, my colleague, Angel Diaz and team, have done a great job of launching hundreds of IBM code patterns. So that you can just pick these artifacts up, these assets up, and leverage them to integrate all sorts of capabilities into your product. >> You know, Dave, I want to get your thoughts on this, because you and I have been talking about the API integration, and I want to get back to Joel's point in a second because I think this is critical for startups and ecosystem partners. API's are the (speaking quickly) for developers right now, so if I don't want to take a big chance on being all in on IBM, say I want to kick the tires, API's are critical. So the question is, are you seeing that traction on your side of the house, in terms of the end now, since the level of API integration, is that the touchpoint? Is it like the beginning phases? And what level of commitment that you're seeing with people. >> Well, John, to me it comes down to innovation, and it's interesting because Joel came out of the data world. To me, the innovation in the next 10 years starts with data. The second component of that innovation, I think, over the next decade or so is going to be, really, A.I., whether you call it cognitive or machine intelligence or artificial intelligence. And then third, I think is cloud economics and that's really where the API economy fits in. You got to have API'S to integrate, as Joel was saying. You've got to have marginal... You've got to have scale, marginal costs go to zero eventually. You've got to have network effects and you've got to be able to track startups, which is another question I have. >> Now Joel, back to you, on the start on the integration, whether it's a startup or a big company. It used to be, the old days, you got to go all in. You've got to get the developer kit, >> Joel: Yeah. >> Download it, line it to a swim lane, get deeper, prove your value. >> Yeah. >> Find the value's faster; what's the first hurdle if someone wants, hey I want to give IBM a shot here? Love the sell, holy grail option, is it API'S, can people integration on their own? Talk about that specific first step because some people might open up the door and go whoa! There's more here than I thought. Or, wow, there's some real tech. Or, I don't want to use IBM tech, I want to use some of mine. There's that first indifference point. >> Yeah, I think there are areas where we've seen dramatic customer experience improvements. So to give one example, as we've partnered with Ubisoft, Redstorm last year around a new title game that they released called Star Trek Bridge Crew, and so, you know, to me, we went on our own merit, and I think that publisher chose IBM because Watson Conversation is absolutely the best on the market. And so what that did is it enabled game players, their end customer, their end user, to speak into a VR headset and just give commands, as you would naturally. And so, I think a lot of, as you think about IBM, it's, yeah, we've made it completely easy to access our API'S. I think, there's a great quote from the founder of Flickr that I read years ago, I'll go dig it up for you guys later, but it was along the lines of business development means, today is exposing your API'S, like, that's it! And, on the other side of it, we give a lot away in terms of cloud credits, right, and so, today, if you go and sign up on our self service platform, we'll give you $10,000 a month in free cloud credits to build and build quickly. Because, at the end of the day, if it's not self service, if it requires more heavy lifting, then, frankly, we're not doing our jobs. And so that's my commitment, is to make sure that is available, is accessible, and there's experts there that can help you on your journey. >> So that attracts startups, obviously, 10K a month is a honey pot for those guys. What about existing IBM clients that want to get to the cloud. Migrate to the cloud. How do you help those guys? >> Yeah, so, in the migration front, we have a great team in place with IBM services, who basically have set up a migration factor, if you will, and there are numerous ways to chart your course to the cloud. Whether it's, you know, full cloud or hybrid cloud, or some offloading, some aspects to the cloud. There's a lot of different paths you can take and so to do that, we're offering $50,000 in migration credits for the first couple months. We're also offering 35% off for professional services. So, we have a great offer going on over the next few months to help people make that first step. >> Incentives are key. >> And, look, we're here with you so it's not like, here, throwing it over the fence, and good luck! You know, tweet at me, instant message me, I'm around. And I will be absolutely committed to partner success. >> Yeah, you know, incentives are critical, that's going to get the market going. But, the end of the day, it's the type of value, and I want to get your thoughts, it's something that's come up that I've heard people talk about in the hallways and other conferences. They kind of chirp about "Hey, you know, "I'd like to get this, from suppliers. "I want to see more tools, more programs "to help me get more customers, to get more value. "I'm building apps, but also got a business to run." What are some of the conversations you've had over the past year with customers and partners? Stack rank the top three or four things that they talk about, either their pain points or things that are on their mind, that's worth noting? >> I mean, I would say first and foremost, I mean, me, myself, being in a startup at H2O. Three, four years ago. We used to walk in there and sell into the data scientists, right, so if you don't know H2O, they're a great company, a machine learning company, but we would get the data scientists really excited about working with our product, and then lo and behold, we'd get to the CIO office saying, "Hey, what is this stuff? "Get it out of here." You know, Hadoop was the same way, by the way, 2010 working at AVG, like, we'd bring in Hadoop. Like what is this data like thing? There's no governance, it's a mess. Where they could really, you know, work with IBM, where they see value from IBM is when we go into the CIO office together and say, look, we've demonstrated that there's value here. We've demonstrated that there's actual customer need. We can create a lot of help in terms of getting the rest of the organization bought in. Put in the right governance around it. Because, look, I mean GDPR is real, it's a big deal. Like, data privacy, is huge. So, you know, Rob Thomas likes to say, "You can't have good A.I. without I.A." I think that's a great information architecture. So, I agree, and so I think that's what the number one benefit is. Really get in there, move quickly, demonstrate value, and then when you're ready to make that next step of how you roll that out to the rest of the enterprise, that's when IBM becomes a huge help. >> You know, you mentioned GDPR. With regulatory issues now are becoming criteria for a lot of application developers that are small that may not have the resources to handle the right to get your name out of a database or other tools, and other regulations, certainly. Decentralize applications with Blockchain, another regulatory challenge-- >> Yep. >> Opportunity as well. Are you guys having those kinds of conversations, like putting specific things in place beyond GDPR, and if so what regulatory and legal things do you see out there that could be blockers for customers, that you guys hope to go after? >> I mean, I don't think there's a one word answer here. I do think that you take it on a case by case basis. I think you're seeing different countries adopt GDPR differently. Germany, obviously, being a very strict kind of country in doing that. So, you know, IBM services, as well as our analytics team, are really focused on that. I think, like I said, what you saw with ICP data coming out this week, I think that's a really important way to look at it. My own personal view, I think, for sure there's a lot of compliance, They have to look at, and understand the workflow, workflows of how people are using that data, as well as application architecture is big. And those are all the considerations, I think, that you are going to see as people move. I read a statistic that 40% of all CSP'S, MSP'S, are moving, are growing, like it's 40% growth from IBC, 50% of all developers are now embedding A.I. So, this market is growing and growing fast. But, you're right. If folks out there aren't really taking GDPR seriously, you can get yourself into some hot water. >> Well, we've observed that scale matters, certainly, whether it's a partner or cloud, that gets, that helps people. >> Yeah. >> Joel, well, thanks for coming onto theCUBE, we really appreciate it. >> Yeah, my pleasure. >> Before we end, I want to get your thoughts, just share with the folks that are watching. What kind of deals do you want to do? What's on your radar? What's the priorities for you? From a strategic business development standpoint. To develop across that horizontally scalable, IBM division space, as well as technology space? >> You know, it's not what deals I want to do, it's really what deals our partners want to do. >> Come on, your in charge, come on. >> It's really what deals our partners want to do, ya know. I mean, look, I get excited about transforming industries, I really do, so I look at, not what's the transactional partnership, like go, we'll do something, and there's some revenue, or something. I look at how do we transform an industry? >> Let me rephrase the question. What's on the priority list for you guys, from a transformational area, that's important for your partners. >> Yeah, I would say for sure, obviously, A.I. is huge. Obviously data is huge, obviously cloud is huge. But, looking really specific, I think you just add tech after each industry. So Addtech, Fintech, Healthtech obviously. Game tech and, I think, probably the last one, to me personally, is the most exciting. We signed an amazing deal with Unity at the end of last year, the start of this year. In fact GDC game developer conference is going on as we speak in San Francisco. So half my team right now is over there, demonstrating Watson as like VR, AR, and it's not just for games, right. It's like with BMW and VW doing some cool stuff there as well. So, I'm really excited about the, AR, VR, industry growing, especially with our partner Unity. >> There's a new creative out there-- >> Can I jump in before you exit? I want to ask you a follow up on that, because if transformation is sort of the target for your partnerships. Healthcare is an area that should be transformed. But, needs to be transformed, but it's hard to transform healthcare. >> Joel: It is, yeah. >> Do you feel like you could start moving the needle from a partnership perspective? Or is that going to take some more time? >> You know, I think there's a lot of great work being done there. I do believe... Look, in general, I think we can move a lot faster with partners, in fact, I like to call it like the Nordstrom model. Right? Like IBM in the past has been Barney's of New York, forever, right? From a branding and from how we partner with folks, like I think we need to move more to a Nordstrom, like, yeah, we'll sell our own offerings off the rack, but then we need to help partners come in and create the right styles for the right need and the right industry. >> Yeah and then there's a Nordstrom Rack you're going to need to put that on. (laughing) Over technology goes the Nordstrom Rack. Joel Horowitz, thanks for coming out. Vice President Strategic Partnerships and Offerings, here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, with three days of IBM Think live streaming, all of the videos will be up on thecube.net sports live now. Youtube.com/siliconangle for all the ondemands when the show's over. We'll be right back with more after this short break. (light techno music)

>> Narrator: From San Jose, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering Hadoop Summit 2016. Brought to you by Hortonworks. Here's your host, John Furrier. >> Welcome back everyone. We are here live in Silicon Valley at Hadoop Summit 2016, actually San Jose. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal to the noise. Our next guest, David Richards, CEO of WANdisco. And Joel Horowitz, strategy and business development, IBM analyst. Guys, welcome back to theCUBE. Good to see you guys. >> Thank you for having us. >> It's great to be here, John. >> Give us the update on WANdisco. What's the relationship with IBM and WANdisco? 'Cause, you know. I can just almost see it, but I'm not going to predict. Just tell us. >> Okay, so, I think the last time we were on theCUBE, I was sitting with Re-ti-co who works very closely with Joe. And we began to talk about how our partnership was evolving. And of course, we were negotiating an OEM deal back then, so we really couldn't talk about it very much. But this week, I'm delighted to say that we announced, I think it's called IBM Big Replicate? >> Joel: Big Replicate, yeah. We have a big everything and Replicate's the latest edition. >> So it's going really well. It's OEM'd into IBM's analytics, big data products, and cloud products. >> Yeah, I'm smiling and smirking because we've had so many conversations, David, on theCUBE with you on and following your business through the bumpy road or the wild seas of big data. And it's been a really interesting tossing and turning of the industry. I mean, Joel, we've talked about it too. The innovation around Hadoop and then the massive slowdown and realization that cloud is now on top of it. The consumerization of the enterprise created a little shift in the value proposition, and then a massive rush to build enterprise grade, right? And you guys had that enterprise grade piece of it. IBM, certainly you're enterprise grade. You have enterprise everywhere. But the ecosystem had to evolve really fast. What happened? Share with the audience this shift. >> So, it's classic product adoption lifecycle and the buying audience has changed over that time continuum. In the very early days when we first started talking more at these events, when we were talking about Hadoop, we all really cared about whether it was Pig and Hive. >> You once had a distribution. That's a throwback. Today's Thursday, we'll do that tomorrow. >> And the buying audience has changed, and consequently, the companies involved in the ecosystem have changed. So where we once used to really care about all of those different components, we don't really care about the machinations below the application layer anymore. Some people do, yes, but by and large, we don't. And that's why cloud for example is so successful because you press a button, and it's there. And that, I think, is where the market is going to very, very quickly. So, it makes perfect sense for a company like WANdisco who've got 20, 30, 40, 50 sales people to move to a company like IBM that have 4 or 5,000 people selling our analytics products. >> Yeah, and so this is an OEM deal. Let's just get that news on the table. So, you're an OEM. IBM's going to OEM their product and brand it IBM, Big Replication? >> Yeah, it's part of our Big Insights Portfolio. We've done a great job at growing this product line over the last few years, with last year talking about how we decoupled all the value-as from the core distribution. So I'm happy to say that we're both part of the ODPI. It's an ODPI-certified distribution. That is Hadoop that we offer today for free. But then we've been adding not just in terms of the data management capabilities, but the partnership here that we're announcing with WANdisco and how we branded it as Big Replicate is squarely aimed at the data management market today. But where we're headed, as David points out, is really much bigger, right? We're talking about support for not only distributed storage and data, but we're also talking about a hybrid offering that will get you to the cloud faster. So not only does Big Replicate work with HDFS, it also works with the Swift objects store, which as you know, kind of the underlying storage for our cloud offering. So what we're hoping to see from this great partnership is as you see around you, Hadoop is a great market. But there's a lot more here when you talk about managing data that you need to consider. And I think hybrid is becoming a lot larger of a story than simply distributing your processing and your storage. It's becoming a lot more about okay, how do you offset different regions? How do you think through that there are multiple, I think there's this idea that there's one Hadoop cluster in an enterprise. I think that's factually wrong. I think what we're observing is that there's actually people who are spinning up, you know, multiple Hadoop distributions at the line of business for maybe a campaign or for maybe doing fraud detection, or maybe doing log file, whatever. And managing all those clusters, and they'll have Cloud Arrow. They'll have Hortonworks. They'll have IBM. They'll have all of these different distributions that they're having to deal with. And what we're offering is sanity. It's like give me sanity for how I can actually replicate that data. >> I love the name Big Replicate, fantastic. Big Insights, Big Replicate. And so go to market, you guys are going to have bigger sales force. It's a nice pop for you guys. I mean, it's good deal. >> We were just talking before we came on air about sort of a deal flow coming through. It's coming through, this potential deal flow coming through, which has been off the charts. I mean, obviously when you turn on the tap, and then suddenly you enable thousands and thousands of sales people to start selling your products. I mean, IBM, are doing a great job. And I think IBM are in a unique position where they own both cloud and on-prem. There are very few companies that own both the on-prem-- >> They're going to need to have that connection for the companies that are going hybrid. So hybrid cloud becomes interesting right now. >> Well, actually, it's, there's a theory that says okay, so, and we were just discussing this, the value of data lies in analytics, not in the data itself. It lies in you've been able to pull out information from that data. Most CIOs-- >> If you can get the data. >> If you can get the data. Let's assume that you've got the data. So then it becomes a question of, >> That's a big assumption. Yes, it is. (laughs) I just had Nancy Handling on about metadata. No, that's an issue. People have data they store they can't do anything with it. >> Exactly. And that's part of the problem because what you actually have to have is CPU slash processing power for an unknown amount of data any one moment in time. Now, that sounds like an elastic use case, and you can't do elastic on-prem. You can only do elastic in cloud. That means that virtually every distribution will have to be a hybrid distribution. IBM realized this years ago and began to build this hybrid infrastructure. We're going to help them to move data, completely consistent data, between on-prem and cloud, so when you query things in the cloud, it's exactly the same results and the correct results you get. >> And also the stability too on that. There's so many potential, as we've discussed in the past, that sounds simple and logical. To do an enterprise grade is pretty complex. And so it just gives a nice, stable enterprise grade component. >> I mean, the volumes of data that we're talking about here are just off the charts. >> Give me a use case of a customer that you guys are working with, or has there been any go-to-market activity or an ideal scenario that you guys see as a use case for this partnership? >> We're already seeing a whole bunch of things come through. >> What's the number one pattern that bubbles up to the top? Use case-wise. >> As Joel pointed out, that he doesn't believe that any one company just has one version of Hadoop behind their firewall. They have multiple vendors. >> 100% agree with that. >> So how do you create one, single cluster from all of those? >> John: That's one problem you solved. >> That's of course a very large problem. Second problem that we're seeing in spades is I have to move data to cloud to run analytics applications against it. That's huge. That required completely guaranteed consistent data between on-prem and cloud. And I think those two use cases alone account for pretty much every single company. >> I think there's even a third here. I think the third is actually, I think frankly there's a lot of inefficiencies in managing just HDFS and how many times you have to actually copy data. If I looked across, I think the standard right now is having like three copies. And actually, working with Big Replicate and WANdisco, you can actually have more assurances and actually have to make less copies across the cluster and actually across multiple clusters. If you think about that, you have three copies of the data sitting in this cluster. Likely, an analysts have a dragged a bunch of the same data in other clusters, so that's another multiple of three. So there's amount of waste in terms of the same data living across your enterprise. That I think there's a huge cost-savings component to this as well. >> Does this involve anything with Project Atlas at all? You guys are working with, >> Not yet, no. >> That project? It's interesting. We're seeing a lot of opening up the data, but all they're doing is creating versions of it. And so then it becomes version control of the data. You see a master or a centralization of data? Actually, not centralize, pull all the data in one spot, but why replicate it? Do you see that going on? I guess I'm not following the trend here. I can't see the mega trend going on. >> It's cloud. >> What's the big trend? >> The big trend is I need an elastic infrastructure. I can't build an elastic infrastructure on-premise. It doesn't make economic sense to build massive redundancy maybe three or four times the infrastructure I need on premise when I'm only going to use it maybe 10, 20% of the time. So the mega trend is cloud provides me with a completely economic, elastic infrastructure. In order to take advantage of that, I have to be able to move data, transactional data, data that changes all the time, into that cloud infrastructure and query it. That's the mega trend. It's as simple as that. >> So moving data around at the right time? >> And that's transaction. Anybody can say okay, press pause. Move the data, press play. >> So if I understand this correctly, and just, sorry, I'm a little slow. End of the day today. So instead of staging the data, you're moving data via the analytics engines. Is that what you're getting at? >> You use data that's being transformed. >> I think you're accessing data differently. I think today with Hadoop, you're accessing it maybe through like Flume or through Oozy, where you're building all these data pipelines that you have to manage. And I think that's obnoxious. I think really what you want is to use something like Apache Spark. Obviously, we've made a large investment in that earlier, actually, last year. To me, what I think I'm seeing is people who have very specific use cases. So, they want to do analysis for a particular campaign, and so they may just pull a bunch of data into memory from across their data environment. And that may be on the cloud. It may be from a third-party. It may be from a transactional system. It may be from anywhere. And that may be done in Hadoop. It may not, frankly. >> Yeah, this is the great point, and again, one of the themes on the show is, this is a question that's kind of been talked about in the hallways. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Is there are some people saying that there's really no traction for Hadoop in the cloud. And that customers are saying, you know, it's not about just Hadoop in the cloud. I'm going to put in S3 or object store. >> You're right. I think-- >> Yeah, I'm right as in what? >> Every single-- >> There's no traction for Hadoop in the cloud? >> I'll tell you what customers tell us. Customers look at what they actually need from storage, and they compare whatever it is, Hadoop or any on-premise proprietor storage array and then look at what S3 and Swift and so on offer to them. And if you do a side-by-side comparison, there isn't really a difference between those two things. So I would argue that it's a fact that functionally, storage in cloud gives you all the functionality that any customer would need. And therefore, the relevance of Hadoop in cloud probably isn't there. >> I would add to that. So it really depends on how you define Hadoop. If you define Hadoop by the storage layer, then I would say for sure. Like HDFS versus an objects store, that's going to be a difficult one to find some sort of benefit there. But if you look at Hadoop, like I was talking to my friend Blake from Netflix, and I was asking him so I hear you guys are kind of like replatforming on Spark now. And he was basically telling me, well, sort of. I mean, they've invested a lot in Pig and Hive. So if you think it now about Hadoop as this broader ecosystem which you brought up Atlas, we talk about Ranger and Knox and all the stuff that keeps coming out, there's a lot of people who are still invested in the peripheral ecosystem around Hadoop as that central point. My argument would be that I think there's still going to be a place for distributed computing kind of projects. And now whether those will continue to interface through Yarn via and then down to HDFS, or whether that'll be Yarn on say an objects store or something and those projects will persist on their own. To me that's kind of more of how I think about the larger discussion around Hadoop. I think people have made a lot of investments in terms of that ecosystem around Hadoop, and that's something that they're going to have to think through. >> Yeah. And Hadoop wasn't really designed for cloud. It was designed for commodity servers, deployment with ease and at low cost. It wasn't designed for cloud-based applications. Storage in cloud was designed for storage in cloud. Right, that's with S3. That's what Swift and so on were designed specifically to do, and they fulfill most of those functions. But Joel's right, there will be companies that continue to use-- >> What's my whole argument? My whole argument is that why would you want to use Hadoop in the cloud when you can just do that? >> Correct. >> There's object store out. There's plenty of great storage opportunities in the cloud. They're mostly shoe-horning Hadoop, and I think that's, anyway. >> There are two classes of customers. There were customers that were born in the cloud, and they're not going to suddenly say, oh you know what, we need to build our own server infrastructure behind our own firewall 'cause they were born in the cloud. >> I'm going to ask you guys this question. You can choose to answer or not. Joel may not want to answer it 'cause he's from IBM and gets his wrist slapped. This is a question I got on DM. Hadoop ecosystem consolidation question. People are mailing in the questions. Now, keep sending me your questions if you don't want your name on it. Hold on, Hadoop system ecosystem. When will this start to happen? What is holding back the M and A? >> So, that's a great question. First of all, consolidation happens when you sort of reach that tipping point or leveling off, that inflection point where the market levels off, and we've reached market saturation. So there's no more market to go after. And the big guys like IBM and so on come in-- >> Or there was never a market to begin with. (laughs) >> I don't think that's the case, but yes, I see the point. Now, what's stopping that from happening today, and you're a naughty boy by the way for asking this question, is a lot of these companies are still very well funded. So while they still have cash on the balance sheet, of course, it's very, very hard for that to take place. >> You picked up my next question. But that's a good point. The VCs held back in 2009 after the crash of 2008. Sequoia's memo, you know, the good times role, or RIP good times. They stopped funding companies. Companies are getting funded, continually getting funding. Joel. >> So I don't think you can look at this market as like an isolated market like there's the Hadoop market and then there's a Spark market. And then even there's like an AI or cognitive market. I actually think this is all the same market. Machine learning would not be possible if you didn't have Hadoop, right? I wouldn't say it. It wouldn't have a resurgence that it has had. Mahout was one of the first machine learning languages that caught fire from Ted Dunning and others. And that kind of brought it back to life. And then Spark, I mean if you talk to-- >> John: I wouldn't say it creates it. Incubated. >> Incubated, right. >> And created that Renaissance-like experience. >> Yeah, deep learning, Some of those machine learning algorithms require you to have a distributed kind of framework to work in. And so I would argue that it's less of a consolidation, but it's more of an evolution of people going okay, there's distributed computing. Do I need to do that on-premise in this Hadoop ecosystem, or can I do that in the cloud, or in a growing Spark ecosystem? But I would argue there's other things happening. >> I would agree with you. I love both areas. My snarky comment there was never a market to begin with, what I'm saying there is that the monetization of commanding the hill that everyone's fighting for was just one of many hills in a bigger field of hills. And so, you could be in a cul-de-sac of being your own champion of no paying customers. >> What you have-- >> John: Or a free open-source product. >> Unlike the dotcom era where most of those companies were in the public markets, and you could actually see proper valuations, most of the companies, the unicorns now, most are not public. So the valuations are really difficult to, and the valuation metrics are hard to come by. There are only few of those companies that are in the public market. >> The cash story's right on. I think to Joel' point, it's easy to pivot in a market that's big and growing. Just 'cause you're in the wrong corner of the market pivoting or vectoring into the value is easier now than it was 10 years ago. Because, one, if you have a unicorn situation, you have cash on the bank. So they have a good flush cash. Your runway's so far out, you can still do your thing. If you're a startup, you can get time to value pretty quickly with the cloud. So again, I still think it's very healthy. In my opinion, I kind of think you guys have good analysis on that point. >> I think we're going to see some really cool stuff happen working together, and especially from what I'm seeing from IBM, in the fact that in the IT crowd, there is a behavioral change that's happening that Hadoop opened the door to. That we're starting to see more and more It professionals walk through. In the sense that, Hadoop has opened the door to not thinking of data as a liability, but actually thinking about data differently as an asset. And I think this is where this market does have an opportunity to continue to grow as long as we don't get carried away with trying to solve all of the old problems that we solved for on-premise data management. Like if we do that, then we're just, then there will be a consolidation. >> Metadata is a huge issue. I think that's going to be a big deal. And on the M and A, my feeling on the M and A is that, you got to buy something of value, so you either have revenue, which means customers, and or initial property. So, in a market of open source, it comes back down to the valuation question. If you're IBM or Oracle or HP, they can pivot too. And they can be agile. Now slower agile, but you know, they can literally throw some engineers at it. So if there's no customers in I and P, they can replicate, >> Exactly. >> That product. >> And we're seeing IBM do that. >> They don't know what they're buying. My whole point is if there's nothing to buy. >> I think it depends on, ultimately it depends on where we see people deriving value, and clearly in WANdisco, there's a huge amount of value that we're seeing our customers derive. So I think it comes down to that, and there is a lot of IP there, and there's a lot of IP in a lot of these companies. I think it's just a matter of widening their view, and I think WANdisco is probably the earliest to do this frankly. Was to recognize that for them to succeed, it couldn't just be about Hadoop. It actually had to expand to talk about cloud and talk about other data environments, right? >> Well, congratulations on the OEM deal. IBM, great name, Big Replicate. Love it, fantastic name. >> We're excited. >> It's a great product, and we've been following you guys for a long time, David. Great product, great energy. So I'm sure there's going to be a lot more deals coming on your. Good strategy is OEM strategy thing, huh? >> Oh yeah. >> It reduces sales cost. >> Gives us tremendous operational leverage. Getting 4,000, 5,000-- >> You get a great partner in IBM. They know the enterprise, great stuff. This is theCUBE bringing all the action here at Hadoop. IBM OEM deal with WANdisco all happening right here on theCUBE. Be back with more live coverage after this short break.