>> Announcer: Live from midtown Manhattan, it's theCUBE, covering BigData New York City 2017, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem sponsors. >> Okay welcome back everyone here live in New York City. This is theCUBE special presentation of our annual event with theCUBE and Wikibon Research called BigData NYC, it's our own event that we have every year, celebrating what's going on in the big data world now. It's evolving to all data, cloud applications, AI, you name it, it's happening. In the enterprise, the impact is huge for developers, the impact is huge. I'm John Furrier, cohost of the theCUBE, with Peter Burris, Head of Research, SiliconANGLE Media and General Manager of Wikibon Research. Our next guest is Jagane Sundar, who's the CTO of WANdisco, Cube alumni, great to see you again as usual here on theCUBE. >> Thank you John, thank you Peter, it's great to be back on theCUBE. >> So we've been talking the big data for many years, certainly with you guys, and it's been a great evolution. I don't want to get into the whole backstory and history, we covered that before, but right now is a really, really important time, we see you know the hurricanes come through, we see the floods in Texas, we've seen Florida, and Puerto Rico now on the main conversation. You're seeing it, you're seeing disasters happen. Disaster recovery's been the low hanging fruit for you guys, and we talked about this when New York City got flooded years and years ago. This is a huge issue for IT, because they have to have disaster recovery. But now it's moving more beyond just disaster recovery. It's cloud. What's the update from WANdisco? You guys have a unique perspective on this. >> Yes, absolutely. So we have capabilities to replicate between the cloud and Hadoop multi data centers across geos, so disasters are not a problem for us. And we have some unique technologies we use. One of the things we do is we can replicate in an active-active mode between different cloud vendors, between cloud and on-prem Hadoop, and we are the only game in town. Nobody else can do that. >> So okay let me just stop right there. When you say the only game in town I got a little skeptic here. Are you saying that nobody does active-active replication at all? >> That is exactly what I'm saying. We had some wonderful announcements from Hortonworks, they have a great product called the Dataplane. But if you dig deep, you'll find that it's actually an active-passive architecture, because to do active-active, you need this capability called the Paxos algorithm for resolving conflict. That's a very hard algorithm to implement. We have over 10 years' experience in that. That's what gives us our ability to do this active-active replication, between clouds, between on-prem and cloud. >> All right so just to take that a step further, I know we're having a CTO conversation, but the classic cliche is skate to where the puck is going to be. So you kind of didn't just decide one morning you're going to be the active-active for cloud. You kind of backed into this. You know the world spun in your direction, the puck came to you guys. Is that a fair statement? >> That is a very fair statement. We've always known there's tremendous value in this technology we own, and with the global infrastructure trends, we knew that this was coming. It wasn't called the cloud when we started out, but that's exactly what it is now, and we're benefiting from it. >> And the cloud is just a data center, it's just, you don't own it. (mumbles) Peter, what's your reaction to this? Because when he says only game in town, implies some scarcity. >> Well, WANdisco has a patent, and it actually is very interesting technology, if I can summarize very quickly. You do continuous replication based on writes that are performed against the database, so that you can have two writers and two separate databases and you guarantee that they will be synchronized at some point in time because you guarantee that the writing of the logs and the messaging to both locations >> Absolutely. >> in order, which is a big issue. You guys put a stamp on the stuff, and it actually writes to the different locations with order guaranteed, and that's not the way most replication software works. >> Yes, that's exactly right. That's very hard to do, and that's the only way for you to allow your clients in different data centers to write to the same data store, whether it's a database, a Hadoop folder, whether it's a bucket in a cloud object store, it doesn't matter. The core fact remains, the Paxos algorithm is the only way for you to do active-active replication, and ours is the only Paxos implementation that can work over the >> John: And that's patented by you guys? >> Yes, it's patented. >> And so someone to replicate that, they'd have to essentially reverse engineer and have a little twist on it to not get around the patents. Are you licensing the technology or are you guys hoarding it for yourselves? >> We have different ways of engaging with partners. We are very reasonable with that, and we work with several powerful partners >> So you partner with the technology. >> Yes. >> But the key thing, John, in answer to your question is that it's unassailable. I mean there's no argument, that is, companies move more towards a digital way of doing things, largely driven by what customers want, your data becomes more of an asset. As you data becomes more of an asset, you make money by using that data in more places, more applications and more times. That is possible with data, but the problem you end up with consistency issues, and for certain applications, it's not an issue, you're basically writing, or if you're basically reading data it's not an issue. But the minute that you're trying to write on behalf of a particular business event or a particular value proposition, then now you have a challenge, you are limited in how you can do it unless you have this kind of a technology. And so this notion of continuous replication in a world that's going to become increasingly dependent upon data, data that is increasingly distributed, data that you want to ensure has common governance and policy in place, technologies like WANdisco provides are going to be increasingly important to the overall way that a business organizes itself, institutes its work and makes sure it takes care of its data assets. >> Okay, so my next question then, thanks for the clarification, it's good input there and thanks for summarizing it like that, 'cause I couldn't have done that. But when we last talked, I always was enamored by the fact that you guys have the data center replication thing down. I always saw that as a great thing for you guys. Okay, I get that, that's an on-premise situation, you have active-active, good for disaster recovery, lot of use cases, people should be beating down your door 'cause you have a better mousetrap, I get that. Now how does that translate to the cloud? So take me through why the cloud now fits nicely with that same paradigm. >> So, I mean, these are industry trends, right. What we've found is that the cloud object stores are very, very cost effective and efficient, so customers are moving towards that. They're using their Hadoop applications but on cloud object stores. Now it's trivial for us to add plugins that enable us to replicate between a cloud object store on one side, and a Hadoop on the other side. It could also be another cloud object store from a different cloud provider on the other side. Once you have that capability, now customers are freed from lock-in from either a cloud vendor or a Hadoop vendor, and they love that, they're looking at it as another way to leverage their data assets. And we enable them to do that without fear of lock-in from any of these vendors. >> So on the cloud side, the regions have always been a big thing. So we've heard Amazon have a region down here, and there was fix it. We saw at VMworld push their VMware solution to only one western region. What's the geo landscape look like in the cloud? Does that relate to anything in your tech? >> So yes, it does relate, and one of the things that people forget is that when you create an Amazon S3 bucket, for example, you specify a region. Well, but this is the cloud, isn't it worldwide? Turns out that object store actually resides in one region, and you can use some shaky technologies like cross-region replication to eventually get the data to the other region. >> Peter: Which just boosts the prices you pay. >> Yes, not just boost the price. >> Well they're trying to save price but then they're exposed on reliability. >> Reliability, exactly. You don't know when the data's going to be there, there are no guarantees. What we offer is, take your cloud storage, but we'll guarantee that we can replicate it in a synchronous fashion to another region. Could be the same provider, could be another provider. That gives tremendous benefits to the customers. >> So you actually have a guarantee when you go to customers, say with an SLA guarantee? Do you back it up with like money back, what's the guarantee? >> So the guarantees are, you know we are willing to back it up with contracts and such like, and our customers put us through rigorous testing procedures, naturally. But we stand up to every one of those. We can scale and maintain the consistency guarantees that they need for modern businesses. >> Okay, so take me through the benefits. Who wants this? Because you can almost get kind of sucked into the complexities of it, and the nuances of cloud and everything as Peter laid out, it's pretty complex even as he simplified it. Who buys this? (laughs) I mean, who's the guy, is it the IT department, is it the ops guy, is it the facilities, who... >> So we sell to the IT departments, and they absolutely love the technology. But to go back to your initial statement, we have all these disasters happening, you know, hopefully people are all doing reasonably okay at the end of these horrible disasters, but if you're an enterprise of any size, it doesn't have to be a big enterprise, you cannot go back to your users or customers and say that because of a hurricane you cannot have access to your data. That's sometimes legally not allowed, and other times it's just suicide for a business >> And HPE in Houston, it's a huge plant down there. >> Jagane: Indeed. >> They got hit hard. >> Yep, in those sort of circumstances, you want to make sure that your data is available in multiple data centers spread throughout the world, and we give you that capability. >> Okay, what are some of the successes? Let's talk through now, obviously you've got the technology, I get that. Where's the stakes in the ground? Who's adopting it? I know you do a lot of biz dev deals. I don't know if they're actually OEM-type deals, or they're just licensing deals. Take us through to where your successes are with this technology. >> So, biz dev wise, we have a mix of OEM deals and licenses and co-selling agreements. The strong ones are all OEMs, of course. We have great partnerships with IBM, Amazon, Microsoft, just wonderful partnerships. The actual end customers, we started off selling mostly to the financial industry because they have a legal mandate, so they were the first to look into this sort of a thing. But now we've expanded into automobile companies. A lot of the auto companies are generating vast amounts of data from their cars, and you can't push all that data into a single data center, that's just not reasonable. You want to push that data into a single data store that's distributed across the world in just wherever the car is closest to. We offer that capability that nobody else can, so that we've got big auto manufacturers signed up, we've got big retailers signed up for exactly the same capability. You cannot imagine ingesting all that data into a single location. You want this replicated across, you want it available no matter what happens to any single region or a data center. So we've got tremendous success in retail, banking, and a lot of this is through partnerships again. >> Well congratulations, I got to ask, you know, what's new with you guys? Obviously you have success with the active-active. We'll dig into the Hortonworks things to check your comment around them not having it, so we'll certainly look with the Dataplane, which we like. We interviewed Rob Bearden. Love the announcement, but they don't have the active-active, we're going to document that, and get that on the record. But you guys are doing well. What's new here, what's in New York, what are some of your wins, can you just give a quick update on what's going on at WANdisco? >> Okay, so quick recap, we love the Hortonworks Dataplane as well. We think that we can build value into that ecosystem by building a plugin for them. And we love the whole technology. I have wonderful friends there as well. As for our own company, we see all of our, a lot of our business coming from cloud and hybrid environments. It's just the reality of the situation. You had, you know, 20 years ago, you had NFS, which was the great appender of all storage, but turned out to be very expensive, and you had 10 years, seven years ago you had HDFS come along, and that appended the cost model of NFS and SANs, which those industries were still working their way through. And now we have cloud object stores, which have appended the HDFS model, it's much more cost-efficient to operate using cloud object stores. So we will be there, we have replication products for that. >> John: And you're in the major clouds, you in Azure? >> Yes, we are in Azure. >> Google? >> Jagane: Yes, absolutely. >> AWS? >> AWS, of course. >> Oracle? >> Oracle, of course. >> So you got all the top four companies. >> We're in all of them. >> All right, so here's the next question is, >> And you're also in IBM stuff too. >> Yes, we're built tightly into IBM >> So you've got a pretty strong legacy >> And a monopoly. >> On the mainframe. >> Like the fiber channel of replication. (John and Jagane laugh) That was a bad analogy. I mean it's like... Well, I mean fiber channel has only limited suppliers 'cause they have unique technology, it was highly important. >> But the basic proposition is look, any customer that wants to ensure that a particular data source is going to be available in a distributed way, and you're going to have some degree of consistency, is going to look at this as an option. >> Yes. >> Well you guys certainly had a great team under your leadership, it's got great tech. The final question I have for you here is, you know, we've had many conversations about the industry, we like to pontificate, I certainly like to speculate, but now we have eight years of history now in the big data world, we look back, you know, we're doing our own event in New York City, you know, thanks to great support from you guys and other great friends in the community. Appreciate everyone out there supporting theCUBE, that's awesome. But the world's changed. So I got to ask you, you're a student of the industry, I know that and knowing you personally. What's been the success formula that keeps the winners around today, and what do people need to do going forward? 'Cause we've seen the train wreck, we've seen the dead bodies in the industry, we've kind of seen what's happened, there've been some survivors. Why did the current list of characters and companies survive, and what's the winning formula in your opinion to stay relevant as big data grows in a huge way from IoT to AI cloud and everything in between? >> I'll quote Stephen Hawking in this. Intelligence is the capability to adapt to changes. That's what keeps industries, that's what keeps companies, that what keeps executives around. If you can adapt to change, if you can see things coming, and adapt your core values, your core technology to that, you can offer customers a value proposition that's going to last a long time. >> And in a big data space, what is that adaptive key focus, what should they be focused on? >> I think at this point, it's extracting information from this volume of data, whether you use machine learning in the modern days, or whether it was simple hive queries, that's the value proposition, and making sure the data's available everywhere so you can do that processing on it, that remains the strength. >> So the whole concept of digital business suggests that increasingly we're going to see our assets rendered in some form as data. >> Yes. >> And we want to be able to ensure that that data is able to be where it needs to be when it needs to be there for any number of reasons. It's a very, very interesting world we're entering into. >> Peter, I think you have a good grasp on this, and I love the narrative of programming the world in real time. What's the phrase you use? It's real time but it's programming the world... Programming the real world. >> Yeah, programming the real world. >> That's a huge, that means something completely, it's not a tech, it's a not a speed or feed. >> Well the way we think about it, is that we look at IoT as a big information transducer, where information's in one form, and then you turn it into another form to do different kinds of work. And that big data's a crucial feature in how you take data from one form and turn it into another form so that it can perform work. But then you have to be able to turn that around and have it perform work back in the real world. There's a lot of new development, a lot of new technology that's coming on to help us do that. But any way you look at it, we're going to have to move data with some degree of consistency, we're still going to have to worry about making sure that if our policy says that that action needs to take place there, and that action needs to take place there, that it actually happens the way we want it to, and that's going to require a whole raft of new technologies. We're just at the very beginning of this. >> And active-active, things like active-active in what you're talking about really is about value creation. >> Well the thing that makes active-active interesting is, again, borrowing from your terms, it's a new term to both of us, I think, today. I like it actually. But the thing that makes it interesting is the idea that you can have a source here that is writing things, and you can have a source over there that are writing things, and as a consequence, you can nonetheless look at a distributed database and keep it consistent. >> Consistent, yeah. >> And that is a major, major challenge that's going to become increasingly a fundamental feature of our digital business as well. >> It's an enabling technology for the value creation and you call it work. >> Yeah, that's right. >> Transformation of work. Jagane, congratulations on the active-active, and WANdiscos's technology and all your deals you're doing, got all the cloud locked up. What's next? Well you going to lock up the edge? You're going to lock up the edge too, the cloud. >> We do like this notion of the edge cloud and all the intermediate steps. We think that replicating data between those systems or running consistent compute across those systems is an interesting problem for us to solve. We've got all the ingredients to solve that problem. We will be on that. >> Jagane Sundar, CTO of WANdisco, back on theCUBE, bringing it down. New tech, whole new generation of modern apps and infrastructure happening in distributed and decentralized networks. Of course theCUBE's got it covered for you, and more live coverage here in New York City for BigData NYC, our annual event, theCUBE and Wikibon here in Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan, more live coverage after this short break.