 Okay, we're back. This is Dave Vellante from Wikibon.org, SiliconAngle.tv's continuous coverage from Strata. We're in day two for us. It's really day sort of one and a half for the conference. They started the keynotes today. Today's the big day, kicking things off with all the sponsors and big-data innovators and practitioners. And we're here covering it. As we always do, check out Wikibon.org for all the research. SiliconAngle.com, SiliconAngle.tv, where all these videos are. And a number of our other publications. We've got a big team here this week. I'm here right now with Jeff Kelly, Wikibon's lead big-data analyst. And we have a relatively new, two-weeks-old CEO. We've been a CEO in past lives, but here with ZetaSet now, two weeks with ZetaSet. Jim Vote, president and CEO. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks very much. Good to be here. Good to have you. Yeah, so two weeks will go easy on you. It's only been two weeks. But you're brave coming on theCUBE, but I was just kidding. theCUBE is a friendly place. So ZetaSet, you guys make deploying Hadoop easier. Everybody needs that. So what are you all about? Tell us about ZetaSet and we'll get into it. Yeah, so I think everybody knows from the show here that big-data is exploding. There's just so much unstructured data that's growing out there. One way to really harness that is to use this infrastructure called Hadoop. Hadoop's a great infrastructure, but unfortunately it's not very enterprise-friendly. So what we do is we put an enterprise wrapper on it. And in my past, I've sold enterprises different technologies. They always want certain things within a solution. They want to have resiliency and failover. They want to be able to monitor, manage, deploy, control, alerts, things like that that just simply aren't in the Hadoop structure. What we do is we put a wrapper on Hadoop and create a solution which is enterprise-ready and enterprise-friendly. So the whole idea is if you look at people out there in the enterprises, there's probably 80% that are somehow involved in a Hadoop project, but only 20% are in production environments. It's mainly because they haven't met just the base enterprise requirements for deploying the technology. So we're a software solution that sits on top of Hadoop, absolutely standard space, and we don't do anything within Hadoop that's outside the community. And basically what we offer is an enterprise software solution which is much easier to deploy and isn't resource-intensive. So we're not about throwing professional services at the problem and bodies at the problem. We're basically about helping a competent IT staff, you know, harness, if you will, a Hadoop cluster so that they can now start to structure their data and then you start to build the analytics and the business intelligence on top of that. But until you get to that first step where you can actually get a Hadoop cluster where you can actually start to build a structured environment, that's the first step and that's what we do. So you sell management software, essentially? It's management, but it's also other parts of the infrastructure. I mean, there's other things that block adoption technology like security and that's what our announcement about Shadoop was all about. Shadoop? Tell us about Shadoop. Shadoop sets secure Hadoop and what that is all about, at least the first steps is being able to have some kind of access control on the technology. So we take a user and group approach where you can actually control and have rule-based access control and set policies. And what that affords at a first level is we can control who's looking at what jobs, who's importing and exporting data, we have full logging and monitoring capabilities on the back end of that. And so that's really the first step. The second step, which we'll be bringing out within probably the next six months, is encryption. So we'll be talking about encrypting data at rest and also in movement between the nodes. So that's really what we bring. And if you look at our past and look at the founder, Brian, Brian Christian, who came from SpyDynamic, I mean, his real background is security. And so he sees some very basic things that need to happen from a security standpoint that aren't happening within the community right now that we can layer on top within our enterprise solution. What's different about securing Hadoop from, say, traditional enterprise infrastructure? I don't think much is different. I mean, if you look back, I was thinking about this. I've been at a couple of different companies in the past. You think about local area networking, right? All the way back to Synoptics and Lattice Net and TenBaseT. I mean, we sold a lot of networking based on Optivity. Optivity was a management platform that gave you SNMP traps and all the monitoring capability and all the security aspects over time. Think about a company like Trapeze where we did 802.11. Well, 802.11 had an issue with wireless isn't secure, right? But through the body, we made it more secure than wired network over about a span of two years. And we sold a whole bunch of wireless infrastructure based on our management platform, which was Ringmaster. So now you bring in Hadoop. Hadoop is now yet a new technology expanse in the infrastructure. And layering the base enterprise requirements on it are basically what we're doing. And so does the cloud change that at all? Or are you talking about sort of things you've done in the past that were more cloud-based? In other words, I think of the common approaches to securing infrastructure where you secure the perimeter. You build a moat around the castle to protect the queen. But with the cloud, the queen wants to leave her castle sometimes. And so how do you solve that problem? Or do you guys attack that problem? Well, I think what you'll find, we will have a cloud aspect to our solution over time, but it'll be more in terms of pushing updates out into the infrastructure from a security standpoint, for example. That's a good use of the cloud. Not much like a multi-tenant cloud where you're actually having to retain and store data to get all the privacy issues and things like that, but really being able to update the infrastructure remotely through a cloud-based infrastructure. That's what we're looking at. So talk about just the need to make Hadoop Enterprise ready and what that means for adoption. As you mentioned, there's a lot of POC deployment to this point, but taking it to production is a different story. Is that what you think is really holding back adoption of Hadoop? Yeah, I think so. The Enterprise is wanted on a silver platter. They basically have their base requirements that they've rolled all kinds of evolving technology through. You have the Hadoop body, which it takes time to get things done within the body. So one question I get a lot of times is, well, why aren't they just doing this within the working body? Well, it takes time. And the immediate need is now in terms of getting these enterprises using Hadoop. So we're actually complementary to the working community because we're speeding the adoption of Hadoop, but if we were to wait for these things to develop within the body itself, it'd take a long time. Take an example, we have high availability which we presented to the body. Well, it's been basically sitting there for eight months because the docket is large. There's a lot of different projects and it just takes time for those things to get done. No criticism to the working body. That's just how these things work. So the value that we have, what we're building a company around quite frankly is meeting the immediate enterprise need outside the standard body, but not in an intrusive manner where we're doing things outside the Hadoop infrastructure. So we're not doing anything non-standard here. So do you complement or compete with a company like Cloudera? Cloudera, I don't like to talk about the competition but I pointed this out earlier. Oh, come on, we do that all the time. I don't like to give them airtime. But anyway, I'll tell you that what they do is they throw people at it. And so that's what Cloudera University is about. Let's train all these Hadoop people. Let's hire Hadoop people. Let's give you Hadoop professionals to help you basically implement your infrastructure. And our approach is you don't need that. You can get it in software and we're here to create value not dependency. And so basically it's about giving them a turnkey solution that meets the enterprise requirements without having to throw bodies at it. So I think we're both solving the same problem but we're doing it in a much different way. Now talk about the company. Where are you guys at in terms of funding and size of the company in terms of headcount? You know, you're not sure you won't give us revenues but maybe talk about where you are in the maturity sector. Yeah, we're a pretty small company right now where we're under 20 people right now but basically we raised around back in the summer last year. A small round was about $3 million. So it was really the first seating of the company. My job is to go get the B-Series financing. That's a big part of my immediate job here. We've had so much interest in terms of partnerships. We've announced our partnership with Cinex and how we're actually embedding this technology with Fusion IO. But we're actually being approached by a lot of different hardware vendors who are solving footprint performance. But now you add a Hadoop layer to that and a value proposition there to build a structured cluster. You know, we're getting a lot of people come after us so we're the only guys out there that actually can put it on a non-commonity platform. And so that's the whole value proposition. We've got to go raise some capital and go get behind these partnerships. So can we talk a little bit more about the... I hear Fusion IO, I get excited because it's changing the way in which applications are taking advantage of storage. Yes. Orders of magnitude, more performance. We love Fusion IO. We talk about them all the time. Very disruptive. What specifically are you doing with that technology and how does it relate to big data? So it's pretty simple and I'll keep it at a high level. But basically what we're doing is they're about footprint and performance, but if you talk about structuring data for data analytics and business intelligence, we have to build a specialized Hadoop cluster with those guys. So having something that's embedded on their technology so that we can do that and build a specific Hadoop cluster, that's what we're doing with them. So when these guys go in and a whole slew of hardware vendors, by the way, they're getting asked about Hadoop and they don't really have a very good answer in terms of how they can give a turnkey solution to their customer. So that's basically what we're addressing with those partnerships. Okay, so you are writing to their API to be able to directly write to a persistent device? Yeah, so we said on top of Hadoop, which a whole set of APIs basically, but there's some interfaces that we work out between these partners so that we design to each other and we have, for one of a better term, an API that they design to correct. Right, right, okay. And the benefit to the end customer is much, much greater performance, presumably, right? They get all the attributes of those vendors. On top of it, they can actually get a usable Hadoop solution without having to hire two or three Hadoop guys or go outside for professional services. The other nice thing about this play outside of those relationships, which will be our first kind of tier to market, there's a real big play for SIs here. So SIs really want to develop a big data practice, right? Their sense is they got to hire all these Hadoop guys to do it, right? And they don't really like the likes of a Cloudera because they're eating their pie, right? So basically, we can do it in a way that they make better margins where they don't have to hire all these Hadoop guys. They can essentially have our software and solution to create a big data service offering, a one-price offering to their client base. Yeah, so, well, that's interesting. But then the services that they're providing are higher up the stack than things like deployment and management and walking and tackling. What's your open source strategy? Can you talk about that a little bit? I mean, we live in this world of open source now and there's all kinds of things like community additions and some are open source, some are not. What's your whole approach? Well, we're very open source friendly, right? So there's just a certain speed in that environment and a certain usability and that's the problem that we're addressing. But we believe that over time, there will be even things that we can introduce to the open source community that will help speed this along, right? So we take a very, you know, a very compatible stance, if you will, with the open source community and we have a complement with our software that fits nicely with everything that exists today. Excellent, okay. Anything else, Jeff? Right, just want to expand on that a little bit. So how would you respond? You know, one of the issues always that we hear about open source versus proprietary is the vendor lock-in issue. Is that a concern you're hearing from customers? Well, that is a concern and that's exactly what we haven't done. We haven't gone and forked off of the Hadoop structure, right? Okay. And one of our competitors has done just that and I think that's the wrong route to take. We want to live within the Hadoop structure and as they work up to some of these requirements and start to build this in, we're going to be further ahead defining new requirements and new features that we're going to have for the enterprise. So there's a whole slew of things we can do to differentiate ourselves at the enterprise level which is non-intrusive to the Hadoop structure. Great, because I think that's one of the other major barriers to adoption is the fear of fork. Correct, correct. And we're not anywhere near the forking issue. So how do you see, you know, let's see. So we've been talking about the progression of big data. We had a number of discussions that, you know, 2009, 2010, it's like, well, what's Hadoop? Right? And 2011 is more, wow, this is going to be big. Big data is going to really change things. The new source of competitive advantage, 2012 seems to be platform maturity, which is really where you guys play and also some application innovation. And then beyond that, 2013 and beyond is really making money. Yeah. Would you buy that scenario? And if you put on your telescope, what do you see as the impact of big data on industries and society? Well, I think, well, two parts of the question. So let me take the second part first. I mean, this is a huge, huge, huge opportunity because there's just so much data. The data is just getting bigger. You're talking about retail. You're talking about healthcare. You're talking about the people that need to harness this data. I mean, this opportunity for the next 10 years is just going to be explosive in terms of big data in general. Bringing it back to the first part of the question, though, is what's creating our opportunity is that people are frustrated. And the first step is just to get past this Hadoop step so they can get onto the more interesting stuff, right? So a lot of the customers that I'm talking to are already dabbling. They're already, I wouldn't call it science project, but they have a project and they're trying to get Hadoop cluster up. And so what speeds that adoption and that revenue is basically crossing that barrier first because once you get past that barrier, there's a whole bunch, then it explodes in terms of tying in the other pieces of the ecosystem and actually building forward analytic tools, predictive type analysis and the real exciting stuff. But it all starts with this basic little thing called Hadoop, right? And that's the problem that we're solving. Okay, great. So in terms of kind of the customers you're working with, are you focused on enterprises that want to deploy Hadoop internally to analyze their own data for its own sake? Are you also working with, what about the big data application vendors, the startups that we're seeing, that want to rely on Hadoop as kind of that underlying layer, kind of leverage Hadoop to create new applications? We are actually. So in working with kind of the BI layer up, you know, essentially it's an API interface between those guys and us in terms of how we will interact. So we are talking with those guys. We, you know, we're a small company. And so, you know, I've built businesses before in a startup environment. Our whole approach is to really leverage partnership, penetrate and access enterprise accounts with partner and essentially build our brand. From there, we'll start to build a bigger component of our software-only business, but that will tie more immediately into those type of vendors as well as the hardware business, right? Making Hadoop easier, securing Hadoop with Shadoop. Jim Voet, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Good luck with the raise. Good luck with the company. It was great having you on. And we'll see you around for sure. Absolutely. Thanks so much.