 from Berlin, Germany. It's theCUBE, covering DataWorks Summit Europe 2018. Brought to you by Hortonworks. Hi, hello, welcome to theCUBE. I'm James Cabela. I'm the lead analyst for Big Data Analytics at the Wikibon, which is the team inside of SiliconANGLE Media that focuses on emerging trends and technologies. We are here on theCUBE at the DataWorks Summit 2018 in Berlin, Germany. And I have a guest here. This is Mugi Van, if I get it wrong, Mugi Van Staden, who is with Obsidian, which is a South Africa-based partner of Hortonworks. And I'm not familiar with Obsidian, so I'm going to ask Mugi to tell us a little bit about your company, what you do, your focus on open source, and really the opportunities you see for Big Data for Hadoop in South Africa are really the African continent as a whole. So, Mugi. Yeah, James, great to be here. Yes, Obsidian, we started at 23 years ago, focusing mostly on open source technologies. And as you can imagine, that has changed a lot over the last 23 years. When we started, the concept of selling Linux was basically a box with a hat and maybe a T-shirt in it. Today, that's changed. Hopefully there's a stuffed penguin in there too. I could use that right now. So, our business has evolved a lot over the last 23 years. And one of the technologies that has come around is Hadoop. And we actually started with some of the other Hadoop vendors out there as our first partnerships. And probably three, four years ago, we decided to take on Hortonworks as one of our vendors. We found them an amazing company to work with. And together with them, we've now worked in four of the big banks in South Africa. One of them is actually here at DataWorks Summit. They won an award last night. So it's fantastic to be part of all of that. And yes, South Africa being so far removed from the rest of the world, they have different challenges. Everybody's nervous of cloud. We have the joys that we don't really have any cloud players locally yet. The two big players in Microsoft and Amazon are planning some data center soon. So the guys have different challenges to Europe and to the states. Big data, the big banks are looking at it, starting to deploy nice Hadoop clusters, starting to ingest data, starting to get real business value out of it. And we're there to help. And hopefully the four is the start for us and we can help lots of customers on this journey. Our South African based companies, because you are so distant in terms of miles on the planet, from Europe, from the EU, are you, is any company in South Africa or many companies concerned at all about the global or the state of general data protection regulation, GDPR? US based companies, certainly, because they operate in Europe. So is that a growing focus for them? And we have five weeks until GDPR kicks in. Tell me about it. Yeah, so from a South African point of view, some of the banks and some of the companies would have subsidiaries in Europe. So for them, it's a very real thing. But we have our own act called POPI, which is protection of private information. So very similar. So everybody is keeping an eye on it. Everybody's worried. Everybody, I think everybody's worried for the first company to be fined and then they will all make sure that they get their things right. But I think not just because of a legislation, I think it's something that everybody should worry about. How do we protect data? How do we make sure that the right people have access to the correct data when they should? And nobody violates that. I mean, in this day and age, Google and Amazon and those guys probably know more about me than my family does. So it's a challenge for everybody. And I think it's just the right thing for companies to do is to make sure that the data that they do have, that they really take good care of it. We trust them with our money and now we're trusting them with our data. So it's a real challenge for everybody. So how long has a city and been a partner of Hortonworks and how has your role or partnership, I should say, evolved over that time? And how do you see it evolving going forward? We've been a partner about three, four years now and started off as a value-added reseller. We're also a training partner in South Africa for them. And there's a company we've had to evolve with them. So they started with HDP as they had new platform. Now they're doing NiFi and HDF. So we have to learn all of those technologies as well. But very, very excited where they're going with Data Plane Service, just managing customers' data across multiple clusters, multiple clouds, because that's realistically where we see all the customers going is clusters, on-premise clusters in typically multiple clouds and how do you manage that? And we are very excited to walk this road together with Hortonworks and all the South African customers that we have. So you say your customers are deploying multiple clouds, public clouds or hybrid private public clouds? You give us a sense in South Africa whether public cloud is a major option or is a major deployment option or choice for financial services? Not necessarily financial services. So most of them are kicking tires at this stage. Nobody's really put major workloads in there. As I mentioned, both Amazon and Microsoft are planning to put data centers down in South Africa very soon. And I think that will spur a big movement towards cloud. But we do have some customers, unfortunately not Hortonworks customers, that are actually mostly in the cloud. And they are now starting to look at a multi-cloud strategy. So to ideally be in the three, four major cloud providers and spinning up the right workloads in the right cloud. And we're there to help them. What are the most predominant workloads that your customers are running in the cloud? Is it backend, in terms of data ingest and transformation? Is it a bit of maybe data warehousing with unstructured data? Is it a bit of things like queryable archiving? I want to get a sense for what is predominant right now in workloads? Yeah, I think most of them start with developer environments, et cetera. So the one customer that's heavily into a cloud from a data point of view literally is their data warehouse. They put everything in there. I think from the banking customers, most of them are considering DR of their existing Hadoop clusters. Maybe a subset of the data and not necessarily everything. And I think some of them are also considering putting their unstructured data outside of the cloud because that's where most of it's coming from. I mean, if you have Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn data, it's a bit silly to pull all of that into your environment. Why not just put it in the cloud? That's where it's coming from. And analyze that and connect it back to your data where relevant. So I think a lot of the customers would love to get there and now that Hortonworks makes it so much easier to do that. I think a lot of them will start moving in that direction. Now, skimming. So are any or many of your customers doing development and training of machine learning algorithms and models in their clouds? And to the extent that they are, are they using tools like the IBM Data Science Experience or Hortonworks Resells for that? I think it's definitely on the radar for a lot of them. I'm not aware of anybody using it yet, but lots of people are looking at it and excited about the partnership between IBM and Hortonworks. And IBM has been a longstanding player in the South African market. And it's exciting for us as well to bring them into the whole Hortonworks ecosystem and to get us all real world problems. Give us a sense for how built out the big data infrastructure is in neighboring countries like Botswana or Angola or Mozambique and so forth. Is that an area that your company, those regions that your company operates in? We don't have offices, but we don't have a problem going and helping customers there. We've had projects in the past not data related that we've flown in and help people. Most of the banks from a South African point of view have branches into Africa. So it's on the roadmap, some are a little bit ahead of others, but definitely on the roadmap to actually put down Hadoop clusters in some of the major countries all throughout Africa. There's a big debate, you put it down there, do you leave the data in South Africa? So they're all going through their own legislation, but it's definitely on the roadmap for all of them to actually take their data, knowledge and data science up into Africa. Now you say that in South Africa proper, there are privacy regulations, with maybe not the same as GDPR, but equivalent. Throughout Africa, at least throughout Southern Africa, how is privacy regulation lacking or is it emerging? I think it's emerging. A lot of the countries do have the basic rule that their data shouldn't leave the country. So everybody wants that data sovereignty and that's why a lot of them will not go to cloud and that's part of the challenges for the banks, that if they have branches up in Botswana et cetera and Botswana rules are, our data has to stay in country, they have to figure out a way, how do they connect that data to get the value for all of their customers? So real world challenges for everybody. When you're going into and selling into an emerging and future developing nation, do you need to provide upfront consulting to help the customer bootstrap their own understanding of the technology and making the business case and so forth, and how consultative is the selling process into these kinds of things? Absolutely, and what we see with the banks, most of them even have a consulted approach within their own environment, so you would have the South African team maybe fly into the team at the Mobi and Botswana and share some of the learnings that they've had and then help those guys get up to speed. The reality is the skills are not necessarily in country, so there's a lot of training, a lot of help to go and say, we've done this, let us upskill you and we're part of that process. So we sometimes send in teams to come and do two, three day training, basics et cetera, so that ultimately the guys can operationalize in each country by themselves. So that's very interesting. So what do you want to take away from this event? What do you find most interesting in terms of the sessions you've been in around the community showcase that you can take back to Obsidian, back in your country and apply? Like the announcement this morning of the Data Steward Studio, do you see a possible, your customers might be eager to use that for curation of their data in their clusters? Definitely, and one of the key messages for me was Scott, the CTO's message about your data strategy, your cloud strategy, your business strategy is effectively the same thing. And I think that's the biggest message that I would like to take back to the South African customers is to go and say, you need to start thinking about this. As cloud becomes a more, a bigger reality for us, we have to align, we have to go and say, how do we get your data where it belongs? So we like to say to our customers, we help their teams get the right code to the right computer and the right data. And I think it's absolutely critical for all of the customers to go and say, well, where is that data going to sit? Where is the right compute for that piece of data? And can we get it then? Can we manage it, et cetera? An aligned to business strategy. Everybody's trying to do digital transformation. And those three things go very much hand in hand. Well, Mugi, thank you very much. We're at the end of our slide. This has been great, been excellent to learn more about Obsidian and the work you're doing in South Africa. Providing big data solutions or working with customers to build out the big data infrastructure in the financial industry down there. So this has been theCUBE. We've been speaking with Mugi Von Staden of Obsidian Systems. And here at DataWorks Summit 2018 in Berlin. Thank you very much.