 Hi, I'm Peter Burris, and welcome to another CUBE Conversation. And today we've got a special guest from Wendisco, Jageen Siddhar, who's a CTO. Jageen, welcome to theCUBE again. Thanks Peter, happy to be here. So Jageen, we've got a lot of talk about today. Wendisco is doing a lot of new things, but clearly the industry is itself in the midst of a relatively important evolution. Now, we at Wikibon's SiliconANGLE have been calling it the transformation of digital business. Everybody talks about this, but we've been pretty specific. We think that it boils down to how a company uses data as an asset and the degree to which it's institutionalizing or re-institutionalizing work around those assets. How does Wendisco see this big transformation that we're in the midst of right now? So, you're exactly right. Businesses are transforming from traditional means to a digital-based business. And the most important thing about that is the data. Wendisco is at the forefront of making your data available for your innovation. We start off with the basic use cases, disaster recovery. That's a traditional problem that people have half solved in many different ways. But we have the ability to solve that problem, take you to the next stage, which is what we call live data, where you don't worry about the availability or the location of your data anymore. Finally, we take you from that live data platform to a place where you can invent with your data the freedom to invent phase of what we call. Now, that's what you're calling the digital transformation and there's great synergy between our two terminologies. That's an important aspect. So, let me impact that a little bit if I can. So, the core notion is that every business has to start acknowledging that data is something more than the exhaust that comes out of applications. It really is a core data asset. So, let's start with this notion of backup and restore or disaster recovery. The historical orientation is I have these very, very expensive assets, typically in the form of hardware or maybe applications. And I have to ensure that I can back those assets up. So, backup, restore used to be back up a device, back up a volume, back up whatever else it might be. And now it's moved to more of a backup of virtual machine. I think we're talking about something different when we talk about your approach to backup and restore. We're really talking about backing up data assets. Do we have that right? That is correct. You have gone from a place where you were backing up PCs and Macintoshes and cell phones to a place where the digital assets of your company that are used for analytics are far more important. Now, simple backup where you take the contents in one data center and push it to another data center are a half solution to the problem. What we've come up with this notion called live data. You have multiple data centers. Some of them you own, they're on premise. Some of them are cloud vendor data centers. They definitely reside in different parts of the world. Your data also is generated in different parts of the world. Now, all of this data goes into this data system, this platform that we built for you and it's available under all circumstances. If a region of a cloud vendor goes down or if your own data center goes down, that's a non-event because that data is available in other data centers around the world. This gives you the flexibility to treat this as a live data platform. You can write wherever you want. You can read and run analytics wherever you want. You've gone from backing up PCs and phones to actually using your digital assets in a manner such that you can make critical business decisions based on that. Imagine an insurance company that's making underwriting policies based on this digital data. If the data is not available, you've got a full halt on the business. That's not acceptable. If the data is not available because a specific data center went down, you can't call a full stop to your business. You've got to make it available. Those are simple examples of how digital transformation is happening and regular backup and DR are really inadequate to fuel your digital transformation. In fact, we like to think, and we're advising our clients, that as they think about digital transformation and the role that data is playing, a digital business is not just backing up and restoring or sustaining or avoiding disasters associated with the data. They're really talking about backing up and restoring their entire business. That's kind of what we mean when we talk about DR in a digital business sense, disaster recovery or backup and recovery restore in a digital business sense. And as you said, this notion of live data increases our ability to do that. But partly that requires a second kind of a step. And by that I mean, most people think about storage. They think about where data is located in terms of persisting the data. When we talk about this new approach we're talking about ensuring that we can deliver the data, restore takes on more importance and backup than it has before. Would you agree with that? They're really talking about live data is really about being able to restore data wherever it's needed. Correct. It's an interesting new approach where we don't really define a primary and a backup. One of the important things about our Paxos based replication system is that each location or each instance replica of your data is exactly equal. So if you have a West Coast data center and an East Coast data center and a Midwest data center and your West Coast data center happens to go down, none of the activities that you perform on your data will stop. You can continue writing your data to your Midwest and your East Coast data center. You continue writing and reading, you're running your applications against this data set. Now, there wasn't a definition that the West Coast's primary and East Coast's backup when a disaster strikes, we will cut over to the backup, we'll start using that when the primary comes back, now we have to reconcile it. That's the traditional way of doing things and it brings about some really bad attributes such as you need to have all your data pumped into one data center. That's counter to our philosophy. We believe that live data is where each of these replicas is equal. We built a platform for you where you can write to any of these. You can run your analytics against any of those. Once you get past that mental hurdle, what you've got is the freedom to innovate. You can look at it and go, I've got my data available everywhere, I can write to it, I can read from it. What can I do with this data? How can I quickly iterate so I can make more interesting business decisions, more relevant business decisions that will result in better business profits and revenue. This interesting outcome is because you're now not concerned about the availability of data or this primary backup and failover and failback, all those disappear from your radar. So let's build, let me build on that a little bit too, Jugain, so the way we would describe that is that a digital business must have those data assets, those crucial data assets available so that they can be delivered to applications and new activities. So we think in terms of what we call data zones, where the idea you take a look at what your digital business value proposition is, what activities are essential to delivering on that value proposition, and then whether or not the data is in a zone proximate to that activity so the activity can actually be executed. So that means from a physical standpoint, it needs to be there from a legal standpoint, from an intellectual property control, from a cost, but also from a consistency standpoint. You don't want dramatically different behaviors in your business just because the data that's over there is not consistent with the data that's over here and that's kind of what you guys are looking at. Now ultimately that means, going on a little bit, but ultimately that means that this notion of deploying data so it serves your business now has to also include a futures orientation that we want to choose technologies that give us high value options on data futures as well. Is that what you mean by effectively freedom to invent? It's definitely one aspect of our definition of freedom to invent. We are focused fully on complying with some of these requirements that you talked about. Regents of data. For example, there are parts of the world where you cannot take the data from that part of the world outside. But often you need to do analytics in a global manner such that if you detect a flaw or a problem that is surfaced by data in one part of the world, the chances are very good that that'll apply to this restricted zone as well. You want to be able to apply your analytics against that. Critical business decisions may need to be made, yet you cannot export that data out of that country. We facilitate such capabilities. So we've gone from a simple primary backup type of system to a live data platform. And finally, we've given you the freedom to invent because you can now take a look at it and go, I can start building applications that are in the critical business path because I'm confident of the availability of my data, the fact that we comply with all regulatory concerns, things like aging out data after a certain number of months or days. We can help you do that really well with our platform. So yes, in fact, the notion that data resides in different pools in different areas, replicated consistently, available under all circumstances, enables businesses to think about their data in a completely different manner, up-level it. And satisfying physical, legal, intellectual property and cost realities. Exactly, those are all concerns that need to be addressed by this replication platform. So as we think about where customers are going clearly they've started around this backup and restore, but it sounds like you guys are helping them today conceive of what it means to do backup and restore in analytics. That is a particularly sensitive issue for a lot of businesses right now that are trying to marry together data science and good practices associated with IT. How is that playing out? Can you give us some insight into how customers are doing a better job of that? Sure, a global automaker that has acquired or software to do replication started off by using it for two very simple use cases. They were looking at migrating from an older version of a data system to a newer version. We enabled them to do that without downtime. That was a clear win for us. The second thing they wanted to do was enable a disaster recovery type scenario. Once we got to that stage, we showed them how easy it was for them to continue writing to what was originally notionally the backup system. That made about twice as much compute resources available for them because their original notion was that the backup system would just be a backup system. Nothing could be done on it. Lightbulbs went off in our customer's head. They looked at it and went, I can continue writing here even if my primary goes down. There is no real notion of a backup. There's no notion of failover and failback. That opened their minds to a whole bunch of new ideas. Now they are in a position to build some business critical applications. Gone are the days when an analytics thing meant you run a report once a week and send it off to the CIO. It's not that anymore. It's up to minute accuracy. People are making things like insurance companies making underwriting decisions and healthcare companies tracking the spread of diseases based on up to the minute information that they're getting. These are not weekly once analytics applications anymore. These are truly businesses that are based on their digital data. So a fundamental promise of live data is that wherever the data is, the application is live. Yes, absolutely. All right, so one other thing I think we want to talk about very quickly to gain is there is some differences in mindset that a CIO has to apply here. Again, the CIO used to look at the assets and say machines, the hardware is the asset, maybe the applications. And now to really see the value, they have to think in terms of the data being the asset. How are your customers starting to evolve that notion so that they see the problem differently? So I think the first thing that happened was the cloud. We can't take credit for that, of course, but it helped our cause a great deal because people looked at infrastructure with a completely different viewpoint. They don't look at it as I'm going to buy a server with this size to run my Oracle. That mentality went away and people started looking at I have to store my data here and I can run an elastic application on this. I can draw resources on demand and surrender those resources back to the cloud when I don't need that. We take that to the next step. We enable them to have consistent replicas of their data across multiple regions of cloud vendors, across different cloud vendors. Suddenly they have the ability to do things like, I can run this analytics on Redshift here and Amazon really well. I can use this same data to run it on Azure SQL DW here, which is a better application for this specific use case. We've opened up the possibilities to them such that they don't worry about what data they're going to use, how much resources they're going to get. Resources are truly elastic now. You can buy and surrender resources as per your demand. So it's opening up possibilities that they never had before. Excellent. Jigain Sundar, CTO of Wendisco talking about live data and the journey the customers are on to make themselves more fully digital businesses. Thanks, Peter. Once again, this is Peter Burris from theCUBE and a CUBE conversation with Jigain Sundar of Wendisco.