 Okay we're back here live in Silicon Valley, we are in the heart of Silicon Valley with the San Jose Convention Center for Hadoop Summit 2013. We're all the actions happening in big data, the ecosystems growing, enterprise grade, all the innovations happening right here, Yahoo and Horton were putting on an amazing show here at the Hadoop Summit. This is theCUBE, our flagship program throughout the events. I'm joined by my co-host Dave Vellante, I'm John Furrier from Silicon Angle. Our next guest is a CUBE alumni, Jonathan Gray, who's the founder and CEO of a startup called Continuity. Jonathan welcome back to theCUBE, you're CUBE alumni, you were on theCUBE when you were still working at Facebook. I was. At the first Hadoop World. Second Hadoop World. I was. Welcome back. Thank you very much, thanks for having me. So we love having founders and startups on and CEOs because one, you guys are at the middle, you're in the eye of the innovation storm, you're also innovating with less capital than, say, the big guys who have 100 million in financing. Small startups here and there. And technical staff, it's just, you know, competing, but it can be good or bad. But startups are really setting the pace for innovation. You guys have a hot startup content that we've covered you on Silicon Angle, Wikibon. Give us the update on your company, you're leading the charge over there as CEO. You guys have a product opportunity, your product market fit is right on the money. Explain to the folks in your own words where you guys are at with the product, market fit and what's happened with the company in terms of funding, hiring and staff, etc. Great. So we're going through the usual phase shifts as we grow and as we get out there in the market, you know, I'd say the past kind of six, seven months, we raise our A in November. So we close our A round, you know, battery ignition injuries and great, great VCs backing us. And that's right when we came out of stealth, right? So we came out of stealth in October at Hadoop World last year. It's when we first started to, you know, talk about application server for Hadoop, very focused around building big data applications and really on the real time side of things. And so went out into the market, put software out there. All of our developer download stuff is all free and available to anyone. And then around February, March timeframe, we went out into the market and started to answer that product, market fit question. And that went tremendously well for us. You know, what I'm really impressed with what you've done over there is that you guys, you know, Dave and I always talk on the queue, we talked, we did a lot of events and, you know, a lot of the big guys like IBM and the HPs. And we've, you know, we've been kicking this turnaround called the modern era like kind of do the sports analogy, the modern era of baseball, the modern era of computing is really a whole new breed. You guys are a young team. You think differently. You worked at Facebook. We just had Kartikon who's now at Nutanix. And, you know, this is you're in that generation of dudes who and and gals who are building their own stuff because there's no real products out there. So at Facebook, we always talk about that, that, Hey, you know what, we can either buy, if we don't have the expertise, we can buy commercial software, Oracle licenses and stack up gear from traditional vendors. But no, we have the expertise, we're going to build our own because we need it. Right. So that that is a great that's the pioneering work that gets done. And they, you know, golf clap for you guys on that. But now you're you're bringing that and you're productizing it. Exactly. So can you describe this modern era and why you guys are attacking that market in that unique way? Yeah, I mean, I think the really interesting thing when you look at, you know, we're from Facebook, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Google, Zynga, a lot of those kind of internet companies, the ones who who paved the road. And I think if you look back at what, you know, we were working on at Facebook three, four years ago, it's very much what is state of the art in Hadoop today. And what I was working on one or two years ago is kind of the bleeding edge of what people are starting to do out there on the enterprise. And so, you know, we kind of saw those signals ahead. And what was done at Facebook in Yahoo was really implementing those systems to drive some end product. But like you're saying, it's not productized. They're one off systems that are built purposefully for some ridiculously hard use case, right? Because everything at Facebook is the same thing, but times a million. So how do you get this scale massive thing through some system, right? And the way you do that is you get 15 of the brightest people in the industry, and you let them hack on something for six months and outcomes a beautiful solution. The problem is it takes those 15 guys to build it and it takes those 15 guys to run it. And that's very much influenced what we're trying to do with continuity is how do you take types of applications that were being built? They tend to be more real time. They tend to be closed loop. So it's less an analyst sitting there doing an interactive query to drive a business decision. And it's more a closed loop system that's making decision on its own. And that's very much the direction that things went at Facebook and we saw the same things at these other tech companies. You guys are skating through the puck is as I always say, or you know, you're trying to vector into a market that's growing. So, you know, we've been talking about on the cube and we even go back and you know, you've been a lot of experience with H base and Hadoop and all those things. But even go back a couple years ago, Mike Olson was then the CEO of Cloudera. He said, Oh, the applications are going to be coming on board. That just didn't happen that year. But instead, the killer app was analytics. Right. So that's good. Now the apps are starting to come in. But there's a huge from our kind of anecdotal assessment market. And Wikibon has actually hard data on this that's going to be coming out is there's a huge pent up army of developers waiting to like get their code at Hadoop. And just it hasn't broken through yet. So they haven't really broken in because the platform is not ready yet. So you have, you know, the normal guys doing the mad produce and on all these hdfs stuff there, I call that the, you know, the Uber's data sciences geek developers. But like mainstream developers, guys at the top of the stack, where you see Mongo doing extremely well, they got a lamp stack, it's easy to code. You know, I got a UI and UX design, right in Chrome, native apps in the browser, no JS, whatever the DevOps tool that there's out there. But that tsunami in my mind, they don't have access yet to the platform. Couldn't agree with you more. You guys are attacking that. What has to happen right now and Hadoop to really accelerate that onboarding of developers? The first thing is the ecosystem and the vendors in this ecosystem have not been focused on the app developer. It's been a focus around IT operations, the management of the infrastructure software. And it's been data analysts, business analysts, data scientists, and not a lot of attention has been paid to the application developers. And partially, like you're saying, it's analytics has been state of the art. It hasn't been about applications. Now it's moving towards all being about applications. And the question is, how do you make it work for a developer? How do you make it so that I don't need to spend a year learning the internals of HDFS, the internals of HBase to be able to reverse engineer an efficient design, which is basically the state of the art on those systems. And for us, we're trying to look into history and to say, you know, we've seen this story before. And if you look back on the JVM and J2EE, what happened was app servers came along, web logic came along, eventually things like Tomcat, JBoss, all these things, that enabled a ton of web apps to be built, right? Now a developer doesn't need to know how do I do connection pooling and threading and message buses. They didn't know even how to write SQL. They used Hibernate, right? And so all of these higher level libraries came out and abstractions came out and an application server that could contain your app and deal with the scalability and deal with the fault tolerance and all of those things. Now I don't need to be a distributed systems engineer. I don't need to understand highly available systems. I don't need to basically be a Hadoop kernel hacker and understand all of that stuff. I can build at a higher level. And so we're trying to echo the same thing that happened with the app server, but purpose built for Hadoop data applications. You see the Hadoop apps evolving in a similar way that we saw as you just described. How about the sort of inherent culture clash between the hyperscale world that you came out of and the traditional enterprise, which is not, for the most part, a DevOps world? Right. And it gets even more interesting when you look at the long tail because so much of big data is medium data, right? And that long tail, maybe they have terabytes and so it's not easy for them to just use my SQL database and everything works. So they have issues and there's a lot of Mongo traction like you're saying and things like that, but it's going to be very interesting. And our eventual vision is to be able to support all different types of workloads and apps and things like that. And as time goes on, as we can capture more and more of the developer ecosystem, right? As our software becomes easier to use as we continue to evolve and develop, then we'll be able to get more and more developers in our ecosystem under our umbrella, right? Eventually we can reach out of Java and we can get people who are more web dev, maybe Ruby guys or Java JavaScripts, Python type of people. Expanding that base. Expanding the base and get as many people under our developer umbrella as we possibly can. So I got to ask one of the things, you know, we track real closely what I watch as the developer community. I say, I'm, you know, in my late 40s, so, you know, I'm old school, so Java's great. I mean, look at Java and say, wow, you know, knowing what I know, C, you know, I don't do assembler anymore, or I don't do anything anymore. But when I did, it was assembler C and Java, really those kind of distractions were really some efficiencies with Java that are nice. And you know, I'm not that old and I was seeing Java too. Java's cool, but a lot of the new new school young dudes coming in don't like Java. They don't want, they're not from the mindset of actually loading Linux and updating patches. Right. They want Amazon. They want fully ingrained stacks. So you have a cultural dynamic. We really haven't talked publicly about this yet, but it's the first time I'm kind of talking about it publicly. But, you know, you have a new school. Yeah. They're like, hey, you know, what? Installing Linux and patches? I don't want that to go automatically. Amazon's doing some of those things, right? So that's cool. Same time, Java, high level abstractions. Yeah, I want to do something different. I want Redis, for instance, on one scale. And some people want Scala, and they want to go into that world. Yeah, so what's your take on that? Other people want JavaScript, server-side, client-side. I want it everywhere. Is that happening one and two? How do you guys handle that? Because you got a deal both, because Java has, I'll see inherent advantages in this end platform, but then you got the new school who won Cloud. Yeah. I mean, you know, one of the interesting things about our company is we were a Cloud company first when we first came out. Now we're kind of an on-premise company first, you know. And so, you know, that's a kind of interesting thing there, which is it's not that the cloud is not important. The value props are very clear on the cloud. I think people understand those. They're so expensive. It's still costly up there. And so a lot of our bigger customers, they're on-premise. It's always been so expensive direct than it is to own, right? In the long run, it is. In the short term, if I'm doing experiments, if I'm running a science project, if I just need to scale up once and of course the cloud is excellent, right? But what we're seeing, you know, with true big data, which is people who actually have scale problems, it's just tremendously moved on-premise. And your customers are saying you got to put this on-premise. So what's that development profile? What's the developer profile you're targeting? Is there one open to all developers? Is there preferences? Do you see some trending frameworks and code bases? Well, I think one of the really interesting things that we're seeing is more libraries coming out, right? So Cladera has a CDK that they've now started to ship. You know, Wibby data has a key G framework for building on top. So there's other people out there now in the ecosystem who are building, you know, everyone understands this problem in the ecosystem, right? People, the HBase community totally understands continuity's value proposition, right? When you've been there and done it, you get the pain. And that's actually who we get the most traction with. People who have paid the pain. Yeah. And we can show them why. And so those that's where we get a lot of the traction. But what I'd say is we're very focused on So you don't want to be a blunt instrument necessarily, but you have to go to the enterprise guys and say, look, you know, we have to highlight essentially what they don't know their pain is. So they are they the frog boiling in the water, so to speak? Or I mean, how do you attack that on premise enterprise world? Because that ultimately is where one is not a lot of developers. Yeah. And now there's new developers coming in. So that you're seeing the investment for in-house development. So I think, you know, the enterprises that we get a lot of traction are those that have a lot of developers. So if you look in telco, and if you look in financial services, like some some financial service companies have tens of thousands of developers. They're not data scientists or analysts. They're actually the biggest budget line item by far. And all those developers are not Hadoop developers. Virtually none of them aren't right. And they tend to be more on the less sophisticated side. Not all of them. There's great developers there as well. But there's a lot. And the challenge for those enterprises is how do you make them relevant on Hadoop? And that's a big challenge. And that's why we're getting great traction with them. Because we can be that bridge, right? We can actually make them relevant and we can get them trained up on top of our stack in weeks rather than months in years. So Jonathan, talk a little bit about Weave. Yeah, great. So Weave is actually the first full open source thing that Continuity has released. And it's essentially a framework for building apps on Yarn. So anyone not familiar with Yarn, it's the new version of Hadoop. And what's very cool about it is it's not just MapReduce anymore. It's a generic distributed resource manager. And so we have a real time stream processing engine. We deploy things with REST endpoints and things like that. We use Yarn to deploy all of these and to manage everything on our cluster. And anyone who's built on top of Yarn has seen that it's actually pretty difficult to use because it's very low level, right? Hadoop and HBase, they're infrastructure. It's not hard for Yahoo. But you know, I mean, look, everything is exactly the way it's supposed to be, right? I mean, a resource manager should be low level because that allows you to build anything on top. The problem is the programming model is not a developer programming model. So what Weave does is creates a thread model. So any developer in Java is used to implementing a runable and you implement a run method, right? Very easy to write threaded programming. Weave is the same thing. You write a Weave runable. You write your run method. Instead of a thread pool, you have a container pool. And so you're able to write this application and run it distributed across the cluster. And that allows you to exploit the capabilities of the R. And so you get full distributed capabilities, but you don't have to be a distributed programmer. Jonathan, great to have you on theCUBE. One last question because we're up on time here. It's great to have the founder CEO on and you guys are an emerging company. And you know, we've been following you guys and the word on the street is you guys are hiring. You're hiring very selectively. You've said no to a lot of folks. You guys want best of breed. You want really good alpha tech athletes. Yeah, the number one asset of continuity is and we hope always will be our team. We have a terrific team. We have great engineers, a lot of people from with great backgrounds in not just building the infrastructure, but in building, deploying and managing large scale apps at Facebook, Yahoo companies like that. And so we're very much out there hiring, very much trying to grow. We're dealing with all of our inbound interests of which there is plenty. Give us a quick update on what the goals are for your growth strategy. You're now leading the charge here. What is your growth plan real quick and then we'll break? Yeah, so we're about 18 right now going up to about 30. Lots of edge, some solutions types of people to help delivering on some of our software. And eventually we'll be scaling up our sales staff when we're good and ready. OK, Jonathan Gray, the CEO and founder of Continuity, an emerging company really have a good position in the marketplace. They are where the puck is coming. The tsunami of application development, we believe Dave and I and our research points to they're just waiting for the platform to be ready. It's very close. Enterprise grade's on its way. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. This is theCUBE. SiliconANGLE will keep on. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back after this short break.