 Live from Midtown Manhattan, it's theCUBE covering Big Data, New York City, 2017, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem sponsors. Okay, welcome back everyone. Live in Manhattan, this is theCUBE's coverage of our fifth year doing Big Data NYC, eighth year covering Hadoop World, which is now involved in Distrata Data, which is right around the corner. We're doing that in conjunction with that event. This is, again, where we have the thought leaders, we have the experts, we have the entrepreneurs and CEOs come in, of course, the who's who in tech and my next two guests is Jigain Sundar, CUBE alum that was on yesterday, CTO of Wendisco. You know, one of the hottest companies, most valuable companies in the space for their unique IP, and not a lot of people know what they're doing, so congratulations on that. But you're here with one of your partners, a company I've heard of called Microsoft, also doing extremely well with Azure Cloud. We got Pranav Rastogi, who's the program manager at Microsoft Cloud Azure. You guys have an event going on as well, Microsoft Ignite, which has been creating a lot of buzz this year, again, as usually we have a good show, but this year the cloud certainly has taken front and center, welcome to the CUBE and good to see you again. Thank you. All right, so talking about the partnership, you guys, Jigain, are dealing with all the cloud guys. You're here with Microsoft. What's going on with Microsoft? Obviously they've been, you know, you may look at the stock price, I mean, from 20 something to complete change over under the leadership of Satya Natala, that the company's mobilized. The cloud has got traction, putting a dent in the universe, certainly the Amazon is a little bit of pain there, but in general, a lot more work to do. What are you guys doing together, share the relationship? So we just announced a product that's a one-click deployment in the Microsoft Azure Cloud of Vendisco's Fusion replication technology. So if you've got some data assets, Hadoop or cloud object stores on-premise and you want to create a hybrid or a cloud-to-cloud environment with Azure in the picture, ours is the only way of doing it active-active. Active-active, and then there is some stuff out there that's looking like active-active, data planed by Hortonworks, but it's really not active-active. We talked about it yesterday. Microsoft, you guys, what's the interesting about these guys beside the active-active? So it's a unique thing, it's an ingredient for you guys. Yeah, so the interesting thing for us is the biggest problem that we think customers have for big data perspective is, if you look at the landscape of the ecosystem in terms of open-source projects that are available, it's very hard to, A, figure out how do I use the software, B, how do I install it? And so what we've done is we've created an experience in Azure HD Insight where you can discover these applications within the context of your cluster and you can install these applications by one click install, which installs the application, configures it, and then you're good to go. And we think that this is gonna sort of increase the productivity of users sort of trying to get sense out of big data. And the key challenges that we think customers have today is sort of setting up some sort of a hybrid environment between how do you connect your on-premise data to sort of move it to the cloud. And there are different use cases that you can have. You can move parts of the data and you can do experiment easily in the cloud. And so what we've done is we've enabled Vandesco as an application on our HD Insight application platform where customers can sort of install it using a single-clip deploy, connected with the data that's sitting on-prem. Use the active-active feature to sort of have both these environments running simultaneously and they're in sync. So one benefits, the one-click thing, that's on your side, right? You guys are enabling that. So okay, I get that, that's totally cool. We'll get that in a second. I want to kind of drill down on that. But what's the benefit to the customers that you guys are having? So I'm a customer, I one click, I want some Vandesco active-active. Why am I doing it? What is the cloud change? What is, how does your cloud change from that experience? Yeah, so one example that you can think about is going to change is in an on-premise environment, you have a cluster running. But you're kind of limited on what you can do with the cluster because you've already set up the number of nodes and the workloads you're running is fairly finite. But what's happening in sort of reality in today is lots of users, especially in the machine learning space and AI space and in the analytics space are using a lot of open source libraries and technologies and they're using it on top of like Hadoop. They're using it on top of Spark. However, like experimenting with these technologies is hard on on-prem because it's a locked environment. So we believe like with the cloud, like especially with an offering like Vandesco on HDN site, once you move the data, you can start spinning up clusters, you can start installing more open source libraries, experiment and you can shut down the clusters when you're down. So it's going to sort of increase your efficiency. It's going to allow you to experiment faster and it's going to reduce your cost as well because you don't have to have the cluster running all the time. And once you are done with your experimentation, then you can decide like which way do you want to go. So it's going to. What's your experience with Azure? I mean, a lot of people have been critical. I mean, rightfully so. You guys are moving as fast as you can. You can only go as fast as you can but the success of the cloud has been phenomenal. You guys have done a great job with the cloud. Got to give you props on that. Your customers are benefiting or Microsoft's customers are benefiting. What's that? How does it, how does it relate? You're getting more customers through these guys do you bring in customers from on-prem to cloud? What's, how's the customer slow going? So almost all of our customers who have on-prem instances of Hadoop are considering cloud in one form or the other. Different clouds of different strengths as they've found. And different technology. Indeed. And Azure strengths appear to be the HD insight piece of it. And as Pranav just mentioned, the cool thing is you can replicate into the cloud, start up a 15 node Spark cluster today to run a query that may return results to you really fast. Now remember, this is data that you can write to both in the cloud and on-premise. It's kept consistent by our technology. Or tomorrow you may find that somebody tells you Hive with the new Tes enhancements is faster. Sure, spin up 100 node Hive cluster in the cloud. HD insight supports that really well. You're getting consistent data and your queries will respond much faster than your on-premise. We've had Oliver Chu on before with Hortonworks. Obviously they're partnering there. HD insights have been getting a lot of traction lately. Where's that going? I mean, we've seen some good buzz on that. Good people talking about it. What's the latest update on your end? HD insight is doing really good. The customers love the ease of sort of creating a cluster using just a few clicks. And the benefits that customers get, you know, clusters are optimized for certain scenarios. So if you're doing data science, you know, you can create a Spark cluster, install open source libraries. We have Microsoft R server sort of running on Spark, which is a unique offering to Microsoft, which lots of customers have sort of appreciated. You know, we also have streaming scenarios that you can do using open source technologies like we have Apache Kafka running on a stack, which is becoming very popular from an ingestion perspective, you know, folks. Has the Kubernetes craze come down to your group yet? Has it trickled down? It seems to be going crazy. You hired an amazing person from Google, Brendan Burns. We've interviewed before. He was part of the original Kubernetes spec. You know, it works for Microsoft. What's the buzz on the Kubernetes container world there? So in general, Microsoft Azure has seen sort of great benefits out of it. So we are seeing lots of traction in that space. So for my role in particular, like I focus more on the HD insights, sort of big data space, just kind of outside of what we do with the Kubernetes. Right, and the relationship going strong with Wendisco? Yes. So we just like launched this offering just about yesterday is what we announced. And we're looking forward to getting customers onto the stack. That's awesome. And what's your take on the industry right now? Honestly, the partnerships are becoming clearer as people can see their swim lanes and you're starting to see the notion of infrastructure and services are changing and more and more people want services. And then you've got the classic infrastructure. It looks like it's going to be hybrid. That's pretty clear, we see that. Services versus infrastructure. How should customers think about how they architect their environment so they can take advantage of the active-active and also have a robust, clean, not a lot of re-skilling going on, but more of a good organization from a personnel standpoint, but yet get to a hybrid architecture. So it depends. The cloud sort of gives you lots of options to meet the customers where they are and different customers have different kinds of requirements. Customers who have specialized some of their applications would probably want to go more of an infrastructure route. But customers would also love to have some of the past benefits where I have a service running where I don't have to worry about the infrastructure, like how does patching happen, how does OS updates happen, how does maintenance happen. They want to sort of rely on the Microsoft Azure Cloud provided to take care of it so that they can focus on their application-specific logic or business-specific logic or the analytical workloads and sort of worry about optimizing those parts of the application, because that is the core spread. That's been great. I want to get your thoughts real quick. Let's share some color, what's going on inside Microsoft. Obviously, open source has become really big part of the culture, even just at Ignite. More Linux news is coming. You guys have been involved in Linux. Obviously, open source with Azure, a ton of stuff I know is built in the Microsoft Cloud and on open source. You're contributing now, as to Kubernetes I mentioned earlier. Seems to be a good cultural shift at Microsoft. What's the vibe on open source internally at Microsoft? Can you share just some anecdotal, kind of like insight into what's the vibe like inside around open source? So the vibe has increased quite a lot around open source. You rightly mentioned, like just recently we announced SQL Server on Linux as well at the Ignite conference. We can also deploy a SQL Server in a Docker container, which is quite revolutionary if you think about how far we've come. And open source is so pervasive, it's almost used in a lot of these projects. And Microsoft employees are sort of contributing back to open source project in terms of bug fixes, feature requests, or documentation updates. So it's a very, very active community. And by and large, I think customers are sort of benefiting all up because there's so many folks working together on like open source projects and sort of making them successful. And especially around the Azure stack, we also ensure that you can run these open source workloads lively in the cloud. So from an enterprise perspective, you get the best of both worlds, you get the latest innovations happening in open source, plus the reliability of the managed platform that Azure provides at an enterprise scale. So again, obviously, Microsoft partnership is huge, you've got other clouds as well. Where do you want to take the relationship of Microsoft, what happens next? You guys just continue to do business, you're like spec'd in and the one clicks nice, some questions on that, but what happens next? So I see our partnership becoming deeper, we see the value that HD Insight brings to the ecosystem and all of that value is captured by the data. At the end of the day, if you have stale data, if you have data that you can't rely on, the applications are useless. So we see ourselves getting more and more deeply embedded in the system. We see ourselves as an essential part of the data strategy for Azure. Yeah, we see continuous integration as a development concept, continuous analytics as a term that's being kicked around. We were talking yesterday about here in theCUBE, real time, I want some data, real time IT goes back, here it is, it's real time. No, but the data is three weeks old. So I mean, real time is a word that doesn't mean it. I got to see it really fast, low latency response, well, that's not the data I want. I meant the data in real time, not you giving me a real time query. So again, this brings up a mind shift in terms of the new way to do business in the cloud and hybrid. So it's changing the game. As customers scratch their heads and try to figure out how to make their organizations more DevOps oriented, what do you guys see for advice for those managers who really are getting behind it, really want to make change, who kind of have to herd the cats a little bit and kind of maybe break out security and put in its own group or you come in and say, okay, IT guys, we're going to change into our operating model, even on-prem, we'll use some bursting to the cloud. Azure's got 365 on there, a lot of coolness developing. What's the advice for the mindset of the change agents out there that are going to do the transformation? So my advice would be, if you've done the same thing by hand over two times, it's time you automated it. But two times, no three rule, three strikes are out, you're saying two, contrarian. That's a casual statement because if you try automating something that you've never actually done by hand, that's a disaster as well. Couple times so you know how it's supposed to work. Get a good groove on it, yeah. Then you optimize, you automate, and then you turn the knob so you try 100 node cluster. Maybe that's going to be faster. Maybe after a certain point you don't get any improvements so you know how to turn the knob. So take some baby steps and one easy way to do is, automate something that you've done. Yes, exactly. That's almost risk-free. Yes. Relatively speaking. Thoughts on advice to change agents out there. This is your industry hat on, you can take your Microsoft hat off. Baby steps. So you start small, you get familiar with the environment and your tool sets are provided so that you get a consistent experience on what you were sort of doing on prem and in sort of in hybrid space. And the whole idea is like as you get more comfortable, the benefits of the cloud will sort of far outweigh any sort of cultural changes that need to happen. Guys, thanks for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it. Thoughts on the big data NYC this week? What do you think? I think it's a conference that has a lot of cloud hanging over it and people are scratching their heads including vendors, customers. Everybody's scratching their head but there is a lot of cloud in this conference although this is not a cloud conference. Yeah, they're trying to make it an AI conference. A lot of AI washing certainly we're seeing that everywhere but again, nothing wrong with hyping up AI. It's good for society. It really is cool. But still, that's talking about baby steps. AI is like, I mean, still not there. It seems like AI from when I went to got my CS degree in the 80s. Not a lot of innovation. Although machine learning is getting better but a lot more way to go on AI, don't you think? Yes, and a few of the announcements that we've made this week is all about making it easier for developers to get started with AI and machine learning. And our whole hope is with the set of investments that we've done in Azure Machine Learning improvements and sort of with the companion app and the workbench. So it allows you to get started very easily with AI and machine learning models and you can sort of apply and build these models. Do I CI CD process and deploy these models and be more effective in this space? Yeah, and also the tooling market has kind of gotten out of control. We were just joking the other day there's a tool shed in my mindset where everything's in the tool shed and people bought a hammer and turned into a lawn mower. So this is like, you got to be careful which tools you have. Think about a platform, think holistically but if you take the baby steps and implement it, certainly there. My personal opinion, I think the cloud is the equalizer. Cloud can bring compute power that changes what a tool was built for. Even go back six years. The tools that were out there even six years ago are completely changed by the impact of potentially unlimited capacity horsepower. So, okay, that resets a little bit. You agree? I do, I totally agree. Who wins, who loses on the reset? You know, the cloud is an equalizer but there is a mindset shift that goes with that. Those who can adapt to the mindset shift will win. Those who cannot and are still clinging to their old practices will have a hard time. It's exciting. If you're still reinventing Hadoop from 2011 then probably not in good shape right now. Not a good place to be. Using Hadoop is great for batch but you can't make that be a lawn mower. That's my opinion. Okay, guys, thanks for coming on. I appreciate it. He's smiling. You got something that you agree. No, thank you so much for that comment. Yeah. Toolsheds are out to be careful. Guys, do your job. Congratulations on your partnership. Appreciate it. Thank you. It's theCUBE live in New York. More after this short break. We'll be right back.