 At Big Data SV 2014 is brought to you by headline sponsors WAN Disco. We make Hadoop Invincible and Actian, accelerating Big Data 2.0. Welcome back. Jeff Rick here at Big Data SV 2014 in Santa Clara, Heart of Silicon Valley. Day three of our wall to wall coverage of this event. We're excited to be here. As we said earlier, we've got a lot of startups today and we're also happy to add to our women in tech on the cube list. So we're very excited to have Pascal Bicot Blanc from Leithis, right? Welcome to the cube. Welcome and thank you for the invitation. So I'm very happy to be here and participate to this big event. Yes, good. Well, welcome. So let's, well, first off, I guess we're going to change the name of the company. So we should probably get that set. So why don't you go ahead and say what the new company is going to be and tell us a little bit about what the company's done. Yes, yes, of course. Yes, we are going to rename the company Cloud Weaver. It's the name of the product we already have on the market. It's a SaaS solution for a cloud infrastructure users. And what we do, we help people get better performance in the cloud. So it's a wonderful technology named application-defined networking, and it helps to get more visibility in the network and the communication of an application in the cloud. So you say application-defined networking instead of software-defined networking. How do you delineate the two? Yeah, so it's complementary. Application-defined networking is a control layer above SDN. If you think SDN helping the cloud providers and the network operator to get more flexibility in their network, application-defined networking is helping the user, the consumer of these cloud resources to build their abstract network in order to have a consistent system for running the application. Okay, and does it work for a single cloud service, multiple cloud services, which ones does it work with? It's agnostic because you abstract the technical specificities of each devices or even each virtual resource. And you build something which is an abstract computing network for your application. And you can expand from one single cloud provider to multiple regions and also to multiple cloud providers even on premise. So it's really agnostic to the technology underneath, and it gives a powerful visibility and control over your own assets. Okay, so when we were looking up your history a little bit on LinkedIn, a little investigation, it looks like you spent a long time in a public sector technology organization in REST. So tell us a little bit about that and what they were about and why you left the secure, comfortable world of the public sector to jump into the crazy jungle of the private sector and start this new company. Yes, maybe I was born a little bit. That's always a good reason to start a new company. No, it's not this. In fact, for me, I have done research for more than 20 years in the public sector. I really enjoy it. I was also teaching as a professor and traveling all over the world and meeting a lot of people, also launching a lot of international initiatives with Japan, with CERN, also with national labs in US. And at some point we were helping researchers for doing a better research, and this researcher were in charge of inventing the future large-scale distributed systems. And at some point I said, oh, but if you look at Google, if you look at Amazon, if you look at Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, these people have the real data, they have the real problem, and that's where you can do the real research. Right. Okay, I will go to this domain, and rather than just taking the data, I will help also to build this system. Okay. So for me it's still research, in fact, it's reinventing computing and networking. Right. So the question of comfort, you know, sometimes you are just driven by your passion and you don't care. Right, good. Well, that's good. We like passionate people. We can't get it done because it's got to wake you up every morning. Talk a little bit about kind of the convergence, because we're here at Strata Conf across the street, Big O'Reilly's Strata show, and of course this is Big Data SV, but talk about the convergence of kind of big data in cloud and kind of how the perfect storm and some of the advances in technologies in both of those areas are now coming together are enabling some of the opportunities that you talked about in terms of attacking some of these big problems. Yes. Yeah. So Big Data, you know, I started working on Big Data with CERN when we developed these data grades, and for me it's because we are gathering a lot of data from sensors, for example, or from human interactions, we have to process this data. So an organism like CERN is looking at, you know, high performance computing. So they were collecting resources to process this huge amount of data they were collected. So for me it was this tsunami of data coming, and today we need this computing power. The cloud is the perfect place for computing all this data. So Big Data is both, I would say, the machine to compute the data, and also of course algorithms that enables to, you know, accelerate the processing. And if you look at what people are really doing, they are injecting a lot of parallelism concept in there and to accelerate this, to make this, you know, large-scale processing and computation affordable and also limited in time. So you, there are a lot, you know, if you think about the theory underneath, it's a lot of science that have been developed by researchers in the past, and that's, you know, very useful when you have petabytes to process. Right, yeah, it's terrific. So I want to shift gears a little bit, you obviously have a great accent, you're from France, right? Yes, I am. And we are here in the US and we're in even more in Silicon Valley, and sometimes I think we get a little bit Silicon Valley centric and forget about the world outside. So I wonder if you can give a little perspective of kind of the development of the market from a European perspective on Cloud and Big Data, and kind of where it's at, and what does it look like kind of looking back across the pond at the US in terms of how things are migrating? Yeah, it's a really interesting question because yesterday, maybe as you know, the French president was here with a large part of the government, and for us it's bridging or, you know, bridging what's happening in the US and in Europe, and we see a lot of, you know, evolution in Europe, especially towards the cloud. I left Europe two, three years back because they were not ready, and we really believe that the cloud was built in Silicon Valley, and we wanted to be part of it. Today I think the cloud is mature, and we can expect that the European countries will really adopt massively because, you know, before Internet, people were using, for example, in France, a technology we call Minitaire, which, you know, was an online system. Of course, the interface was not that, you know... It was like texting, right? Yeah. Wasn't it kind of a texting over the telephone thing? Yes. Yeah, I remember. And they were adopting this massively, and then Internet came and they adopted, after some time, they adopted massively also, and for me, the cloud will just be the next way for this. Well, the other thing that's interesting to me is the cloud crosses borders, right? Yeah, of course. And, you know, with the myriad of regulations that you had in Europe, all different as you cross borders, you know, what do you do when everyone's just logging into Amazon, and the privacy issues, and of Germany, and does that start to break down? Is the cloud just another thing, like the euro, to start to break down some of those cross border differences? Yes. Yeah. I think privacy is an important point. I think it's a constraint on an attribute of data that you want to add, as you may have to add, you know, more security, or more performance, or more reliability. So it's this type of non-functional property that we have as provider of solutions to give to the customers. So, for me, protection is a good constraint or a good problem to solve. Right, right. It's not a barrier. It's normal. It's just normal that people want to protect their data. Right, right. My question was more, if you've got different regs, I mean, I guess we don't really read the user agreement anyway. However long that thing is, or different levels of security based on different geographies. So I don't want to shift gears again. We talked a little bit before we got started about, you know, women in tech, and there just aren't a lot of women in tech, or certainly there needs to be more. John's got daughters. I've got daughters. Dave, we have a lot of daughters represented here. I don't want to do it. You have daughters too. So we're very passionate about it. Yes, yes. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about, you know, your role as really a leader in that, both from the public sector now as a CEO and founder of your own company, and a little bit about what you see with women in tech, and are we moving forward? What are some of the things that you see that are out helping girls do better? We call it STEM. There's a big movement here called STEM, which is more science and technology education and math for girls. Or engineering, excuse me. Thank you. Yes. Yeah, I really believe that, you know, ladies like me have to, you know, help other to become more confident in their power and their capabilities of doing things and understanding things and also taking the responsibilities. Even it's, you know, not that obvious, and maybe sometimes you have other choices and you have to, you know, mitigate all these different paths. But, you know, I, in my company, I'm hiring both. Right. And I try to encourage also young ladies to adopt and embrace, you know, a scientific or engineering career because we need this diversity in companies. We need this in the economy. And they have a lot of great ideas. And sometimes it helps also to, you know, change a little bit the way we are framing or structuring things. And I think it's very good. So I enjoy a lot. And I push the young ladies to just be confident. And, you know, it's a lot of time, it's self-barrier. So we just need to remove this barrier. We are, the boys are not better than us. And we can do the same, maybe sometime differently. But we have a lot of great, we can bring a lot of value to any field, I would say, in education, in research, in business, that's, you know, for everybody. Yeah, absolutely. And you're showing that with what you do every day. So we're about out of time. I want to kind of wrap up with kind of what's been your impression of the show. Is there anything that you've seen over the last couple of days that has been tremendously insightful, surprising? What's kind of been your feel of the vibe of the show? Yeah, what I feel is there is a bubbling in a lot of algorithms in a lot of different types of company taking data, different types of data, and helping crunching and making this data speak better. And I feel there is a lot of, you know, it's a good sign. Something is really happening. And we are seeing that Internet of Things will bring this field with more data. And there is a huge, you know, huge new world to explore. So I'm really excited. Good, good. So thanks for coming on theCUBE. I'm sure you'll notice. Thank you very much. Thank you. Pascal has got Blanc from the newly named Cloud Weaver. So thanks again for coming on theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. Thank you.