 Everyone, welcome to this CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are here with Joel Horwitz, who's the CMO of WAN-DISCO. Joel, great to see you. Formerly of IBM, we've known you for many years at great conversations when you were at IBM, rising star now at WAN-DISCO. Congratulations. Thank you, yes. It's really great to be at WAN-DISCO and great to be here with theCUBE. So we've had many conversations, again, going back. You were a rising star in data. You know the cloud real well. Why WAN-DISCO? Why leave IBM for WAN-DISCO? What attracted you to the opportunity? Yeah, really three things. First and foremost, the people. I've known the WAN-DISCO team now for years. Back in my Hadoop days when I was at Datamere, I used to, you know, hang out with the WAN-DISCO team at Data After Dark in New York, which was great. They had the best marketing there at the time. To the product, I mean, I always, I won't join a company unless the product is really legit and they have, you know, they have an absolutely great technology and they are applying it to some really tough problems. And third is just the potential. Really, the potential of this company is not even close to being tapped. So there's a ton of, you know, there's a ton of runway there. And so for me, I'm just totally grateful and totally honored to be a part of WAN-DISCO. What's the tailwind for them? The trend that wave that they're on, if you will, because you mentioned a lot of, there's a lot of runway or headroom, a lot of market growth, certainly cloud. David Richards will talk about that, but what attracted you? Because you knew the cloud game too. IBM made a big run at the cloud. Yeah, well, I came in at IBM through the data door, so to speak, and then I walked through the cloud door as well while I was there. And the reality is that data continues to be the lifeblood of an enterprise, no matter what. And so, you know, what I saw in WAN-DISCO is that they had technology that allowed people to, in large enterprise, to, frankly, replicate or manage their data across Hadoop clusters from cluster to cluster. And then we ended up, when I spoke with you last, with David here, we also recognized the opportunity that just how, you know, copying data, large-scale data from one Hadoop cluster to another is challenging. Copying data, it's really not that different of copying data from, say, HDFS to an object storage, or S3, is a pretty similar problem. And so that's why, you know, just this past week we announced live data for Multicloud. Explain live data for Multicloud. I've read it in the news, got some buzz. This is a great trend live, where we do a lot of live videos on theCUBE. Live implies real-time data's data. Multicloud is clearly becoming one of those enterprise categories. First it was public cloud, then hybrid cloud, now it's Multicloud. How does live data fit into Multicloud? Yeah, so Multicloud and live data, as I just mentioned, like we have live data for Hadoop, so that's fairly obvious. So if you're going multi-cluster, you can do that. As well as from, you know, even on-prem, data center to data center, so multi-site, if you will. But Multicloud is a really interesting phrase that's kind of cropped up this year. We're seeing it used quite a lot. And it's mainly been, the focus in Multicloud has been mainly focused on applications. And so talking about, you know, how do you have a container strategy or a virtualization strategy for your applications. And so I think of it really as a multi-cloud strategy as opposed to a multi-cloud architecture. So, you know, we're helping our enterprise clients think about their multi-cloud strategy. So they're not locked into any one vendor. So they're able to take advantage of all the great innovations that are happening, if you ask me, on the cloud first, and then ultimately comes down to, at times, on-prem. What's the pitfall between multi-cloud strategy and multi-cloud architecture? You said customers don't want to get locked in, honestly. No one wants to get locked in. Multi-vendor used to be a big buzzword during the last wave of computer client server. Now, multi-cloud seems like multi-vendor. What do you mean by architecture versus strategy? How do you parse that? Yeah, so I mean, like I said, you know, in terms of your data, right? And Nicole comes back to your data. If you go all in on, say, one vendor and you're architecting for that vendor only and you're choosing your migration, your data management tools for a particular cloud vendor and set a different way, if you're only using the native tools from that vendor, then it's very difficult to ever move off of that cloud or to take advantage of other clouds as they, for example, maybe have new IoT offerings or have new blockchain offerings or have new AI offerings as many others come on the scene. And so that's what I mean by strategy is if you choose one vendor for your certain tool set, then it's going to be very difficult to maintain arbitrage between the different vendors. Talk about how you guys are attacking the market. Obviously, you know, it's clear that data has been a fundamental part of when this goes value of reposition, you know, moving data around has been a top concern even back in the Hadoop days. Now it's in the cloud. Moving data across the network, whether it's cloud to cloud or cloud to data center or to the edge of the network is a challenge. Yep. Yeah, we, you know, at IBM, when I was there in 2016 and we were coming up with our, you know, strategy when I was in corp dev, we talked about four different areas of data. We talked about data gravity. So data has gravity. We talked about data movement and we talked about data science and we talked about data governance. And I still think those are still relatively the four major themes around this topic of data. And so absolutely data has gravity and not just in terms of the absolute size and weight, if you will, but it also has, you know, applications that depend on it. The business itself depends on it. And so the types of strategies that we've seen to migrate data, say to the cloud or have a hybrid, you know, data management strategy has been, you know, a lift and shift or to load it onto the back of, I always picture that, you know, image of the forklift lifting all those tape drives onto the airplane, you know, the IBM version of that. And, you know, that's like a century old at this point. So, you know, we have a way to replicate data continuously using our patented consensus technology. That's in the lifeblood of our company, which is distributed computing. And so having a way to migrate data to the cloud without disrupting your business is not just marketing speak, but it's really what we are able to do for our clients. How do you guys go to market? How do you guys serve customers? What's the strategy? So primarily we formed a number of strategic partnerships. Obviously one with IBM that I helped spearhead while I was there. We actually just recently announced that we now support big SQL. So it's actually the first opportunity where if you are using a database provided by IBM, you can actually replicate across different databases and still query it with big SQL, which is a big deal, right? It means you can still have access to your data while it's in motion, right? That's pretty cool. And then so IBM is there and then secondly, we formed a number of other strategic partnerships with the other cloud vendors, of course. Alibaba, we have an OEM, Microsoft, we have preferred selling motion with them. AWS, of course, we're in their marketplace. So primarily we sell through a number of our key partnerships because we are fairly integrated like I said, into the architecture of these platforms. And just a comment more deeply on that. When you look at object storage on each of these various public cloud vendors, they may look similar on the surface. Maybe they all use the same APIs or have some level of similar interaction. They look like they're the same. The pricing might be the same. But you go like one level deeper and they're all very different. They're all very different flavors of object storage. And so while it might seem like, oh, that's trivial to work with, it really isn't, it's extremely non-trivial. So we help not only our customer solve that, we also help our partner significantly help their clients move to the cloud, to their cloud faster. So you basically work through people who sell your product to the end user customer or through their application or service? Yeah, that's our main route to market, I would say. The other, obviously the main, we have a direct sales force who's out there working with the best clients in the world. AMD is a great customer of ours who we recently helped migrate to Microsoft Azure. And we have a number of other large enterprise customers in retail and finance and media. And so really, when it comes down to it, yeah, it's those two major motions, one through the cloud vendors themselves, because frankly, in most cases, they don't have this technology to do it. They're trying to basically take snapshots of data and they're struggling to convince their customers to move to their cloud. It becomes a key feature in platforms. Yes, it does. So that's obviously what attracts sellers. What other things would attract sellers or partners for you? What motivates them? Obviously, the IP clearly is the number one. Economics, what's the other value? Yeah, I mean, look, as part of the end goal isn't to move data to the cloud. The end goal is to move business processes to the cloud and then be able to take advantage of the other value ads that already exist on the cloud. And so if you're saying, what's the benefit there? Well, once you do that move, then you can sell into clients with all your additional value ads. So that's really powerful if you are stuck with this stage of like, hey, how do we actually migrate data to the cloud? So IBM Think is coming up. What's your view of what's happening there? What are you guys going to be doing there? I was like, you were on the IBM side, now you're on the other side of the table. You've been on both sides of the table. So what's going on in Think and how does WAN disco vector and certain theCUBE be there? Yeah, we'll be there. So WAN disco is a sponsor of IBM Think as well. Clearly, as I mentioned, we'll be talking about Big Replicate, which is our Hadoop replication offering with IBM that's sold with IBM. The other one, as I mentioned, is Big SQL. So that's a new offering that we just announced this past month. So we'll be talking about that and showing a number of great examples of how that actually works. So if you're going to be at Think, come by our booth and check that out. In addition to that, clearly, IBM is also talking about multicloud and hybrid cloud. So hybrid data management, hybrid cloud is a big topic. So you can expect to see at IBM Think a lot of conversations on the application side in terms of obviously with their acquisition of Red Hat. You can well imagine they're going to be talking a lot about the software stack there, but I would say that we'll be talking and spending most of our time talking about how to manage your data across different environments. Where's the product roadmap heading? I know you guys don't like to go into some public sort of information, but generally speaking, where's the main trend lines that you guys are going to be building on? Obviously, cloud data, they're all coming together, good core competency there for one disco. What's next? What's the next level for you guys? Yeah, look, I mean, so what's really fascinating, and I actually didn't realize this when I joined One Disco, just to be completely transparent. One Disco has a core piece of technology called Decone, distributed coordination engine. It essentially is a form of blockchain, really. It's consensus technology, it's an algorithm. And that's been their secret sauce since the founding of the company. And so they originally applied that to code through source code management. And then only in this last few years, they've applied it to data. So you can guess that other areas that we might apply it to, and already this past year, we actually filed two patents, the area of blockchain, or really distributed ledger technology, as we're starting to hear it called in the actual enterprise that's using it. But you can expand that to any other enterprise asset, really, that has, that's big, right? That has value, and that you want to manage across different environments. So you can imagine, you know, a lots of other assets that we could apply this to, not only code, not only data, not only ledgers, but what are the other assets? And so that's essentially what we're doing. Is that protectable IP, the patent? So those are file on the blockchain? Yeah, yeah, so Decone is certainly patented. That's a really difficult, I'm sure Gigan will talk more about this. Yeah, we're gonna do it. But that's a really, you know, there's probably a handful of people in the world, and they might all be working at one disco at this point, who actually know how that works. And it's essentially Paxos, which is a really gnarly problem to solve, a really difficult math problem. And as David mentioned earlier, you know, Google, you know, Smartis, the other smartest kind of company in the world, you know, published their paper on Spanner. And as you said, they use brute force really to solve the problem, where we have a very, you know, elegant solution using software, right? So it's a really great time to be at one disco, because I just see that there's so many applications of our technology, but right now, you know, we're mainly focused on what our customers are asking for. You guys got a great question. Joel, final question for you. Where do you see it going? When disco, what are your plans? Do you have anything in mind? You want to share anything notable around what you're doing, and what you think when disco will be in a few years? Yeah, I mean, we have an incredible team, as I mentioned, the people that are joining one disco, as David mentioned, I myself, not to say too much there, but the new, you know, folks that have joined our research and development team, but we've been making some great hires to one disco. So I'm really excited about the team I'm going actually to visit. We have a great team in Europe and in the UK and the United Kingdom. So I'm going to go see them next week. But we have just the company culture is what, you know, drives me. I think that's just one of those hard things really to find. So that's what, you know, I'm really excited about sort of there's a lot of cool stuff happening there. You know, on that note, it's actually kind of funny because on one of the articles that, you know, talked about live data for multicloud, you know, asked the question in there, her headline was, are you down to boogie, you know? So disco continues to be a great meme for us with our name, unintentional. So as a marketer, it's a pretty fun time to be at one disco. 70s and 80s for a great time. Certainly I'm an 80s guy. Joel, thanks for coming on. Appreciate the update. Joel Horwitz, CMO, Chief Marketing Officer when disco really on a nice wave right now. Cloud growth, data growth all coming together. Real IP looking forward to hearing more what comes down the pike for those guys. We'll see them at IBM think. I'm John Furrier here in the studios in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching.