 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 here live in New York City. This is theCUBE's special presentation of our annual event with theCUBE and Wikibon research called Big Data NYC. It's our own event that we have every year celebrating what's going on in the Big Data world now. It's evolving to all data, cloud, applications, AI, you name it, it's happening. In the enterprise, the impact is huge. For developers, the impact is huge. I'm John Furrier, cohost of theCUBE with Peter Burris, head of research at the Langel Media and General Manager of Wikibon Research. Our next guest is Jagane Sundar, who's a CTO of WAN, Disco, CUBE alumni. Great to see you again as usual here on theCUBE. Thank you John, thank you Peter. It's great to be back on theCUBE. So we've been talking about the Big Data for many years, certainly with you guys and it's been a great evolution. I don't want to get into the whole backstory and the history we've covered that before, but right now is really, really important time. We see, you know, the hurricanes come through, we see the floods in Texas, we see in Florida and Puerto Rico now on the main conversation. You're seeing it, you're seeing disasters happen. Disaster recovery has been low hanging fruit for you guys. We talked about this when New York City got flooded years and years ago. This is a huge issue for IT because they have to have disaster recovery. But now it's moving more beyond just disaster recovery. It's cloud. Yes. What's the update from WAN Disco? You guys have a unique perspective on this. Yes, absolutely. So we have capabilities to replicate between the cloud and Hadoop multi data centers across GEOs, so disasters are not a problem for us. And we have some unique technologies we use. One of the things we do is we can replicate in an active, active mode between different cloud vendors, between cloud and on-prem Hadoop. And we are the only game in town. Nobody else can do that. So you're the, okay, let me just stop right there. When you say the only game in town, I got to get a little skeptic here. Are you saying that nobody does active, active replication on at all? That is exactly what I'm saying. We had some wonderful announcements from Hortonworks. They have a great product called the Data Plane. But if you dig deep, you'll find that it's actually an active, passive architecture. Because to do active, active, you need this capability called the PAXOS algorithm for resolving conflict. That's a very hard algorithm to implement. We have over 10 years experience in that. That's what gives us our ability to do this active, active replication between clouds, between on-prem and cloud. All right, so just to take that step further, I know we're having a CTO conversation, but the classic cliche is skate to where the puck is going to be. So you kind of didn't just decide one more and you're going to be the active, active or cloud. You kind of backed into this, the world spun in your direction. The puck came to you guys. Is that a fair statement? That is a very fair statement. We've always known that there's tremendous value in this technology we own and with the global infrastructure trends, we knew that this was coming. It wasn't called the cloud when we started off, but that's exactly what it is now and we're benefiting from it. And the cloud is just a data center. It's just, you don't own it. As soon as we spin this on the cue, Peter, what's your reaction to this? Because when he says only game in town implies some scarcity. Well, it's when disco has a patents and it's actually a very interesting technology and if I can summarize very quickly, you do continuous replication based on rights that are performed against the database so that you can have two writers and two separate databases and you guarantee that they will be made, they will be synchronized at some point in time because you guarantee that the writing of the logs and the messaging to both locations in order, which is a big issue that you guys put a stamp on stuff and it actually writes to the different locations with order guaranteed. And that's not the way most replication software works. Yes, that's exactly right. That's very hard to do. And that's the only way for you to allow your clients in different data centers to write to the same data store, whether it's a database, a Hadoop folder, whether it's a bucket in a cloud object store, it doesn't matter. The core fact remains, the Paxus algorithm is the only way for you to do active, active replication and ours is the only Paxus implementation that can work over the- And that's patented by you guys. Yes, it's patented. And so someone to replicate that, they'd have to essentially reverse engineer and have a little twist on it to not get around the patents. Are you licensing the technology or are you guys ordering it for yourselves? We have different ways of engaging with partners. We are very reasonable with that and we work with several powerful partners. To you partner with the technology. But the key thing, John, and answer your question is that it's unassailable. There's no argument that is companies move more towards a digital way of doing things, largely driven by what customers want. Your data becomes more of an asset. As your data becomes more of an asset, you make money by using that data in more places, more applications and more times. That is possible with data, but the problem you end up with is consistency issues. And for certain applications, it's not an issue. You're basically writing or if you're basically reading data, it's not an issue. But the minute that you're trying to write on behalf of a particular business event or a particular value proposition, then now you have a challenge. You are limited in how you can do it unless you have this kind of a technology. And so this notion of continuous replication in a world that's going to become increasingly dependent upon data, data that is increasingly distributed, data that you want to ensure has common governance and policy in place. Technologies like what Wendisco provides are going to be increasingly important to the overall way that a business organizes itself, institutes its work, and make sure it takes care of its data assets. Okay, so my next question then, thanks for the clarification, that's good input there. And thanks for summarizing it like that because I couldn't have done that. But when we last talked, I was enamored by the fact that you guys have the data center replication thing down. And I always saw that as a great thing for you guys. Okay, I get that. That's an on-premise situation. You have active-active, good for disaster recovery. A lot of use cases, people should be, you know, beating down your door because you have the better mousetrap, I get that. Now how does that translate to the cloud? So take me through why the cloud now fits nicely with that same paradigm. So I mean, these are industry trends, right? What we've found is that the cloud object stores are very, very cost-effective and efficient. So customers are moving towards that. They're using their Hadoop applications but on cloud object stores. Now it's trivial for us to add plugins that enable us to replicate between a cloud object store on one side and a Hadoop on the other side. It could also be another cloud object store from a different cloud provider on the other side. Once you have that capability, now customers are freed from, lock-in from either a cloud vendor or a Hadoop vendor. And they love that. They're looking at it as another way to leverage their data assets. And we enable them to do that without fear of lock-in from any of these vendors. So on the cloud side, the regions are always been a big thing. We've heard Amazon have a region down here and they would fix it. We saw VMworld push their VMware solution to only one Western region. What's the geo landscape look like with the cloud? Does that relate to anything in your tech? So yes, it does relate. And one of the things that people forget is that when you create an Amazon S3 bucket, for example, you specify a region. Well, but this is the cloud, isn't it? Worldwide, it turns out that the object store actually resides in one region. And you can use some shaky technologies like cross-region replication to eventually get the data to the other region. But if you use- Which just boosts the price as you pay. Yeah, not just boosts the price. Well, they try to save price rather than they're exposed on reliability. Reliability. Exactly, you don't know when the data's going to be there. There are no guarantees. What we offer is take your cloud storage, but we'll guarantee that we can replicate it in a synchronous fashion to another region. Could be the same provider, could be another provider. That gives tremendous benefits to the customers. So do you actually have a guarantee when you go to customers to say we have an SLA guarantee? Yes, absolutely. Do you back it up like money back? What's the guarantee? So the guarantees are, you know, we are willing to back it up with contracts and such like and our customers put us through rigorous testing procedures naturally. But we stand up to every one of those. We can scale and maintain the consistency guarantees that they need for modern businesses. Okay, so take me through the benefits. Who wants this? Because almost, you can almost get kind of sucked into the complexities of it and the nuances of cloud and everything. As Peter laid out, it's pretty complex even as he simplified it. Who buys this? I mean, who's the guy? Is it the IT department? Is it the ops guys? Is it facilities? So we sell to the IT departments. They absolutely love the technology. But to go back to your initial statement, we have all these disasters happening. Hopefully people are all doing reasonably okay at the end of these horrible disasters. But if you're an enterprise of any size, it doesn't have to be a big enterprise. You cannot go back to your users or customers and say that because of a hurricane, you cannot have access to your data. That's sometimes legally not allowed. And other times it's just suicide for business. I mean, HPE in Houston has a huge plant down there. They got hit hard. Yes, in those sort of circumstances, you want to make sure that your data is available in multiple data centers spread throughout the world and we give you that capability. Okay, what are some of the successes? Let's talk through now. Obviously you've got the technology, I get that. Where's the stakes in the ground? Who's adopting it? I know you do a lot of biz dev deals. Kind of know if they're actually OEM type deals or they're just licensing deals. Take us through to where your successes are with this technology. So biz dev wise, we have a mix of OEM deals and licenses and co-selling agreements. The strong ones are all OEMs. Of course, we have great partnerships with IBM, Amazon, Microsoft, just wonderful partnerships. The actual end customers, we started off selling mostly to the financial industry because they have legal mandates. So they were the first to look into this sort of a thing. But now we've expanded into automobile companies. A lot of the auto companies are generating vast amounts of data from their cars and you can't push all the data into a single data center that's just not reasonable. You want to push that data into a single data store that's distributed across the world in just wherever the car is closest to. We offer that capability that nobody else can. So we've got big auto manufacturers signed up. We've got big retailers signed up for exactly the same capability. You cannot imagine ingesting all that data into a single location. You want this replicated across. You want it available no matter what happens to any single region or a data center. So we've had tremendous success in retail banking and a lot of this is through partnerships again. Well congratulations. I got to ask, what's new with you guys? So you have success with the Rep Active Active? We'll dig into the Hortonworks things to check your comment around it. They're not having it. So we'll certainly, we'll, the data plan, which we like. We interviewed Rob Bearden. Love the announcement, but if they don't have the Active Active, we'll have to document that. I don't get that on the record. But you guys are doing well. What's new here? What's in New York? What are some of your wins? Can you just give a quick update on what's going on with WAN Disco? Okay, so quick recap. We love the Hortonworks data plan as well. We think that we can build value into that ecosystem by building a plugin for them. And we love the whole technology. I have wonderful friends there as well. As for our own company, we see all of our, a lot of our business coming from cloud and hybrid environments. It's just the reality of the situation. You had, you know, 20 years ago, you had NFS, which was the great appender of all storage, but turned out to be very expensive. And you had 10 years, seven years ago, you had HDFS come along. And that appended the cost model of NFS and SANS, which those industries are still working their way through. Now we have cloud object stores, which have appended the HDFS model. It's much more cost efficient to operate using cloud object stores. So we will be there. We have replication products for that. And you're in the major clouds. Are you in Azure? Yes, we are in Azure. Google? Yes, absolutely. AWS? AWS. Oracle? Oracle, of course. We're in all of them. All right, so here's the next question is, is that? And you're also in IBM stuff too. Yes, we're a bit of a pipeline. You've got a pretty strong legacy. You've got a monopoly. The mainframe. Like the fiber channel of replication. You get, that is a bad analogy. Yes it is. I mean, fiber channel is only limited suppliers because they had unique technology was highly important. But the basic proposition, the basic proposition is, look, any customer that wants to ensure that a particular data source is going to be available in a distributed way and you're going to have some degree of consistency is going to look at this as an option. Yes. Well you guys certainly got a great team and your leadership has got great tech. The final question I have for you here is, we've had many conversations about the industry. We like to pontificate. I'll certainly like to speculate. But now we have eight years of history now in the big data world. We look back, we're doing our own event in New York City thanks to great support from you guys and other great friends in the community. Appreciate everyone out there supporting theCUBE. It's awesome. But the world's changed. So I got to ask you. You're a student of the industry. I know that knowing you personally. What's been the success formula that keeps the winners around today and what do people need to do going forward? Because we've seen a trainwreck. We've seen the dead bodies in the industry. We've kind of seen what's happened. There's been some survivors. Yes. Why did the current list of characters and companies survive? And what's the winning formula in your opinion to stay relevant as big data grows in a huge way from IoT to AI, cloud, everything in between? I'll quote Stephen Hawking in this. Intelligence is the capability to adapt to changes. That's what keeps industries. That's what keeps companies. That's what keeps executives around. If you can adapt to change, if you can see things coming and adapt your core values, your core technology to that, you can offer customers a value proposition that's going to last a long time. And in a big data space, what is that adaptive key focus? What should they be focused on? I think at this point, it's extracting information from this volume of data. Whether you use machine learning in the modern days or whether it was simple, hive queries, that's the value proposition. And making sure the data's available everywhere so you can do that processing on it. That remains the- The whole concept of digital business suggests that increasingly we're going to see our assets rendered in some form as data. And we want to be able to ensure that that data is able to be where it needs to be, when it needs to be there for any number of reasons. It's a very, very interesting world we're entering. Peter, I think you have a good grasp on this. And I love the narrative of the real time, programming the world in real time. What's the phrase you use? It's real time, but it's the programming the world. Well, programming the real world. Yeah, programming the real world. That's a huge, I mean, something completely, it's not a tech, it's not a speed or feed. Well, the way we think about it is that we look at, we look at IoT as a big information transducer. Where information's in one form and then you turn it into another form to do different kinds of work. And that big data's a crucial feature in how you take data from one form and turn it into another form so that it can perform work. But then you have to be able to turn that around and have it perform work back in the real world. There's a lot of new development, a lot of new technology that's coming on to help us do that. But anyway, you look at it, we're going to have to move data with some degree of consistency. We're still going to have to worry about, making sure that if our policy says that that action needs to take place there and that action needs to take place there, that it actually happens the way we wanted it. And it wanted to. And that's going to require a whole raft of new technologies. We're just at the very beginning of this. And active, active, things like active, active. What you're talking about really is about value creation. Well, the thing that makes active, active, interesting is again, borrowing from your terms, it's a new term to both of us I think today. I like it actually. But the thing that makes it interesting is the idea that you can have a source here that is writing things. And you can have a source over there that are writing things. And as a consequence, you can nonetheless look at a distributed database and keep it consistent. And that is a major, major challenge that's going to become increasingly a fundamental feature of our digital business as well. It's an enabling technology for the value creation as you call it work. Yeah, that's right. Transformational work. So again, congratulations on the active, active, and when this goes to technology and all your deals you're doing, got all the cloud locked up. What's next? We're also going to lock up the edge. You know, look at the edge too, the cloud. We do like this notion of the edge cloud and all the intermediate steps. We think that replicating data between those systems or running consistent compute across the systems is an interesting problem for us to solve. We've got all the ingredients to solve that problem. We will be on that. Jageen Sundar, CTO of WAN, Disco, back on theCUBE, breaking it down. New tech, whole new generation of modern apps and infrastructure happening and distributed and decentralized networks. Of course theCUBE got it covered for you. There are more live coverage here when New York City, for Big Data NYC, our annual event, CUBE and Wikibon here in Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan. More live coverage after the short break.