 Live from Manhattan, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Summit New York City 2017, brought to you by Amazon Web Services. And welcome back to New York here, AWS Summit, theCUBE continue our coverage of what's happening here in the Big Apple. I'm John Wall, someone with Stu Benjamin, and what this is, is maybe not the most prolific CUBE guest of all time, but he's in the Hall of Fame. He really is a CUBE MVP for sure. It's good to have David Richards with us, the president, chairman, CEO of Wendisco. Good to see you, sir. It's a pleasure to be back again, it feels like home. It is like home, we're going to get your own microphone, I think, you know. I know, I didn't even name on the back of the seat or something. This isn't quite a home game for you, all right? So you've got an office in Sheffield, England, you've got an office out in the Valley, still the Count Valley. We got you right in the middle, I think, almost, don't we? Exactly. We kind of split the difference for you this week. I always tell people I'm recolonizing United States. I've been here for about 20 years, but I haven't changed the accent. I'll get you all eventually. All right, well, another year or two, we'll see how that works for you. Big, I guess, six, seven months for you, right? As far as some acquisitions you've done, some business partnerships and arrangements you've done. Yeah, so as a business, we've really progressed well in the first half of the year. We've got to be a little bit careful. We've got results coming out September the 6th in London, but we did do a pre-announcement of a business update. We signed a record big data cloud contract with a very large bank for over $4 million. That was our largest ever contract win. We signed a major retailer who we can't name, obviously, which is another sort of cloud object store on-premises big data win. And interestingly, we stopped burning cash and investors really like this kind of perfect storm of, we've 175%, 173% growth in our cloud big data revenue, booking, sorry, combined with a flat cost base, which meant a first half of last year burning $5.4 million down to virtually zero, just $600,000 in the first half. So investors really like that. We really like that. And it demonstrates that perfect storm of flat cost base and growing sales. David, I'm curious, does working with Amazon and your customers being an Amazon, does the speed and agility and everything like that contribute to that profitability? Well, Amazon kind of changes the game for all vendors, right? Because nobody, you know, it used to be the sort of big four, five, six, whatever it is these days, consulting companies that had to implement ERP systems, all those complex applications. I don't necessarily think they're the people, they're not the go-to people anymore for cloud. So it's down to uniqueness of technology. I mean, Amazon have got such a wide array, we were talking earlier about some of their announcements out today as they continue to go up the stack with applications and so on. So it does lend itself very well to small vendors with sticky, unique intellectual property and unique products and services that are going to really thrive in this kind of cloud environment. So we've really enjoyed working with Amazon, but we're also working with the other cloud vendors as well. And I have to say, when we first saw the snowmobile and the snowball, well, actually the snowmobile drive out on stage in New York, was it 12, 18 months ago? Like, stog years so everything goes, you know, seven times faster. I was like laughing. I was like, how on earth can you possibly use a truck to move data? But a customer came to us, a prospect came to us the other day who wants to move 100 petabytes of data. Now if you're going to use the public internet to do that, that's going to take a hell of a long time. So this idea of a mix between physical and digital data movement, I think, is when moving to cloud is actually fascinating. I think it's a really fascinating subject area and one that customers are definitely going to use. Yeah, you've got a great vantage point looking at customers' migration. So it was actually something big in the keynote talking about there's so many migrations out there that Amazon released in AWS migration hubs. So obviously physics is always a challenge. You know, my legacy mindset, you know, customers, you know, we heard customer up on stage and it's usually not, you know, list and shift maybe for the private cloud but for public cloud I usually, I need to rewrite, I need to do microservices. What is the friction for customers and how are you and Amazon and the other clouds helping customers work through those challenges? Okay, so just to take a step back and think about the problems that happen at hyperscale data movement. So small scale data, gigabytes scale data, the stuff that you typically see in a relational database, they're not particularly big problems. It's kind of minimal outage, press pause, move data, make it consistent and you're done. You know, you can have a sort of a small outage, maybe 15 minutes or even a day to move data. But when it gets to hyperscale, when it gets to petabyte scale, multi terabyte scale data moves, that's when you have a problem. That's really the problem that we solve. So the idea that you can move data that's moving and changing without an interruption to service from on premise to cloud and support a hybrid cloud topology for an elongated period of time is fascinating. I mean, I was listening at an investor conference to the CEO of VMware, who was talking about we're going to be in a situation of hybrid cloud for the next 20, 25 years. Because overnight, not everybody can just repurpose every single application that they're running on premise, whether it's in the mainframe application or relational data application or wherever it is in the RP application and repurpose that in cloud overnight. So we're going to have to gradually move and migrate those applications over. So it's highly likely we're going to be in a hybrid cloud environment for the foreseeable future. And that's actually a fantastic news for us. I mean, we're moving, as I said, at scale companies into cloud with transactional data. And nobody else can touch us in terms of the uniqueness of the IP, which is fantastic news for us. In terms of just big data in general, let's see, Stu has one use for it. I have a different use for it. It's going to live in a lot of different places. I mean, how are you, I guess, responding to different needs within your clients and trying to make them more effective, make them more efficient? And yet when you're dealing with more and more data, that's a big storm to handle. That's a great question. I went to speak a couple of months ago to a new customer of ours who's a major healthcare provider on the East Coast. And I kind of said to him, okay, you've had this Hadoop cluster for the past three years. Why are you calling us, you know, why now? Which is the question that I always ask our customers. Why, what changed? Why are you doing this right now? And maybe for the past three years, they've been putting legal data into this system. That's data, but who cares if you can't get access to it? We can move to telephone. We can move to emails. We can go into an archive and paper archive even and find it. But the why now is that they're now putting patient record data, patient information with regulated SLAs into this system. And that really is our sweet spot. As you get to that investment thesis, small scale gigabyte outage is small outage. When you get into petabyte, exabyte scale, when you've got data sets that are a thousand, million times greater, it's linear to the quantum of data, the outage becomes a thousand or a million times greater. So that's kind of intolerable. So we love it when strategic applications regardless of what the use case is, we could all have different, might be patient data, might be retail information, it might be banking data, it might be customer retention information. When those strategic applications move onto this hyperscale infrastructure, you have to support RTO and RTP and that's what we do. And is a bite a bite a bite? I mean, like you have these thousands of needles and haystacks, right? I mean, how do you assign value to one as opposed to another? So this is another great question and one of the investors kind of asked me a lot. So we used to model our business from kind of the ground up. So we'd take the classic enterprise sales team, you have a sales and marketing organization that's quite large. You would multiply that by their quota and then multiply it by 66% because that's how many of them are going to be successful in selling product. Well, we completely threw that away when we launched the WANDISCO Fusion, our new technology for early 2016. And then we moved to a channel-based approach. So we have IBM, we have an OEM, 5,000 quota-carrying enterprise sales guys at IBM selling our products. That was a fantastic deal for us. Signed it in April 2016 and they've done in the first half of this year, I don't know, at least $6 million in sales that we've also announced. And then we've got strategic partnerships with Amazon, with Microsoft, with Google and we model our business by those channels. So we're not looking for needles in haystacks. We couldn't ever hire enough. And if we had to come into the market and say we need to go and hire 5,000 enterprise sales guys, we'd have to be raising, doing fundraisers like Uber or something. It would just be untenable, we couldn't do it. So we have a product that lends itself very well to a channel-based approach and that's working very nicely for us. So we're not looking for, we're just looking for haystacks. Somebody else can go and find needles. Bye, man. David, how are your customers managing the pace of change these days? We said, you know, Amazon as an example, it's like every day there's three new services coming out. Are they excited? Are they completely overwhelmed? You know, what do you think these days? So I think it's classic sort of products and optional life-cycle stuff. The sort of technical enthusiast, they love all this change. You know, the early stage companies that are implementing this new cloud-based technology, object store technology and so on. They're managing very well. It's the latest stage companies that we might go to and say, object store, and we'll go, what's object store? We're just getting our head around Hadoop that you and Hive and Pig and all this other stuff that you were talking about three years ago. You know, and sales guys are going there now and saying, oh, no, no, no, don't worry about Hadoop. Nobody's going to run Hadoop in the cloud. It's like, well, that's what you told me three years ago. So I think the market's certainly divided. I think you're going to see, as we move up products of optional life-cycle, you're going to see lots and lots and lots of interesting moves happen. I mean, the companies that seem to be owning cloud, I mean, I think Alibaba's coming up really fast. We're seeing them doing some interesting things. Obviously, they've got dominance in the Chinese market. Amazon first mover, Microsoft's futures dependent on cloud. So they all have their different spin and different take on applications that they're going to run in cloud. I think there is, I think it's a bit like the cell phone industry. There's lots and lots of different plans, lots and lots of different confusing nomenclature. That's going to settle out in the next couple of years, but there's unquestionably, if you look at the audience here today, unquestionably large-scale movement of applications and data to cloud. We appreciate the time, as always. Great to see you. Another notch in your cube belt. So congratulations for that. And maybe you can settle in New York for a day or two. You said your travels have had you flip flop it back and forth between England and here. So maybe you can settle in for a day or two. Yeah, I need to replicate myself. I mean, I just put myself in at least two different places at the same time. Live data replication right here. All right, David, thanks for being with us. David Richards. Thank you, thanks guys. Back with more here on the cube and continue our coverage of AWS Summit from New York City right after this break.