 Everyone, welcome to this CUBE Conversations here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of the CUBE. I'm here at Jagain Sundar, CTO, Chief Technology Officer of Wendisco. Jagain, great to see you. Again, thanks for coming on. Thank you for having me, John. So the conversation I want to talk to you about is the technology behind Wendisco. And we've had many conversations, so for the folks watching, go to our YouTube channel, you can see the evolution of conversations over I think eight, nine years now we've been chatting. What a level up you guys are now with cloud, big announcements around multi-cloud, live data in particular. So the technology is the gift that keeps giving for Wendisco. You guys continuing to take territory, now a big wave with cloud, big growth, a lot of changes, a lot of hires. What's going on? So as you well know, Wendisco stands for Wide Area Network Distributed Computing and the value of the Wide Area Network aspect is really shining through now because nobody goes to the cloud saying, I'm going to put it in one data center. It's always multiple regions, multiple data centers in each region. Suddenly, the problem of having your data consistent, be it across multiple cloud vendors or on-prem to cloud, becomes a real challenge. We stepped in, we had something that was a good solution for small users, small data, but we developed it into something that's fantastic for large data volumes. And people are running into the problem. The biggest problem that IT providers have is that data scientists do not respect data that's not consistent. If you look at a replica of data and you're not sure whether it's exactly accurate or not, the data scientist who spent all his time building algorithms to predict some model, he's going to look at it and go, that data's not quite right. I'm not going to look at it. So if you use an inconsistent tool or an inadequate tool to replicate your data, you have the problem that nobody's going to respect the replicas, everybody's going to go back to the source of truth. We solved that problem elegantly and accurately. State the problem specifically. Is it the integrity of the data? What is the specific problem statement that you guys solved with the technology? Let me give you an example. You have notifications that come out of cloud object stores when an object is placed into the store or deleted from the store. That's a best effort delivery. If there are log jams in this mechanism used to deliver, some notifications may be dropped. The problem with using that notification mechanism to replicate your data is that over a period of time, say you have two, three petabytes of data and you're replicating it, over a month or a month and a half, you'll find that maybe 0.1% of your data is not quite accurate anymore. So the value of that replica is essentially zero. It's like a leaky pipe, basically. Indeed, if you have a leaky pipe, then it's just totally worthless. You need to have integrity end to end. All right, so let's get back to some of the things I want to ask you, because I think it's a fascinating and been following your story for years. You had a point solution, went wider. You had the replication active, active, great for data centers, so disaster recovery, not a mission critical, but certainly critical. Correct. I don't know what the mission was, it was a disaster. Income's cloud, you mentioned wide area networks. If you go back to the old days, when I was breaking into the business, this is when they had dial-up modems and pagers, not even cell phones, just starting. Wide area network was a really complicated beast and all the best resources worked on it. It was expensive bandwidth. Then you had remote offices, then you had campus networking. And then, so wide area networking went through that phase one. Correct. Now we're living in a WAN all the time. Cloud is WAN, wide area. Correct. Cloud is WAN, but there are subtle aspects that people miss all the time. If you go to store an object in Amazon says three, for example, you pick a region. If it's a complete wide area distributed entity, why do you need to pick a region? The truth is, each cloud vendor hides a number of region specific or local area network specific aspects of their service. DynamoDB runs in one data center, one region, two or three availability zones in a region. If you want to replicate that data, you don't really have much help from the cloud vendor themselves. So you need to parse the truth from what is offered. What you will find is the WAN is still a very challenging problem for a lot of these data replication problems. Talk about the wide area network challenges in the modern era we're living in, which is cloud computing. We mentioned some of the nuances around regions and availability zones. Basically the cloud grew up as building blocks. And the plumbing underneath it was essentially a hybrid of certain techniques in networking. Local area networks, VLANs, tunneling, all these stuff, that's router. It's all basically plumbing. What's different now that's important to take that to the next level? Because there are arguments that's saying, hey GDPR, I might want to have certain regions be smarter. So you're starting to see a level up that Amazon and others are going. Google in particular talks about this a lot as does Microsoft. What's that next level of WAN where the plumbing gets upgraded from basic VLANs and other things? Right. So the problem really has to be stated in terms of your data architecture. If you look at your data and figure out that you need this set of data to be available for your business critical applications, then the problem turns into I need replicas of this data in this region and this other region, perhaps in two different cloud vendor locations because you don't want to be tied down to the availability of one cloud vendor. Then the problem turns into how do you hide the complexity of replicating and keeping this data consistent from the users of the data, the data scientists, the application authors and so on. Now that's where we step in. We have a transparent replication solution that fits into the plumbing. It's often offered by the IT folks as part of their cloud offering or as part of their hybrid offering. The application developers don't really need to worry about those things. A specific example would be hive tables that a user is building in one data center and IT professional from that organization can buy our replication software. That table will be available in multiple data centers and multiple regions available for both read and write. The user did not do anything or does not need to be aware. So if you have a problem such as GDPR requires this data to be here, but this summarized data can be available across all of these regions, then we can solve that problem elegantly for you without any application rewiring or reauthoring. Talk about the technology that makes all this happen. Again, this has been a key part of your success at WAN Discord. I always love the name wide area. I'm a big wide area network fan. Did that in my early days, configuring router tables. You know how it has been hardcore back then. The distributed systems is certainly large scale now is part of the cloud. So all the large scale guys like me when we grew up into computer science days had to think about systems architecture at scale. We're actually living it now. So talk about the technology. What specifically do you guys have that's your technology? And talk about the impact to the scale piece. I think that's a real key technology piece. Indeed. So the core of our algorithm is enhancements and superior implementation of an algorithm called PAXOS. Now PAXOS itself is the only mathematically proven algorithm for keeping replicas in multiple machines or multiple regions or multiple data centers. The other alternatives such as RAFT and ZooKeeper protocol. These are all compromises for the sake of ease of implementation. Now we don't fear the cost of implementation. We've spent many years doing the research on it. So we have fantastic implementation of PAXOS extended for use over wide area networks without any special hardware. I mentioned the without any special hardware piece because Google Spanner, which is one of our primary competitors has an implementation, but that needs their own specific network and hardware. So the value of- Because they tie the clock, atomic clock, to the infrastructure that they are timing, so it's all synchronized. So it's only within Google Cloud. Exactly. It cannot even be made available to Google's customers of Google Cloud. That was a feature that they added recently, but it's rolling out in very limited. Well they inherited that from their large scale. Correct. Google. Yes. Which is big table, Spanner. These are awesome products. These are awesome products, but they're very specific- Caleb for Google. Yes. They're great in the Google environment. They're not so great outside of Google. Now we have technology that makes you able to run this across say Google Cloud and Microsoft's Cloud and Amazon's Cloud. The value of this is that you have truly cloud neutral solutions. You don't need to worry about vendor lock-in. You don't need to worry about availability problems in one of the cloud vendors. And then you can scale your solution. You can go in with an approach such that when the virtual machines or the compute resources in one cloud vendor are really inexpensive, we'll use that. When it's very expensive, we'll move our workloads to other locations. You can think of architectures like that with our solution underpinning your replication. All right, so again, I got to ask you the technical question. A lot of these conversations can get down dirty under the hood. So Joel Horowitz was on your new CMO, former Microsoft Cube alumni. David Richardson, CEO, talked about the same thing. Moving data around is a key value proposition and that's tied right into your legacy of your IP and how that value is. With integrity, moving data from point A to point B. But the world's moving also to identify scenarios where I'm going to move compute rather than move the data because people have recognized that moving data is hard. You've got latency and there's cost in bandwidth. So, two schools of thought, not mutually exclusive, when do you pick one? Oh, okay, absolutely. They're not mutually exclusive because there are data availability needs that define some replication scenarios and there are compute needs that can be more flexible. If you had the ability to say have data in Amazon's cloud and in Microsoft's cloud, you may want to use some Amazon specific tools for specific compute scenarios. At the same time, use Microsoft tools for other scenarios or perhaps use open source tool like Hadoop in either one of those clouds. Those are all mechanisms that work perfectly well, but at the core, you have to figure out your data architecture. If you can live with your data in one region or in one data center, clearly that's what you should do. But if you cannot have that data be unavailable, you do have to replicate it. At that point, you should consider replicating to a different cloud vendor because availability is a concern with all these vendors. So two things I hear you say. One, availability is its driver. The other one is user preference. Yes, absolutely. So why not have people who know Microsoft tools and Microsoft software work on it. Microsoft framework is the one using something else on another cloud. The same data can live in both places. You guys make that happen, is that what you're saying? Exactly, that's a big deal. Absolutely, and we guarantee the consistency. That's a guarantee that you will not get from any other vendor. So this basically debunks the whole lock-in. Yes. That you guys are a solution to essentially relieve this notion of lock-in. So me as a customer, I say, hey, I'm in Amazon right now. We're all in on Amazon. But I've got some temptation to go to Azure or Google. Why wouldn't I if I have the ability to make my data consistent? Exactly. Is that what you're saying? That is exactly what I'm saying. You have this ability to experiment with different cloud vendors. You also have the ability to mitigate some of the cost aspects. If you're going to pay for copies in two different geographic locations, you might as well do it on two different cloud vendors so you have the richer subset of applications and better availability. So for people who say data is a lock-in spec for cloud, it's kind of right unless they use Wendisco because in a sense, no one really moves with it. I mean, if your data is there, you stay there. And that's kind of common sense. It's not so much technical lock-in. So there's no real technical lock-in. It's more operational lock-in with data if you don't want to. But if you're afraid of lock-in, you go with the Wendisco. And that's live data multi-cloud, is that? That's live data multi-cloud and this new ability to actually have active data sets that are available in different cloud vendor locations. Well, that's a killer app right there. How do you feel? I mean, you must feel pretty good. You and I have talked many times. Yes. I mean, this is like you've been waiting for this moment. This is actually real wide area, aka cloud. Exactly. So I was a big data problem which was only getting bigger. Exactly. Replication is now the transport between clouds for anti-lock-in. This is the Holy Grail for Wendisco. It is the Holy Grail for the industry. We've been talking about it for years now and we feel completely redeemed now. We feel that the industry has gotten to the point that they understand what we've talked about. We are very excited. The customer traction we're seeing and watching our customers light up when we describe the attributes we bring, it's exciting. I mean, just the risk management alone is a hedge. I mean, if I'm someone in either the cybersecurity challenges alone on data, you got data sovereignty, you got compliance. Never mind the productivity piece of it, which is pretty amazing. So you guys are changing the data equation. Indeed, our most excited customers are CIOs because mitigating risk from things like cybersecurity as you point out, you may have a breach in one cloud vendor. You can turn that off and use your replica in the other cloud vendor side instantly. Those are comforts you do not get with other solutions. So, we're all having a love fest here. I love the whole multi-cloud data anti-locking. I think that's a killer feature. I think yous will sell that. But I'm going to say, okay, that's all good, but I'm going to get you on this one, security. So no one saw security yet. So if you saw that, then you pretty much got it all. So tell me the security situation. So I'll start by saying, right, our biggest customer base is the financial industry. Banking companies, insurance companies, healthcare. There is no industry in the world that's more security conscious than the banking industry. Government? The government, perhaps. I mean, the banks are really security conscious. They are. Money is money. Money is money. And they have a fiduciary responsibility both to governments and to their customers. So we've catered to these customers for upwards of a decade now. Every technical decision we make has security as one of the focus items. And we- So you guys are good on security. You feel. Absolutely. We are top in security when it comes to data, yes. Encryption, what's the security? It's encrypted on the wire. We support all on-disk data at rest encryption schemes. We support all the Hadoop and the cloud vendor security mechanisms. We have a cross-cloud product. So the security problems are multiplied and we take care of each of those specifically. So you can be confident that your data is secure. And wire speed security, no overhead involved. No overhead involved at all. It's not measurable. So. Well congratulations on where you guys are. You got a lot more work to do. You guys got a staff. So you're hiring a lot of people. Talk about the talent you're hiring real quick. Because attracting large-scale talent is also one indicator of a successful opportunity. Honestly, I think the positioning is phenomenal. Congratulations. Absolutely. Talk about the hireings. As David mentioned a few minutes ago, we hired Joel from IBM for our marketing department. He's CMO, wonderful hire. We've got Ramkey who's from the University of Denver left the head of that computer science department to come work for us. Another amazing guy, terrific background. We've got Shakti who's another IAT alum, UT, Austin, PhD. He's running engineering for us. We're so pleased to be able to hire talent at this level. As you well know, it's the people who make these jobs interesting and products interesting. We are so excited. What are some of the things that those guys say when they get interviewed and get exposed? What would take someone to quit their tenured professor job at a university which is pretty much retirement to engage in a growing opportunity? What do they say? So the single theme that you'll find in all of this is very complex, unique technology that has been refined and it's on the verge of exploding to probably something 10 to 100 times the size it is today. People see that when we show them the value of what we've got and the market that we are taking this to, they're just very excited. Well, congratulations. You guys have certainly worked hard. It's been great to watch the entrepreneurial journey. Getting into that growth stream and just the winds that you're back, all that hard work. And the technology is phenomenal. Again, multi-cloud data, not worrying about where your data is is going to give people some ease and rest and they're going to rest at night. Well, because that's the number one of the number one words besides security. Absolutely. Chagain Sundar, CTO, Chief Technology Officer of Wendisco here inside the Cuban Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.