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>> Everyone, welcome to this CUBE Conversation
here at Palo Alto, California.
I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE.
We are here with Joel Horwitz, who's the CMO of WANdisco,
Joel, great to see you, formerly of IBM,
we've known you for many years,
we've had great conversations when you were at IBM,
rising star, now at WANdisco, congratulations.
>> Thank you, yeah, it's really great to be at WANdisco,
and great to be here with theCUBE.
So we've had many conversations, again, goin' back,
you were a rising star in data,
you know the cloud real well,
why WANdisco, why leave IBM for WANdisco,
what attracted you to the opportunity?
>> Yeah, really three things.
First and foremost, the people.
I've known the WANdisco team now for years.
Back in my Hadoop days, when I was at Datamere,
I used to, hang out with the WANdisco team
at Data After Dark, in New York, which was great,
and they had the best marketing there at the time.
Two, the product, I mean I won't join a company
unless the product is really legit,
and 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 runway there,
and so, for me, I'm just totally grateful,
and totally honored, to be a part of WANdisco.
>> What's the tailwind for them,
that wave that they're on, if you will,
because you mentioned,
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, 'cause you knew the cloud game too.
>> Yeah, yeah. >> 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, what I saw in WANdisco
was that they had technology that allowed people
to enlarge 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 recognize the opportunity
that just how 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,
as pretty similar problem.
And so that's why, 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,
it's this great trend, live.
We're doing you a lot of live videos on theCUBE,
live implies real time.
Data's data.
Multicloud is clearly becoming
one of those enterprise categories.
>> Yeah.
>> First it was public cloud, then hybrid cloud.
>> Yeah. >> Now it's multicloud.
How does live data fit into multicloud?
>> Yeah, so multicloud, and live data,
as I just mentioned, 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, 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.
The focus in multicloud
has been mainly focus on applications.
And so, talking about, how do you have a container strategy?
Or a virtualization strategy, for your applications?
And so, I think of it really as a multicloud strategy,
as opposed to a multicloud architecture.
So we're helping our enterprise clients
think about their multicloud strategy.
So they're not locked in to 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 pitfalls between multicloud strategy
and multicloud architecture, you just said,
customers don't want to get locked in,
obviously, no-one wants to get locked in,
multi-vendor used to be a big buzzword,
during that last wave of computer-to-client server.
>> Yeah. >> Now multicloud
seems like multi-vendor,
what do you mean by architecture versus strategy,
how do you parse that?
Yeah, so like I said, in terms of your data, right,
and it all 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, said 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 toolset,
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, it's clear that data,
has been a fundamental part of WANdisco's value proposition.
Moving data around has been a top concern,
even back in the Hadoop days, now it's in the cloud.
>> Yeah. >> Moving data
across the network, whether it's cloud to cloud,
or cloud to data center, or to the edge of the network--
>> Yep. Yep. >> Is a challenge.
>> You know at IBM, when I was there in 2016,
and we're coming up with our 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 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 data management strategy,
has been lift and shift, or to load it on to the back of,
I always picture that image of the forklift lifting
all those tape drives onto the airplane,
you know, the IBM version of that.
And that's like a century old at this point,
so, 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've 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've 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 to 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.
We 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 customers solve that,
but we also help our partners 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 majors motions,
one through the cloud vendors themselves,
'cause frankly, in most cases,
they don't have this technology to do it,
you know, 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 proposition?
>> 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 adds
that already exist in 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 adds.
So that's really powerful, if you are stuck
with this stage of
"Eh, 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,
as are you, on the IBM side-- >> Yeah.
>> Now you're on the other side of the table.
You've been on both sides of the table.
>> Yeah. >> So what's goin' on at Think,
and how does WANdisco, vector,
and certainly CUBE will be there.
>> Yeah, we'll be there, so WANdisco
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,
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, I mean, clearly,
IBM is also talking about multicloud and hybrid cloud,
so hybrid data management, hybrid cloud is a big topic.
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 specifics in public-
>> Yeah. >> Sensitive information,
but, generally speaking,
where's the main trendlines
that you guys are going to be building on,
obviously, cloud data, they'll come in together,
good core competency there for WANdisco,
what's next, what's the next level for you guys?
>> So what's really fascinating,
and I actually didn't realize this when I joined WANdisco,
just to be completely transparent.
WANdisco has a core piece of technology called DConE,
Distributed Coordination Engine.
It essentially is a form of blockchain,
really, it's a 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, at other areas that we might apply it to,
and already this past year,
we actually filed two patents,
in 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's big, right, that has value,
and that you want to manage across different environments,
so you can imagine, 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 working on. >> Is that protectable IP
the patents, so those are filed on the blockchain?
>> Yeah, yeah. >> For instance?
>> So DConE is certainly patented,
I'm sure Jagane'll talk more about this.
>> Yeah, we'll get into it.
>> There's probably a handful of people in the world,
and they might all be working at WANdisco at this point.
(chuckles)
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,
Google, the other smartest company in the world,
published their paper on Spanner,
and as you said, they used brute force,
really, to solve the problem.
Where we have a very elegant solution,
using software, right?
So it's a really great time to be at WANdisco,
because I just see
that there's so many applications of our technology,
but, right now, we're mainly focused on
what our customers are asking for.
>> You've said a great quote, thanks Joe,
final question for you,
where do you see it going, WANdisco,
what are your plans, do you have anything in mind,
do you want to share anything notable,
around what you're doing,
and what you think WANdisco will be in a few years.
>> We have an incredible team, as I mentioned,
the people that are joining WANdisco, as David mentioned,
I myself, not to say too much there, but,
the new folks that have joined
our Research and Development Team,
but we've been making some great hires, to WANdisco.
So I'm really excited about the team,
I'm going, actually, to visit,
we have a great team in Europe,
in the UK, in the United Kingdom,
so I'm going to go see them next week.
But we have just the company culture is what drives me,
I think that's just one of those hard things,
really, to find.
And so that's what I'm really excited about,
so 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 talked about live data for multicloud,
asked the question, and her headline was
"Are You Down to Boogie?"
So, disco continues to be a great meme for us,
with our name. (John chuckles)
Unintentional, so, as a marketer,
it's a pretty fun time to be at WANdisco.
>> Seventies and eighties were great times,
certainly I'm an eighties guy,
Joel, thanks for comin' on, appreciate the update,
Joel Horowitz, CMO, Chief Marketing Officer, WANdisco,
really on a nice wave right now,
cloud growth, data growth, all comin' together,
real IP, lookin' forward to hearing more,
what comes down the pipe for those guys,
you'll see him at IBM Think.
I'm John Furrier here,
in the studios at Palo Alto, thanks for watching.
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