Thought Leaders in Big Data: Ed Walsh, CEO of Catalogic Software (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: There’s no venture capital involved in the first round?

Ed Walsh: No, it was a spin-out. It was management and some existing board members.

Sramana Mitra: So you’re in the process of raising your first institutional round right now?

Ed Walsh: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the product and the area in general. Let me ask a dumb question here. What are we trying to do with this copy data? Are we trying to keep track of how many copies there are? What is the goal of the copy data field?

Ed Walsh: It’s two-fold. One is, what do I have and how do I control it so that it could result in cost savings. Am I being wasteful? The other one is, how do I leverage that copy data. In a typical environment, when you have a database environment, you have a local disk storage. You make a local copy for resiliency in case something happens. Then, you make a remote copy for resiliency. You use snap-shotting to have application-consistent copies. Literally, you have first copy, which you’re using. Second copy is local. Third copy is remote. What do you do with the second and third copy? Nothing. You have it for a good reason but you don’t leverage it because you don’t have the tools to see it, automate, and orchestrate it.

Second is, how do I leverage them or apply analytics. Everyone wants to know what their production environment looks like an hour ago and leverage that for operational analytics to be added into Big Data. Right now, you’re doing ETL process. You’re doing basically extractions of databases, files, or logs. What we do now is we can take a snapshot. We can give you access to any system across the enterprise and leverage that for business analytics with no additional cost. You already have the data. You’re just not leveraging it.

Sramana Mitra: Some application that’s trying to run analytics application on top of the master data or the full data is looking to tap into either the main database or find another copy to be able to work with it. You’re saying that copies already exist. You just need to identify where those copies are and be able to pair them up with the applications that are trying to access them and make a much better use of the data footprint that exists within the organization.

Ed Walsh: Exactly. I give you better data access, but I do it without additional cost. I also avoid a big problem with data, which is what is the true copy of the data. When you start replicating data form different databases, you put it in the repository. It doesn’t necessarily reflect what the current environment looks like. This allows you to literally copy your production environment as of an hour ago. Now, you can get it directly from the true data source. You actually save money because you’re not going to a separate environment that you’re trying to populate. That is the power of what the enterprises already have.

The industry has spent a lot of time and money showing people how to copy their data over and over, but not how to access it. The next big leap will be, “I’ll show you what you have and I’ll show you how to leverage them.” Here’s another use case. Am I underprotected? How do I leverage it? Analytics is an easy one. You don’t have to negotiate for what you’re getting from the production Oracle environment. In fact, once they go to production, within an hour, you can see exactly full fidelity and you can do a bunch of what-ifs compared to waiting to negotiate the extraction process later. That’s one of the big use cases for copy data leverage.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Ed Walsh, CEO of Catalogic Software
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