In the fast moving world of Big Data, a new idea has been born. Application Defined Networking is being pioneered by the company formerly known as Lyatiss. Cloud Weaver CEO and founder Pascale Vicat-Blanc joined theCUBE GM Jeff Frick at SiliconANGLE’s BigDataSV to talk about the new paradigm being explored by her company.

Kicking off the conversation, Frick asked Vicat-Blanc to detail the new name for the company and where they see themselves positioned in the market. Vicat-Blanc explained the new name, Cloud Weaver, was derived from their most popular product they currently offer on the market. “It’s a SaaS solution for Cloud infrastructure users,” explained Vicat-Blanc. Cloud Weaver aims at providing better performance in the Cloud by providing better visibility and communication in the network.

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“You say Application Defined Networking instead of Software Defined Networking,” noted Frick. “How do you delineate the two?” Vicat-Blanc pointed out they are actually complementary. “ADN is in control of your SDN. Application Defined Networking helps the user, the consumer of the Cloud resources, to build their abstract network in order to have a consistent system for running the application.”

A benefit to ADN is that it is agnostic across the spectrum of Cloud services. This is, according to Vicat-Blanc, “…because you abstract the technical specificities of each device or each virtual resource and you build something that is an abstract computing network for your application. It’s agnostic to the technology underneath and it gives powerful visibility and control over your own assets.”

Explaining her transition from public sector to starting her own company, Vicat-Blanc stated, “Maybe I was bored. I have done research for 20 years in the public sector. I was also teaching as a professor and travelling all over the world launching a lot of international initiatives.” Vicat-Blanc realized her public sector work, which brought her to the US and Japan and had her working with researchers at CERN was something she could leverage in her own private initiative. “At some point I said, ‘If you look at Google, Amazon, if you look at Facebook, if you look at Twitter, these people have the real data. They have the problem. And that’s where you can do the real research.’” Vicat-Blanc decided her path would break from the research side to actually helping to build this new system. “For me, it’s still research. In fact, its reinventing computing and networking.”

The convergence of Big Data and Cloud seems to be in, according to Frick, a perfect storm. “Talk about how the advances in both of those areas are now coming together and are enabling some of the opportunities you talked about in terms of attacking some of these big problems.”

In her work at CERN, Vicat-Blanc was instrumental in the development of the data grid. “It was a tsunami of data coming in. We need this computing power. The Cloud is the perfect place for computing all these data,” she explained. “Big Data is both the machine to compute the data and also the algorithms that allow the acceleration of the computing of the data. People are injecting a lot of parallism concept in there to accelerate this, to make this large-scale processing and computation affordable and also limited in time.” Vicat-Blanc pointed out the theory beneath it is derived from excellent science developed by researchers in the past.

ACROSS THE POND

Alluding to Vicat-Blanc’s European heritage, Frick was interested to gain a more worldly and less Silicon Valley-centric perspective on Cloud and Big Data. “What does it look like looking back across the pond at the US in terms of how things are migrating?”

“I left Europe a few years back because I believe the Cloud was built in Silicon Valley and wanted to be a part of it,” commented Vicat-Blanc. She cited the relatively passive adoption of previous technologies, including the Internet, of European consumers as key to her decision to relocate.

Turning Vicat-Blanc’s perspective from the US back to Europe, Frick wondered how the different state regulations and privacy concerns were being addressed with the advent of Cloud computing across the continent. “Is the Cloud just another thing like the Euro that will start to break down some of those cross border differences?”

Vicat-Blanc spoke almost entirely on the aspect of privacy and security stating, “I think privacy is an important point. I think it is a constraint and an attribute.” As a provider a balance has to be struck between security, performance and reliability. “For me, protection is a good constraint or a good problem to solve. It’s not a barrier. It’s just normal that people want to protect their data.”

WOMEN IN TECHNOLOGY

The direction of the conversation shifted to something Vicat-Blanc could expertly address. “I was wondering,” asked Frick, “if you could talk about your role as a leading woman in technology, both in the public sector and now as CEO and founder of your own company?”

“I really believe that ladies like me have to help one another become more confident in their power and capabilities,” explained Vicat-Blanc. “In my company, I am hiring both [women and men]. I try to encourage young ladies to adopt and embrace a scientifical [sic] or engineering career. We need this diversity in companies and in the economy.”

Wrapping up the conversation on this segment of theCUBE, Frick asked Vicat-Blanc to share her thoughts on the overall vibe of the O’Reilly Strata Conference occurring just across the street. “I feel there is a lot of dabbling in algorithms. A lot of companies have data and there is work in making it speak better. Something is really happening.” Vicat-Blanc concluded, “We are seeing the Internet of Things is presenting a huge new world to explore.”

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