David Richards, founder and CEO of WANdisco, Inc., says that the company has found ways to embrace the disruption caused by systems like Hadoop.

“The heritage of WANdisco is in replicating data … replicating whole data centers,” Richards told theCUBE at Hadoop Summit 2015. “And we placed a big bet a few years ago when we could see Hadoop coming over the horizon and disrupting, fundamentally disrupting the storage space.”

What were those bets?

“What we could also see happening was enterprises adopting this stuff, and if enterprises adopt this stuff, there are a couple of things they fundamentally need,” he said. “They need some way to manage it … they need security products … and they also need to be super reliable and resilient for enterprise use. That was the bet that we placed with our technology.”

Unmet needs in the ecosystem

So far, it seems to be working for WANdisco, but Richards thinks there are more needs in the ecosystem that are going unmet.

“In this early part of the marketplace, we see a great deal of demand, particularly from financial services institutions, banks, who really don’t want to run their own data centers, for a start,” Richards said. “They kind of have to for the moment because of all the compliance and security issues. But … they really don’t want to implement software. They want to buy an appliance from somebody. So actually the appliance vendors, I think, are a little bit behind the curve here. They should be doing a lot better than they are,” he explained.

Like most players in this market, their systems are dependent on HCFS, the Hadoop-Compatible File System API, but that could all change in the near future.

“The next step for us is any storage system,” Richards stated. “The Fusion platform as it is today has a very thin veneer that allows us to integrate with HCFS-compliant file systems. Imagine if we could do this with NFS; imagine if we could do this with SQL databases.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Hadoop Summit 2015.