Data is the oil powering a transformed cloud market, but so many enterprise data strategies are still built around computing architectures that limit essential data value extraction. As a hybrid cloud alternative emerges to save legacy workloads, Mike Waas (pictured), founder and chief executive officer of Datometry Inc., encourages organizations to re-prioritize their distribution plans and identify the separate migration and modernization needs in their business.

Waas sat down with Peter Burris (@plburris), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California, to discuss challenges in data migration and how Datometry is working to lower the risks of cloud adoption.

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

You’re on the road talking with a lot of customers. What are you encountering?

Waas: People are on different trajectories. There are a number of enterprises that are ready to pull the trigger and looking for a tactical solution to get there. Then there are customers who are still in the process of figuring it out; they understand what workloads probably would work in the cloud [and] start with those. My favorite are the ones in the early stages of the journey, an exploratory phase. Our product allows all of them to get value out of this without having to wait for years of planning, rewriting and remodeling applications.

What kinds of workloads are especially open to this approach [of] moving the data and re-platforming it to a more modern technology?

Waas: In a classic migration, the moment somebody opens the hood on the current system and says, “Hey, we’re re-platforming this to the cloud,” a myriad of people [come] out of the woodwork [with] all these janitorial tasks [they’ve] been sitting on. Migration very quickly turns unmanageable; 60 to 70 percent of migrations [are] failing because it’s just spiraling out of control.

What we give IT leaders is the ability to take these two things apart. Move first; move everything; move right now. Then afterwards, look at your application. There’s usually three categories. One of them is run these forever. That’s your mission critical but fairly established applications. Then there’s a second category: “We always wanted to rewrite this thing; we just never found time. And for all sorts of business reasons, we want to rewrite this.”

The last category is applications we should probably deprecate anyway, and it’s usually a much smaller group. That separation of migration and modernization really resonates well with the IT leaders.

It sounds as though you’re proposing we can unlock potential unlimited streams of future value out of data once we get it to a place where we’re not worried about the impact on the underlying hardware.

Waas: [It’s] doing away with the data silos. It’s not about getting your database into the cloud and then having it sit in the database, but making it available to all the myriad of processing techniques and applications that cloud service providers put out there. Having the ability to process your data with [artificial intelligence], advanced analytics without having to shovel it out of the database and back in every time. Getting the data there is the holy grail for enterprise in the next five to 10 years.

We sit so low in the stack, we’re agnostic to the application. We give you a system we call qInsight that allows you to run workload logs from your existing data warehouse and simulate it through our system. At the end of this process, we give you a scorecard that lets you tease apart the applications, the features, [and] the complexity that’s in there.

Where do you think this technology is in a couple of years in terms of simplifying this whole process for enterprises?

Waas: 2019 is going to be the year of the cloud for the enterprise. It’s been a long time coming, but finally we’ve reached critical threshold. We’re creating a new geography that didn’t exist before — where you had functionality sitting in the application and then copied across thousands of applications, or try to shoehorn it into the database. We give people that whole vision of functionality in the space in between long-term that is much richer than actually a database, or the application itself.

Watch the entire video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations.

Photo: SiliconANGLE