WANdisco, the LiveData company, announced a milestone with over 150 Live Data customers and 200 petabytes of data under management, the equivalent of all printed material that has ever been produced. WANdisco's LiveData Migrator is the only hands-off, automated data lake migration service to allow on-premise applications to continue to operate while migrating data under active change. Available to AWS and Google Cloud Platform customers and as a native turnkey service in Microsoft Azure, WANdisco shifted to a channel-first sales model with the launch of its LiveData Partner Network. The exabyte-scale Hadoop to cloud migration opportunity represents more than 100 exabytes of data and thus a multi-billion dollar total addressable market. 

"2020 demonstrated that cloud plays a vital role in business, and we look forward to continuing to give customers the complete freedom to choose where their data lives within their enterprises' IT infrastructure, free from technological or cost constraints," said David Richards, CEO and Co-founder of WANdisco. "As we move into 2021 with a solid foundation and expanded sources of revenue, WANdisco seeks to extend its lead within the cloud migration and replication market with an exciting product roadmap, a world class team and strategic partnerships."

New Partners and Customers

2020 saw substantial customer and partner growth for WANdisco with the signing of multiple, million-plus dollar deals that have expanded customer reach into new industries. Recent customers include one of the largest global airlines, a worldwide retail franchise, a world leader in telecommunications, a leading media conglomerate and a major UK-based supermarket chain among others.

WANdisco significantly expanded its market reach with its global reseller agreement with Infosys to de-risk and accelerate data lake migration to the cloud. Leveraging Infosys' vast experience and cloud capabilities, WANdisco will help enterprises across the globe migrate their data lakes to major public clouds including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. 

Using WANdisco LiveData Migrator, GoDaddy achieved their initial goal to migrate 500TB to AWS S3 in 45 days and to take advantage of the cloud provider's modern tooling and analytics capabilities. On average, GoDaddy processes over 21,000 change operations per second with peaks of over 100,000 change operations per second while normal business operations continued uninterrupted, leaving engineers to focus on other business-critical projects like refactoring and moving applications to the cloud. "WANdisco provided a solution that addressed our cloud migration challenges," said Jeremy Zogg, Senior Director of Engineering, GoDaddy. "This includes managing the technical debt inherited by our aging software and hardware, handling the scale of data that we accumulated over the years, and doing so without impacting our business continuity. We couldn't afford any downtime during the migration process. With WANdisco and AWS, we were able to get up and running in weeks so we could begin experimenting with the new cloud environment very quickly." 

Xandr accelerated its cloud adoption goals and leverage cloud analytical services by deploying WANdisco LiveData Platform. As the advertising and analytics division of WarnerMedia, Xandr migrated multiple petabytes of on-premises Hadoop data to the cloud while continuing to ingest and process hundreds of terabytes of new data every day - all without taking production clusters offline and completing the migration in a single scan.  

Successful partnerships with leading cloud providers

In 2020, WANdisco deepened its relationship with Microsoft as its LiveData Platform became the first natively integrated service in the Azure Customer Portal. Since its preview began in June, the collaboration between Microsoft and WANdisco has drawn numerous enterprises who have registered for the service within the Azure Portal, offering positive feedback on its efficiency and operation. As part of the Microsoft Hadoop Migration Accelerator program with Databricks, LiveData Migrator for Azure is a fully operational Azure-nature service and is Microsoft's recommended Hadoop to Azure migration platform. 

New Channel Program

Through the new WANdisco LiveData Partner Network portal, cloud service providers, consulting partners, system integrators, ISVs, resellers, and others can leverage WANdisco's LiveData Cloud Services to enable Hadoop migrations at any scale, in addition to a robust set of new sales, marketing, training, certification and support resources to unlock new revenue streams. WANdisco envisions that the partner network will be its biggest growth driver for the company in 2021, enabling it to quickly expand and scale its business globally. Through these new partnerships, WANdisco will help partners grow their business while providing customers with the tools to accelerate their data and application modernization plans.

"We see this as a significant growth area," said Alan Grogan, executive leader for data platform modernization at Avanade Europe, a WANdisco reseller and strategic systems integrator partner.  "Hadoop is failing to meet a lot of the early expectations. WANdisco is an accelerating technology that we see the value in using to help clients who are currently struggling with - or not getting value out of - Hadoop, to move those workloads they are spending billions on," Grogan said in an interview with CRN. 

"The LiveData Partner Network, coupled with WANdisco's newly released and self service LiveData Migrator service, will serve to accelerate our business together and enable Motifworks to focus on the upstack aspects of customers' digital transformation," said Tarun Agarwal, Director and Practice Lead, Data & AI, Motifworks, a WANdisco partner. "WANdisco has made it easy to do business together, providing a state-of-the-art technology platform to more rapidly onboard Motifworks sellers and cloud architects."

LiveData Migrator

WANdisco is changing the future of migration with this year's launch of LiveData Migrator. The company's automated, self-service solution democratizes cloud data migration at any scale by enabling companies to start migrating Hadoop data from on-premises to Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google Cloud Platform within minutes, even while the source data sets are under active use. With LiveData Migrator, businesses can migrate HDFS data without the expertise of engineers or other consultants. The platform enables enterprises to operate without any production system downtime or business disruption while ensuring the migration is complete and continuous, and any ongoing data changes are replicated to the target cloud environment. "It's as close to a silver bullet as you can find for this type of project," according to Gartner analyst Merv Adrian in an interview with TechTarget.

WANdisco gained designation as an Advanced Technology Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN) and achieved AWS Migration Competency status with the release of LiveData Migrator. The only ISV certified in the new Workload Mobility for Data Migration, Data Lake Migration category, WANdisco collaborated with AWS to define the requirements to cover different use cases, including Hadoop, storage and database data migration, and mainframe data integration.

Awards

WANdisco's technological accomplishments were recognized within three awards in 2020. It was a finalist for the Stratus Awards in the Cloud Computing category, organized by the Business Intelligence Group, and shortlisted for the Cloud Awards within the category of Best Cloud Migration or Systems Integration Solution. WANdisco was also highly commended at the UK IT Awards for Cloud Innovation Provider of the Year in November.