 Live from Seattle, Washington, it's The Cube at Tableau Conference 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsor, Tableau. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Kelly. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Seattle, Washington for The Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the civil noise for Tableau's end user conference, data14. That's the hashtag, data14. Go to crowdchat.net slash data14. It's The Cube, I'm John Furrier with my co-host Jeff Kelly, our next guest, Chris Selland, who's VP of BizDev and marking for HP Vertica. Chris, welcome back to The Cube. Great to see you again. It is always a pleasure. I think you've been on, you're pushing the top tier of Cube alum, you've been involved with us for many years. We've seen this movie kind of evolve and I'm excited to talk to you because we just had a great event with you guys kind of extracting all the info about your customer base called the Ferrari. I think I coined you guys as the Ferrari of a big data confirmed by Colin Mahoney. But more importantly, you guys now have a lot of big customers in the sweet spot of the market, the mid-range as well, not just the Ferrari, you're becoming the great engine for the data. But visualization is the killer app, so you're here obviously because Tableau. So talk about the relationship between Tableau and HP. Seems pretty obvious, some might not connect the dots, but share with us and connect the dots. Well, it really goes back to when Vertica was an independent company prior to being acquired by HP. Well, actually when both companies were startups, I mean, when Tableau and Vertica started at a similar time, really the partnership really started early on. So back in those days when both organizations were a lot smaller, the products are just perfect fit. So it's like chocolate and peanut butter, right? I mean, products really work well together, they work well together from the get-go. I mean, when you're doing visualization, the whole idea of visualization has just taken off. I mean, so it just makes all of this analytics, I wouldn't even say big data analytics, but just analytics in general, so much more meaningful to non-technical audiences and gets it embraced throughout the organization, but you need a powerful engine to drive it. And so, and we can provide that. And so I think the last time, I think the last time Tech Validate, who's this firm who goes and surveys our customers every year, it was somewhere in the mid 30% range of our customers or using Tableau and vice versa. So it's a great relationship. We had tons of joint customers, really good cultural fit too. Jeff, Kelly and I were talking earlier about how we've been to pretty much all the Hadoop events, which kind of kicked off the big data world and certainly didn't kick off the big data usage. Big data's been around for a while, people know, but certainly that whole open source ethos kind of drove from there. And it was a moment like, I think three years ago or four years ago, there was a big push for tsunami of apps that were going to come out in big data. Mike Olson was like, oh yeah, we're going to do this. Ping Lee from Excel partners had a big fund. It just never happened. There hasn't been a tsunami of big data apps. There's been a tsunami of apps all using big data. So the real dynamic is every app is a big data app or data app at some level, but also visualization maintains the killer app status. Do you agree with that? Do you see that visualization maintains the big data killer app status and do you agree that all apps have a big data component? Yeah, I mean, I think I would sort of, no, I guess I would sort of drop the big because it's not necessarily relevant. I mean, what Tableau has been about is democratizing data and not just democratizing data, but analytics and making it accessible to, so it's not just the CIO, but a CMO and a COO and always make jokes about when you say Hadoop to CMO, they say, God bless you, right? But it's not, I mean, obviously there's some very powerful technology running here, but what the value proposition of this audience and this event is about is making this meaningful to the business. So I'm not just looking at rows and columns and talking about file formats, but I'm looking at heat maps. I'm looking at the kinds of things that actually move and let me see what's going on in my business. And so whether the data is big, smaller and different or big, smaller in the middle, I guess I should say, it's really, it's a sort of a different value proposition. So it's not so much about big data. It's about democratized data. It's about making accessible and making it meaningful to the entire organization, not just the techies because the Hadoop world is still the world of the techies I guess is what I was saying before. So, and that's a different audience. And there's not that there's not hardcore technology work here and that there's not technical people here. There are plenty, but this is really about spreading it and spreading the word. And that's why, you know, I always say big data is kind of in a crossing the chasm period, right? Where you got to make it meaningful to those non-technical users and Tableau's been a fabulous job of that. So Chris, talk about Tableau the company. You, as you mentioned earlier, you guys have been partners for years. You've kind of, you've grown up kind of alongside Tableau. You know, Tableau, the knock on Tableau, you know, two, three years ago was that it was, you know, it was a good tool, but it wasn't really enterprise grade, enterprise ready. How have you seen Tableau, both the company evolve and their technology portfolio as well? Yeah, well, you know, I think that's, that's kind of your traditional knocking by the incumbents, you know, sort of, I mean, we hear it from the data warehouse guys, too. You know, so, but, you know, the thing is, it becomes less and less true and it becomes less and less important over time, right? So, I think they've done a fabulous job of spreading the word, I mean, going across the market. And, you know, when you talk about visualization these days, I think for most people, it's the first thing that comes up. So, and, you know, that's, I mean, like I said, it's a great sort of symbiotic relationship we have, but it's really about democratizing data. And again, it's about making it meaningful. So whether it's big, small, or indifferent, you know, we're in the middle, it's interesting and different, but I mean, in the middle. But, you know, we're really about kind of just making it accessible and making it available to everybody and making it understandable. So what does this mean? So that's really what Tableau's done a great job of. Yeah, I think, I agree with you. I mean, I think some of those knocks that Tableau was getting, of course, you know, FUD being spread by competitors and, but to some extent, I think it was also coming from IT a little bit, which felt like there was kind of an end run around IT with Tableau, which is part of their value proposition. But clearly, I think Tableau is, well, it's what we call shadow IT. Right, shadow IT. But that was part of the value proposition of Tableau is that, hey, look, you don't want to wait two months for IT to come back with some report. I'm just going to download Tableau or install Tableau and do it myself. But I think they've clearly added some capabilities around management, enterprise management, bringing IT into the equation. You have to. Yeah, and so I'm curious. So from your perspective as a vendor and your customer base, I think you mentioned 30% or so of your customers are using Tableau. Has that been kind of on the steady increase? Are you seeing any patterns in terms of the usage of Tableau associated with your customer base? Yeah, I mean to your point about enterprise is certainly getting bigger and we're seeing them in larger organizations. We tend to cater to many larger organizations as well, you know, the very high end where you really are talking about big data. But I think, you know, again, I think it's very typical for how new technology and disruptive technology gets adopted. And as I was saying earlier in sort of the histories of Tableau and the histories of Vertica, in both cases, we're disruptive. In Vertica's case, we're really disruptive to the data warehouse market. Tableau's case, they were very disruptive to the BI market. And so, you know, and those things come together and they fit together really nicely. So, and those who are being disruptive are going to say, well, it's not an enterprise class, because what happens is initially you get into these larger organizations that do have the very powerful central IT and we don't want to be their enemy. But what happens is that, you know, the people on the periphery, the field offices, the branch offices, I mean, this is salesforce.com grew as well. They need to get stuff done. They can't wait for this monolithic organization to make decisions so they start doing stuff on their own. But eventually, as that stuff starts to become important in the organization, it has to get centralized, so you have to be able to work. So like I said, I don't think anybody here is trying to be the enemy of central IT, but you know, it's a matter of kind of how you come in. It's not, you don't come in through the central organization and profile it out. You sort of go in through the edges of the organization and come in. And that's how disruption happens. So that's how Vertica grew. That's how Tableau grew. I don't want to speak for them, but I'm sure they would agree with that. That's how salesforce.com grew. So that's how new technology gets introduced very commonly. And it's, you know, it's a dynamic of this industry. So. Well, the reporting that we've been giving on Tableau has been pretty straightforward. The product leadership has been great. Customer testimonials are fantastic. You guys have a lot of overlap. There's a huge international push now. Certainly they're still losing money as a public company, but they still have a lot of money in the bank. So talk about the international expansion around your customer base and Tableau. Seems to be a big discussion point. Are you writing that way with them? Oh yeah. Can you share any commentary on that? Absolutely, absolutely. The relationship's worldwide. I mean, I kind of point on this relationship, and I get calls and emails from all over the world about where we're working together. So, and again, both of us have very broad ecosystems. We work with each other's competitors as well. We need to. Because I think it comes back to the first thing you mentioned, which is customers. And I think that's one of the, when I said earlier, I think it was a response to you, Jeff, that there's a great cultural fit. I think probably the most important thing, I mean, the most important thing is the fact that we're both really focused on the success of our customers. And when you're focused on making your customers successful, you can't just have one partnership. But what happens is when you've got a great cultural affinity with a partner like Tableau, well then you wind up having lots of joint customers and lots of joint happy customers, which is a great thing to have. So talk about the business model. You're referencing that's how business gets done right now. Obviously, there's a real kind of tension in the enterprise software business, where the old days was you come in, make the big sales pitch, go golfing, whatever they got to do to get the deal done. Big license fee, you lock them in and then you got to deal with it, right? And then prove the value. This whole freemium model, and I'm not going to say Tableau's freemium, but it is easy to get involved in a very low cost basis to get it going. And then people have grown from that. Seems to be the chosen business model. How do you guys play in with that? Does Vertica have the same approach? And do you think that is now the new standard? I think it's an important model. There's all sorts of different types of models. I mean, as you probably know, we give Vertica way up to a terabyte. We give the community addition away. Anybody can use Vertica and download it from our website for free. Full featured, no restriction whatsoever, up to a terabyte of data, which is quite a bit of data. So to some degree, you could call that a freemium model, although we also give away to a lot of academic non-profit, because we're also trying to build a base of people who are skilled with Vertica. But I think to some degree, yeah, you could call it a freemium strategy. I think the whole calling it a land and expand strategy, which I know is terminology that I think Tableau uses is exactly so you land in these different places where there are needs. You take care of the needs, you make the customers happy and it expands in the organization. So yes, I don't think it's identical, but I think they're following similar strategies. Well, I mean land and expand is an industry term. It sounds almost like land grab, but I'm not going to say land grab, because it's not land grab, but shadow IT has certainly been this new cloud phenomenon where the needs of the user groups or the users or the business units really are top priority right now. We've heard all the customers say, get out where the users are and go from there, not try to figure it out in IT and then deploy. So land and expand is subjective based on your approach. How do you guys deal with that getting out where the needs are? You guys do that? I mean, again, that's why we give away so much community vision, but it's not so much the model. It's that the users are realizing they don't have to wait anymore and they're able to basically get their needs met and they can acquire technology in their own at a very low cost. And it might not solve all of their needs. It might not give them access to all of the data right away, but it'll get them started. And so that's how a lot of this stuff gets in. And they're enlightened IT organizations. It certainly is part of the world's largest IT largest IT provider, I guess. We work with a lot of large IT organizations. They realize this. The enlightened ones realize this. They realize they need to move quickly. So it's made everybody more nimble. So even if the decisions are centralized, or at least central IT is in the room, which is really how it should be to have it be a successful long-term relationship, there's a need to move much more quickly, much faster, be much more nimble. So you mentioned a couple of times, really one of the keys being very customer focused. Yes. I think one of the challenges for a company like Tableau is they grow is keeping that customer focused with the breakneck pace that they are growing, both in terms of employees, new customers. What's your advice to Tableau? How do they stay close to the customer when they are growing so fast? And do it in a way that's, because when you come to the show, the community here is very excited. Clearly they're doing the right thing so far, but as they continue to grow, it could be a challenge. What's your advice for them? That is the hard thing. And I think it's two things. I think it's first of all, when the customers know that you deliver an excellent product, that goes a long way. So focus on continued product excellence, which I think Tableau has done tremendously well and there's some other hardware company that's having a big event today who's also done the same thing. So that in and of itself engenders tremendous customer loyalty and we focus on the same thing. So because you're right, you can't possibly when you're in sort of hyper growth mode, which we are, they are. I mean, you can't be as close to every customer every day because you're just growing so fast. And then the other thing is building an ecosystem around the company, around the products as well. Because the more partners you have who are, and they have to be knowledgeable partners, they have to build expertise and that's a challenge in and of themselves. But I know, and I'll speak for ourselves, that's what we're spending a lot of time and that's what I spend a lot of time on personally is the ecosystem around Vertica and the ecosystem around Tableau and the big data ecosystem. And so leveraging the ecosystem as much as possible because it is, it's a good news, bad news thing. Because when you're in this mode where you're just growing and booming and everybody's buying your product, it is hard to stay hands on with every customer every day. But if the product's great and the ecosystem is a focus, you can keep it going. And so that's our model. And like I said, I won't speak for Tableau but I'm pretty sure that's a big part of their model as well. So Chris, I want to get your opinion on something. You guys have the big data marketplace summer saying it's not developing as fast as it should be. I want to get your comment on that. Some, huh? Some? Some? Maybe you? Maybe, maybe. That's new, but it's new. I mean, it's a big developer focus. But also, let's just start with that. Go with that. Are you happy with the performance of the marketplace for HP? You mean the apps? The online marketplace? The online marketplace, yeah. Yeah, yeah. We set us up about six months ago. We put it out there. We've been monitoring and seeing how customers have been using it. And yeah, we're getting good adoption. We haven't pushed hard on it but the more products we've put in it, the more customers are using it, the more they're using it, the more feedback we're getting, the more feedback we're getting, the more partners want to come and be in it. So yeah, it's been growing nicely for us and we're actually putting a lot more weight behind it as we go forward. So you'll be in a lot more. It is still early. It's still early and plus HP software is a big group, not just your group. Well, that was kind of my, I didn't mean to kind of put you in a spot there. No, that's okay. I guess I did, but. I just wasn't sure what you said about the marketplace, but I, I don't know. No, could you have a developer focus? Right. And so my real question was weaving into this developer market and I got to ask you as more of an analyst, because you've been an analyst in your career. So I want to get you to Chris Seedland perspective, not so much the HP perspective is, there are a lot of IT guys out there decision makers betting their job on, on platforms and products. There's a lot of, I don't say vapor, I would just say not mature enough platforms and the stakes are high now. The ROI has to be there, value has to be there. We talked about the price point land versus big price point versus get in, land and expand, try it before you buy freemium, whatever you want to call it so. But everyone's inundated right now with some pitch or messaging around, buy my platform, buy my platform. Here's a tool. And I hit this quote all the time. If someone comes in and says I want to see, buy another tool, you know, shoot me in the head. There's so much bombardment at the CXO level. So I want you to share your perspective. How should customers evaluate those kinds of bet the job decisions, whether it's data platforms, whether it's visualization, obviously the value in the outcome has to be business success. But as an analyst, how would you talk to a customer saying, hey, if you're going to look at stuff, here's the lens you should look at for. Yeah. Well, I think touched on a small scale and going back to the earlier conversation we're having about kind of, in some cases it might not even be shadow IT. It just might be sort of a small test implementation. And you're seeing a lot of that in the doop world right now. I know when you were at our conference a few weeks ago, I think Dave stood up and basically said, you know, how many are you using Hadoop? All the hands go up. How many are you paying for it? Almost all the hands go down, right? So there's a lot of early stage experimentation going on. And I think that's what's happening is a lot of customers are doing exactly what you're describing and saying, well, you know, let's try this out on a small scale. But the other thing, and I think what's incumbent on the technology community to do, and you know, the vendors like us, is really not just show what the technology does anymore, but what organizations can do with it. Which, again, I talked about crossing the chasm moment that I believe this market's in, which is that, because that's a thing, you know, more and more customers don't really care about the features of the product and the speeds and feeds. They care about what other customers like them are doing. They don't necessarily want it to be their direct competitor, but what other customers are doing being successful. So this focus on customer success sort of creates a virtual cycle, if you will. So that's really- And their messaging today was experimentation, fast experimentation is what they call it. Some people call it agile, iteration, continuous development. But the interesting thing was, they said in the analogy today, they used digital photography and they said, when the cost of film went to zero, massive creativity happened. So how would you take the- Not in Rochester, New York, but yeah. They certainly go back, yeah. Could have bought Instagram with worth a billion dollars. But again, the point, value creation and creativity goes off the scale. How do you take that analogy and apply it to your world, right? You got, certainly you provide a lot of the storage and the engine for the data. You have platform for Haven for extracting. You got a relationship with Tableau. So how do you take that analogy and put it into HP terms? Well again, I think you turn it into and having happy customers. That's why foundationally, I mean the best, most important thing you can do is focus on making early customers successful, making them your advocates. Because that's what, as the market starts to evolve and as the market starts to really hit, you know, as the sort of chasm group, Jeffrey Moore, you know, the tornado, if you will, in these later stages, that's what really drives, because it's, you know, the reality is there are absolutely some very innovative, leading edge, CIOs, developers out there who are doing true cutting edge stuff. But most of the world would really not want to be the pioneers with the arrows in their back. They want to see somebody else do it successful first. So if you're early in a market, get those first customers, make them happy, keep them on your side, keep them, you know, keep them growing. But then get them telling your stories because and if they're happy with you, they're going to because they're gonna want to tell their stories. It's good for their careers too. So that's really what it's all about, but that success feeds on itself and that's really the model as far as, you know, at least in my opinion. So can you give us some examples of what kind of some of your joint customers, Tableau and Burke customers are doing these days? Do you see any trends there? What are some use cases that are kind of bubbling up to the surface? You know, a lot of it is really around real time and near real time visualizations and doing things like heat maps. And it's funny, I did a webinar this morning, although I did it with Hortonworks at Tableau, but we were talking about customer analytics and what a big use case it is. And I mean, you know, things like sales, trending heat maps and those sorts of visualizations, you know, that's what, and we have so many joint customers, it's hard to say with this one and that one are doing, but those kinds of things. And you know, show it to me in a visual way, show it to me in an interactive way, sort of provide it and obviously then you got to have high performance, right? I can't be playing with my interactive visual dashboard and have it be laggy. I mean, it has to really snap and that's why the partnership works out so well. But I mean, those sorts of things, it's not necessarily rocket science in terms of what people are trying to understand. They're trying to understand, you know, what's happening with sales, what's happening with operations, what's happening with suppliers and kind of look at it live in, if not real time and near real time and look at those kinds of trending things in an interactive way. That, you know, that in a nutshell is what. So is it kind of more on the operational side, kind of getting a real time view of your business versus some of the big picture, let's step back and look at these really large trends or is that simplifying too much? Both, like we do a lot of, you know, what's going on with my network, that sort of, you know, what's going on with my business, we definitely do a lot of that and we do a lot of that together. But there's also a lot of like sales trends, market trends, you know, who's buying what, we work very heavily in the retail space, you know, what's selling where, those sorts of things. So, and you could call that operations or you could call it more revenue focused so, but the short answer is both. So related to performance, obviously Vertica provides that real time performance capabilities with Tableau, but of course Tableau's kind of, as we heard in the keynote this morning, they're investing in their own kind of data engines, they call it, where does kind of Vertica pick up where the Tableau engine leaves off? Is there any overlap there in terms of the technology and do you see Tableau moving further, I guess, down the stack in a sense to the database layer? Yeah, I mean, you know, we've been talking a lot internally to Vertica about, you know, what we sort of describe as data tiering, which is, you know, it's like hot, warm, cold data and you could sort of have like hot, red, hot, you know, where do you sort of use in memory, like the data's right away, as opposed to where do you need it fast but not that fast, as opposed to where is your more longitudinal data that you might call on once in a while, as opposed to where's the data that I might need every seven years for the regulators, so. And, you know, the reality is that so many organizations sort of think they need a single platform for their data, but it's really a multiplicity of platforms and capabilities and it's where, what Tableau is doing and what we're doing and what's going on with our partners Hortonworks and Hadoop vendors are doing as well, it sort of all comes together because, you know, there's really a need to sort of look at this in a holistic way and look at kind of, you know, how fast I need it, what kind of performance I need, what kind of solutions I need, what I'm willing to pay for it and it's not one answer across different types of applications and different types of data, there's a continuum of stuff going on, particularly with all these new forms of data, the social data, the internet, things, data, the log files, so, and then of course I got to be able to secure it and all these other things, so, you know, it really, it argues for much more, I mean, it is coming into the enterprise now and that's what's got to happen, we got to build, all build more features to support that and manage it and secure it, but that's really where the market is going. Chris, you guys have been the kind of the shiny jewel of HP software, Vertica kind of, still the engine that keeps on going, the gift that keeps on giving performance-wise, you guys have a lot of successful customers. Yes, we do. And, you know, I know you run your own event and it's kind of like a gorilla event but you really have amazing customers. You have developers, but they're also practitioners. What does that mean to the marketplace? Share with folks why that is happening. Quick product commercial if you want, but don't go too heavily, but in the marketplace, what is the market trend that's doing that? I mean, is this the new profile customer? Yeah, I think, you know, and I said it earlier, but I think success breeds success, right? And I think that's what, when the sort of, you know, the late majority, if you will, sort of sees the early adopters being successful, they want to replicate what they're doing. So, and so, you know, that's, it's not about speeds and feeds and technology anymore, even though, you know, our product is very much about speeds and feeds and technology, but ultimately, organizationally, it's really about focusing on the customer. And it's also focusing on scaling in a way to Jeff's question before, that, you know, as your customer base starts to get really big and starts to grow really fast, you can still support them and keep them happy, which A is product excellence, and B is really building an ecosystem around the product. So with us in Tableau, we're each part of each other's ecosystems, we've got a fabulous relationship and, you know, we're thrilled to be here. So I got to ask you the marketing question. Dave Vellante and I were talking last week and just recently this weekend, you know, all those debates around in Silicon Valley, I studied how the VCs are investing, looking at ecosystems, and there's new business models out there, so if success breeds success, how do you market in that channel, is it word of mouth? And then in commenting with Dave, I was like, if you look at Andreessen Horowitz and the venture models, it's vertically integrating ecosystems. So the ecosystem is not just a one-trick pony marketing tactic, it's an ongoing sustained cadence. So how do you do those things? How do you market into these network effect ecosystems, as well as accelerate the success, breed success in these new social word of mouth environments? Well, that's a big question, so. We got three minutes. Yeah, we got three minutes, okay. So. Give me five. You know, let me try to say this in a non-repetitive way, because like I said, first of all, happy customers is, you know, the biggest answer. But yeah, it's really, it's also getting the product in as many hands as possible. But of course, having a good product, because word of mouth, you know, is what drives so much, as a matter of fact, it's funny, you know, oh, I'll sort of answer that through a story, because when I swung by my booth earlier, one of my colleagues was telling me that they were talking about how there's a, one of the companies in the booth, and I don't even know the name of it, I'm not holding this back, he just told me the story anecdotally, has a statistical analysis product that's based on the R language, and I guess one of the guys who originally wrote R basically blessed the product recently in an online posting, and their daily downloads like went up 10X in a single day, right? So that positive word of mouth from an influential member of the community meant everything, and that's really what it is. So it's, I think I would say, you know, I keep talking about happy customers, happy customers, and you're probably tired of hearing that now, but it's happy customers, but it's also word of mouth, and it's word of mouth, of course, the happy customers are part of that, but sort of the influential users and the sort of influential people in the industry, you know, people like you guys, right? You got my hot button going on, so influentials, it doesn't mean that blogger or cube host that has a zillion followers, or someone who people think is an influencer, this was a customer. So influence is not so much about a ranking as it is more about relevance, right? That's what you're basically saying. Well, you know what, it's reach and credibility, and I think, you know, and then we're totally, you know, going into a whole different topic area now, but so much of the social world is focused just on reach, but if you have credibility and reach, that's very, very powerful. There's a lot of people with a lot of Twitter followers and a lot of reach, but they don't really have any credibility, so they may say something and may get out to a big audience, but when you get those credible folks, and of course, you know, customers who are actually doing it, you know, the companies are actually achieving cool stuff with new technology, definitely fall in that category. When you get credibility and reach put together, that's very, very powerful. I mean, a million followers doesn't translate directly into sales, basically what you're saying. Right, not necessarily, so it certainly doesn't hurt, but a million followers with no credibility, or you know, nobody really recognizes you as an expert, so yeah. So I got to ask you, tell the folks out there in your own words, why is Tableau so successful? I mean, now I have my opinion, I'll hold that, but I said it on the intro package, on the intro segment, but you're in the industry, again, you're a vet, you've seen the cycles come and go, growth, boom and bust cycles, you can recognize patterns. Why is Tableau so successful for the folks that aren't in the inside baseball? Yep, great product, so product excellence, great culture, I mean, you know, we've worked with these guys for, guys and gals for many years, and I can tell you they've got a great culture and happy customers, and I mean, to me it's like, you put those three things together, you put together an excellent product, a culture, and obviously the culture has very much to do with the customer success, and you put those three things together and you've got a winner, and that sounds so simple, and it is simple to envision. Put it on paper. But it's hard to do. It's hard to execute. It's really hard to do, and it's really hard to execute at scale, in particular, and that's, you know, and to be able to do it at scale, I think is what happens. Well I was commenting on when I was tweeting on the plane, because I love when I get on the plane and do all my power tweeting and Facebook updating, because I have all that time in the seat, but I said, this is a bubble proof market. Visualization, big data, certainly the growth is the total adjustable market, the TAM, as Jeff and Dave always talk about is huge. Every company's going to need visualization, but it's truly bubble proof. What I like about Tableau is, what gets my attention, more of a personal nuance or a tweak that I have, is that they built the company from the ground up without outside capital and got critical mass, they built the platform, they built the rocket ship, they had rocket fuel, and they just added more with venture capital than with public, so the DNA of the company has come from customer centric product excellence, driven by the founders, not, here's a bunch of gas, let's see if the ship can blow up or go into orbit, so which a lot of those companies are going to start to see this now third year into the big data space, those companies might not make it. So the question to you is, what should we look for for those kinds of companies that are going to be blowing up in midair? Well I think- What are the signals? I mean, you can talk about blowing up with an overabundance of venture capital, but obviously venture capital can do a lot of good in the right place, but I think the cultural foundation in customer success, customer focus and customer success, where at what point the money comes in, is kind of relevant and I agree with you, an organization that starts off with, let's make customers successful, as opposed to let's go raise a lot of money, probably has a bit of a jump there in terms of a mindset and I think that was the point you were trying to make, so but yeah, I think when you've got those two things together, then they can kind of make each other much better, so that's exactly what's happening here. So we have a question from CrowdChat from Burt Lattimore, question to you, Chris, does Vertica see Oracle as a competitor? Is there a trend of Vertica customers replacing Oracle? We've heard some of that at other conferences. Yes and yes, no doubt, so absolutely, yep. Now, we have a ton of respect for Oracle as well, but absolutely, yes. We've heard some big wins there. Oracle's certainly in the big data space, I mean I'm sure I can't wait to see if Oracle Open World coming up, the queue will be there live. We'll see what Larry defines as they're in the business again, do you see purpose-built systems continuing to go, we saw it VMworld, the rise of Newtonics, EVO rails, you're starting to see converged infrastructure, Magnum, certainly HB, has a dog in that fight. Yep. How does that affect your business? You know, I think there's customers that go for that approach, and then there's customers that kind of go for the more open approach, so, and we try to serve them both, really, because obviously being part of the power and organization we are, we have the ability to kind of go either way on that, so, and... Chris, sounds like we're getting another question, are we out of time? No, no, we're out of time, but I want to extend a little bit, because I'm getting the hook here for not going on. Chris Selland, VP of Marketing, BizDev, at HP Vertica, part of the HP software team doing great, congratulations, good to see you in the ecosystem, pounding the pavement, pressing the palm, pressing the flesh as they say, this is theCUBE, live in Seattle, Washington, we'll be right back with our next guest after this short break, at Tableau for Data 14, we'll be right back.