 Wikibon.org, and we're here with Colin Mahoney of Vertica. Again, Colin, welcome back. Thank you. It's good to be here. So this is my second year here, a big change, pretty noticeable change from last year. What's changed in the marketplace, the whole? We talked a lot about big data. We met on an airplane, actually. Yeah. You shared with me some of your insights. What's changed in the last six, nine, 12 months, other than the fact that you guys got caught? Yeah. Well, so I think one of the things that I've seen change in this market is that people have recognized that, quote unquote, big data is everywhere. You don't have to be a Fortune 50-sized company to be dealing with it. Everybody wants to leverage information. And I think we all know what it can do from a competitive differentiation. If you can leverage data in near real time and make decisions on it that can affect your business, it has huge implications. And so I think data has always been there. And what's different now is that people really understand the value of that data. And I think, secondly, the cost of storing, managing, and analyzing that data is just dropping dramatically. So on the one hand, you have a cost curve that's going down, and you have a value curve that's going up. And I think in between there is where everybody sees the value. And so there's a lot of activity going on. Mike Olson was just making the point that he sees this whole Hadoop movement as incremental value creation. He doesn't see it as a cannibalization of anything transaction-oriented. Do you see it the same way? I do. I really do. I think that the transactional systems remain. There are still many transactional systems, many what I call structured data systems that are outputting structured information and inputting that as well. There's so much other information that's coming in that, frankly, I think was difficult to capture. And that's where Hadoop plays a huge role. It's really easy just to place the information on the HDFS or on the Hadoop clusters. And then you have all the flexibility of the different types of analytics that you can do with it. And so what Vertica sees is really where those two things come together. We have connectors to Hadoop, bidirectional. And I think if you really want to harness the value of information, you need all of the information. You need a 360-degree view of that information. That's unstructured, semi-structured, structured data. Yeah, so somebody tweeted out today. I don't believe Hadoop gives me a 360-degree view of the information. And it's not like an enterprise data warehouse potentially. So talk about that a little bit and what role you guys play there. Well, I think one of the most important factors for getting information out is the ecosystem of tools that can connect to any data source, whether it's an enterprise data warehouse or it's Hadoop or something else. There is a rich set of ecosystem BI tools, frankly, that everybody's using to ultimately output the visualizations. There's also companies here like Datamir who have some next generation solutions that run on Hadoop. But I think that that's a huge part of it, being able to have the applications that are written to analyze and report the data, communicate directly with Hadoop. And to a certain extent, that sometimes lack of structure on some of this data can create challenges. Because a lot of those tools were made for SQL as an interface. And it's not there. But that's coming. And I always think there's going to be a lot of other sources of data. And what we as vendors have to do is make those connection points between all these different pieces of infrastructure seamless so that you can use the best tool for the job, but you don't have to go through the pain of integrating everything. And I think that's the direction that we and many others in this space are trying to move towards. We had Daniel on from Yale, Daniel Abadi from Yale. And he told us, basically, he got sick of watching Stonebreaker start company. So he decided to start one. I'm paraphrasing, of course. But so a lot of interesting innovation there. But one of the things I want you to talk about is what's different about Vertica. What impressed me when we met on the plane is you shared with me your guy's dogma in a way. I mean, you have a really solid philosophy around what the right direction is. And I mentioned Stonebreaker. He obviously was pretty influential in that direction. But talk a little bit about your perspectives around your fundamental architecture. Yeah, so when the company was founded in 2005, we saw the data tsunami that was happening. And on the one hand, you look at a data cager of 40%, but you look at IT budgets that are growing between 2% and 5%. And that was true back then. It's probably even more true now. So something has to give. You can't have that much information with budgets the way they are. Meanwhile, most of the traditional database technologies that were out there, they were created for OLTP environments, transactional environments. They weren't created for analytics. So the premise of Vertica was to design something from scratch, a purpose-built analytic platform that can handle both the volume of data, the real-time nature of analytics, and the scale of big data. And we wanted to make it sort of big data for the masses, something that's very simple for not just programmers and PhDs to be able to work with, but really for anybody that's been trained with SQL, leverage this platform, but also fix a lot of the inherent issues with traditional relational technology around scalability, around flexibility. So we put together a platform that I think is very unique when compared to a lot of the other database platforms out there. And so it was primarily SQL-based for the first four versions. And then in 5.0, we introduced a software development kit and we support procedural programming that leverages the parallelism of our platform. But again, all of that is handled automatically. The compression is automatic. So you don't have to deal with a lot of the hand coding that you might on some other type of platform. What are we expecting for you guys this year at HP? Because obviously HP had bought autonomy. And you guys were in that special group with Leo and Shane Robertson. He's left the company. There's everything shaking out now. Are you going to be in a division, your own division? Can you share? You probably can't, but I hope to, you know. Yeah, so I can't share too much, but what I will tell you is you will start seeing a lot of information very soon come out on what we have. And frankly, I think what HP now has is one of the most robust data management platforms in the world, frankly. I think one thing that's very unique about HP's strategy, if you look at what they've brought together, they didn't say, let's go and reinvent the old stack. Let's go and get this type of vendor, that type of vendor. What they did do is they said, where is the growth coming from? What are people doing today and what are they going to be doing tomorrow? And I think you can imagine some of the use cases where there is a lot of unstructured data and you need to go through that data and understand the meaning of that data. It's not easy to do, but then when you understand the meaning of the data and now you can categorize, classify that data, let's put it into an environment where now it does have structure that can actually report and analyze that structure. So it really takes both of those things. In many ways, it's similar to some of the things that we're talking about here at Hadoop World. So what I like, and of course I'm biased, but what I like about the approach is let's not reinvent yesterday because the world doesn't look anything like it did even three years ago today. Let's look at today and where we think it's going to go. And I think that's- Yeah, we heard from Mike Olson just, you were listening about how disruptive and how it's really not taking away from anything this new marketplace is plowing new ground, new fields of being plowed. So it's not really cannibalizing like MySQL or JVOS did. The Hadoop movement is about going side by side. So it's interesting. So that you guys play in all that legacy area at HP. So we were interested. So when you're ready to tell us, please share with us. No, we absolutely will. And would love to get in the cube and talk about it. I think you hit it on the head. When you think about this company from a services perspective, converged infrastructure hardware perspective, many applications that HP has, Vertica, Autonomy. There is a lot of certainly technology, wonderful people, and solutions that can get pulled together. And frankly, the biggest disconnect I see in this industry right now is I go out there and I meet with a lot of other vendors and I meet with a lot of customers. And on the one hand, I meet these lines of business and they have these grand aspirations for what big data can do for them. And then you will also meet with a lot of the people on the ground who are working with data. What's missing is this huge middle ground where people are taking the business use case and the technology and they're really figuring out how to maximize what the two can do for one another. And I think that's where these solutions and some of the glue that's coming in is going to be so important. There are not a lot of business use cases that you hear around big, everybody says big data, monetize data. And then you say, okay, let's double click on that. What exactly are you doing? A lot of people can't answer that. I think we have over 500 customers that are answering that question every day. We're creating more material around it. And I think the entire industry- Well, our speculation, because we've been speculating is the whole autonomy thing and going on for months. And our speculation is quite frankly, we're bullish on HP. We think HP's got all the elements in place that you just kind of get your story together. It's like, okay, it's like redesigning the suit that hangs together, which pants to put with the jacket and shirt. So we think you guys have it there. So, cloud, same thing, all the open stack is, we're questioning that. But in general, HP's poised. So we're curious to see who's the leader of what the story is and the products, of course. Our line on HP, I just shared, John, you coined it again, HP all-stake no sizzle. So it's like, okay, you've got the ingredients, now you're going to start to bring it together. And it's going to take some time. Meg just came on, right? She needs a little time to digest everything. She made one good decision to keep the PC division. We were happy about that. Yeah, we were. Yeah, I mean, like I said, there's not a lot I can comment on. One thing I can tell you is that the stake sizzle comment, Vertica has a long history of announcing things six months after they've been out in production. And on the one hand, you could say from a marketing perspective, that's terrible of Vertica. You guys have so much, you have the customers tell the stories. But I'd much rather have that than the other way around. Because I think water is quickly finding its own level in this industry. And we want people to know that we have real solutions. We're solving real problems and we're creating real values. The noise is going to fall away when dollars are stuck in the table, which say this is the proof that it is here at the Hadoop world is that it's not just about Cloudera now, it's an ecosystem of vendors who multivend, it's the classic multivendern situation, which you guys know a little bit about. Well, that philosophy has served HP really well. I mean, obviously you guys score very, very high in all the customer delight surveys that we look at and so forth. So, you got a very loyal customer base sticking with you. So, we buy that. What's your take? I want to talk about the competition that's come in. That's one of the other big things that's changed in the last 12 months is you've seen EMC partner up with MapR, you see Hortonworks now, we're going to have them on the queue a little bit later. Yep, yep. What do you take on that? I mean, you guys have done your own Hadoop connectors. I think we've talked in the past about you guys just taking the core of the Apache Hadoop code. So, what do you see as the competitive landscape? What does it mean to you guys? What's your angle on that? So, from the Vertica perspective, we partner with a lot of companies in the BI space and the ETL space and we have a very robust partner ecosystem. It's the same thing now that we're seeing play out in the Hadoop world. We think that so long as this industry doesn't get fragmented, which I think would be a disaster as it's just ramping up, that's a very good thing. Having different competitors work on product in a certain market. So, our philosophy is let's work with as many of the companies in the space as we can. We do work on our connector ourselves, but we work with vendors like Hortonworks, we're Apache, obviously, Cloudera. And we will continue to do that. We also have a lot of our own initiatives around expanding what we do on top of Hadoop. We came out with the Vertica Community Edition. We announced that about a month ago. That's something that's very different for us, but it ties very well into this space where we give away a one terabyte license on three nodes of Vertica to anybody that wants it. So anybody that wants to sign up can go to vertica.com slash community and there's the quote unquote free version of Vertica. And we really believe that our biggest challenge to scale is just letting more people know about what we do. And I think that's true of many vendors that you're seeing here today is we gotta get the word out that there are solutions to help people as they analyze and monetize this data. So all of these vendors, from our perspective, form a very important ecosystem. We have no plans to do our own, say, distribution of Hadoop, which sounds like what you might have been referring to. We were joking that SiliconANGLE announced the Hadoop distribution a couple months ago. Back in the day when everybody was doing it. We're actually gonna announce an H-based implementation of something, actually, real product. That was just a joke before. Yeah, so you're not gonna package your own distribution. The important works clearly is not a fork, right? You would agree with that, I presume. Yeah, as far as I know. Pure Apache. Yeah, Pure Apache. EMC Green Plum, different story. Different story. And you can say the same about LexusNexus, right? Yeah. Those are strategies that would be a fork if they took off as a de facto standard. Yeah, and I think, frankly, you look at companies like EMC where you were saying this is mostly incremental. I think companies like that actually have the most to lose. If storage is your business, the one thing that Hadoop is doing, HDFS specifically, is it is taking storage share. And if I'm EMC, I think, you know, I can look really hard about that and worry about it. Whereas for analytics and databases and those sorts of things, yes, they cut into part of that market, not nearly as pronounced as some of the storage. Well, and hence the Green Plum acquisition and probably the strategy to go proprietary. I mean, there's a logic behind it. So I just got a Facebook text that Bill Schmarzl's watching. So he's like, I'm William. We mentioned Green Plum. He's like, I'm watching. Hi, Bill. We cover all the bases. Yeah, I wish you were here for HB who says you want to watch out for your storage. That's vertical. It's not the storage division. That's good. Okay, so you've got this new competitive landscape emerging. I guess that's the consensus amongst the cloud area executive that we talked to is that's a good thing. Yeah. You know, if we didn't have that competition, we'd sort of be wondering what's wrong? How come nobody's jumping into this space? Yeah, I mean, that's what I would love. I wish that we had no competition over the last five years with Vertica, but frankly, I think that the entire market and what I tell customers all the time is they are so much better off. You look at the price per terabyte of database systems today versus where it was when Teradata was the only game in town and their prices are coming down, down, down. Why? Because all of us are driving their prices down and as a customer, that's exactly what you want. As a vendor, maybe not, but it's a lot easier for us because we didn't have this huge, incumbent install base. So we're happy to do it. The competition has made us better. I think we've made it better and that's playing out in the whole industry. It's good for the industry. The competition enforces alternatives. No lock-in, although everyone wants to lock-in, but I mean, people want choices. Customers don't want one vendor dominating. That's right. So, okay. Colin, thanks so much for coming inside the studio. Thank you for your support. Congratulations. Can we hear the story? Thank you.