 We're here with Rob Strickland. Rob is a former CIO, I have T-Mobile. So there's a certain amount of time you can become the X, but right now I'm still the former. You're a former, right, okay. When did you leave T-Mobile? About a year ago. About a year ago, okay, yeah, so almost X. Yeah, right, right, almost. And also, and now you're consulting with senior executives, right? But you've got, this cloud meets big data, this big data piece is something that you know a lot about, isn't it? Yeah, I've kind of swam around in that stuff for a while, yeah, absolutely. So maybe we can start with what you're doing these days and you know, you're, as I say, consulting with senior executives and what are you seeing out there? For example, what's your practice? Do a little commercial for Rob Strickland, Inc. And then we'll talk about what some of the senior execs are telling you and I want to talk about big data and how you see some of these problems being solved. Excellent, well, first up, I think it's great to be a CIO and working on both sides of the table, if you will. So a lot of what I get involved with right now with companies is really helping give this CIO perspective. And let's face it, and there are not a lot of times that companies really understand what we're doing. So under the premise that it takes a thief to catch a thief kind of thing, we're, I spend a lot of time working with the companies in and around the carrier space. And a lot of that has to do with the way that they perceive CIOs and executives want to consume, deploy, or distribute technology that is therefore consumed by the IT groups. And let's face it, I think we've talked about this earlier, listening in, there's a big transformation going on, not only with big data, but also in IT departments. I think companies now are struggling a little bit to say how do you sell either directly into the IT department to the CIO or go around the CIO? Cloud computing and some of these new technologies have made it more available to go directly into the business units. And we used to call that affectionately shadow IT. And so now that we really have to kind of take down some of these barriers of shadow IT and kind of find a new way to work the sales channel and not sort of throw the IT guys under the bus necessarily in the process of bringing this technology there. Yeah, I mean, you know, you remember the distributed computing days, right? And everybody said, oh, we're just going to run around IT and put in all this infrastructure and the corner execs let it happen. I mean, because it was such a productivity hit, but then realized, wow, this was not the right thing to do. And then went back to guys like you and said, can you please help us clean up this mess? Yeah. You know, we're sorry. Right. You know, here's a big bag of money. Fix this, yeah. And I think people learn from that, don't you? Yeah, well, you'd like to think that we learn along the way, but it's interesting how much we go back to the old tricks, you know? So, right? I mean, it's kind of like, oh, you know, we called the old the new and we're kind of right back in there again. So, you know, if you've been around a couple of decades, I've been fortunate enough, my first CIO job, I was about 28 years old, so that was like 10 years ago now, right? So, you know, look at that. Looking good. Yeah, looking good, huh? But, you know, it's kind of out with the old and with the new, and the more the new stuff comes in, the more it looks the same. And, but you know, the cloud computing, even the advent, we're going to be talking about thin clients again, I think, pretty soon too, right? And low iPad, virtualization at the desktop. Yeah, you know, and these smart devices are on all the time everywhere. It really kind of gets us back into that old 3270. What do you think of the application market? I mean, I wrote a post in 2009 called the Mobile Innovation Cycle, and I was essentially referring to the SMS application on mobile. Back in the day, that was a huge success, but vertically built by the provider. But now at the Apple App Store, you have massive tsunami of apps that are essentially not part of the carriers. And so you've got video coming in with Netflix, Dish NetworkBot, Blockbuster. The content market's interesting. And the data's always been there on the carrier side. Is there any insight you can share around how you think data will be used in that market? Well, we hope it is the data we used for more revenue. Right? I mean, it's all about really making money at the end of the day. But the challenge is going to be is how to actually, how do you package the applications and the content so that you're not just in the pipe business? And so, you know, therein lies the problem because people can go over the top on you pretty quickly. And we've kind of faced that in the tethered world. We just don't call it that. You know, the apps have proliferated. How you get them, you know, you can get them any way you want now. So why not on the mobile side? But, you know, I'm not surprised that the folks at Dish are expanding out and NBCU, Comcast getting into content. Content still is king. And the monetization of that becomes pretty important on top of distributing the network. Is over the top now fully a done deal? I mean, that's obviously the model. It's not the own carrier model. What was that? Well, the carriers are, I think, you know, carriers can be kind of preoccupied. Look, they've got spent a lot of money building out LTE. And that's a huge amount of CapEx to deliver. At the same time, you have a huge number of human beings that you're deploying on top of that, doing superior customer service, and you're trying now to deploy applications. It's kind of really hard to say, what kind of business are you in? And so, you know, I think that's why we see roll up. Have you seen some of the LTE performance? Verizon's been phenomenal. Palo Alto, we were pulling down 25 meg, Dave, in spots. And even in spots where it's really had one bar, you know, five meg down and one meg up. Really amazing performance. We could run the cube almost. Yeah, the cube's going to be on there. But you think about this, though. I think the challenge is, is just when, the early days we were talking about how fast is your computer? Talking about how, you know, what are you doing? How many megahertz? Yeah, you're doing dual token ring, you know, passing, right, or you're either not fast enough. And now, we're getting to the point where it's going to be just fast enough. And then, what do you really care about? So, we're going to be talking about it less and less, and then we start talking about content, we start talking about applications, we start talking about security, mobile wallet. Yeah, in the old days, the networking vendors or the storage or the hardware vendors, where the big innovation was, we added a new port or some software feature. I think now we're hearing this story about value and business model innovation, and it's just a whole different mindset. Yeah. Well, I think that's why you see companies like EMC moving up the stack. You know, they're a trusted brand, we see them in the data centers, you never got fired for bringing the big iron in, but to become more relevant, really, to the portfolio, you've got to move up the stack, you've got to get in the app layers, and then you go and buy companies that start to be more relevant, and now you have the guts, even to go buy companies that have core of open source, like Green Plum, that's pretty impressive. Now they'll start looking on analytics, they'll start looking on how to capitalize on this proliferation of data. Green Plum, we met the Green Plum at the Green Plum Hadoop World, we met Marco Pacelli from ClickFox, and very impressive five-time entrepreneur. This guy's got an amazing view, Dave. We've talked to Marco before, and I think you guys might have even had a chat about it at a conversation, about how he's using the data, and what's interesting is that, he's probably one of the only companies I can see out there that's really putting the data equation to revenue, where he's looking at actual saying, hey, here's data, here's what the customers are doing, cross multiple data sets, and to look at a customer footprint. So the ClickFox is an interesting company. I mean, they basically, as I would describe it, allow companies, organizations to get a view of the touch points that the customers come through, whether it's chat, or web, or phone, and it's a hot button for me. We have a large audience out there, and I'm sure that all of you can sympathize with, you've had a problem, you call up a service provider, whether it's a telco, or an airline, or whomever, and you get put on hold, or you get routed to the wrong agent, they can't help you, you call with the same problem over and over again, you hang up, you go back to the web, you can't find it on the web. It's just a very frustrating experience. Rob, I know you've had a lot of experience in the telco world, we've all experienced this, but it's a point now where the touch points are exploding, and the frustration is at an all-time high, but it seems like technology sort of got us into this problem and is helping us get out. So I wonder if you could talk about, so why is the problem so acute, and what are organizations doing about it? And I want to talk about analytics and the role they play. Well, it's interesting because when you problem solve, you tend to do it in an organic way, and so you get the stove pipes, you get a channel that sort of overdevelops across the different channel, so maybe your IVR has gone on a little bit faster. Fix the IVR. Yeah, fix the IVR, it's the heat of the day, and now your web channel sort of explodes, or you're in the truck roll business like a cable carrier or a dish network, and you got to roll a truck. Now, the two curves you worry about most are painfully obvious. You got the cost curve and you got the revenue curve. If you don't tie those together with customer experience, I think you lose, and so we always leave these footprints in the sand, but very few companies have been able to pour concrete over them and then lift them up and say, here's what happened. And we have these little happy trails that go through all of these systems, and we think when we program them, aha, we fixed it. When you have companies like ClickFox that take customer experience and actually expose it, you can actually drive up the revenue because you find out where people are helping you really make money, and then also you can cut out the cost. So now you lift those two curves in their appropriate directions and now you have the margin which you want and now you're a profitable business. Yeah, so the interesting thing that when the conversation we had before is you had obviously a lot of experience with traditional analytics and traditional data warehouse and we're hearing about big data now, it's different, isn't it? In terms of just the amount of data that you can operate on and the speed at which you can load data, right? That's sort of game-changing. Can you talk about that a little bit in terms of your experience? Well, loading data I think is, I think it's a really interesting question because I think we think about getting the analytics right and then we think about the data stores and we have some really cool stuff now that we know is hitting the market. But we're not really yet talking about in-memory movement of data and we have the traditional guys out there, but there are some sort of jumping on the scene like CRX and others that are trying to do this in-memory translation. SAP's starting to talk about a little bit more. SAP's doing it with what they've done with HANA and with Sybase, very impressive stuff and really we're on the edge of people sort of saying, look, I got structured and unstructured data and I got a ton of it. But by the way, I want near real-time analytics, which means if there's any latency, it's not good enough. And the social media aspects are now really putting pressure on us to say if somebody is sort of hitting our brand or their net promoter score opportunities to move one way or the other, if you miss that opportunity, it's sort of like the Justin Bieber effect. They're gone and they're gone. And so nobody's waiting any longer to do a phone call and I'll get to you when I get a break at the office. They're talking to you live all the time. And so I think it really gets to be very important. I wouldn't be surprised that we're here next year really talking now about up the stack again and we're talking about analytics and the transformation of data out of structured and unstructured inside the firewall, out how fast it's getting to actually hold in and how scalable it is. I think that's going to be huge. Yeah, so you had actual experience with ClickVox, right? And I believe Green Plum as well, right? That was the combination. And compared to a traditional warehouse, you're talking about the latency factor. But what's interesting to me about that is I think about real-time. We have debates all the time. John and I talk about it. What's real-time? What's that really mean? And I think you just defined it. Real-time is fast enough so that you don't lose the customer. It might not be a synchronous interaction, but it's fast enough before they're gone. Is that a good way to look at it? Yeah, I kind of say near real-time where n is quite small and n just has to be tolerable to whoever is actually consuming the data and what the situation is. Because there are sometimes when you're, if the customer is down and you know red is dead, their tolerance around latency is zero. But if something is sort of breaking, we have a higher degree of tolerance. We have a low degree of tolerance on an airplane ride versus maybe in the cashier line at a store. So there's just a different level of... It's just, I mean, my view is real-time is about real-time value. So if you're driving your car, you're doing something different than sitting down quiet. So I think real-time to me, I totally agree with you. It's just in the eye of the beholder because it depends upon what the situation is. If you're looking for real-time value, you have to be doing something in real-time. So if I'm driving to in town and I want to find out where the garage sales are, that's real-time. I need to get that data. Or I'm a customer, I want to find out some support. I want that real-time if I'm in that situation. So there's no one formula, Dave. I mean, I think that's where the data is interesting. And we heard that yesterday. It's how you collect that data in and make sense of it. Well, so we've had Marco Pichelli on theCUBE a couple of times and I'm sort of curious as to what your experiences are. Is all that great stuff he's telling us true? Yeah, well, my experience has been, it's very true. It really is an up-and-coming technology and I think, again, these customer analytics are going to be really important as we sort of rock it forward to understanding that customer experience across all these channels really matters because if a customer comes at you from one viewpoint, like maybe the web, and you don't correlate that back to a call center experience, you really lose out to where the customer went left or right. And then, of course, I think that you see the analytics on top of now data stores and storage capabilities, like we see with EMC Green Plum, that really allows the business user to dynamically put things up into a data store so that you really don't get this shadow IT. I mean, I was running around playing whack-a-mole for years about the way that you could actually do these little data stores. Otherwise, you'd have to go up to the big expensive stuff. And so now there's somewhat in between that it actually is in production and production ready but it dynamically moves. So that helps people like Clickbox and Marko sort of bring their solutions to bear where people can actually start using on the business. Their time to market for that solution is measured now in months instead of years. And it gets IT off the hook for saying, hey, when you give us the requirements, we'll deliver for you. And Marko and these companies now offer this software as a service. So you can actually, you try, you like you buy. That's the other thing that's just amazing is that you can actually put this in the cloud. And if you really have to be on-premise and you have to put it on your tiles, you can do that later, or you can do it at the very beginning. So it's very flexible. All right, we're here with Rob Strickland. Rob, thank you very much. I could go on forever with you. It was a fascinating discussion. We got to stay on time.