 I'm Alex Williams here live at the Stratoconference here with two gentlemen from Ibitis, which is a big data services company. You guys are at the right place. Absolutely. When I first talked with you guys, it was Tuesday, you were had your we're hiring batch. Can you show that? Just yeah. So like this has been a this has been a common thing that we've been seeing here at the conference. And so I'm wondering how's the hiring been going? Slow huh? Yeah absolutely. The good talent is hard to find. Uh-huh. Big data analytics is such a new subject. There's very little ready-made expertise in the area. So we have we have we've cultivated our own expertise in the last few years in our centers in India and we're beginning to ramp up here in the US and we're definitely committed to hiring more and more and more. So it might help to just outline what well let me let me let me let me just get a the roots of your company how you started and was big data services the original focus? Actually no. And then we'll get back into the hiring. Yeah great. So Ibitis Technologies is a outsourced product engineering services company. What that means is we build mission critical software and platforms for CTOs and VPs of engineering of software and technology companies. Uh-huh. Three or four years ago so we've been in that business for about 15 years now. Okay. With large customers like ComScore, Newstar, McKesson, across industry verticals. Okay. And three or four years ago in in our impetus innovation labs we created a center of excellence around big data analytics. Okay. And that caught fire with the with the market trend converging with our R&D investment. What was it that you saw three to four years ago that led you to this conclusion that you need to put some focus on big data? Let me let me have that because because we're dealing with Fortune 100 companies we're aware of what their interests and concerns are. So we're qualified at most of the companies that are named here. Standard and Poor as ComScore networks, Newstar Networks as one of a handful of providers, really the go to provider on mobile platforms on new big data projects. So they were actually coming after us observing the work we were doing to fill in the gaps on some platforms in the marketplace. And it just happened naturally that we started serving our own clients. Now there's frankly a show like this has really been phenomenal for us because there's just lots and lots of new people that are have established a cluster, have a fundamental understanding of it may have picked one or another vendors. Now they want to scale it and do creative things. And that's where we come in. So it started with the research and the understanding of the Fortune 100 company needs and it's gone from there. And today you say that you're seeing companies coming by already have established clusters. What's the next step that they're trying to take? Well, it's it's often it's a fundamental IT experiment in the beginning with a business driver. But now they really want to they want to get in a room and dialogue and what the use case possibilities are. They really want to understand and use outside resources to help determine that and what's the best way to do it. So frankly, there's as we see in the exhibit area here, there's lots of new providers in the marketplace. We consider it's our job to become expert in what they do and lead the customer the right way. Great. And I'm curious if you could outline maybe four use cases that you're seeing about people that are, you know, that you're seeing in the market around Hadoop in particular. I think social media analytics is definitely one that's across industry verticals. We, in fact, did a nice little prototype demonstration for our last major financial services customer. And that directly applies to all major industries where there are four or five leading brands. I think we've seen fraud in, again, financial institutions quite a bit clearly. In the telecom world, we've seen a lot of churn analysis, finding out why customers are leaving us upgrading them to higher products, protecting churn and doing cross sell upsell. And in, in, we've just seen the last, the last in healthcare, of course, it's been in quite a few. Right. Protecting, essentially cost reduction and in healthcare, it's all around cost reduction, right? Network security is the other last one that we saw in the telco space. So there are four. So with Hadoop, do most people want to use it as a, as backup storage, or do they want to use it for analytics? Do they want to integrate it with their data warehouse? Where do you see rankings there? The most simplistic place where people get in is large data storage, really large data storage replacement of or using that as their next generation ETL platform. Right. And of course, analytics analytics is the classic well known use case. Right. So storage is, is the big one. And I imagine that the companies are coming to talk to you, they're like saying, okay, we've, we've begun to use it as a storage environment. Now, what can we do with it? Right. Right. They, most of our customers are really smart. They, they're, they're definitely not looking at it as just pure storage. They want, they want to do things with it. Clearly want to monetize it with, with analytics, either directly, directly running on top of Hadoop or moving it into a data mart and then doing analytics on top of that. So social media, for instance, as, as a, as a need. So what kind of, what, what would you say is the market difference between now and last year, Jerry? What, what is some of the things that you've really seen change? I think the maturity of the client set, they've, they've gotten to the point where they're, they're into it and yet now they want to mature and they want to really do it in a robust way. They've experimented with a couple of tool sets. And now they need to go to the next level. They have budgeting potentially this year, certainly next year. Are more budgets being put into it? Absolutely. Absolutely. And they're willing to spend. One of our largest clients uses the term related to Hadoop as it's, it's less expensive than free. It's less expensive than free. Hadoop is less expensive than free. Right. That's a pretty good deal. Well, and the point is that they're dealing with terabytes of data daily. And so in some of that, they need to repurpose and have a forever archive in it. Some of it, they do analytics and sell that material. So for them, it's a whole new opportunity. You were asking Alex about use cases. We have other customers that we do five nines in the telecom industry. So there's a river of number portability, a river of enum, they call it, a river of data that's going through in the, in the major carriers want access to that. So this company is a supplier of interoperability services. They have access to data internet wide. So they're in a position they're sitting back saying, what do I do with this? Interoperability services. What does that mean? I'm certain that would be number portability for landline and telephone calls. So when you move when you move from AT&T to Verizon, somebody's got to provision that transaction. So that's become a big market I expect. People are moving around all the time because they tell because the carriers are always offering deals to switch. Right. Our customer, we operate that provisioning capability of an FCC contract 2014. And we really run the internals of that operation. So based upon those use cases, based upon, you know, how the market has changed, and based upon this eagerness to, you know, spend more money really and to, to, you know, extend the infrastructure. Tell me about the kind of people who you're looking to hire. Most ideal candidates would be people who have ready made expertise with with Hadoop or major no sequel technologies like Cassandra, HBase. Cassandra and HBase? Yeah, Hadoop, Cassandra, HBase, that whole ecosystem as well as experience with MPP databases like Green Plum and so there's really three levels, three tiers that people are only here in smattering. So we've got three search people that are scouring the floor, if you will, but at the top of the stack, we're looking for business analysts that that have a real sensitivity to they're not data scientists, but close. We have solution architects that have a sense of domain expertise. Okay. And then below that senior engineers. Okay, solutions, architects, and engineers, data scientists. Yeah, architects and the different types of architects I talked about. Yeah, right. And then the first level of engagement is going to come from people who understand the business domain, right, and can combine it with data science. Now, there's an interesting conversation starting to bubble up. And I've been hearing it from Alistair Kroll, who brought it up initially. And Alistair said that one of the things that they're starting to notice is that we're starting to move more toward this world where domain expertise is trumped by data. What do you think? I can see some sense in that. I know some some analytics guys who have applied themselves equally well in e-commerce versus healthcare versus retail. So there's clearly a layer of analytics, which is vertical independent. But then when the analyst gives you some some information, like, hey, you know, this guy is buying this and that together, the domain expert really needs to come in to to make a difference and to see where we can leverage that pattern into new products. Jerry, maybe I'll ask you a last question. Are there any particular vertical industries? One, we're seeing the biggest adoption right now. And number two, what geographies around the world? Were there any particular countries that you're seeing that are really going for it? Let me do the last question first. We're partnering with Green Plum. We're working with Oracle. And frankly, there's a draw around the world. And there's very little support in the work that we do in Europe, for example, there will be everybody's training for it. And in Asia as well, that'll be a huge space. Our primary sweet spot is the US. Frankly, there's more opportunity here than we can we can even begin to address. So we're focused on back to the verticals question. I think the biggest most immediate payback is in the financial services area, information management, network management, certainly telecom and then in healthcare would be right behind it. And I forgot media. So media and all of those services. Well, you guys have an important role. You guys have to solve the the mortgage crisis. I mean, that's essentially what you guys have to do here, isn't it? Right. Right. We can improve on what happened last time. I'm sure that well, Jerry, AV, thank you very much for taking some time to talk. You know, I'm the editor of services angle and really look forward to keeping in touch with you guys as you go forward. And we're always looking for interesting companies and what they're doing. So appreciate you taking the time. Fantastic. Thank you, Alex. Thank you. Great. I'm Alex Williams of Silicon Angle. We will be right back with more from the cube at the Stratocomference.