 Hi, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Palo Alto. I'm joined here by Ariana Grattau. We're really excited. It's March, so it must mean madness, Ariana. Yeah, it's madness. Time for Cube Madness. Time for Cube Madness 2015. We had a great event last year in the inaugural Cube Madness. And I just wanted to go through again, really, what are the objectives of Cube Madness? Why do we do the madness? One is because it's March and it's March Madness. But really the idea is to highlight some of the great interviews of terrific guests. We did over 900 interviews, over 1,000 guests, over 1,100 segments in 2014. So this in no way represents all of them or even maybe the best. But we wanted to get a selection of different types of guests, different types of shows, different types of interviews, and really bring it out. And we actually did increase the field this year, Ariana. We were only 32 last year, but Greg and Patrick and the team been working their tails off. We got the full 64. We're gonna run the contest really in conjunction with regular March Madness. So you fill out your ESPN bracket. Next year we'll have brackets for Cube Madness. So we'll kick it off this weekend, as all Cube Madness does. We'll open up the voting. And then with each round of March Madness, we'll move to 32 then, sweet 16. Next weekend we'll go to the Elite Eight, and then of course the Final Four, and then the Final. So we hope you enjoy it. We hope you really, the purpose again is to re-enjoy some of these great interviews from 2014. We're really blessed that we have so many terrific folks that come on the Cube, share their knowledge, share their insight with our community, and we just want to highlight it. Awesome, yeah, lots of great interviews constantly going on. So voting begins this Thursday, is that correct? Right, voting begins Thursday, so we're releasing the brackets. We're releasing all the people you'll be able to go on and vote, do a side-by-side comparison of each of the interviews, and cast your vote. And I think we're gonna- All right, awesome. So what region are we gonna do here? So we're gonna delve into the Silicon Angle region. It's the top region. Yeah, we got lots of good interviews, lots of tech athletes out there, and we're gonna begin with Telly Whitney from Anita Borg Institute, versus Charles Phillips from N4. Yeah, this is a tough one. Who do you think, what are your thoughts on this? This is a tough one. So one of the tricks in Cube Madness is really activating your social network. So these people come from very different backgrounds. Telly Whitney runs the Anita Borg Institute, one of the premier institutes really about women's issues, and we interviewed him last year at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. So Telly's got a huge fan base. She's a really active lady. Charles Phillips, tech exec extraordinaire, went from Wall Street to Oracle, left Oracle to really be the CEO of N4. They're completely transforming their business. They run a lot of great applications, and now they're moving to the cloud. Big keynote speaker at AWS last year. But I don't know how active Charles is on his social side. So that might be difficult for him. So I think Telly Whitney can activate her social map a little easier than Charles Phillips. I'll go with Telly on that round. All right. Yeah, Telly has a lot of a good, great fan base. I'm a fan myself. She does a lot for women in tech, and I might have to agree with you on that one. And we're hoping to be Grace Hopper Celebration 15 this year. Awesome. All right. Who's next? Next, we got Adrienne Ionel from Mirantis. Versus Joe Hellerstein from Trifacta. Interesting setup here. Again, looking at the Twitter following, Joe has a significant advantage. 5,000 Twitter followers, Adrienne only 500. But Mirantis is making a lot of noise in the open space world. They are doing a lot of promotion. They put on this Open Stack Silicon Valley event, which is where we interviewed Adrienne. And in fact, he kind of turned the tables. He actually interviewed Martin Mico. So it was Martin Mico's first interview coming post the Eucalyptus acquisition. So that was pretty good. I don't know if either of them are super active on social. I think I'm going to go with Mirantis on this. I think I'll go with Adrienne. I think they will kick it into gear and we'll see if we can get Joe to kind of make some noise out of Berkeley. He's one of our Berkeley startups that we're a big fan of. Awesome. All right, the next match up, it's a good one. Padme Shree Warrior from Cisco, and Bill Schmarzo, the dean of Big Data from EMC. What are your thoughts, who do you think? Two favorites. So again, Padme Shree, probably one of the biggest Twitter following certainly in our population, 1.57 million Twitter followers. She's got a huge Twitter following, terrific interview, Red Hat Summit last year, talking about the third wave of the internet, which was really all about the internet of things and connected things and IoT. And Cisco's clearly right in the middle of that. On the other side, you have a cube favorite, the dean of Big Data himself, Bill Schmarzo, many-time cube alum, really active social guys. Got his book, we just had him on again at Big Data SV. He's on quite frequently. But Bill's only got 2,000 Twitter followers. So can Bill in a really active campaign and activation knock off Padme Shree? Actually, I think he will, because I think Padme Shree has so many followers. I don't think she's quite as active and curating and keeping it going. But who knows, if she just turns on the spicket a little bit, Bill's going to have a tough time with that matchup, great matchup, two really phenomenal tech athletes. So let's just interject really quickly. Do you think, what are some tips? Do you think it's really all about social activation for getting in the next round? What are some tips for people that are in this year's cube madness? How are they going to win? How can they get to the next level? Yeah, I think it really is social activation, Arianna. The types of interviews that we have, the breadth of interviews that we have, the topics of interviews that we have are so varied that it's really hard to do a one-to-one comparison of what Padme Shree was talking about, internet of things, and Bill Schmarzo was talking about Big Data. And he gives a ton of customer examples. Tuesday through Thursday in the field with customers. So I do think it's really a social activation. Can you get people excited about your interview? Can you get people excited about your bracket? Can you activate that crowd? And are you excited about it? And I will tell you that last night, as Greg and the team were starting to leak out some of the you've been selected for 2015, the call started coming in and people want to know, are they in? Who's in their bracket? Who's in their region? So the people that are into the game and into the fun and really get into it, I think are the ones that activate their community and you can see it in the results. Awesome. All right, next matchup. Joshua McKenty from Cloud Foundry versus Jesse Proudman from Proudman. Yeah, Jesse Proudman has an interesting, it's basically OpenStack as a service. That was another interview at the OpenStack Silicon Valley. The OpenStack Silicon Valley show turned out to really kick out a lot of the candidates. And Joshua McKenty, also they're a founder of OpenStack who recently left Piston Cloud to go to Cloud Foundry Pivotal. That was his last interview at Piston Cloud before he announced that he was making the move. Both of them really active on Twitter, neither has a really giant social graph like Padmashree. But this will be a good one because they're both super active in the OpenStack community. They love to get it on Twitter and this will be a fun one. I think I'm gonna go with Jesse though. Jesse likes to make noise, he likes to get out there and I think that he will take on this challenge and really activate his community. Awesome. All right. All right, next matchup. We got Carla Gentry from Analytical Solutions and Dave Koval, the president of San Jose Earthquakes. Yeah, interesting. Again, how do you compare these interviews with completely different people talking about completely different topics? Carla Gentry, big data influencer. She comes to a lot of IBM events. In fact, I think this interview is from the IBM Inside Event 2014. She's super active on Twitter. She's got a huge following on Twitter. People responding on Twitter. She's kind of lighted up. Dave Koval, his business is getting people excited, they just finished the new Levi Stadium with the earthquakes. He joined us at our inaugural Sports Data SV last year. They're gonna host our Sports Data SV this year. He's an innovator, you can buy a t-shirt with Bitcoin at a San Jose Earthquakes game. So this is gonna be an interesting challenge to very different audiences that they're gonna activate. I think I gotta go with Carla though because Carla is just so active and Dave's probably gonna be busy promoting earthquakes games more than he is gonna be a cute benefit. I wouldn't be surprised if he pulls an upset there. Yeah, and he does have a big following. A lot of people love the earthquakes. Yeah, yeah, they do. So I might just go for him just because of that. They do. You never know. All right, we got Lena Joshi from Splunk versus Katie Linnendoll, of course the tech expert. Yeah, a couple women in techs. This is an interesting one. Lena Joshi's been on a couple times at Splunk. She's kind of quiet and reserved the first time we had her on two years ago in 2012, but last year when we had her on at Splunk.com 2014, literally there were people cheering walking by that saw her on stage. So she has a big following. It's a little bit more isolated than Katie's obviously is really around Splunk and the Splunk community is Splunk big data. Again, can she activate it? I don't know that I haven't seen her a ton on Twitter but she's clearly a rising star at Splunk and excited to have her in the contest. Katie Linnendoll, I mean she's Emmy award winning TV gal. If she decides to activate, she'll probably win in a landslide. But again, you sometimes wonder about some of these folks that have these giant social graphs. Are they actively managing? Is it really personal? Has it grown to the size where now they're just kind of following a star, they're following a media personality versus really following an individual and can she activate it? If she activates it, I think she wins in a landslide. It'll be interesting to see what Lena can do. I think a relatively small community but can she get it going? So you really see from last year, did you really see the people on the cube, the competitors really charging it up, activating their crowds and activating their audiences and their fan base and their followers? Yeah, absolutely. Push their interviews out. Absolutely. If we go back the last year and just look at the final four, right? The final four was Abhi Mehta who you've met from Truseta, super active guy, high energy guy, really got into it, activated his community. We had George Sleshman who was just on top of it from IO data centers, very much on top of it. He activated. You have Jason Stowe, cycle computing. It's on at AWS. Hi Jason, who won the incumbent. Sorry I didn't get you this year. Whose business is basically creating temporary super computers out of XSAWS resources. He got way into it and then Michael Dell. Now the Michael Dell one, I don't know if I don't remember if we got direct evidence of Michael Dell activating his community. It'll be interesting because this year he's a private company and this year I think he's a little bit louder. And of course they just announced the Michael Dell, the Benioff contest, a Fitbit contest as part of their March Madness celebration of who can get more steps. And I think Michael Dell has already pulled ahead by 17,000 steps last time I checked Twitter and Benioff can't figure it out. So I don't know if it's a company-wide or just the two of them, the battle of the billionaires. But clearly Michael Dell gets into it. He gets into the contest. So I really do think it's about activating your graph. And again, you have to sustain it over six rounds of voting, right? From 64 to 32, 32 to 16, 16 to eight. So reposting the interviews. So you've got to be into it and you've got to stick with it. And again, we map this contest to the excitement of the actual March Madness which basically encompasses three weekends. So yeah, absolutely. You got to be activating your people. All right, next we've got Merv Adrian from Gartner and James Waters from Cloud Foundry. Another really interesting match at Merv Gartner or Merv Adrian from Gartner, really frequent, a CUBE guest, loves to come on, always has something to say, especially around the big data space. Got a pretty active community, 19,000 Twitter followers. And he's pretty active on Twitter. He likes to share things. And he definitely has a following. And you've got James Water, who's opinionated from Cloud Foundry Pivotal. We had him on it at Open Stack Silicon Valley. He had a ton to say, Pivotal's really making a move right now and really kind of coming out of their shell. Not that they were totally in it before, but they really seem to be making noise. And James is opinionated and likes to share his opinion. So on that one, I think I'm gonna go with James. I think James will take the challenge and try to outgun Merv. That'll be a good one. Yeah. All right. And the last bracket or last little segment is Brian Dahl from GitHub and Lou Tucker from Cisco. Yeah, interesting combination, right? So GitHub is really an anchor system that people use now. And in fact, if you start to notice on the people's business cards and citations on their emails, people are putting their GitHub account, right? It's where people share open source content and now that open source is getting bigger and bigger, it's where there's a lot of code. There's a lot of people involved in GitHub. Question is, does Brian himself have really an activated social network? Not so much with about one and a half thousand Twitter followers. Lou Tucker recently joined Cisco. Again, really enthusiastic guy. Cisco's making heavy moves in Open Stack, big moves on the data center with Jim McHugh, who I think is in one of our other brackets. I think Lou's got this one. I think he's more of an evangelist. I think he is more of getting the word out. And so I think I got to go with Lou on this one. Awesome. Yeah, I mean, GitHub's, it's popular. It's kind of like a celebrity job these days. And that just might have him get a one up, you know? Yeah, you just never know. Or the other thing you just don't know is that there's somebody in their graph, there's somebody that maybe not them directly, but it's influential, that gets behind the campaign if you go almost like a campaign manager. That can push it over the edge. We didn't see much of that. But that would be a potential thing with like a GitHub. Do you ever see the companies activating, helping activate the interviews as well? It's hard to tell, you know. In the big company, no, I don't think so. But in the littler companies, you know, how much of the company is really driven by the primary executive. And I think like Obimeta for sure, you know, how much of the company Traseta is Obimeta? Probably quite a bit. Michael Dell, probably quite a bit if he gets behind it. But I think more of the smaller companies, you see more of the company focus versus the bigger companies, it's really the individual. Or the work group or the business unit that are involved in. All right, so who do you think will advance from the Silicon Engle region to Cube Madness, the final four? 2015, tough one. On the left side of our bracket, you know, I think Bill's gonna be really active if he can get past Padma Street. I think Telly Whitney could really activate her community. On the other side, Carla Gentry is just on Twitter and she just likes to share stuff and she pushes it hard. And then James Waters, I think, could be the dark horse coming out because again, he's got lots of opinions that he likes to share and that's the way we love having him on the Cube. But I think for this one, I think I'm gonna go with the woman in tech. I think Carla Gentry, sorry, Bill. I think Carla Gentry might just pull it out in the end and make that final four. All right, I think that I personally think Telly Whitney, you know, on the left side, she's got a big following. I'm a big fan, woman in tech and another woman in tech on the right side, Katie Lindahl, big following. And if she can activate it right, she's definitely got an upper hand. 21,000 followers that in Padma Street sitting there with her 1.57, Padma Street sent out like three tweets that could be a landslide. But could she sustain it during the whole time? That's to be told. But we're really excited. This is the Cube interview show, the preview show. We're releasing the brackets, we're releasing the participants. We've got four brackets all together, the Silicon Angle region, the Tech Athlete region, the Cube region, and the Wikibon region. Enjoy the contest, vote often. Watch the results, track it with your friends. Thanks for watching Cube Bandit's preview show, 2015.