 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi everybody, I'm Dave Vellante, and welcome to the Vertica Big Data Conference virtual. This is our digital presentation, wall-to-wall coverage actually of the Vertica Big Data Conference. And with me is Jeff Healey, who directs product marketing at Vertica. Jeff, good to see you. Good to see you, Dave. Thanks for the opportunity to chat. You're very welcome now. I'm excited about the products that you guys announced and you're hardcore into product marketing, but we're going to talk about the Vertica Big Data Conference. It's been a while since you guys had this. Obviously, new owner, new company, some changes, but that new company Micro Focus has announced that it's investing. I think the number was $70 million into two areas. One was security and the other, of course, was Vertica. So we're really excited to be back at the virtual Big Data Conference and let's hear from you. What are your thoughts? Yeah, no, Dave, thanks. And we love having theCUBE at all of these events. We're thrilled to have the next Vertica Big Data Conference. Naturally, it was a physical event. We're moving it online. We know it's going to be a big hit because we've been doing this for some time, particularly with two of the webcast series we have every month. One is the Under the Hood webcast series, which is led by our engineers. And the other is what we call the Data Disruptors webcast series, which is led by all customers. So we were really confident that this was going to be a big hit and we've seen the registration spike. We just hit 1,000 and we were planning on having about 1,000 of the physical event. It's growing and growing. We're going to see those big numbers and it's not going to be a one-time thing. We're going to keep the conversation going, make sure there's plenty of best practices learning throughout the year. Yeah, Dave, we've been at all the big BDCs and the first ones were really in the heart of the Big Data movement, really exciting time. And the interesting thing about this event is it was always sort of customers talking to customers. There wasn't a lot of commercials, an intimate event. Of course, I loved it because it was in our hometown. But I think you're trying to carry that theme, obviously, into the digital sphere. Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. Yeah, Dave, absolutely right. I mean, of course, nothing replaces kind of face-to-face, but everything that you just mentioned makes it special about the Big Data conference. And you know, you guys have been there throughout and showing great support and talking to so many customers and leaders and what have you. We're doing the same thing. So we had about 40 plus sessions planned for the physical event. We're going to run half of those and we're not going to lose anything though. That's the key point. So what makes the Vertica Big Data conference really special is that the only presenters that are allowed to present are either engineers, Vertica engineers or best practices engineers. And then customers, customers that actually use the product. There's no sales or marketing pitches or anything like that. And I'll tell you, as far as the customer lineup that we have, we've got five or six already lined up as part of those 20 sessions. Customers like Uber, customers like the trade desk, customers like Phillips talking about predictive maintenance. So this goes on and on. You won't want to miss it if you're on the fence or if you're trying to figure out if you want to register for this event. Best part about it, it's all free. And if you can't attend it live and there'll be live Q and A chat on every single one of those sessions, we promise we'll answer every question if we don't get it live as we always do. They'll all be available on demand. So no reason not to register and attend or watch later. You know, and thinking about the content over the years, I mean, in the early days of the big data conference, well, of course, Vertica started before the whole big data meme really took off. And then as it took off, you plugged right into it. But back then the discussion was a lot of, you know, what do I do with big data? I got in there's three V's and how do I wrangle it all? And what's the best approach? And this stuff is, you know, Hadoop is really complicated. Of course, you know, Vertica was an alternative to RDBMS that really couldn't scale or give that type of performance for analytical databases. So you had, you know, your foot in that door. But now the conversation, it's interesting your theme. It's win big with data. Of course, the physical event was at the Encore, which is the new casino in Boston. But my point is the conversation is no longer about, you know, how to wrangle all this data, you know, how to lower the cost of storing this data, you know, how to make it go faster and actually make it work. It's really about how to turn data into insights and transform your organizations and going to, quote, win with big data. That's right. Yeah, now that's a great point, Dave. And that's why, I mean, we chose the title really because it was about our customers and what they're able to do with our platform. And it's, we know it's not just one platform, all of the ecosystem, all of our incredible partners. Yeah, it's funny when I started with the organization about seven years ago, we were closing lots of deals and it was, and I was following up on case studies and it was like, okay, why'd you choose Vertica? Well, the queries went fast. Okay, so what does that mean for your business? We knew we were kind of in the early adopter stage and we were disrupting the data warehouse market. Now we're talking to our customers that are the volumes are growing and growing and they really have these analytical use cases and can talk to the value that the entire organization is gaining from it. And that's the difference between now and a few years ago, just like you were saying when Vertica disrupted the database market would also the data warehouse market. You can speak to our customers and they can tell you exactly what's happening, how it's moving the needle or really advancing the entire organization, regardless of the analytical use case, whether it's in an area of things around predictive maintenance or customer behavior analytics, they can speak confidently of it more than just, hey, our queries went faster. You know, I mentioned before the micro focus investment, I want to drill into that a bit because Vertica, the Vertica brand stands alone. It's a micro focus company, but Vertica has its own sort of brand awareness. The reason I've mentioned that is because if you go back to the early days of MPP database, there was a state of companies, startups that formed and many, if not, all of those got acquired. Some lived on with the code base, going into the cloud, but generally speaking, many of those brands have gone away. Vertica stays. And so my point is that we've seen Vertica have staying power throughout. I think it's a function of the architecture that Stonebreaker originally envisioned. You guys were early on at the market, had a lot of good customer traction, and you've been very responsive to a lot of the trends. Col Mahoney will talk about how you adopted and really embraced cloud, for example, and different data formats. And so you've really been able to participate in a lot of the new emerging waves that have come out to the market. And I would imagine some of that's cultural. I wonder if you could just address that in the context of VDC. Oh, yeah, absolutely. You hit on all the key points there, Dave. So a lot of changes in the industry. We're in the hottest industry, the tech industry right now. There's lots of competition, but one of the things we'll say in terms of, hey, who do you compete with? You compete with these players in the cloud, open source alternatives, traditional enterprise data warehouses, that's true. And one of the things we've stayed true with and Colin has really kind of led the charge for the organization is that we know what we are, right? So we're an analytical database platform, and we're constantly just working on that one source code base to make sure that we don't provide a bunch of different technologies and databases and different types of technologies you need to stitch together. This platform just has unbelievable universal capabilities from everything from running analytics at scale to in database machine learning with a different approach to all different types of deployment models that are supported, right? We don't go to our companies and we say, yeah, we take care of all your problems, but you have to stitch together all these different types of technologies. It's all based on that core Vertica engine and we've expanded it to meet all these market needs. So Colin knows and what he believes in and what he tells the team what we lead with is that, you know, lead with that one core platform that can address all these analytical initiatives. So we know what we are and we continue to improve on it regardless of the pivots and the drastic measures that some of the other competitors have taken. You know, I got to ask you, so we're in the middle of this global pandemic with coronavirus and COVID-19 and things change, you know, daily by the hour, sometimes by the minute. I mean, every day you get up, there's something new. So you see a lot of forecast, you see a lot of probability models, best case, worst case, likely case, even though nobody really knows what that likely case looks like. So there's a lot of analytics going on, a lot of data that people are crunching, new data sources come in every day. Are you guys participating directly in that? You know, specifically your customers are they using your technology? You can't use a traditional data warehouse for this. It's just too slow, too asynchronous. The process is to encompass them. What are you seeing in the customer base as it relates to this crisis? Sure, well, I mean, naturally we have a lot of customers that are in that healthcare technology companies, companies like CERN or companies like Philips, right? That are kind of leading the charge here. And of course, our whole motto has always been, don't throw away any of the data, this value in that data. You don't have to with Vertica, right? So you got petabyte scale types of analytics across many of our customers. Again, just a few years ago, we called the customers a petabyte club. Now a majority of our large enterprise software companies are approaching those petabyte volumes. So it's important to be able to run those analytics at that scale and that volume. The other thing we've been seeing from some of our partners is really putting that analytics use with visualizations. So one of the customers that's going to be presenting is part of the Vertica Big Data Conference is DOMO. DOMO has a really nice demo around be able to track the coronavirus, the outbreak and how we're getting care and things like that in a visual manner. You're seeing more of those. Well, DOMO embeds Vertica, right? So that's another customer of ours. So think of Vertica is that embedded analytical engine to support those visualizations so that just anyone in the world can contract this. And hopefully as we see over time, cases go down and we overcome this. We can talk a little bit more about that because again, the BDC has always been engineers presenting to audiences. You guys have a lot of, you just mentioned the demo by DOMO. You have a lot of brand names that we've interviewed on theCUBE before, but maybe you could talk a little bit more about some of the customers that are going to be speaking at the virtual event and what people can expect. Sure, yeah, absolutely. So we've got Uber that's presenting, just a quick fact around Uber. Really the analytical data warehouse is all Vertica, right? And it works very closely with open source or what have you. Just a quick stat on Uber, 14 million rides per day. What Uber's able to do is connect the riders with the drivers so that they can determine the appropriate pricing. So Uber's going to be a great session that everyone will want to tune in on that. Others like the trade desk, right? Massive ad tech company, 10 billion ad auctions daily. It may even be per second or per minute. The amount of scale and analytical volume that they have that they're running their queries across. It can really only be accomplished with a few platforms in the world and that's Vertica. That's another hot one is with the trade desk. Phillips is going to be presenting. IOT analytical workloads, we're seeing more and more of those across not only telematics, what you would expect with an automotive, but predictive maintenance that cuts across all the original equipment manufacturers. And Phillips has got a long history of being able to handle sensor data to be able to apply to those business cases where you can improve customer satisfaction and lower costs related to service visits. So around there, MRI machines are predictive maintenance initiative. Again, Vertica is kind of that heartbeat, that analytical platform that's driving those initiatives. So this goes on and on. Again, the conversation is going to continue with the data disruptors in the Underhood webcast series. Any customers that weren't able to present and we had a few that just weren't able to do it. They've already signed up for future months. So we're already booked out six months out. More and more customer stories you're going to hear from vertica.com. Awesome, and we're going to be sharing some of those on theCUBE as well. The BDC, it's always been an intimate event. One of my favorites, a lot of substance. And I'm sure the online version, the virtual digital version is going to be the same. Jeff Healy, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and give us a little preview of what we can expect at the Vertica BDC 2020. Thank you. Yeah, Dave, thanks to you and the whole CUBE team. Appreciate it. All right, and thank you for watching everybody. Keep it right here for all the coverage of the Virtual Big Data Conference 2020. You're watching theCUBE, I'm Dave Vellante. We'll see you soon.