 Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE, covering Pentaho World 2017. Brought to you by Hitachi Ventura. Welcome back to sunny Orlando, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is our second day covering Pentaho World 2017. theCUBE was here in 2015 when Pentaho was just had just been recently acquired by Hitachi. We then, let's see, around September timeframe, we saw Hitachi rebrand as Hitachi Data Systems, rebrand as Hitachi Ventura, bringing together three components of its business, the Hitachi Data Systems business, the Hitachi Insights business, and of course, the Pentaho Analytics platform. And we heard yesterday from Brian Householder, the president and COO of Hitachi Ventura, what the strategy was. I thought he was a very crisp, clear presenter. The strategy made a lot of sense, it resonated. Obviously, a lot of execution to be done. And then subsequently, at the last two days, we've heard largely from Pentaho practitioners who are applying this end-to-end analytics platform to really transform their businesses, to really become data-driven, supporting those digital transformations. So, pretty positive story overall. You know, a lot of work to be done. We got to see how this whole edge to outcome plays out. Sounds good. There's got to be some execution there. We got to see the ecosystem grow, for sure. They guys got a great story. This conference should explode. It's really a product of Pentaho. They've been on the market for more than a decade now as the spearhead for the open source analytics revolution in business analytics and in predictive modeling and in data integration, all of it open source. And they've come very far, and they're really a blue chip solution provider. I think this show has been a great validation of their Pentaho's portfolio presence in the market. Now, Hitachi Von Ventara has a gem of a core asset. You know, clearly the storage market, the data center, converged infrastructure, the core Hitachi data systems, product lines are starting to experience the low growth that is such a mature space experiences. And clearly they're placing a strong bet, Hitachi Ventara, that the IoT, the edge analytics market will just boom wide open. Hitachi Insight Group, which was only created last year by their corporate parent, was chartered to explore opportunities in IoT. They've got the Lumata platform. They had Hitachi next to their conference last month focused on IoT. I think that's really the capstone, the Lumata portfolio in this overall story. Now, I think what we're hearing this week is that, great, they've got nice, the components, the building blocks of potential growth, but I don't think they're gonna be able to achieve takeoff growth until such time Hitachi Ventara. They have a stronger, more credible reach out to the developer community, specifically the developers who are building the AI and machine learning for deployment to the edge. That will require to have credibility in that space. Clearly it's gonna have to be the new set of frameworks, such as TensorFlow, NXNet, and Theano, and so forth. They're gonna need some sort of a modeling frame or abstraction for me that sits on top of the Pentaho platform or really across all of their offerings, including Lumata, and enables a developer to using the mainstream application developer to use code, like whether it be Python or R or Java or whatever, to build the deep learning and AI models at the highest level of abstraction, the business level of abstraction, then to automatically compile those models, which are computational graphs, down to formats that are optimized and efficient to run on devices of all sorts, chipsets of all sorts, that are increasingly resource constrained. They're not there yet. I'm not hearing that overall developer story at this show. I think they've got a lot of smart people, including Brian, pushing them in that direction. Hopefully next year's Pentaho world or however they may rebrand this show, I think they'll probably have more of that put together, but Wikibon's waiting to see. Well, and that's something that I pushed on a little bit this week. And in particular, that requires a whole new go to market. You know, where the starting point is developers and then you're nurturing those developers. And certainly Pentaho has experience with community additions, but that was more to get enterprise buyers to kind of try before they buy. As you know well, Jim, the developer community is, they're very fickle, they're persnickety, they're demanding, and they're super smart, and they can be your best advocates, or they'll just ignore you. And it's just kind of the way it is with developers. And if you can appeal to them, you can get a foothold in markets. We've seen it so, I mean, look at Microsoft is done, look at what Amazon has done, you know, certainly Docker, you know, on and on and on. Community marketing, it's full bore, is what the app. User groups, developer days, hackathons, the whole nine yards. I'm not seeing a huge emphasis on community marketing in that really evangelistic sense. They need to go there seriously. They need to win the hearts and minds of the next generation developer. The next generation developer who actually won't care about whether it's TensorFlow, backends, or the other ones, what they will care is the high level framework, and really a collaborative framework that the solution provider gives them for their teams to collaborate on building and training and deploying all this stuff. I'm not hearing that from this solution provider, DevOps really, here, this year. Hopefully in the coming years there will be, other vendors are a bit further along than they are. We see a bit further along, IBM is. We see a bit further along, like Cloudera and others are, in putting together really a developer friendly ecosystem of components within a broader, really broader data lake framework. Yeah, and that's not been the historical Pentaho DNA. However, as you know, to reach out, have a community effort to reach out to developers requires resources and commitment, and it's not a one shot deal. But it also requires a platform. And what we're seeing today is the formation of that, the reformation of Hitachi into Hitachi Ventara with a lot of resources that has a vision of a platform, of which Pentaho is a critical component. But it's going to take a lot of effort, a lot of cultivating. You know, I presume they're having those conversations internally, they're not ready to have them externally, which is, I presume, why they're not having them. But that's something that we're going to certainly watch for, you know, in the coming years. What else, you gave a talk this afternoon. Yeah, AI is eating the edge, and it was well received. Because, in fact, when I prepared these by thoughts in my research about a month ago for this, so that I was thinking, am I way too far ahead of where, this is Pentaho, I've been, of course, familiar with them since their inception. I thought, are there other users, other developers, is their community going deep into AI and all the IoT stuff? And the last day or so here at this event, it's like, well, everybody's here is into that, they know this stuff. So, not only was I relieved that I wouldn't have to explain the ABCs of all that, they were ahead of me on a lot of, in terms of the questions I got. I mean, you know, the questions are, you know, once again, you know, what framework should we adopt for AI, you know, the whole TensorFlow, all those framework wars, which I think are sort of overblown, and they will be fairly soon, it'll be irrelevant. But those kinds of questions, those are actually developer level questions that people are just, you know, here, and then coming to me with. Well, you know, I tell ya, I'm no expert in frameworks, but my advice would be, whatever framework you adopt, you're probably not going to be using that same framework down the road. So you have to be flexible as an organization. A lot of technical, you know, leaders tell me this, is look, technology is going to come and it's going to go. We got to have great people, we got to be able to respond to the market requirements, we have to have processes that allow us to be proactive and responsive. And that your choice of framework should, you should ensure that it doesn't constrict you in those areas. And you know the framework that actually appeals to this crowd, including the people in my room, it's a Wikibon framework, it's also what Brian Hopkins of Forrester presented, the three tier architecture. There's the edge devices, there are the gateways or hubs, there's the cloud. We call them primary, secondary, tertiary issues. Whatever you call them, you put different data, you put different analytics on each of those two, and they really, in many ways, in a modular fashion, then you begin to orchestrate with Kubernetes and so forth. These AI-infused apps and these distributed architectures, like, you know, cell driving vehicles or whatever. That, in the buzz I've been getting here, including in my session, everybody's saying, yeah, that's exactly the way to go. That's a broader, you know, in other words, that thinking in those terms prevents you as a developer from thinking that AI has to be some monolithic freaking stack on one single note. No, it actually has to be massively parallel and distributed, because these are potentially very compute-intensive applications. I think there's a growing realization in the developer community that, when you're talking about developing AI, you're really talking about developing two core workloads. There's the inferencing, which is where the magic happens in terms of predictions and classification, but even more resource-consumptive is the training that has to happen in the cloud, and that's data-intensive. That's exabytes, petabytes-intensive, potentially. That's compute-intensive. Very different workload. That definitely needs to happen in the cloud, and primarily, there's a little bit of federated training that goes out to the edge, but that's really the exception right now. So there's a growing realization in the developer community that, well, we better get a really good platform for training. And actually, they can leverage. We've seen in our research at Wikibon is that many AI developers, many deep-learning developers, actually leverage their spark clusters for training of TensorFlow and so forth because of in-memory, massive parallelism, so forth and so on. I think a lot of, there will be a growing realization in the developer community that the investments they've been making in Hadoop and Spark will just be leveraged for this growing stack for training, if nothing else. Well, and then 8.0, that was sort of the big buzz here, and you and I talked at the Open with Rebecca, our other co-host, about 8.0, a lot of incremental improvements, but you know what, in talking to customers, that's kind of what they want. They want Pentaho to do a good job of incorporating, curating, open-source content, open-source platforms and products, bringing them into their system and making sure that their customers can take advantage of them. That's what they consistently kept asking for. They weren't freaked out about lack of AI and lack of deep-learning and ML and WECAs is fine. Now, maybe it's a blind spot. I don't know. Actually, I've had 24 hours since the announce. I don't know to chew on it. In fact, I have a SiliconANGLE article going up fairly soon with my, essentially my trip report of the basic takeaway. And actually, what I like about 8.0 is that it focuses on streaming, bringing open-source analytics, streaming more completely into the Pentaho data integration platform. In other words, there's stronger interoperability with spark streaming with Kafka and so forth, but also they have the ability with an 8.0 to better match real-time streaming workloads to execution engines in a distributed fabric. In other words, what I think that represents, in terms of, not only in terms of Hitachi, Vantara's portfolio, but in terms of where the industry is going with all things to do with big data applications, whether or not the above AI is streaming is coming into the mainstream, pun intended. And data at rest platforms are starting to become marginalized in a lot of applications. In other words, Hadoop is data at rest par excellence. So are a fair number of other no-SQL platforms. Those are not going away. Those are the core of your data lakes. But most development is being developed not most AI and machine learning is being developed for streaming environments that increasingly are edge-oriented. So Pentaho by Hitachi Vantara for 8.0 is actually have put in the right incremental features for the market that lies ahead. And so in many ways, I think that was actually a well-thought-out set of release for this particular event. Great. Okay, some of the highlights here. We had a lot of different industries. We had gaming. We had experts on autonomous vehicles. We had the NASDAQ guys on that was very interesting segment, the German police interview you did. The chief data officer of community colleges in Indiana. So a lot of diversity, which underscores the platform-ness of Pentaho. It's not some industry-specific system. It is a horizontal capabilities platform. Final thoughts on the show. Some interesting things that you saw, things you learned. Yeah, on the show itself. They did a really good job Hitachi Vantara. Of course it's a new brand, but it's an old company. And it's even an old established set of product teams that have come together in a hurry essentially, though it's really been two years since the acquisition. They did a really good job of presenting a unified go-to-market message. That's a good start. They've done a good job of, the fact that they had these two shows in a rapid sequence, Hitachi Next, which was IoT and Lumata, but it was Hitachi Vantara. And now this one, where it's all data analytics, the fact that here in the peak of the fall announcement or event season, they had these two shows really highlighting their innovations and their roadmaps for those core pieces of their portfolio and they've done a good job of positioning themselves in each case. That shows that the teams are working orchestrating well in terms of at least go-to-market presenting their value prop. I think in terms of the actual, we've had a lot of great customer and partner interviews on this show. And I think you mentioned gaming first. I wasn't actually on the gaming related Cube interview, but gaming is a hot, of course, it's a hot, hot market for AI increasingly. A lot of AI that gets developed now for lots of applications involves simulations of whatever scenario you're building, including like autonomous vehicles. So gaming is many ways, a set of practices that are well-established and mature that are becoming fundamental to development of all AI because you're developing synthetic data based on simulation environments. The fact that Hitachi Vantara has strong presence as a data provider in the gaming market, I think in many ways indicates that they've got, you know, it's a crowded marketplace, they have much larger competitors and deeper pocketed, but I think the fact is they've got all the piece parts needed to be a roaring success in this new era, and they've got strong and loyal, very loyal customers, I'm discovering, not discovering, I've known this all along, but since I've rejoined the analyst space, it's been re-validated that Pentaho, how strong and blue-chip they are. Now that they're a new brand in a new era, they're turning themselves around fairly well. I don't think they'll be obsolete by clearly. I mean, AI right now belongs to AWS and Microsoft and Google and IBM to some degree. We have to recognize that the Hitachi Vantaras of the world right now are still a second tier in that arena. They probably have to hitch their wagon to at least one of those core cloud providers as a core partner going forward to really prevail. Which they can do. Yeah, they can do. All right, Jim, thanks very much for closing with me. Thanks to you all for watching. TheCube puts out a lot of content. You can go to siliconangle.com to see all the news. TheCube.net is where we host all these videos. Wikibon.com is our research site, so check that out as well. We got crowd chats going on, crowdchat.net. It's just unbelievable. Unbelievable. A rush of content. We're all about the data. We're all about sharing, so check those sites out. Thanks very much to the crew here. Great job. And next week, a lot going on. We're in New York City. We got some stuff going on there. I want to thank our sponsor without whom this show, this Cube show would not be possible. Hitachi Ventara slash Pentaho. Thank you to Sunny Orlando. Yep, it's great and wonderful. This has been theCUBE at Pentaho World 2017. We'll see you next time. Thanks for watching.