 We're here in Boston, Massachusetts. This is HP Vertica's user conference. The hashtag is HP Big Data 2013 and we're here exclusively on the ground coverage of what's going on in Big Data, what's going on underneath under the covers of the new modern architectures of Big Data Powering, new value proposition for entrepreneurs and businesses as they retool and rethink the modern infrastructure and software paradigms or software-led infrastructure as we talk about. And to kick things off, Noah then talked to the leader of HP. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined by co-host. Hi everybody, I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon. Colin Mahoney is here. He's the vice president general manager of HP Vertica. Just coming off the keynote. Great job this morning, Colin. I got to ask you, what the heck is a Brontabyte? It's a lot of data. It's a lot of information. Yeah, it's funny, I talked about it this morning, but we think back, I think back to my first hard drive. And it was the early 80s and it was 20 megabytes. And at the time, I couldn't even fathom what a gigabyte was. So if you had asked me at that time, what the heck is a gigabyte, I probably would have given you a similar answer. Certainly for a terabyte, back then I would have given you a similar answer. And so now we sit here today and we hear about exabytes, zettabytes, Brontobytes. Who knows what else is coming? I think we're gonna run out of the decimal system maybe before we get there. But it's coming. I mean, the amount and volumes of information that are out there are growing at faster and faster pace every day. And I think what's so exciting is that we're realizing how to really take advantage of that. And that can lead to better lives, better healthcare, better experiences and gaming and products and services. So it's an exciting time. And I've no doubt we'll have a Brontobytes pretty soon. Colin, I got to ask you, obviously, we've had many conversations in the past. You came from Vertica, the startup now part of HP and leading the charge, fast growing executive. Got a lot of credibility within the company. You guys are doing great. But before we get into what's new with Vertica, I want to ask you, you've been in the industry for a while, we've had conversations about other cycles of innovation like client server and the computer industry. What's your take on the current big data? You have a lot of great customers here. Not just token customers, but real innovators here from really growing web scale, hyper scale startups to existing enterprises. What's your take on the big data? How important is it and what can you compare and contrast to other major innovations in the computer industry? Yeah, well you mentioned, certainly, that we went from mainframe to client server, client server to web. And HP CTO Martin Fank, he talks about this as perhaps the largest tectonic shift in information technology. And I agree with that. I think it's for a few different reasons. Number one to me is there's a perfect storm of what's happening right now. It's cloud, it's mobility, it's security, it's big data. All three of those other pillars relate to information and big data. So they're all generating enormous volumes of information and we're acting on them. And we're acting on them at a faster pace than ever. And so I think big data is a tough thing to define and it's tough to say that is big data. But I think it's one of these things where when you see it, you know it. And when you see what's going on around information technology generally, you know it. And what's so exciting from my perspective is just like all those other tectonic shifts, new applications, new products, new services are being developed to take advantage of it. And I think that's the refresh that's going on right now in IT, around big data, and it affects everything. It's hardware, it's software, it's services. So it really is a renaissance of sorts for IT. We'll get into some of this all day and next day tomorrow about the vertical solution. But you guys have played in a lot of different environments. I got to ask you, what do you think is the core enabling technology that's causing all this massive positive value proposition disruption right now? Was there one thing, is there a collection of things that's really the enablement that you guys see really being the lever for this massive shift? Well, I think if I were to point to one thing, I just think that we're at a point with compute power and processing power where it's fairly inexpensive to do incredible things with data. And that, by the way, not only lets us work with the data, but these devices are creating data. I mean, consider a cell phone, if you're using an LTAE network right now, every time you pick up the phone, you're generating about 10 times more data than the previous generation of network technology for the carrier. And what that means is for quality of service and just tracking how that phone call is working across the network, there's probably 1,000 fields of data that are being collected every time you make the call. Now, previously, it would have been too expensive from a processing power standpoint to do that. You never as a developer would have had that luxury to use, but with all the processing power and everything that we're doing, I think that's really behind it. The other thing that's behind it is social. You know, think about Fitbits, think about the upbands. There's a social element to data where everybody wants to compare. They want to compare themselves. They want to compare to themselves over time and they want to compare to others and they want to share that. And so again, I think it's the social aspect of computing and it ties also into the processing power that we have. One of the things Dave and I were talking on the intro prior to you coming on, doing on the kickoff is, you know, obviously Mark Andrewsson wrote that Wall Street Journal article, software's eating the world. We have, you know, research agenda, software-led infrastructure. The software paradigm's changing. So, you know, in a way, you guys are enabling some disruption around business intelligence, data warehousing, traditionally legacy kind of environments where software is built for different purposes. So, when you take away the fact that compute now is almost unlimitedly free and low latency. And there's new connected devices that can create social or internet of things with the industrial internet. It changes the software architecture. What are you seeing in that regard? Like just some anecdotal proof points. You can say, hey, how customers are behaving differently, how are they writing their software different, role of the data scientists, all of the above. Just give some color to that, that changing paradigm from old way to new way. Yeah, well, one of the most intriguing things I've seen from how software's being developed that actually relates to the data is we have a customer that actually writes clinical healthcare software and they put breadcrumbs in their software. Which, think of a breadcrumb as a virtual sensor. Now the developer has the ability to drop a sensor anywhere they want in the code. And many of their customers opt into this where they allow the data to be collected on not only how a physician or a healthcare provider is using the software, but also how the code is executing in there. That feedback goes directly back to the engineering organization. So imagine that in the past, you'd need product management to be collecting information. Here's how people are using it. Here's how long it's taking them. You put focus groups together. Now these assumptions. Making assumptions. Oh, by the way, the data's changing in real time. Data's changing in real time. All of a sudden this customer in the period of about three weeks collected 500 billion rows of breadcrumb data on how it was used. Imagine how powerful that is to have that precision of data without any of the color commentary. Not to say that product managers don't still have a huge job, but you're arming yourself with a lot more information. So that's an example to me of not only how is the software world changing, but again it's self-perpetuating because the software applications that are being developed have all these hooks that can pull that information and then create better software. So I think another big change in software is the agility. You look at the scrum agile methods of software, you can't come out with a release every couple of years. It's just not, that's not the world we live in. You have to be able to have a scrum method where you come out constantly with new releases that can leverage this. So how are you guys taking advantage of this? You talked about your three priorities that you have for HP Vertica in your keynote. You said consume data anywhere, reveal and share insights, sorry consume any data, reveal and share insights and deploy anywhere. Maybe you could talk about each of those and share with us your vision. Yeah, so for us it's always been very simple. Number one we want to make it easy for people to get information in. And given the real time component we want to make it easy for them to get the information in very quickly. So that's a given. Until the information gets into any platform you can't do much with it. The second thing is once it's in there we want to make sure that you can do as many things with that information as possible. And that's the whole interactive analytics. Batch processing, asking one question, you can do that with other platforms with the power of information is ask many questions against the data over and over again and ask different kinds of questions. So we're building up a lot more capabilities and we have been doing this for quite some time in the engine of what you can do with the data. And then thirdly, and I think this is one of the greatest aspects of being at HP is deploy it anywhere. And my analogy is just like when you use a GPS system you just want it to tell you where to go. And you don't know that analytics are happening but they are. And much the same way all analytics today should be close to the application or the user who's taking advantage of it. And that means you've got to be able to deploy it on the cloud. You've got to have appliances for people that want appliances. You've got to have software. It's got to be embeddable. And from the founding of Vertica we've been committed to that very lightweight footprint that can be flexible and deployed anywhere. And of course HP gives us that breadth and the ability to take advantage of it on different platforms. So you talked earlier about sometimes people don't really even know what big data is and we think of it as you need to do things differently. Because whether it's architecturally or programmatically and you've got a spectrum. You've got sort of the traditional guys and you've got the Hadoop pure plays. And you guys are new and different but you sort of bridge both of those worlds. Can you talk about that a little bit and then we can tie it into what you're doing with Haven? Absolutely, so I think with any technology and probably any product or service you've got to remove the friction to adoption. And so there has been for decades a vibrant community around SQL, ODBC, JDBC, methods of moving around data. So what we did was we said let's take all the great things about that ecosystem and many of those partners are here today. Let's embrace it, let's make it better. But let's take the things that people don't like about databases and many times you hear the vocal NoSQL community talking about it. No scale out or other aspects that traditional databases had. And we try to, we solve those problems. So give them the full SQL capabilities in fact add a lot more analytic capabilities that aren't necessarily in the standard SQL. And then also fix all the issues that traditional databases had. And I think that's the key. You've got to embrace what's out there in the ecosystem, because there's so many people that have been trained on this that want to keep doing things the way they're doing but solve the root of the problem. And that's really what our focus has always been. Okay, so the folks out there who aren't attending, I'll see you guys sold out, well oversubscribed on the attendance. Congratulations. Thank you. Summer in Boston, I think it's a great sign. First people love to come to Boston in the summer, but a great, great sign there. But you have like basically three tracks going on right now, the business track, technical product track and the ecosystem track. Could you just break down quickly from your perspective as the leader? What are the key things that you guys are talking about on these tracks on the business, product, technical and then the ecosystem? Yeah, great question. So in fact, Billy Bean is our keynote speaker today. And I would relate it in many ways to the Moneyball theme. Michael Lewis' famous book and ultimately the film. But what's happening today is to really take advantage of information, you need IT obviously to be intimately involved with the technology. You need some data science and people that understand what the data really means. And you need the business buy-in as well. And so these tracks that we've created are really trying to cover all bases, I guess to use that analogy again, of what it takes to win with analytics and data within the organization. It's not just a technology problem. It's not just a data problem. It's not just a business problem. It's how you bring those things together. And I think what's really exciting about this is we're bringing together all these different people who can learn not only in their area, but what it takes from some of the other sides as well. What are the key variables on the business side? Obviously, is it the POC? Is it the proven getting the business case right? Is it the architecture? I think for businesses right now, everything technology related is about the return on investment. We call it the return on information. But I think just given how competitive everything is right now, business people want to know, what am I going to spend? What am I going to get? How fast am I going to get it? And then how sustainable is that? And data is actually a very highly sustainable competitive advantage. So I want to follow up on that because using the Moneyball analogy, the book Michael Lewis, clearly when you read that book, you see that the Oakland A's have this competitive advantage. You wonder, is it sustainable? Of course, they continue to do pretty well with their model, but others have adopted it. The Red Sox sort of tried it, and they actually did it, won a couple of World Series, and then sort of abandoned it, and now they seem to be back to it. Do you feel like, I want to follow up on that point, do you feel like it is sustainable, i.e. big data is sustainable, or is it a race to sort of a level playing field? And why are you confident that it's sustainable? I think big data is sustainable, but what has to be done is constant reiteration, constantly finding new models, bringing in new types of information. HP introduced Haven at Discover, as you guys remember. And that's all about not just taking transactional structured data, but unstructured information. And I think what will be sustainable when it comes to information and competitive advantage is taking in 100% of the information and trying things that you might have thought never had a correlation to what you were doing and bringing that into your predictive model. So if you're a telco, pulling in pieces of data that nobody would ever think relates to your churn model or your retention model, bringing that data in, the data is never static. And I think as long as you continually bring in more data, new data faster, and you're changing your models, and you're just trying things. This notion of A-B testing, it's all the rage because it continuously lets people try in real time and see what's working. It's not just A-B anymore, it's A-B-C-D. A-B-C-D, yeah. A-B-C-D, yeah. Z and more. An unlimited amount of querying in real time agility, as you mentioned, on the business side. But I got to ask you more about the HP growth strategy. I know you're in a quiet period, you really can't talk to numbers, so we won't go there. Be respectful for that. But I got to ask you about the, obviously you're embedded in HP fully with the acquisition, taking advantage of the winds at your back, the HP turnaround's happening, and big data's hot and you have a great product. I want to talk about the ecosystem. Yep. It becomes a punchline in a growth strategy. You know, hey, we got an ecosystem play. What is your ecosystem play here? Obviously it's early for you guys. You have an early channel you're developing, you're nurturing, almost kind of a blank sheet of paper, if you will. You've got some existing assets, but what is your ecosystem strategy, and where is it now, and what's your vision for that? Well, I think again, you know, HP's been around for 75 years and it was built on partners. This is a company in the DNA of this company that understands how to work with partners. And for so many channel partners, there's so much pent up demand right now around big data. So number one, we've been embracing that and we will continue to embrace that. But secondly, I think part of the vertical side of things is that we really are a pure play analytic platform and it takes BI front ends and it takes ETL and it takes all sorts of other visualization and related technologies. And because we're open standards based, we embrace that. And you know, here we have wonderful sponsors. We've got incredible partners every day and every customer that we play in, we've got partners around us. And I think in a time where there's been massive consolidation and lots of vertical integration within companies, what customers are telling us more than ever is they want choice. And having a strong ecosystem, having open standards gives them the choice. So we are fully committed to that. And you said it, we're just beginning, but I think you'll continue to see- What are some of the things ecosystem partners have? Because obviously ecosystem is on everyone's agenda and it's one of those things where it's almost like on everyone's slide and part of their management team. Really, I mean, it's an important part of growth. But you have to hit the mark with the right approach. What are you guys taking? What approach are you taking with the partners? What are they looking for? What are the things you're hearing from them? Well, I think what everybody wants right now, especially in the big data space, is they want use cases. They want to know exactly what problem are you solving. And the easiest way to show them that is with our partners, we take a use case, whether it's a telco use case, a healthcare use case, social networking, analytics use case. We go in with the partners and we say, this is what we've done. This is how we've solved that. And by the way, let us show you how we've solved that. And I think that is the most important. And they want a winner too. They want to bet with a winner. They want a winner. They want to make money. Yeah, they want to make money. And be a neighbor to make money. Yep, exactly. So I think partnerships like anything else, they're not something that you set up and then walk away from. There's something that you continue to build over time. You have to work with them every day. You learn a lot from them. And that's what we do. That's what we're committed to. Okay, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante here in theCUBE. We're on the ground exclusive with HP. Two days of wall-to-wall coverage here at the Vertica HP Vertica Big Data User Conference, hashtag HP Big Data 2013. I'll call and I'll let you get the last word in. What do you want folks to walk away with from this conference? What is the objective at the end of this conference? What do you want folks to walk away with? And for the folks not here and watching or watching on demand, what do you want them to understand? The real objective here is to get our customers and our partners talking to each other. It's not about what HP and Vertica are telling everybody. It's really come learn and hear the stories, the success story, the amazing things that people have been able to do with data. The real heroes are the users, the customers, the partners. And so if you look at the agenda, it's all about listening to them and hearing their story. So our only goal is to get out of their way, facilitate a great environment over the next two days and just get to listen and learn from all of them. Well Collin, I just want to say it's been fun watching you and your career go from the startup now to the big company and leading the team and congratulations on your success. You guys are winning and some of the deployments we're seeing, you guys are doing great. And again, great strategy, great team. And we're going to drill into those use cases here inside theCUBE all for the next day and two days. So stay tuned for more here, live in Boston. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back after this short break. Thank you.