 Okay, we're back here live in New York City for Strata Hadoop World 2012. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events. To the events, they extract a signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com. Join us, my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org, and we're here with Oran Falcovitz, who's the co-founder and CEO of Squirrel, a new company that's really been built around the Accumulo project. We first found out about Squirrel earlier this year. Oran came on theCUBE. We Skyped Oran in. So welcome back to theCUBE, I guess. We're good to be here live. And we were talking at the time about the need for security and big data. You guys came out of the NSA, and there's a lot of government use cases and you're commercializing now and working very closely with the Apache community. So give us an update on where you're at. You just got the funding, you moved to Boston. You moved to Cambridge. Which is great, you know? We'd love to have more folks on the East Coast and big data. So again, welcome and just take us through where you guys are at. Yeah, great. Well, thanks for having me. You know, like you said, we've moved everyone to Boston. It's been really exciting for us. And what's been more exciting is some of the enthusiasm for Accumulo and for some of the key things that we think we're bringing to the Hadoop ecosystem. Primarily security and scalability and more user interactivity with data. So it's been pretty good. I mean, particularly here at Hadoop World, we've noticed real focus on ecosystem building and it's really exciting to work with many folks. And also some great talks about how you go to the next stage from bringing your data into a data warehouse to creating interactive analytics at scale. Yeah, so when we were talking at the Wikibon offices, when you were Skyping in, we were on theCUBE there remotely, we went into some detail around, you know, what you guys are doing around cell level security. We sort of defined what it is. So you guys can check that out, that video out, on siliconangle.tv. Also check out youtube.com slash siliconangle. All our videos are up there. But, and John, I know you had a deep dive with David Floyer out in the West Coast with some of the squirrel guys. So, you know, we've been talking about this or internally and it really came to our attention at Oracle OpenWorld. When Larry Ellison said, we now have the world's first multi-tenant database. And of course, DB2's been multi-tenant for a while, but DB2, I guess, doesn't count. But it seems like with what the Accumulo project has done, you've got a multi-tenant database for the cloud that's open source. That's where it is. That scales, so talk about that a little bit. Yeah, it should be really exciting. You know, the security is sometimes misconstrued to be a locking away and we talk about it in terms of unlocking the power and so there's some really exciting use cases where you can use these visibility fields for licensing and for bringing tens, if not hundreds of thousands of users together in one system to see very disparate data sets that they may not want to bump up against. So, we think that's pretty exciting. We think it's exciting for enterprises to be able to consolidate their data internally to see more and look across that. We also think it's exciting for enterprises to create infomediaries and their verticals and then even beyond that, groups like InfoChimps and others who are creating data applications where they house data and they source data for data science or for other applications that should be really good use. Why don't you actually, before we get into it, why don't you talk a little bit about the Acumulo project for those who aren't familiar with it because many aren't, but set that up as well. Sure, so Acumulo was initially designed by a national security agency starting in 2008 and it was designed to solve a number of problems. The first is to solve a scale problem where traditional data architectures couldn't solve a huge or massive data problems in the multi-petabyte level. It was designed to reduce administrative burdens, both in costs, the cost for administering those and the cost for having to separate your data because of scalability limits and then also in terms of fracturing your data where you don't want every user to see every piece of data. And so it was designed to bring data together, reduce costs, and then to simultaneously allow for tens of thousands of users who are running a Google style like analytics, search, statistics, graph traversal, doing intelligence analysis and simultaneously where you have data scientists, mathematicians running new algorithms, testing new theories, new ideas against that data, creating summaries of it for analysts and for them to meet in the middle and to really reform that traditional architecture. And so at the end of 2011, the government decided to release that to the Apache Open Source Foundation to grow the community, to extend the adoption and to really let the project take on a shape that it wouldn't have just solely being a government project. And our company formed at the beginning of August with many of the core members who developed that and have been working on top of it, developing applications and use cases for it to bring it to healthcare, financial services, energy, education, e-discovery, and so on. Now why could you just bolt on some of these features to a more, I'll call it traditional, no-SQL database if there is such a word? So I think it's two things. One, the security features are embedded into the core architecture, which is unique, right? It speaks to two things. It speaks to one, an appreciation for the seriousness of it. It's not, security in our case isn't something that comes in the next release. It's something that's at the forefront. So it's important from that level. And the second is that it's important to go back to 2008 and look at what some of the other adjacent technologies, what they were, right? Very nascent at that time. And to just bolt on security would break a lot of backwards compatibility and would essentially lose some of the performance designs that have been baked into a cumulo going forward. Yeah, our CTO, David Fleur, said if you tried to do this with a traditional architecture, it would just bring it to its knees, essentially. So your scale is a key component of this, right? I could try to get it worded. Okay, John, go ahead. There you go, no worries. There you go, I see you. Okay, so security and analytics are hot. Obviously, scale, the top three criteria is for the market right now. So that's what Dave and I looked at. The market was saying, people want scale, they want better analytics. That's the top of mind. But security's kind of mandated implied. Sure. You guys built your product squirrel, SQRRL, for the folks out there who want to know the spelling, SQRRL, from NSA. You guys have to build huge number of clusters before Hadoop was around, right? So you kind of had to do this from scratch, right? Is that true? Yeah, I mean, I think one of the key things, the maturity in the product, is that it's solved one of the most extreme problems at scale, in terms of security, and then very diverse, rich analytic ecosystem. And so that gives, for SQRRL, the company, our product Acorn, it gives our customers a lot of comfort and flexibility and applying it to their solutions. So HBase is great for rights, right? So you're doing a lot of rights, HBase is great. What do you guys do? What's your product hanging their hat on in terms? Is it reads? A lot of reads, random reads in rights? Or is it all rights like HBase? Could you explain your approach? Sure, so I mean, Acumulo is designed to be successful at a number of different things. It really supported the first set of analytics. So getting data ingested into the system very quickly, being able to scale that out, being able to isolate those data elements at a very fine level, and then supporting incremental map reduce through the iterator framework, being able to support low latency query, number of indexing and partitioning schemes to take advantage of full analytic features going forward. So you guys are relatively new to the scene, relative as a startup, right? So you just got funding. What's your take of the whole ecosystem? I mean, you're not amateurs, you're not new to the game from an expertise standpoint, but as a company, your young company just formed, funded, going out into the wild. You're not geared up yet with all the product, and you're going to get customers now, you got some great, great traction from what we've been talking about before you came on camera. What's it like and what's your plan? Yeah, so I think one of the great things is that specialization is really key in this environment, that no one group can do it all themselves, and so we're fortunate to have a number of key partners in the Dubico system, Hortonworks and MapR, and working with a number of other folks as we go to market, as we launch our enterprise product. So we think that what we bring, the maturity, the uniqueness to the security and the scalability through the database layer, adds a lot of value, and we're eager to partner with many others who add additional value on the business intelligence front, folks like Tableau, Pentaho, the Burst folks met up with today, had some really interesting things, as well as a number of other vendors from ETL, forward, so. So talk about the different search options. I was just talking to Claudia or Jeff Hammerbocker, we were talking about what they're gonna do with Cloud Solar, and they got the new Impala platform that they're promoting, obviously real time, it's a pretty big deal for them. You guys have played with Solar and Lucene, what's your take on the different search options? I think customers are looking for a variety of different types of search capabilities, both traditional, faceted search, more advanced search capabilities, and we'll have a lot more to announce at the beginning of the year when we put our product out there. Just trying to get you, trying to get better. You want to show a little leg on the cube? I'm wearing jeans, so yeah, impossible. So we've talked earlier about some of the use cases, I mean, obviously government, financial services, their healthcare, there are others. Is the strategy of the company to get a foothold in those industries where people have the greatest appetite for security and then expand out, is it to stay narrow within those niches? Well I think just take a step back, we see through our engagements, people across a number of verticals, that there is a large appetite for security either as a compliance mechanism or as a licensing mechanism, one way to bring business units together. So for us, what we're looking for and where we're seeing the greatest amount of enthusiasm are folks who want more from big data, more than just ETL and people who understand that this is an alchemy, it's not magic, there's a lot of hard work and there's a lot of core mature technologies that are needed to do that. So folks who have big data problems, who are suffering from keeping their data separate today, folks who have emerging big data problems but have immediate security concerns and then vice versa, folks who just have performance problems but would benefit from having an additional security story on top of that. We're working with all of them and getting a lot of good traction. How would people solve this problem in means other than a cumulo? Are they not solving it or are they just having to work incredibly hard to figure this out? Yeah, so I think what we're seeing is people are going to a lot of exotic lengths to sort of work around the edges, make a lot of hodgepodge. A lot of gymnastics going on. Yeah, a lot of gymnastics and they're just losing a lot of the efficiencies that they want, the simplicity that we provide and then ultimately this has negative effects on the analytic outcomes and the data-driven solutions that they're pushing. Yeah, so we've been poking around a little bit about the need for security and obviously it's there. We were at IOD this week and of course it's IBM conference. IBM's very focused on security. Sure. Has a strong security background and I think there's definitely affirmation for what you're doing. I would also expect to see a lot of competition in this space. Have you seen it yet? Do you expect to see it? Talk about that a little bit. Well, we hope that many people adopt this type of security. We think it's critical and we think that it's not a one-trick pony, squirrel, security, plus the scalability and the advanced real-time analytics will give us a competitive advantage going forward. So we're eager to have many folks bring security in and take a serious look at it. We think that it takes a lot of dedication. It takes a certain amount of seriousness and secondly we think that it's not trivial to do it and talk is cheap in this area and we think that we have a good head start on that front. So you have a young CEO, very committed, passionate for what you're doing, knowledgeable. Talk about the next 100 days. I mean, what's the plan? What's the main 100, 200, whatever? Period you want to choose. What's the priorities? What's on Oren Falcovitz's to-do list in the near term? Sure, so first thing is that we're recruiting more top engineers and we're growing out the rest of our team, both at a senior leadership level as well as marketing and sales folks so we can get out there and meet with customers and solve their problems. And I think the second part of that is we're going to be delivering an early version of our product in January and then making that generally available in the early part of Q2 for 2013 already. So it should be pretty exciting. You're going to have a busy holiday season. Yeah, so we're busily working on that but bringing on more top people, grow the team and then start solving people's problems. Cambridge, Massachusetts, right? That's your office? That's right, yeah. All right, Cambridge, Massachusetts, not Boston, not, Dave, Cambridge is a little bit different so, Dave, what's it like in Cambridge? Well, is it, you know, there's a... Is there a vibe in Cambridge that's pulling on startups? I will tell you this, that the Boston area sort of went on the biotech track and it was attracting a lot of VC funding and I have to say, compared to Silicon Valley, it's been pretty quiet in Boston. No, just in general, right? And now I'm not saying that there's any kind of competition, why try to compete with Silicon Valley? It's a vortex. But I will tell you this, there's a lot of great action happening in big data in Boston. You know, you need a purpose as a region. Boston definitely can't compare to Silicon Valley. Yeah, it should try. In the big picture, but in big data, we said on theCUBE, big Boston's a lot of legacy systems guys going back to the 80s, you know, like Cal Berkley here in Silicon Valley, all the big data startups, you look at them. Systems backgrounds, networking guys, not the flashy, 2.0 company. Yeah, I mean, I'm a Boston transplant, right? I haven't been there for very long, but I'd say that I think that it's gonna compete well for two key reasons. One, academic institutions are the best in the world. You know, Harvard, MIT, and I think second is that when you can bring the types of technology and computer science that we're bringing together with the life sciences industry that's already strong, like you mentioned, Dave, you're gonna see some really interesting outcomes. And that's very unique and that's not existing, I think, on the West Coast. Yeah, and we're gonna be covering this. So in early November, it gives me a launch at the HackReduce event. We're gonna be there, we're gonna have the cameras and figure that out. So we're gonna cover these innovations. We gotta cover the East Coast, we gotta cover the West Coast with Silicon Angle. So go to Wikibon.org, check out the research. We've got a couple of pieces, actually, on Silicon Angle as well around this topic. The Acumulo Project Squirrel, very interesting trend. One that's gonna just become of increasing importance, especially as Hadoop gets more and more into the enterprise and starts going commercial grade. So, Oren, thanks very much for coming on the group. It's always great seeing you. I appreciate it, yeah. Can we be right back with our next guest after this short break? Here on SiliconAngle.com's theCUBE.