 This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Big Data NYC where we will be breaking down all the analysis of the show here at Strata Conference, Hadoop World, and Big Data NYC. And we want to have a shout out right now to the two key sponsors to make theCUBE happen here because the top story here is to sell out at O'Reilly Media across the street. Hilton is sold out. They have sold out everything inside the show. It's packed. We are here across the street at the war work and we would not be here live bringing you our independent open source coverage of Hadoop World and Big Data NYC. It wasn't for Hortonworks and it wasn't for Wendisco. Those two guys, thanks for you guys for supporting us. I'm here joined with Dave Vellante, my co-host for the week. Dave, welcome back to New York City. We're back again, fourth consecutive year for Hadoop World. Thank you, John. It's a pleasure to be here. I remember the first one that we did in 2010. You pulled me out of a miserable conference in Dallas and got me into Hadoop World. That really started sort of opened my eyes to the Big Data world. And you know, John, back in 2010, it was what is this thing called Hadoop? I remember I was leaving that conference, traditional sort of old enterprise tech conference and everybody was saying, what's Hadoop? What is that? What is that one person out of the 30 people that I told, said, you know, you're lucky you're going to Hadoop World. And we've seen a migration really from what is Hadoop to how can I utilize it? How can I take advantage of it? Now we're sort of entering the phase of how do I get more business value out of Hadoop? You know, we look at the surveys from the Wikibon community and they're not getting as much value as they could. Well, we're here live in New York City and again, we're excited. It's the fourth year this market of Big Data started out as Hadoop. No one's ever heard of it. We were there, President at Creation. It's grown up, it's big, it's mainstream. I mean, you have other blogs now doing events around Big Data. Everyone's doing things with Big Data. But Dave, there's two types of companies. There's creators and the commoditizers. And we've been following this traction of Big Data from the technology side to the business side. And there are platforms that are out there. There's decisions to be made by business users about who to buy and ultimately create value. So that's going to be the topic here. I also want to bring in Jeff Kelly who will be co-hosting with Jeff. He's going to be coming in and out throughout the event. Is the Big Data Analyst at Wikibon. Jeff, welcome to theCUBE. John, thanks for having me. So you're going to be out scouting the landscape. I know you're going down to the NYC Hall for an event tonight. Talking about some Big Data there to find out what's going on with Pivotal. Pivotal again, the spin out from VMware is having a big event down there. Pivotal doing very, very well, building on all their momentum around Green Plum. Really trying to figure out the software side of the equation. There's a lot of things they're working on. So hopefully we'll hear some news that may be getting their toe in the water with Big Data from Pivotal. So I want to find out what's going on there. What else are you finding to show here? Sure, there's going to be a lot of news as there always is at Strata Hadoop World. Seems like every company who's got Big Data in its purview drops some news, big and small at this event. So there's just going to be a lot of noise happening. And part of our job here is to help cut through that noise and bring in the signal and really drill down into some of the important areas. And I think one important area, as always, being Hadoop World is all about Hadoop as a platform. I think we're going to talk about where it stands in terms of the technology, in terms of enterprise readiness, in terms of making it accessible to a wider range of users. Of course, the horse is on the track. We're also going to talk about the different players in the market. Hortonworks, Cloudera, Platfora, as you mentioned, MapR and others. And of course, there's also a lot of talk at this conference around making business analytics, advanced analytics available and more accessible to regular business users. So we're going to see a number of news releases around that and we're going to kind of break that down for you and really tell you where that, is it real yet? Analytics for all, as we're calling it. Well, we're here excited to be here again. The big story here across the street at the Hilton is it's a sell out, O'Reilly has sold out again. They're doing very, very well with this conference, monetizing it very, very well from their standpoint, Dave. But we are here for the fourth year and one of the themes is the Freedom Tower and our logo for the big data NYC because Open Source is about, not about free, it's about freedom and we're really passionate to be covering it. And again, the world is really exploding. The developers and technology, just from four years ago, with Doug Cutting, with Cloudera, hence Hortonworks, that's the equation that way and disco and a bunch of other companies has created business value and that's attracted a lot more startups, a lot more developers and VCs. So we're gonna hear a lot this week, Dave, about startups being funded. We're gonna hear from folks like ClearStory where they're gonna make their announcement kind of I think two years later. And also the other big story is the evolution and the transformation of Cloudera where Cloudera is changing their colors again. They're gonna hear some announcements from them. We were pre-brief, we kind of know it's coming down but you're gonna start to see Cloudera going after a different market space. I don't know why I say I call it a pivot but GigaOm ran a story this week that kind of talked about some of the telegraph messaging we're seeing from Cloudera which is essentially saying that Hadoop and others aren't competitors. So that tells me that it looks like they're pivoting out of the Apache space. Pivotal is, so it's a little bit of a pivoting. So they're pivoting to a straight line into the Pivotal, the EMC. So we have a lot of the data around this. So I want to really drill down on Cloudera on that because in a way that GigaOm article is intimating that they don't look at Horton versus competitor. If that's the case, then Hortonworks is the number one open source pure Apache if that's the case. I mean, what are you taking? Well, so here's the thing, John. As you well know, there was these sort of what I sometimes call urinary Olympics between Hortonworks and Cloudera and obviously MAPR as well. Sort of fighting over who has the biggest contributions to open source. Sort of the Hortonworks came out of the Woodworks said we've got the most contributions and most committers. MAPR was doing its thing. So the question is this, John. Did Cloudera essentially tap out of that battle? Say, hey, that's a race to zero. You know, we want to go compete with others. The likes of Pivotal. So that's sort of an interesting theme. I don't know, Jeff Kelly, what you think about it. But I would say that Hortonworks or rather Cloudera is really trying to take the high road here in terms of saying we're not participating in that sort of Hadoop distribution business. We're going after the high margin stuff. We're going to go compete against essentially EMC and VMware. Right, well, is it them taking the high road or is it more of a marketing strategy to get them in the conversation with the likes of IBM and Pivotal? If you look at the capabilities of an IBM, I mean, Cloudera's done a lot of great work in Hadoop, but they're nowhere near what IBM can offer in terms of a comprehensive big data platform. Platform is a little, excuse me, Pivotal's a little different story. They're still kind of a group of different technologies, different companies that are still bringing it together. If they can bring that all together, they're going to have a pretty interesting platform also. I mean, they made some interesting announcements around Gemfire and some other things this week. So if they're able to actually execute on this and actually compete with those two, that'd be something because right now, it seems to me, those two players you mentioned, Pivotal and IBM, certainly have a lot more of the pieces anyway. So it seems, John, we got a case of a new CEO coming in at Cloudera with a lot of new messaging. Yeah, I mean, well, first of all, he's from HP, so we have to weigh that, what his role at HP was. But from the people I talked to, I talked with Mike Olson in depth, and Mike is very optimistic that the folks at Cloudera are very excited about this new CEO, Dave. He's got the suit mentality of building a company so that he's going to continue to transform Cloudera on their path to all their ultimate destination, which is an IPO. That's the goal, right? It's been talked about kind of in the back channels around IPO is the goal. But the markets changed a lot from our original conversation with Pat Gelsinger at EMC World four years ago where you asked him, will there be a red hat for Hadoop? He said, what was his advice Pete and Mike Olson of the CEO of Cloudera? And he said, find your center point. And so since then, if you'd noticed, Cloudera's center point has always shifted a little bit. Impala, so they almost felt like they were groping for a position to get that burst into success and have an innovation strategy and a growth strategy that was coherent and relevant. So I think since that EMC entering the market, you've seen Cloudera get their focus. I think now you're seeing Cloudera kind of bear down and the folks I'm talking to close to the company all agree and talk that it's not the same Cloudera it was when they were a small startup, they're getting their grit and grown up, they're going to find their center point. And I think what we're going to hear from Cloudera here, Dave, is they're going to look and control their own narrative and they're going to focus on their own mission. So it's going to be interesting to see if that's going to be a pivot towards Pivotal and IBM and the data warehousing market, or are they going to come in and try to win the Apache? You really can't do bulls. So I'm going to be curious to see both. Essentially, I think what Pat Gelsinger was saying at that time was we're not going to let a red hat run for a decade and run loose and get a $10 billion valuation. We're going to get a piece of that action. So I think that the fact that three years later now Cloudera's realizing that Pivotal is the real competition is probably apropos. Right, I think it's interesting because we talk to Hortonworks. They're all about, as they say in their slogan, all about Hadoop. We do Hadoop and that's what they do and that's all they're interested in doing. When you talk to Cloudera, they're clearly trying to move much higher up the stack. I mean, if they want to compete with an IBM around big data and analytics, you're going to have to start getting applications, analytic environments for data scientists, those kind of things. So that's a very different strategy than what we're seeing from Hortonworks, which is laser focused on Hadoop, Patrick Hadoop. So again, it'll be interesting to see. It's a longer term play and it'll be interesting to see if they can pull it off. So Dave, I want to get your perspective. I want to talk about the event here. The big data NYC is our Silicon Angle Wikibon produced event around the cube. We're going to have a party here. So the folks watching Tuesday, if you're in Manhattan, swing by the war, we're going to have a party on Tuesday night. Happy hour six to eight. We have special commemorative shot glasses with the cube logo on there. First time we've ever had commemorative gifts at an event. So since we're having our own event, Dave, this is our own big data NYC, we're going to have commemorative gifts for everyone who attends. This is really designed for cube alumnus, thought leaders, CIOs. Again, everything about the cube event here is all open source, all the proceeds we've received from our sponsors and underwriters are going right back into the event and the production for more great content and analysis. But our goal is to one, get the signal here in New York City what's going on with big data in all industries that are here, pharma, financial, two core industries here, and media and entertainment, but also dissect strata conference. I mean, the strata conference has evolved and morphed from kind of an interesting conference to partnering with Cloudera to a full on commercialization sell out, if you will, Dave. They've sold out everything and they've made a lot of monetization and congratulations for them. I'm really happy for them. But there's still that hype factor going on and what we want to do is understand which company's going to make it, where is the signal from the noise, a lot of announcements from startups, a lot of VCs promoting their portfolio companies, a lot of people putting that out there that they're the bridge to the future. And it comes down to, does the technology match the market requirements for the people buying Dave? So I want to get your perspective, CIO perspective, a buyer, what are they looking for? So I think that from, first of all, let me just say it really is a pleasure to be here, John. I love when you talk about the freedom tower. You go to the Wikibon blog, you'll see Jeff Kelly wrote a preview to this event, Big Data NYC and StrataConf in Hadoop World. Go to siliconangle.com slash Big Data NYC. You'll read about all the stuff that we got going this week and the freedom tower itself, John, freedom not just free like open source is free, but freedom to do with the technology and the code, what you see fit. That is a theme that I think is, you know, resonates very well. Now you asked about CIOs. I think that from a CIO perspective, I think most CIOs are still very risk averse. They would prefer, by our research, to risk lock-in to get function. So the open source world, which is the big wild card here, has to bake over time. It could take a decade, you know? Who knows, maybe even longer to really replicate the functionality that exists in more proprietary code, what Cloud Era calls sort of open core and then proprietary on top of that. They don't use that word versus, say for instance, we've been talking about the Hortonworks approach, which is really open source everything. And of course, MapR as well really started the whole proprietary thing. So you're actually seeing, I would say, John, you said they're not really pivoting. They really are pivoting, right? They really are pivoting, in my view, to much more of a integrated stack approach. So the CIO, which is, by the way, not a bad move because the CIO, as they say, is risk averse, looking potentially for more function and risking lock-in. Only about 10 to 15% of the practitioners that we talked to in the Wikibon community are dogmatic about open source. Now, this is where open source becomes such a wildcard. If you look at the way Linux, really disrupted Microsoft's franchise, look at what Canonical is doing with regard to Red Hat. And I really think that the Hortonworks strategy is going to be very, very disruptive. It's extremely hard to predict, John, what's going to happen. But I think that open source is this lever that can move huge boulders. So guys, we're going to have to get a break here, but Dave, we'll be jumping into all the analysis. Companies like Pivotal, companies like EMC, companies like HP, all here, big companies. Really, it's a developer tech conference meets business value. I think that's been the confluence of Strata and Hadoop World. And of course, it's a startup thing. Companies I'm watching are obviously, you know, Cloudera, Hortonworks, WAN, Disco, Aerospy, Cognitio, Pivotal, Platforma, HP, Splunk, Microsoft, MAPR, Revolution Analytics, Clear Stories, Announcements, and a company, Gnip, we're going to try to get those guys on. We've worked with those guys on the data, social data, want to weave them into the conversation, because a lot of the Twitter data has been part of the big data NYC discussion for some time from the financial markets, whether it's hedge funds, getting predictive analytics, among other companies here. I'll say that the backdrop on all of this is that on the eve of Apple's earnings, you're seeing business value at the front of the conversation again. But we've said that every year, but more importantly, this year, I think you're going to see the winners separate from the losers on the technology side, Dave. I really want to watch that. So on this event, we will be dissecting and reading and squinting through all the noise at the Stratoconference this year. And we will try to find out who the winners are going to be on the technology side and that business value. So this is theCUBE live from New York City. We are at the Warwick Hotel, literally less than a New York minute across the street from the Hilton behind us in New York City. We're going to be dissecting the Stratoconference as well, all activity in New York City. We'll be right back with our next guest. This is our opening evening Monday night preview of Stratoconference, Hadoop World, big data NYC. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante and Jeff Kelley. Be right back.