 This is SiliconANGLE, Wiggy Bond's exclusive coverage of HP's Vertica end user conference here. HP Big Data 2013 is the hashtag on Twitter. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract a signal from the noise, and we want to extract that and share that with you. Big Data is the hottest topic in the world, and there's a variety of new modern technologies coming out. HP is leading the way with Vertica, the acquisition they made over a year ago, and now, centerpiece of the HP turnaround, very sexy product, very relevant, and a lot of top end users here. A lot of practitioners, no press, no analysts, but we're here, extract that signal from the noise. Again, this is SiliconANGLE, and Wiggy Bond's exclusive coverage in Boston on the harbor front in Massachusetts. Boston is in the summer, it's beautiful here, and we're here to get the data for you. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, joining with my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of wiggybond.org. Hi, everybody. We're here live at the Western Waterfront Hotel. We heard keynotes this morning from Colin Mahoney, who's the GM of Vertica, a longtime Vertica employee, and we also heard from a panel of customers. What Mahoney stressed is really that this conference is not about Vertica, it's not about HP, it's really about how customers are actually using the technology to solve problems, so he really went into some depth about the roadmap of Vertica. It was founded by Professor Michael Stonebreaker, who was looking at the traditional database worlds. Of course, Stonebreaker's very famous in the world of database, knows it very well, and wanted to find a new way to attack some of the problems that at the time weren't called big data, but they forecast that data was coming. HP gave a stat in one of its videos, they talked about how from the beginning of the dawn of time to 2003, five exabytes of data were created. Now we create five exabytes of data every 12 hours. So Vertica was really formed to try to solve that problem, very data intensive, an architecture that can handle data intensive problems. So we heard from a number of Vertica customers and practitioners, really that's going to be the emphasis of this event. It's not a bunch of PR, it's not a bunch of media here, of course theCUBE is here, John, but it's really about the customers, their use cases and the stories, and we're going to be covering that wall to wall for two days here from Boston. You know, Dave, one of the things that, you know, we talk about big data, we've been covering it for years, you know, for the original Hadoop world, we've been there, we have Hadoop world coming up in Strato, it's trying to figure out if we're going to be there as well. Obviously, O'Reilly Media now took over Hadoop world, so we're going to try to get down there, it's now called Hadoop World Strato, we're going to try to be there as well. But Dave, I want to just share a perspective that I had and last night I'm talking to a lot of these folks here and there's some big name companies here, there's a couple confidential conversations, I was involved in them, unfortunately I can't break that because of the strict embargo that we're here, but you're going to hear some amazing news from HP Vertica, with some massive customer wins, you're going to hear about those. But one of the things that's really interesting about big data is, big data has become a category, it's become a concept, it's become a mandate for companies to look at their entire business and re-architect their entire business, but there's no other time in history that I can say there's an entrepreneur, this is an amazing time, because of the modern technologies of big data, underneath big data, there's a lot of new things happening. I wrote a post this morning about natural language learning that you think of Siri, you want to think of machine learning, algorithmic ways to use new ways of computer science in a modern era to reconstruct and rebuild value. And if you're a startup, these new computer science techniques and algorithms are available, if you're an existing business looking to re-architect, no better way to do that. And what this disrupts, Dave, is the data warehouse market, the business intelligence market. I talked to a guy who was an engineer at Netscape going back to the web, he's now got a company, it's called Looker.com, Lloyd, great CTO, he doesn't need to do another startup, but he's passionate about things because with the new architecture, the new converged software-led infrastructure, speed of access to data is no longer the bottleneck and so what that means is, the old way of doing things doesn't need to be done anymore. The systems and the BI tools and the data warehouse and capabilities are no longer needed, the tools that were available aren't needed because it's faster, you can get data really, really fast. So with solutions like Vertica, it makes a whole other software paradigm explode with value, and this value proposition is what people are talking about with big data. This enables Google-like querying into massive sets of data. We met with last night, the CTO of DDN, who's an XHP CTO in the Information Governance Group, John Luke-Shatlain and they showed a demo where they have a trillion rows of data and they get stuff back in less than a second. This kind of capability is a revolution and this is going to create a software paradigm at the application level, the BI, business intelligence level and the data warehousing that will create a massive explosion of innovation and Dave, that's the exciting thing about big data is the things underneath the covers, the new technology like natural language learning, machine learning, all kinds of new technologies being developed. So to me, that's what I'm looking at, what architectures, what use cases, what are customers doing, how are they deploying things like Vertica, what's the competition look like? These are the questions that we're going to dive into today and ask them, how are their POCs doing? What's in production? What specific solutions and technologies are they using to create that new value? Yeah, we're going to hear a lot this week about Haven, that's something that HP announced that around the Discover timeframe and they sort of been showing that to clients under the covers for a while and it's really their dupe play with autonomy and a number of other pieces of IP that HP has brought to the table. But again, the big emphasis here is on the customers and what they're doing, we're going to have Cerner on, we're going to look at some serious use cases there, we're going to look at some of what's going on in the gaming industry, of course Zynga is a big client of Vertica's and we're going to talk about the competition like we always do in theCUBE. We want to understand where HP wins, why it's winning, if it doesn't, why it doesn't win and we're going to unpack that here on theCUBE. One of the things that I would observe, John, is you mentioned HP bought Vertica quite some time ago for around $340 million and it took a while for HP or really Vertica to embrace the HP mothership, it's doing that now. We were talking to Colin Mahoney last night, he said what's good is that Meg Whitman actually allows Vertica to run as an autonomous business unit and really cultivate the innovation, but at the same time, and he talked about this today, leveraging the pieces of HP that they can, certainly the channel, the brand, the service and support, Colin joked people will return our phone calls now almost every time and that's what happens when a small company with great technology that doesn't have a huge sales channel, gets embedded into a large company like HP, whether it's HP or IBM or Oracle and you're starting to see that pay dividends and I think that by all accounts, Vertica's on quite a nice growth trajectory, of course they're not talking about that now, they're in a quiet period, but nonetheless John, I think that from a software standpoint, we're going to have George Kadifa on a little later. HP is a tale of two businesses, they've got the old legacy business, the stuff that's competing in the IT service management space, a lot of on premise stuff, they're trying to move to the cloud, they're competing with the likes of companies like ServiceNow where of course we've been covering here at Silicon Angle and Wikibon and they're on a rocket ship that is ServiceNow and so that business for HP is under pressure, it's in a transformation, at the same time you've got Vertica which is really a blank sheet of paper for HP, it really hasn't been big into the database business in its history and now it is with a massively parallel database called Vertica, it's a software base. The other thing that Colin Mahoney stressed is they really want to give options to customers, they want to be able to focus on, whether it's on premise or cloud or appliance or software only, whatever the deployment model is that you as a customer want, HP Vertica wants to be able to deliver that, it kind of reminds me of the discussions that we have John about the media business, however people want to consume whether it's blog or Wiki or video or data, you want to make that or social, you want to make that easy for them to consume. So they really focus on scaling out the company, scaling out the business model, innovating in the technology and making it easier for people to adopt and that's what we're really going to hear about today. Hey Dave, so I want to ask you, what's your perspective of the keynote? Obviously Colin Mahoney, who's a rising star here at HP, he was part of the Vertica acquisition, he's now leading the team, we have Chris Seeland who was a new hire from HP, former analyst, great guy, actually former SiliconANGLE contributor, super guy, knows the space, great marketer, he's new to the team, you have essentially a new channel manager here, I met with last night Debbie Berg, huge ecosystem developing around Vertica. What is your take? Is this viable? Does Vertica have the juice to make it happen? Do they have the capability? I'll see the winds at their back on the HP turnaround and they have a huge muscle with the HP installed base, but I want to get your perspective of their chances, what they have working for them and some of the customers, the quality of customers that you've seen. I've been very outspoken on this topic generally, I'll start at the high level and work down, I'm a top down thinker as you know, so HP is the sixth largest software company in the world, software is about 4% of HP's revenue, those metrics just aren't good enough in my opinion. HP as part of its transformation absolutely has to grow its software business and become more of a player in that software space and I think it can do that, so does Vertica have the juice? I think because of HP it does, we've talked to Meg Whitman about this extensively, I mean HP is focused like a laser in terms of paying down its debt, she's obviously fixing other problems, organizing the company in a way that's effective, but paying down the debt is a top priority and I personally talked to her about this as to when she will start making acquisitions, she said no big acquisitions or even smaller acquisitions unless they're really important tuck-ins until we pay down that debt. But I will tell you John, in the year, year and a half timeframe, I think HP is going to become a big acquirer of technologies, I think software's going to be a big target and I think they're going to surround, I think Vertica is a crown jewel of their software strategy. As I said, their legacy business is in transformation with things like Data Protector and the IT service management portfolios, the old Mercury Interactive business. Vertica to me is the growth engine of HP software business, it's a dupe, it's big data. Martin Fink who runs HP Labs has said that big data is the biggest tectonic shift the IT industry has ever seen. Perhaps he's right, but certainly I would think perhaps the most transformative for businesses. So HP is getting back in the game and the important piece about Vertica, John, to me is it allows HP to compete more effectively with the likes of IBM and Oracle and Teradata head on. So we're here live in Boston, this is theCUBE, we're here with HP Vertica, so HP's big data platform, a lot of customer activity here. Really we walked in yesterday, Dave, one of the things first thing I noticed was that a draw-dropping amount of real practitioners here. Guys, not token customers or users, like real people, I mean the level of conversations we had last night were significant. This wasn't, hey, I'm bolting on some big data to some leg-lead systems. These were people who were in the trenches doing some really kick-ass work, looking at really transforming their infrastructure, looking at ways of saying, hey, I'm going to transform BI into some old fenced-out organization, bad user interface into a dynamic value proposition for analysts, for users, for anyone that doesn't have to be techie. Then we heard some folks talking about how they're actually coding data models at a new level that we've never seen before. That is dynamic and agile. So again, this is what big data is, and again, one of the things that I am personally excited about is I wrote a post in 2007 or 2008, I forget which year, where I kind of said, hey, data's the new development environment, data's the new development kit, and that is totally true. You see in companies like Zynga that uses Vertica. People are using data in a programmatic way, not looking at it as just a sunk asset or pool of data. They're looking at data as something that's alive and manageable and programmable, and the software coding that's going into these systems is actually going to change the game. So the shift of the DBA is going to be the new big data guy is not happening. You're going to see programming, data modeling, data science, that's going to be programmatic and computer science oriented, and then you're going to see some data science that's more analyst and user-focused. So I think this notion that a DBA will be the steward of big data, I think will not happen, and that's kind of my prediction going forward, that you're going to see that trend not happen. So it's a whole focus on the DBA, I don't think it's going to happen. All right, John, well listen, Colin Mahoney's coming up next. We are going to be covering the HP Vertica users conference wall to wall, pretty much all day today and three quarters of a day tomorrow. So Colin Mahoney's coming out today. We've got a number of their partners coming up. We've got Bruce Yen of Guess, who's a practitioner in this space. We've got folks coming up from Cerner. We're going to be talking healthcare, the impact of electronic medical records and different types of data. So we got it all covered. Okay, we'll be back. We're going to take a break and we're going to have Colin Mahoney come on. He's the leader of the troops here at Vertica. And again, Vertica and Ubalt on Autonomy, which is a separate group underneath it. A lot of integration with an HP, a lot of exciting stuff and we're going to be here reporting it for you. Here in the cube, this is Silicon Angle and Wikibon's exclusive coverage of HP Big Data 2013, the Vertica Usage Conference. On Twitter, use the hashtag HP Big Data 2013. We're watching that. If you have any questions, ping us. We try to pull off a crowd chat. So check out crowdchat.net. We might do one after the event. We're going to maybe poll the town hall meeting and have a discussion around what we heard today. So keep watching, go to SiliconAngle.com for the latest reference point of tech innovation and go to wikibon.org for all the free research. We'll be right back after this short break.