 Live from Dublin, Ireland, it's theCUBE, covering Hadoop Summit Europe 2016, brought to you by Hortonworks. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Inside theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Good. Hey John, thank you very much. So Ron Botkin is here, he's the president of Think Big Analytics. Ron, welcome back to theCUBE. It was good to see you again. Last time we saw you was in New York City last fall. Thanks Dave, it's great to be back. So here we are in Dublin, you know, another Hadoop Summit. What do you think of the show? Well, it's just awesome to see, you know, so many people here in Europe, serious about Hadoop and the ecosystem around it. You know, it's grown up a lot very quickly. So, you know, we're always talking about theCUBE, but Hadoop's now entered adolescence and you know, it's kind of growing up a little bit. You remember the early days, everybody said, well, we have to bring enterprise capabilities to Hadoop. Hey, everybody was talking about that. It seems to have happened, right? You had the big guys sort of jumped in, the guys who were here from the beginning, innovated and they sort of met in the middle. So where are we today in terms of Hadoop, enterprise readiness? Yeah, I mean, certainly we see many of our customers are, you know, in production at scale and you know, moving from kind of the initial use cases to getting more analytics value, more real time, you know, more ability to do large scale proactive analytics of new kinds as well as, you know, some of their initial use cases that maybe were more batch and, you know, cost optimization. So the capabilities have come a long way. At the same time, you can see rapid innovation, right? This whole concept of continuous applications that involve, you know, working with data in real time, incredibly important, whether it's for internet of things or consumer behavior data. So we should set the context for the audience. I mean, Think Big Analytics is a service oriented organization helping people, you know, consult and advise and actually get to the point of implementing their big data solutions. You guys are, you know, we're early on in that space acquired by Teradata a year ago. A little over a year ago, yeah. A little over a year ago have allowed you to sort of keep the brand and, you know, one of their sort of little jewels, Think Big, is tip of the spear. I always call it. Johanna and I talk about that all the time. How has that integration gone? How has it affected, how has it affected the Think Business, big business and how has it affected the Teradata business? That was a good question. So definitely, you know, just to make sure people know the services we offer, we help people not only in planning and architecture, but right through partnering on the engineering implementation, data science analytics and then even managed services, right? So, you know, one of the things- Planning, design, implementation and management. The whole PDIM cycle. We pride ourselves in being able to be long term partners with our customers to help them continue to get value out of big data. And, you know, one of the big things that was important for me and us deciding to join Teradata was that they saw it as strategic to have us continue to be independent consultants, not just a separate brand, but, you know, a focus on consulting and helping customers pick the best technology, right? So we're not incented to sell Teradata products and where we have many of our customers continue to not be Teradata customers, right? So we're working with innovators, maybe using other databases, maybe having more of an open source strategy from the get go around their data. So we work across that whole range. You know, so for us, the- And that's not changed. That's not changed. You still got Oracle customers. That's right, we still have Oracle customers and Redshift customers and everything in between, right? So, you know, we, so for us, it's been great because, you know, we've got now the backing of a global public corporation that lets us do things like we're expanding rapidly here in Europe. You know, we have the benefit of all the infrastructure and great teams, great relations with customers. You know, Teradata is the nice guys in the industry, right, they take care of their customers and they have great relations with their customers. I mean, their customers are always telling them they want to pay less, but I guess everyone does, it tells commercial vendors that these days, don't they? So, you know, they've got these great relations because they take care of their customers and we get the chance to come in and help them with the whole ecosystem, right? Go deep and, you know, as you say, tip of the spear, how do you put the whole thing together in dry value? So that's valuable to Teradata because it lets them play an important role across the whole ecosystem and their depths of experience around data management and ours and around the open source environment really come together in a powerful way, right? There's a lot of lessons, right? I mean, we're busy, I'm very active right now in driving to have more integration with architects between the Teradata for some of the best of the best in Teradata and Think Big to really cross-pollinate some of the best ideas, right? I mean, so that you really have the benefit of the best thinking and data management from both worlds, which I think is super important in the enterprise. So that's real valuable to Teradata, that's real valuable to us, that partnership. Right? We're on at Big Data Week in Silicon Valley, which is Big Data Week is our event, Big Data SV in Strata, Hadoop, more commercial event going on. We talked to you guys and was very clear that this year is the year of the cloud where everything kind of fits into place from a Lego block standpoint. Data warehouse, business intelligence, tweaks, monetization, I mean modernization where you can have emerging tech, AKA Hadoop and other stuff, plugged into pre-existing and or retooled or replatformed data warehousing, which you guys were talking about. So it's not a mutually exclusive, that's very clear. But the thing that we saw was the power of the cloud and how that's accelerating that. So what's your take on that? Cause you've seen the insights early on in your company. And it's always been kind of like that out of reach and people touch it and they're in a vertical, they get lucky or they step on it or they bump into it or they have expertise and they can go in and do some great insights. But the operationalizing and the mainstream wasn't getting there fast enough. But now it seems cloud is driving that heavily. Share your thoughts on what you're seeing. Do you agree with that statement? Do you see other things, other forces? So certainly, we started a company almost six years ago and six years ago startups were doing things in cloud and the enterprise, what we would see often in the early years would be enterprises would get started, do something in the cloud cause it was so compelling to get up and move quickly. And then the antibodies would come out and stop it. I mean, one of our big customers early on, we were working with them on Amazon web services and the business unit wanted us to take the application and put it live on Amazon. But then the internal IT department competed for the business and came up with a pricing that was, there was no way that they were charging for it. They just did not want to have this competition to their own services, right? So. They didn't want to give up the footprint. That's right. They wanted to control this thing, right? So early days we saw a lot more of that. Nowadays we're seeing a lot more progressive enterprises really going cloud. And it's not a surprise that in this newer space around big data, around these new technologies that people are leaning in on cloud because it tends to be net new. There's a lot that has to get done, right? But I'm impressed, you know, talking to a lot of CIOs. The timing's much different now, right, than it was. I mean, you guys were, I mean, I mean, we've all done starts where we've been early. But the timing's critical. You got there early and you had a good exit. But the thing is, is that, that antibody effect around the whole shadow IT scared, kind of held things back. But now with cloud, more resources are available. You run compute at things. You have in memory. There's a lot more stuff going on to make things. That's right. It's matured a lot. Adoption is mindset. I really think the biggest thing is mindset. That instead of the mindset being like a few years ago that cloud was insecure and you couldn't do it, now the mindset is that it's got a lot of advantages. And so with that mindset change, the other thing that's happened is, at CIO Summit a couple months ago and all the CIOs I was talking to, one of the big themes was how much Amazon has done to become certified and compliant in regulatory industries. So they're taking it really seriously to things like PCI compliance, right, in the financial industry. And that makes a big difference, right? And GovCloud too, they've done well. Yeah, GovCloud was a huge one a couple of years ago, right? Well, it's interesting, because your timing actually was quite good. You coming out of the downturn, and remember during the downturn, a lot of CFOs said, all right, shift everything from CapEx to OpEx. So that was the move. And then coming out, the business lines had this pent up demand for projects, and they had more cash. So they were sort of racing to the cloud without a lot of consideration for governance and security and compliance. And that was sort of a backlash to Amazon. And Amazon, you're right, has stepped up in a big way. And that's just made the market more resilient and overall better. So, okay, so now we're here in 2016. What's the next five years look like for Think Big? Well, I think we're going to continue to move quickly to, we see a lot more emphasis from customers on getting the data organized then really enables all these new analytics on new data sets, internet of things, which could be manufacturing yields or real time connected products, whether it's business to business, or whether it's healthcare, whether it'd be really more deeply understanding the consumer and driving a personalized experience with the consumer. All of those are going to be critical. I think those capabilities to use data analytics are going to become critical elements of competition in many industries. Like I think Andreessen Horowitz is right when they talk about the industrialist dilemma that these industrial companies that for the longest time had a big moat, it was very hard to compete against them. So they didn't have to be as nimble and adaptable. That's going away. Having the digitization is changing those industries and it means data analytics is not an option. So we're going to continue to be out there helping customers but driving much more advanced outcomes and help them compete successfully to be the winners in this new digital world. So you hear a lot about IoT. Obviously there's the next wave of ROI potentially and we agree with the sort of Andreessen scenario. It's all, the digitization completely breaks down those industry silos and allows all kinds of disruption. Having said that, what's the bell curve look like? Is a lot of companies still struggle with ROI beyond reducing the cost of storing data? So what's your sort of scenario on sort of plain vanilla dupe giving back ROI? Beyond let's say fraud detection and ad tech and some of the standard things that we always talk about. Yeah, well what we see is that there's huge returns when you get to where you're really starting to use the data and drive the analytics. So there are cases where you have very clear metrics, things like better models for interactive customers. Some of the things that are also easy are like, well we can measure better sales. Some of the deeper things are like, we're working with global high tech manufacturer and we have helped change the way they do engineering using big data. So they have a deeper understanding of the science of their product. They're able to get products to market faster. They're able to drive up quality. If you're developing a product with a two year product life cycle and you get it to market one month faster, that's huge value. However, what you find is any of these upside scenarios where you're driving better revenue or profitability, there's usually many variables that go in. So the expression that I like to say for that is an old one, success has 1,000 fathers and failure is an orphan. So anytime you're going to use data and analytics to drive benefit in the business, there's going to be a lot of other things that came together to make that happen. And so the best way to do it is to, again, you have this partnership where the business owns this solution. They're responsible for the success and they realize that this is a capability it must have in order to make it work. So that's where we've had a lot of success with customers where the initiative one and big data was a key part of enabling it and we're not debating how much of it was this versus the process change versus hiring the right skill set. All of those things came together and they're all important as part of succeeding. But there was a big schism between the way in which, for instance, and I liked your description of the business owning it, but there was a schism between the way in which IT defines success and the way in which business defines its IT is, hey, it worked in the business, like, well, I'm not really not sure what I'm getting. Are you saying that's changing quite dramatically because those two are coming together as an alignment? There is, right? So I think when you talked about this challenge of people going out in the cloud and sort of running wild, right? There's this balance of, you want to have a happy medium in so many of these things with governance. You want to have enough governance that you kind of have confidence. You've got complete data and you want to have some consistency and not chaos, right? So you need- Just enough, but not too much. Just enough, but not too much. You don't want to have heavyweight processes where nothing gets done and neither do you want to have chaos going on, right? So I think a lot of times what I've noticed is there's a lot of places like so many marketing organizations have flavor of the month. They have so many little siloed products that they use, each of them with their own little analytics piece that it's overwhelming. It's like the value of integrated data and consistent analytic approaches is being lost, right? And so a lot of times the IT organization, the information management people have a perspective on having some commonality, right? Its agile is about moving quickly but then harvesting and building commonality after you've proven value. And that's very different than chaos, which is just keep doing it, never clean it up. And it's very different than waterfall where you have to plan everything out before you take a step, right? So the future is going to be agile, which has to be a partnership. Whether it sits in IT or whether it sits in the business, you've got to have technology teams that keep, you know, minimize the debt and make things better over time but are tied to the business working closely as a partner for success. I got to ask you the security question I've been asking all the smart people today. So security's changed a lot. You were talking earlier about how, you know, cloud security is now perceived as, you know, kind of world-class, even though perhaps it always was but they're filling in some of the holes. How should CIOs be conversing to their boards about security? There seems to be more of a recognition that there's exposure, that they're going to get, you know, penetrated. How should a CIO communicate to the board? What's your advice to CIOs? Well, you know, fundamentally, the security conversation in a modern corporation has to be one about risks and trade-off, right? That nothing is perfectly secure. Security is about knowing your risks and weighing the business impact and making rational choices about what you're going to do, right? So that should be- And determining how much you should spend to mitigate that risk. That's right, that's the point, right? You decide, you know, where do you put your bets? How do you address those risks? And, you know, the board conversation has to be at the level of, you know, some of the top order questions around the impact of the business and, you know, frankly, the commitment to make investments, to avoid certain risks, right? But it should be at that level of transparency and there's also the notion that you're never done, right? The security, there's adversaries out there, so you've got to constantly be upping your game, constantly going back and testing, constantly responding, right? I mean, the recent example of, I think it was Home Depot that had hackers penetrate their systems and they got a lot of credit because they had already identified vulnerabilities were exploited and were in a process of closing them out, right? So they were following the right process of proactively addressing the issue. You're not going to always fix everything in time, but by being proactive and on top of it, that's a best practice. You're talking about a response plan, right? So it's transparency to the board, it's a framework to actually quantify the exposure of how frequent, how bad, what's going to cost, et cetera, and then how to respond to it. That's right. So you're being proactive and identifying the problems to begin with, right? So you're constantly questioning, are we following best practice, do we need to up our game, and how we operate? So that's a continuous proven factor, which, because the bad guys keep getting bad, it's like the old radar detectors. Remember we used to have radar detectors and then they'd be obsolete the next year, you'd have to buy another one because the cops had better radar detectors? Sort of, it's a lot more risky though these days just getting a ticket. Well speaking of radar, what's on your radar now because you have seen the early days, you've seen the trajectory, and there's still new people coming into the game you saw on stage today during the keynote, Herb asked people to raise their hands, and it's still a lot, 25% of the people knew to Hadoop, knew the ecosystem, guns blaring, come on in, jump in the deep end, welcome to the party, what do you say to them? Let me hear those folks watching. I think for them the great news is there's so much good technology that with the right services help from a company like ours and specialists, you can get a lot done quickly. I mean, unfortunately we're seeing though, the other side which is a lot of times companies go out and hire the large SIs and they get people that have no real expertise, they've just taken some training and literally I was talking to a customer who's complaining that they had to kick out a bunch of Accenture people who were sitting there googling every time they asked them for help in their Hadoop cluster, they had like 25 people on site googling the answers right in front of the customer because they had no idea what they were doing. Oh, that's bad. That's good, well it's good to show you the state of the industry, to that point though, now you've walked in your shoes as an entrepreneur, get the scar tissue to prove it, a lot of the folks who have been here for 10 years have seen this journey and they're veterans, I guess it's dog years or how we want to call it, it's maturing, you mentioned, what's your advice for folks out there right now? I mean, you've seen the ups and downs, certainly a lot's happening faster, there's more money in the tables, the reality's hit in the road, rubber's hit in the road, what's your advice for folks? I think there's a lot of capability, the places where innovation is happening is out in that continuous application space around more real time, there's a lot of maturing, you're seeing a lot of coalescing around engines like Spark as a compute framework with a lot of real desirable properties, so there's a lot more capability in other place, we're seeing a lot of innovation is around improving tools for governance and security and data management, so the bar is raising, but you're continuing to see, as in so many open source ecosystems, rapid pace of evolution, so you're not going to see a slow down in the next Apache flink and Kafka streams and you're just going to keep seeing innovative new things come out. There's early stuff going on, new projects, but there's also no maturity, I got to ask you the question about the antibodies, your comment about the cloud and how exciting that was during that Amazon stage of the past, they're 10 years, I mean they're celebrating their 10 year anniversary, so I remember how much fun that was, certainly the past five years, it's been great too, we were able to go by five years ago, you mentioned antibodies, when you get something in the cloud, you stand it up, DevOps, it's really easy to get something going, then startups could actually go in and win some business, then the antibodies come in, so, but now we're seeing integration, I want to give you thoughts on integration, because integrations are the new antibodies that are in place now, which is, okay, go out and do some stuff, we'll let you play around in the cloud, but now the table stakes to engage in enterprise has integration bar, you mentioned Amazon's facilitating with their PCI compliance and other enterprise grade, what is that bar now? I mean, because we're hearing that buzz all through the show, Pat here, and back in Silicon Valley and throughout the industry, integration is the new lock-in, where in the 90s, you couldn't even go to an enterprise, it was to where mega-funded, full-stack, now it's the integration. Yeah, so I think you're always going to have different axes, right? There's tons of value in bringing integrated services and capabilities and customers buy it for a reason, because it really helps them achieve results, right? That's why you have Hadoop distributions and people don't get 25 independent components and cobble them together themselves, right? So there's a lot of value in integration, there's the same in cloud, right? I mean, when you look at, I'm just always blown away when I go to the Amazon Web Services console now and it's like the whole page of services when it used to be like three or four now. It's monstrous, monstrous. And re-invents coming up, they have a slew more. Oh, it's just going to be 200 more. Absolutely. But the bar, do you see the bar though higher on integration than it was? Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, high in certainly the sense that there's more value. I'd say that customers generally are more wary of using things that generate lock-in, right? That there's an awareness of that phenomenon, but there's still cases where convenience and speed to market wins and people are willing to take the hit. I think that the biggest place people care most about not being locked in is around the long-lived things. So data storage lasts a long time. Data formats and storage is a lot harder to move around whereas applications can be rebuilt with, many applications are not so complicated to rebuild. So obviously, like if you have a banking system, you really don't want to take a lot of risk in that. So re-writing something like that's a lot more complicated. All right, Ron, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Getting down to day one. Live coverage is great to see you again. Thanks for sharing your insights. Well, thank you. All right, we are live here on the side of theCUBE, here in Ireland in Dublin. We'll be back with more live coverage after this short break.