 Okay, we're back live inside theCUBE. This is siliconangle.com and siliconangle.tv's exclusive coverage of HP Discover 2012. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante to do an analysis on big data. John, it's great to be here with you. I mean, you got me into the whole big data trend. You know, years ago pulled me out of storage networking world. I want to thank you for that, by the way. And, you know, got me to Hadoop World. And it's, I think it's one of the best things that's ever happened in terms of just intellectually the great things that are happening and the curiosity that one has around big data. So I wanted to ask you about your take. You've seen the waves in the industry. You've seen the PC disruption and client server and internet. What's your take on big data? Is that the next wave? Oh, absolutely. I'm big on big data because big data represents a revolution in my mind. And one that's grounded in a lot of hype right now, but real, real value. This is a real valuable trend. This is one of those things they call, you know, in Silicon Valley, a thermal. It's a marketplace that's going to suck up massive amounts of growth. And I'll tell you why I think big data is so important. In my career, going back to when I was in college, the PC revolution hit the scene. And, you know, the PC changed everything. The PC changed computing and changed, and it created the computer industry as we know it. Bill Gates is just doing the startup, Steve Jobs startup. And look how far we've come. But what the PC represented there was a new paradigm of putting productivity in the hands of the user. And that changed everything. And, you know, you had spreadsheets and software and that created the software industry. So that created wealth, okay? And you've seen a lot of other ways. Client server, the internet with the worldwide web, social media with Facebook, Twitter, connections, people, you know, crowdsourcing. And then you got big data. Big data to me wraps everything up right now around cloud, mobile, and social. But big data is about wealth creation and changing the user experience. And if you look at all the changes in history in the computer business, it's always been fundamentally around the user experience. When a user experience changes to something new, and that creates new value, new features, new functionality, software, whatever it is, that creates new value. And that creates a new economics, which really drives wealth, wealth creation. That ecosystem of startups is just how it works. But big data has everything in place, Dave, for that. It has, it's really transformed every part of business and tech. And I believe big data will be an industry by itself. You know, the other thing about big data, John, that we've been batting around here on theCUBE the last several weeks is that the practitioners of big data, the companies out there that are implementing big data and figuring out how to monetize and extract value from data are going to create more value than the suppliers. We always talk, we love to talk in theCUBE about the next red hat of Hadoop and pontificate about what EMC or Hortonworks is doing in that world and Vertica and Green Plum. And the reality is, I think, John, that the productivity impacts of big data at the practitioner level, the corporations, the financial services companies, the manufacturers, the energy companies is going to create much more wealth than for the technology companies. And if you're an investor out there and you can find who's really actually using big data for their business, I think there's a lot of money to be made there. Yeah, I mean, I think that you're totally right. And here's how I see it there. I mean, it all comes down to opportunity, right? Whether you're an entrepreneur with opportunity recognition, whether you're a business creating more value and opportunity to your customers, you're going to make more money. But really it's about the user experience, like I said, the market changing and ultimately this opportunity. And big data gives that, all those elements are in play with big data because with big data it's changing incumbent positions. Leaders have to change because now we heard you can measure everything with the internet. So customer experience, user experience, value creation and ultimately economics. So I'm huge on big data and I got to tell you that the ratio of value creation is not just people selling big data solutions because the business opportunities are everywhere. You're seeing software creating applications for data centers, software creating applications for other environments. And data's being generated at a rate now that we've never seen before and it comes from applications, it comes from people and it comes from machines. So you got three types of data elements now. Machine data, human data and ultimately application data. And that's all flooding the marketplace publicly and privately within companies. And so to me it's an adapt or die situation which is why the fact that HP is talking about it here is a testament because HP's not a hype company. One thing I will give the HP credit for is that they don't hype things. When they get behind something, they believe it to be real, they're very technical and strong and they're even pumping up the big data message. So. So John, you and I were in Barcelona in 2010, the first year we started working together and we asked Dave Donatelli at that time, you know, what's your strategy on big data? And we were obviously very high on that at the time and his response was, well, you know, that's a different part of the company. That's really not my area of responsibility. Now today he would never give that response, right? The whole mindset around big data. It wasn't even on his radar screen. Right. That video we actually have on SiliconANGLE, if you find it, you'll actually look at him and he thought about it, it was not even on his radar. Yeah, and so that overnight, that's changed. So my specific question to you is, what's your take on HP in big data? Are they behind or is everybody behind? Do they have the right assets? What's your angle on that? I think HP is really behind, relative to just getting their act together. So, but going back to Donatelli's comment back in Barcelona in 2010, you know, he didn't look at it as a sellable product, right? You know, Donatelli is a great operator and he's great executive, right? And he runs billions and billions of dollars for HP via CEO anywhere else. So to him, it's just like, oh, if I can sell it, I understand it and it has value to a customer, I'll do it. At that time, big data was really growing up and it was more of an element. And he actually did some work that year and doing big data work within his ESN group. That being said, it's an industry now. So big data is everywhere within HP. So when they bought Vertica, that was a really good move to bring big data into as a product and potentially a product line. But then what happened when they bought Autonomy, it became a big data company. So HP right now is a big data company. They haven't said it directly, but they are and they will probably say it directly. They are a big data company. Because big data is about putting IT services in the hands of someone in Africa as we heard from HP Labs. IT services will be everywhere. Cloud computing will change the data center. Cloud computing will change the application landscape. Consumerization of IT will be there. So HP is a big data company. They just have to realize it and kind of get their act together and pull together. So yes, they're doing much better than they did, but they have a lot of work to do. So John, I want to talk about Vertica a little bit. You know that Wikibon, Jeff Kelly, Jeff Kelly's report on the big data market sizing. Five billion dollars today, growing to 50 billion dollars by 2015. And the number one big data pure play was Vertica, no. Jeff chose to keep Vertica and Green Plum and Aster and the teaser as pure plays because they hadn't been fully integrated into their parent companies yet. They're acquiring companies yet. Vertica was number one. So that we were encouraged very much around Vertica. At the same time, Green Plum we've sensed was struggling a little bit to figure out what that right business model was. They were sort of abbing and flowing. Remember they did their own Hadoop distribution and they were doing relationships with Hortonworks competitors and then one day or rather Cloudera competitors and the next day they were Cloudera friends and they've sort of balanced that out. Here's what we see though. Green Plum now seems to be doing very well. EMC has figured out how to integrate Green Plum into the core sales force and I don't think HP's done that with Vertica. Well here's what's going down with HP relative to Vertica. Vertica was bought under the watch of another CEO, okay? And then autonomy came in in the same wave of acquisitions. So there was inherent conflict between the two companies. In my mind, right? Well you have a startup that's growing rapidly and the appliance Hadoop world and then you have the old school I guess big data autonomy who just thinks they're the king of the hill. That's a little cultural issue. So I think Vertica's been sideways a little bit but in talking to Colin Mahoney here in theCUBE I saw your interview is that you've got Vertica 6 analytics platform now. Vertica's not doing poorly, okay? They may not have the best hype out there but they are doing well. They're not dying at all. So Vertica is solid. Vertica's solid. Go down. They've got solid performance. They've got solid solution. Vertica is one of the leaders. Let's face it. Vertica's one of the leaders. I'm high on Vertica. I love Vertica. I think they're really good. But the upside is to really bring Vertica through the HP sales channel. I mean I think that could be an enormous hit. Here's why Vertica's important. Vertica is important because they bring real time performance and massive scale into an IT environment. So I think that's a focus issue for them and combined with the HP sales channel Dave that is going to be massive. We heard that clearly at HP that Vertica will be a scalable solution. So that's what differentiates them from the competition. As we know we work a lot with Hadoop and H-Base and they're just now, Cloudera just announced CDH4 which brings high availability in MapReduce2 to the equation. Again, Apples and Orange. But very impressive set of announcements with a lot of rich functionality. We're starting to see really a flood of innovation coming out of Amarawa Dollar's team. Cloudera, I mean I'm not trying to compare the two because like Cloudera is leading and doing amazing work. And then they've got more people trained on Hadoop. That ecosystem is a completely different marketplace. Vertica has pivoted into a really great solution for large scale enterprises. So it's just different. I mean Vertica's not trying to compete with Cloudera. In fact, what I like about the marketplace is and we predicted this in theCUBE was these vendors that come into the big data world can't be throwing sand around in the sandbox meaning the ecosystem's just too early in developing at a very fragile rate and it's a core group of people that are driving that Hadoop community. So it's just too early to get in there and try to land grab. So that was been rejected. MapR, Vertica, you see people align natively with Hadoop and start contributing. We heard from HP here on all sides, both the cloud group and within Vertica that they're contributing to Hadoop. Well, and I have to say, I was always very impressed with Vertica. I met Colin Mahoney on a plane a couple years ago and he told me at the time, no, we already did a connector to Hadoop and with Cloudera, not with Cloudera on our own. Now most enterprise data warehousing companies went to Cloudera and Cloudera said, okay, we'll do a developer connector. We'll develop a connector with you. Vertica had already done that. So that shows me that they've got some foresight as well. Now Vertica's really, their vision is really driving into real time and they're doing things that you're seeing really these Hadoop startups doing. So Vertica is there and they're, you know, intending to compete very effectively, I think. Yeah, and I think you brought up the point about HP software, right? Having to get their act together. I think this is a great opportunity. The new COO, it comes from the software side of the business. And so you're, I think I like Meg Whitman's moves. We talked about her segment. We didn't really get into that there, but you mentioned HP has to get their, you know, really sharpen their focus on software. This is an amazing opportunity. They got all that legacy IP and good IP from autonomy. They paid a lot for it. There's excitement to bring that in. You got Vertica and HP software has a division that actually has great software for developers. So, you know, they bought Mercury Interactive. So you know that they got it, right? So, you know, they have to be a software company. Software is the key to commodity hardware. And if you're going to learn anything from Hadoop and what Cloudera has done and now Hortonworks is that you can put great software on commodity hardware and scale it. So, you know, I think it's an opportunity for HP to use this moment of big data to be the software company that they need to be. Should HP buy Cloudera? I think so. I think I talked to the folks here with an HP. They said it's too early because it's not clear that they're going to be the absolute winner and that's the right move for them. And I think HP doesn't intend to buy companies that they have to nurture a little bit. I think Cloudera is ripe to buy. I would buy Cloudera if I were. Where the foracle buys Cloudera? It's a smart buy. I personally would buy Cloudera. I was at HP, I would buy Cloudera for a billion dollars and I think the VCs would go for that deal. No one's told me that they'd go for that deal. But what would do for HP is that it would give them a leadership position instantly overnight at many levels. So, at a marketing level, at a product level. Open source software. Open source community, they're dabbling with OpenStack which I think is, it's okay, but I'm not falling out of my chair with OpenStack, right? So I haven't seen that. OpenStack doesn't impress me from an HP perspective. They're just too big to be meddling around an Open Source like that at that level. They should, of course it's good to be in there, but that's not the flag that I'd be waving around in the marketplace as a leadership. OpenStack is a great initiative, but it's one of many. You have MongoDB, you've got Cloudera with the dupes. So, there's a lot of things that they could do. And they got the dough to do it. So, acquisitions are going to be key to HP. All right, John, this is a good segment. We got a break. This is SiliconANGLE.tv's continuous coverage from HP Discover. We're live, we'll be right back. Keep it right there.