 Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante. This is theCUBE, where we extract the signal from the noise, we bring you the smartest guests that we can find. We're here at the HackReduce launch in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And we're here with Eli Kahn of Squirrel, a company that we've been tracking, cell level security, taking a big table, really to new scales, bringing new capabilities to the big data world. Eli, welcome back to theCUBE. Yeah, happy to be here. Just flew in from Virginia, so a little bit late, but excited to see this awesome crowd here tonight. So did you miss the governor? Unfortunately, but I was following him on Twitter, so it sounded like the speech went well. Yeah, so he was saying, he's very non-partisan at the big data conference, but he was very happy about last Tuesday. What's the mood like down in Virginia? You know, the DoD's pretty apolitical, they have to be, but personally I'm excited, having worked in the White House, the Obama White House, so glad to see another four years there. So well, I said to Governor Patrick, it was a super Tuesday in many respects for him, so he was very happy, but he was here putting his support behind HackReduce and big data. What do you think that means to the industry and to the region? Yeah, so I think Boston has an amazing opportunity right now to establish itself as the premier region for big data, and us at Squirrel, we're trying to become the next big company in the area, and we're gonna be growing rapidly, hiring, we're hoping to find lots of great talent that's being attracted by the new HackReduce space, so we're gonna be hosting workshops and hackathons and really trying to build up the big data community here. Yeah, we're excited. At Wikibon and SiliconANGLE, we have a saying is you can't go wrong with startups, so we just love the innovation, we love the risk-taking, so tell us about what's happening with Squirrel, give us a quick update, you say you're growing, I know you're hiring, people, you guys just moved up here, I think you're gonna be in the HackReduce space for a while anyway, talk about the company. Yeah, so the company's new, we launched in August of 2012, raised seed funding from Atlas Ventures and Matrix. The big thing we're doing with Squirrel is pulling out some really cool technology out of the US intelligence community and making it ready for the commercial businesses. So Squirrel is a great example of innovation in governments and open governments in that the technology that we're pulling out of the NSA allows folks to dump all of their data into a single analytical platform, regardless of security concerns, regardless of data types, and regardless of data volumes, and extract insights and value from that data. Sort of like Wikibon, we're helping people extract signals from the noise. And I love the other concept is you're actually creating more value than you're extracting, you're helping the community, Accumul is an open source project, it's an Apache project, talk about your relationship with the Apache Foundation. Yeah, so it took us a while to convince the NSA to allow us to open source Accumulo to the Apache Foundation, but we did that at the end of 2011. It became a top level Apache Foundation project in 2012. It's a very active project. We have lots of contributors from the DC Maryland area from the military intelligence community. And now that we moved up here at Boston, we're hoping to attract a lot of new contributors and committers from the larger big data ecosystem and community up here. Yeah, we had Doug Cutting on down at Strada, who's obviously heavily involved in Apache, and he was very excited about Accumulo, and as he is about a lot of the projects at Apache, but I mean, that whole movement is just exploding. There's so much innovation going on. Database four or five years ago was boring if you were in a party and somebody said, oh, I'm in a database industry that say, oh yeah, good luck. But now it's like the hottest industry going. Yeah, it's really exciting time. We're moving from the stage of experimentation with big data tools like Hadoop and Accumulo, and a lot of companies are now ready to take a leap into production. And so our real goal is to make our product Acorn really easy to use in addition to breaking new boundaries in terms of the security aspects being applied to big data. So to deliver the kind of security capabilities that you have, you've got to do it with performance in mind. You've got to have scale. So you kind of get that by default, don't you? Yeah, so Accumulo has a really unique position in that it's one of the few new secure, new database technologies where security was built in from the very beginning. It's a lot harder to attack on this stuff after the fact, but by designing it in from the very beginning, we can turn on cell level security without any significant performance degradations, which is a real differentiator for us. You know, when people hear that a lot and you might think that, oh, that's a bromide designed in from the beginning, because you hear that a lot, but I was just down at IBM this week. IBM's got a 40 year history of security innovation and they really stress it's got to be designed in from the start. And here we talking about IBM mainframes and RACF the early days, it's true. And you guys have followed sort of that heritage in a modern platform. Yeah, a lot of people think of government as being a big slow bureaucracy in a lot of places it is, but this type piece of technology is truly breaking new ground. And we pulled the smartest guys out of the NSA that we could find that initially developed it and now they're building the same products to deliver to organizations around the country. Well, I mean, you know, oftentimes as there's in this world some good comes out of bad and obviously 9-11 was just an absolutely tragic event, but it was a renaissance in terms of innovation within the government, wasn't it? Yeah, so cumulow is at the centerpiece of NSA's private cloud strategy and it enabled NSA to do a much better job at connecting the dots, solving the type of failures that led to 9-11. So with the cumulow, NSA went from tens of thousands of separate enclaves and by utilizing the cell level security and the scalability aspects of the cumulow, they were able to reduce the number of enclaves within NSA to a very small number which allows them to better push out patches, better analyze all their data and deliver some of those key insights from their big data. So Eli, thanks for coming on. We'll be watching. Squirrel, really interesting tech. Keep an eye on it. We'll be covered like a blanket at Wikibon and Silicon Angle. Eli, always great to see you. Thanks a lot. Keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest after this.