 This is our flagship program. We go out to the events to extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com. This is HP Discovered Frankfurt, Germany here in Europe, where HP is launching a slew of new products. Biggest announcements we heard last night from the HP Storage Group all across the company. We'll be covering it live all week. In-depth interviews, wall-to-wall coverage. Again, this is SiliconANGLE.com. Go there for all the news, all the analysis, all the breaking news. Also, wikibon.org for all the research. Recently just published software, led infrastructure report. Talking about the role of software with hardware, delivering performance with big data and infrastructure. Again, I'm John Furrier, I'm joined by my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of wikibon.org, and we're here with Colin Mahoney, who is the general manager of Vertica. Colin, welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you, it's great to be here. Always a pleasure to see you guys, and it's great to be here in Frankfurt, Germany, especially. Yeah, I'm trying to think of the win the last time we caught up with you. It was probably Discover in the summer, right? Yeah, in Las Vegas, exactly. There's a lot going on. Let's see, we had big data week this fall. We were down at Strata, we did an IOD event, so give us an update on what's new. I know you guys just had a big announcement with 6.1, so take us through that. Yeah, so we're announcing Vertica 6.1 today. It was codenamed Bulldozer, so some folks might know it as that. And there's really three things that we focused on in 6.1. The first is Hadoop. We were obviously the first analytic database company to come out with a Hadoop MapReduce connector. We now have another connector, which is an HDFS connector, and it allows us to get native hookups, basically, with Hadoop and the HDFS underlying file system so that you can pull all of that data and actually use the Vertica Analytics engine to analyze data, even if it resides on HDFS. So it's building on our ability to basically separate the two and leverage all the analytics and the ecosystem that Vertica has around the BI tooling on Hadoop, and of course, you can also pull that information in, run it natively in Vertica. So that's the first thing. The second is around analytics packs. We've always been committed to just putting more and more analytics inside the platform. For our customers who buy our platform, our promise is that we will continue to deliver more and more innovation in what they can do on the platform. And so in Vertica 6, we announced that we were including R, the statistical language, and massively paralyzing that on our platform. And what we've done is we've added to that and built these packs on top of R to make a lot of the analytics that people do that much easier in terms of calling the functions. And then finally, it's around cloud, and we've enhanced our cloud capabilities in Vertica with some new packages for things like AMI on Amazon, et cetera, so that we make it a lot easier for customers to deploy on-prem or in the cloud. And then also related to that on the flexibility, we have new app systems. There's a new app system from our brothers here at HP for Vertica, very exciting based on the new DL380 Gen 8. And we're also part of the new app system for Hadoop as well. So everything ties into big data, everything ties into the theme of the overall information optimization strategy here at HP. And it's just great to be part of an organization that has the hardware, the software, and the services to focus on that. Colin, I want to ask you a couple of questions. One, we'll get to in a minute about the whole Vertica migration into HP over the past couple of years. Obviously, as a startup, you guys are doing some great work and then now you're part of HP. Want to get in and dig into that hole where you guys are at now. But first, we were at Strada and Hadoop World. And it's great to see the evolution of that whole ecosystem that you've been involved in. Because the killer app, the application levels aren't really kind of coming on board. But the one killer app that was identified as analytics. So analytics is a no brainer, it's out there. Everyone wants analytics. So I want to ask you, analytics is all about performance. So talk about what's happening in the analytics space on top of Hadoop and how it shifted in your mind from an ecosystem where it was open source space, which is still happening and still cool. But where it starts to convert into reality. Because in reality, in businesses, it's production, scale, and performance. How has that changed the game in terms of analytics as the application and to the future of big data? Yeah, so great questions. I think, firstly, just on analytics itself. I talked to so many CIOs and customers who are pairing down certain things budget-wise, but they all want to double down on analytics. And I think part of that is there's research out there that says for every dollar you spend on analytics, you're going to get at least $10 out. So it is all the rage. On the evolution of Hadoop, I think one of the things everybody realizes in this space is once you have the information, that's great to store the information, but what you need to do is act on the information and understand the information. And one of Hadoop's strengths is that you can just put information in without having to add a structure to it. Ultimately, when it comes to monetizing information, there has to be a structure to it. Otherwise, it's really hard to do that. So we're seeing the sort of Hadoop community tie off much more closely with us when it comes to needing to do the structure and really get the interactive analysis. And I think that's why both are very complimentary and they work well together. And we're seeing HDFS and Hadoop specifically is a great source of that information. But there's no question. I think everybody in this space is looking at the killer app, as you said, and analytics really are what bring that information from just sort of what I call the black sand of data and make it gold. Yeah, and the religious arguments, as they say, is Apache, Hadoop is great, and that's still growing, but now as you get more into the business side, really it's not so much religious because it's about money making, as you said, return. What are some of the issues that you're finding with customers around performance? Well, so specifically with Hadoop, if you're looking to try to do analytics off of Hadoop, it was never designed for real time. It was designed for batch processing. It was never meant to be able to pull information interactively with the BI ecosystem that's out there. And so I think that community's trying to change their platform. The more they change the platform, the more it starts becoming a database. And you've got to do all the things that you have to do in a database. You have to create a catalog. You have to have an optimizer. You have to have an execution engine. And so they're kind of moving that way. And I think at the same time, you're seeing platforms like Vertica moving more into the space of taking files on more broadly managing information. We have a lot of innovation around schema flexibilities so that you don't have to define a rigid schema before you start using Vertica. A lot of the strengths that you hear of the Hadoop community. So I think you're seeing both of those try to converge but performance is critical. You can't wait for access to the information. You want to ask a question? We all are used to just typing into a web browser and getting immediate results. And that's what every business wants right now. So speed and performance are key. What are you guys doing for performance? Share with the audience out there some of the things that Vertica's differentiated on because there's a lot of confusion around a lot of different solutions. What do you guys bring to the table? Yeah, so our focus from day one has been on performance and speed. And it starts with a platform that was purpose built for speed, big data, the volume, the variety of information. And so one of the things that we did early on was we made a decision, our founder, co-founder, Mike Stonebreaker, that we weren't going to just build on traditional databases. We were going to build a fundamental platform that leveraged columnar technology primarily, massively parallel technology. So it's a scale at architecture and heavy use of compression and encoding. All three of those things combined really make a huge difference on the performance. But most importantly, because we built this from the ground up, the modularity lets us go in any direction we want. So it's really easy for us to add additional data types or add additional types of analytics models to the platform because we don't have this rigidity that a lot of the other platforms that have been around for decades have. So it was really designed from the beginning to focus on that speed and performance. And that's always what gives us the edge. Ease of use is really important. The simplicity is important, but you always have to have the speed. And so we've added more of that in this release as well on top of those other ideas. And your HDFS connector you talked about, I'm inferring from what you said, it's more native, more really trying to bring real time to big data. Is that, am I understanding that correctly? It is, and so the whole goal there is to basically get right at that information so that you can just connect as a local connection and massively parallelize that connection between Hadoop clusters and Vertica clusters and make that information passing that much easier. So it has intelligence in it, it starts to know where data is laid out on obviously Vertica but also Hadoop so it can make decisions about how to efficiently query the data on Hadoop as well as the data on Vertica and we're seeing just a huge boost in performance versus some of the other solutions out there. Final question, because we're getting the hook here, is everyone wants to know what's going on with Vertica inside HP. Obviously the news we won't drill into the latest and greatest gossip around HP, around some of the history with the autonomy, CEO out there, Michael Lynch, which is circulating, but really autonomy has been in the startup community and Wikibon had great research, had you guys, we're leading the marketplace. I mean Vertica, where you guys at now internally, what's the roadmap, how you guys shaped out internally at the HP and what's the going forward plan? Yeah, great question. So I think the way that HP has integrated us has been phenomenal. We are part of HP software, so I report to George Kadefa who runs HP software and really HP is helping us scale in all those areas that we need to scale, but they want us to keep the culture and the innovation and everything that we're doing and they're really, from Meg right on down, helping us do that. And so from my perspective, I think it's been a perfect integration. We keep all the great things about Vertica, we get to extend and scale out, embrace all the great things about HP and I'll give you a great example, last quarter, we were at a customer, we had some challenges with just helping this customer on the hardware environment, it's not really Vertica, but we said to them, you know what, let us bring in some of our partners here on the EG side, I know Dave Donnelly is coming up after me, we made a couple phone calls and immediately, Meg always says this, but if customers need it, HP will darken the skies and bring in those solutions and this was an example where I saw this army show up and we had hardware people, we had software people, we had services people and we just went and solved the customer problem and it was so easy for the customer, they knew exactly who to deal with, we had all the people there and all the support and I think in no place more than big data, do you need that right now? Because it touches every aspect of information technology. That's what's so exciting about HP, so it's been a great, great integration. Call Mahoney's an entrepreneur at Vertica, as in the startup world, now with an HP leading the charge over there and one of the things that I'll share with the folks out there that might not be aware is a lot of entrepreneurs are successfully executing within HP, the big company, yourself included and we saw David Scott yesterday at the press announcement. That is a shining star within HP that they have the ability to keep such great talent and certainly Vertica's been a great shining example of what's going on in some of the analytics in the big data side, so congratulations. We'll be right back with our next guest which will be Dave Donatelli here inside theCUBE. This is Silicon Angles coverage of HP Discover in Frankfurt, Germany. We'll be right back with our next guest. Thank you. Colin, thank you very much. Yeah, thank you. Appreciate it.