 Hello, welcome back. I'm Jeff Kelly from Wikibon. We're here inside theCUBE live at Cassandra Summit. My co-host, John Furrier, is just stepped out for a little bit and I'll be hosting Navi Akiya, executive VP of marketing from Actuate. We're here to talk a little bit about what Actuate is doing in the Cassandra community and kind of how you guys play there. Actuate, if you're not familiar with, is kind of the company behind Fert. The open source BI reporting tool community. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, it's nice to be here. Thanks very much. Appreciate the time. So why don't we just start off with a little bit of background for our audience. Kind of tell us a little bit about Actuate and how you got involved in the kind of how the big data world kind of intersects with the BI world that you play in. Yeah, absolutely. I think Actuate, I think from the very founding, back in 93, has really been about taking lots of data that's available throughout the organization, now obviously increasingly outside of the organization and getting it to lots of people. And that's kind of been the founding vision of Actuate from the very beginning. And we really haven't strayed for that. Of course, I think what's changed is the definition of what we mean by lots of information, lots of data, and what we mean by getting information to lots of people. Now those are obviously constantly evolving. And obviously when you talk about lots of data, clearly the big data movement and particularly projects like Cassandra and partners like Datasax are going to become increasingly important because that's where I think more and more data and other kind of information is headed into in terms of that. And what we're obviously looking to do is to help our customers take all that data and make sure that they're able to present it, analyze it, discover things from it so that they can make the most of that information in things like Cassandra. Right, so yeah, some of the NoSQL databases, Cassandra being one I think that's really known for supporting big data, real time applications, transactional applications but not necessarily known for the ability to report and do analytics against that data. So that's where actually it comes in. And tell me about the fit from a technology perspective in terms of actually reporting against volumes of data that we're talking about now with Cassandra and other NoSQL stores and how that affects your ability to report or does it change some of the metrics you have to look at or the way you look at data? How does that impact what you do? Well, yeah, I think you brought up a lot of points in that question. I think the things that, and I think we have an advantage, I think in contrast to some of our competitors and more the traditional BI is that, I think our philosophy all the way along has been to go after lots of different data sources and in fact, traditional BI model obviously relies heavily on a data warehouse and we've never done that from the very beginning. We've always gone after things like transactional systems and so on. So we're very well equipped to kind of handle the volume and clearly the variety and the velocity of the data. And I think some of the things that Cassandra brings that's very exciting to us is some of the high scale, the real time nature of the be able to kind of process that data. And what we're looking to do is obviously then turn that data into compelling visualizations and analysis. And I think that's what brings to the party and obviously that's the other aspect of I think what we're excited about is that even though we started out as a kind of very traditional enterprise software company, back in 2004 we initiated an open source project called BERT with the Eclipse Foundation and I think that's that heritage of starting from open source I think makes us a very good fit because again Cassandra and BERT I think will be a very good fit kind of even at the open source level and then I think both data stacks and actuates are going to have very I think compelling offerings kind of on top of the open source stack if you will to kind of provide the solutions that customers are looking for. So let's dig into some of the use cases to what you're seeing your customers really using Actuate 4 on top of Cassandra or data stacks platform. What are one or two really compelling use cases that you're seeing bubble up to the surface? Sure I think there's several of those I think what the real time aspects and so on Cassandra is going to allow us to do is to really play to our traditional strength which is tends to be more of the operational you know dashboards, operational reports and so on because those really do rely on a kind of a low latency model because you want to make sure that they get the data up front. So you know I think ask things like you know unstructured information or even machine generated information comes more and more into play. You know we see a lot of kind of applications in that area where you know we're able to provide real time alerts to start but then be able to kind of dig down and really be able to kind of do some compelling analysis and take some you know significant actions based on that. So we see that as one of the areas. Now I'll admit this is still pretty early days so it's not like we have you know tons of customers using it together but you know we are starting to get a lot of our large customers asking us about what we're doing in this whole area of big data and you know Cassandra is one of the areas that comes up and in fact it's a you know to a point one of the ways that we can connect to Cassandra is actually a community provided connector to Cassandra. You know along with that we're obviously also supporting you know HQL and Hector as well but yeah I think it just shows that you know they're members of the Burke community that are really anxious to kind of connect Burke to Cassandra to a point where you know they're contributing back to the Burke community connectors to Cassandra as well. Well that's interesting yeah I mean both being open source tools platforms talk a little bit more about the community we've asked some previous guests today about the kind of the personality of the Cassandra community you know we're finding it's really kind of a hard charging as my co-host John Furrier put it alpha geeks. How does that compare and mesh with what the open source of the Burke community is like and maybe expand a little bit more on some of those connections that you're seeing being built. Yeah and I think profiles for the good chunk of it I think it's pretty similar you know obviously I think these are people who want to get things done which is why I think the open source model is very attractive to them so they can kind of just download try things out make things happen and go. You know I think what the interesting thing we're finding with the Burke community you know we've been at it since all four as I said and you know I think where it's been good for us commercially is that we really are starting to find a core group of developers in the large enterprises that we focus on because like I said you know we've kind of mixed our open source model with our heritage of enterprise software and you know it's really been the driver of our commercial business it's really been to find these alpha geeks if you will but in large enterprises that are starting to really drive some very significant projects. That's our model on the commercialization side is that you know we obviously first objective was to build a very large community which we've done I think with like a million and a half developers that we can see on a global basis and now but what we really have focused the commercial is really kind of the relatively small percentage of those developers that are building large scale applications for large enterprises and again I think that's another area where we're going to fit very well with Cassandra and DataSaxx because I think the characteristics of the data sources those companies need to support I think is a good fit for Cassandra and DataSaxx and you know and DataSaxx has been a great I think it's going to be a great partner because obviously Cassandra is central but they also support the other key Apache projects that we're excited about Hadoop and Solar as well. Yeah I wonder I'd love to get you to take you know kind of on the evolution of the BI industry especially as big data has come to the fore it was interesting you mentioned that actually its heritage is kind of not necessarily around that centralized data warehouse model but kind of pulling data from multiple sources so that puts you in kind of a different position than most of the traditional BI players that are focused on you know reporting against a centralized data warehouse. How has the BI industry kind of started to evolve in this big data world? Is BI essentially as we traditionally know it going to be relevant in a big data world and you know what role is it going to play going forward? Are we going to see finally for instance the talk about self-service BI and the ability for you know non-technical users to use BI but we're still not seeing a huge adoption in that sense. So what are some of the implications of big data on BI going forward? Well I think you know I think one of the key things about the self-service aspect that I think big data is going to play and particularly something like Cassandra will be a very big fit is that you know when you require a data warehouse that's an enormous project in most cases right? You got to yeah and it's a project that is often gets obsolete fairly quickly right? Because you got to put a structure in place with a warehouse if you need to add new data elements that's a pretty big project in itself whereas I think things like Cassandra is going to allow you to do just basically load data without having to do a lot of pre-processing and then you know you get powerful tools like BERT on top of that that allows you to literally extract process, analyze and then visualize the data. I think that's really where the future of BI is headed. We got I think one of the big trends in BI the last three years is where I kind of been the data discovery kind of you know where you put things in an in-memory database and then do visualization which is fine but again by being in memory there's some limitations to data size I think if we can now take some of that concept of self-service and visualization then but put that effectively on top of something like Cassandra you know then I think it really opens up enormous opportunities and I think that's where you know I think clearly BI I think is headed in that area you know and obviously I think that also speaks to some of the you know the key visualizations you're going to have to do as well you know as well as the you know of course the other side of that equation from the data side is obviously the visualization side and we do see devices like the iPad and tablets becoming increasingly important as well so that's I think the other nature where the the market is headed and I think it's going to call on some it's going to norm some enormous opportunity it's a very exciting time I think in the BI market and you know I think we're all kind of jockey for that position of course. Absolutely I bet it's also a challenge isn't it I mean you've got all these different when you're looking at the big data world you've got all these different kind of projects popping up in summer hot at this given time and then there's another you know H-Bases hot at one point and then Cassandra and then Mongo whatever it might be how does a vendor like yourself keep up with everything that's going on and manage to stay relevant in such an evolving kind of community like that do you have to pick kind of winners to try to pick the winners ahead of time or are you able to kind of adapt to the I don't want to call it the whims of the market but as the fortunes of the different projects rise and fall do you kind of go after it that way? Well I think we've been fortunate because of our heritage so you know in fact you know I've talked about BERT which is a kind of a business intelligence technology at the Eclipse level but the other thing we've actually contributed to the Eclipse Foundation is something that we call the open data access framework so that allows us a fairly effective efficient way to go after different data sources and in fact it's what our community uses to build the Cassandra connector or other connectors or other thing and so I think technologically we're in good shape to keep up with that but of course the other enormous advantage we have is the community right so the community will kind of tell us where to head you know that's the beauty of having a very large active community like we do with BERT so we can monitor, we can monitor our forms we can monitor the questions we can monitor what technologies those developers are sharing with us and you know and that's also clearly telling us big data is a big and real because you know a lot of interest and a lot of the development work that our community has contributed has been really in that area including obviously Cassandra and other kind of big data no SQL, new SQL data sources so last question, tell us a little bit about specifically how you're working with data stacks and what's the state of that partnership at this point? Well you know I think we're obviously very excited with the partnership that we announced this morning and you know I think we've started at the kind of the basic good kind of technology integration but we also do feel like at least with data stacks we're going to share a lot of profiles in terms of the kind of customers that I think is going to be a good fit and I think they're going to tend to be relatively large enterprises that are going to deal with lots of data sources that is going to need the speed of delivery and access and in fact you know when I look at some of the customers that are presenting here you know I think it's going to end up being good there are many customers that we'd love to go after and I think what I think data stacks finds with the actual customer base are large financial institutions and so on I think are going to be good targets so you know we're looking forward to I think it's one of my colleagues at Data Stacks that you know let's go sell some things and I think that's what we're going to you know I think we're going to have a good opportunity to kind of do that with starting with our mutual customer base but I think we'll also open up through our communities even more opportunities for us so we're excited about the partnership with Data Stacks Fantastic, all right well good luck to you thanks so much Abby for coming on You're welcome We'll be right back here from live from Cassandra Summit we'll have a full day of programming ahead and again thanks so much for joining us You're welcome