 Okay, welcome back to SiliconANGLE, Wikibon's theCUBE, our flagship program. We're live in Boston, this is the wrap-up segment for day one of the Vertica user conference here, all about Hadoop, big data, and the upcoming Hadoop World's going to be in New York City, we'll be there. As always, we'll try to get down there and get down on the ground, so look for that coming up in the fall. We're just talking about that here. Hadoop World's going to be pretty big this year. I'm here with Dave Vellante and Jeff Kelly for wrap-up of the HP Big Data 2013 or the Vertica user conference. Guys, I want to get your take on it, but first, my perspective is we heard from Colin Mahoney, the general manager and senior executive for Vertica. We heard from Billy Bean here on Kino, kind of a great anecdotal story about Moneyball the movie and how that applies to baseball, how that applies to business. But we also talked to a lot of practitioners last night and tonight, and this is not a vendor event. This is not a HP flex-stair muscle, promote their wares and software. This was all about customer interactions, very social, no press, no analysts, except for us. And just to kind of be laid back, let the customers interact with each other, share their stories, pretty impressive. I'm really, really impressed with the quality of people here. What's your take, Dave? We'll start with you. I agree, John. The attendees are excellent. I would say to this, while they're very understated at HP, if I'm HP, behind closed doors, I'm doing high fives and fist pumps because I'm really excited about the quality of the customers that are here. I think we're seeing the solidification of the HP Vertica strategy finally starting to come into focus. I mean, I think this is, there were some initial bumps where I think the Vertica team didn't necessarily embrace HP or maybe vice versa, or maybe there was some turmoil in the organization. Well, I remember when they bought them. It was right when all that stuff was bombing, you know, in Megwood, when we were the CEO, yes. It discovered, two years ago, it was two years ago, maybe not three years ago, Leo Apatec had never even really, hardly even mentioned HP Vertica. And we were shocked. We said, well, they paid $340 million for this diamond in the rough. It's a key part of the software strategy. I didn't even mention it. So Meg Whitman understands the value of HP Vertica. Big data is one of the pillars that she talks about. So Vertica is critical to HP software strategy. We're going to have George Kedifa on tomorrow. Again, I've been very outspoken that HP has to grow with software business. A way to do that is certainly organically, Vertica's a key. As it pays down its debt, it will acquire more tuck-ins, more companies, and it's got to become, you know, a more prominent software company. And Vertica's critical to that. I guess the second point is here, there's the ecosystem. You know, we just had Andy on Mandy McBean talking about the ecosystem. The ecosystem is pretty robust. It's substantially larger than I thought it was. The fact that these guys are all here, they're paying, they got boots, they're supporting this, it's very impressive. And the last point to your point, John, is the customers. The quality of the practitioners here is very high. They're astute, they're young, they're moving and shaking, they're focused on the innovations around big data, how to monetize big data. And for many of them, Vertica is at the heart of their big data platform. So I'm impressed with that. And then I guess the last piece is, we have customers coming on theCUBE talking about, relative to things like Oracle and other traditional databases, how that just didn't get it done for them. And there was a lot of friction internally within the organization. And just the simplicity and the speed of Vertica really won them over. Yeah, and I want to dig in and ask Jeff Kelly, because he was out here, I was just scouring the landscape, doing his research, and you put out the big data research study, the first report ever on big data and your influence, I just read, it's really high on the big data top 10 list. I just saw that on the web. I don't know if I got the email that to you. I'll take your word for it. Congratulations on that, by the way. But analytics is a big part of big data. This is really about analytics on the BI side. And we got Tableau, it was on theCUBE earlier. But also we heard a lot of ETL, data warehouse and kind of conversations going on. There's some tech involved, there's some programming. So what's your take on? How does the Vertica solution, which is enabling some disruption, obviously, and it's not mutually exclusive with Hadoop. You can use Hadoop, but they're enabling speed and compute and some clustering. That is causing some innovation. So what's your take on what this means to the big data landscape? Well, I think certainly there is some overlap with some of the different technologies associated with big data. But clearly Vertica has resonated with customers. There's about 650, 700 people who heard this comment. Probably about half of those are customers. I've had a bunch on theCUBE today. And really what it's all about is getting insights into the hands of business people as fast as possible. And that's what Vertica allows. That's what I'm hearing from customer after customer that I've spoken to today. Really, it all boils down to performance and the ease of use and the ability to get data and analytics and insights into the hands of users as fast as possible so that they can make better decisions. And that's what Vertica allows. I think one of the issues with big data that we've struggled with as an industry over the last year or two, especially related to Hadoop is it's difficult to find practitioners and companies that are using Hadoop and really mature production deployments running mission-critical applications simply because it's a relatively new technology. And even those companies that have, in fact, reached that point are low to talk about it because it's often a part, you know, it's still early in early, early days and they're not quite ready to go public. Vertica, on the other hand, has been around for a while now. They've got a really strong customer base and they haven't really kind of put those customers on display until really this event. And so I think it was a strong, a smart move on their part to really focus on customers in this event. You know, been in several panels today, customer panels and really, you know, as Dave, as you said, they're really focusing on letting the customers talk to each other. You know, been to a couple panels where Chris Sellon, VP of Marketing was kind of hosting the panel but kind of, you know, quickly introduce everybody and then step back and let the customers talk amongst themselves. And I think that's really smart because they've got some great customers who are doing some really interesting things and, you know, that is really the best marketing. So John, I want to, I mean, you know, we've been doing, you dragged me, I wasn't kicking his screen, but you dragged me into this big data world several years ago. So you've been observing the evolution of big data. Where do you think we are? What do you think about where we're at with this big data conference with Vertica? You know, Dave, obviously, you know, we've been analysts in this market for a while. Obviously, blogging and analyzing it as well and then doing the video coverage. But you know, the big thing here to me is that I've always said and had the vision and a lot of the people like Michaels and Amar Awadallah, Cloudera and others always had the same vision is that the modern era is going to look differently and it's going to look differently from an infrastructure standpoint and from a software standpoint. And the third, the thing that we all saw that no one saw early was data as a development part of the process was going to be key. It's not just a pool of data sitting there where you manage it's isolated, you're pulling it back and forth. Sure, there's a lot of motion going on, but the role of data is going to be critical. What we heard here today is complete validation of the early pioneers and visionaries because we heard the gaming company saying UX is influenced by data. They use the data specifically to change the user experience. And it's not about getting all the data, it's about getting the right data. In some cases, small amounts of data and using that high quality data and making massive changes. That's the on the gaming side. On the transformation side saying, hey, I need to get access to data, we'll transform later. And then we'll manage. You're seeing different types of access methods to data and the data, that's all part of interacting with software. And that's the main thing we're hearing today. And to me, that's what gets me excited and I wrote in my blog post today at the end. If you're an entrepreneur building a startup or product and entering a market or you're an existing company, retooling and rebuilding, this is a great time to be building software because the Vertica allows you to completely eliminate building out massive clustering and speed so you can focus on the software and you're going to start to see absolutely up the stack and I think it's exciting. And that's going to change the game and it's going to make search, Google search like features for BI. You've made the point a number of times data is the new development kit. What do you mean by that? And talk about that a little bit. Well, I've always said, like, you know, when we used to do software, when I don't do anymore, but when we used to write software, you go to libraries and you go to code and you use code and borrow code with now it's open source base, but still you write your own code and sometimes you write very little of your own code. You use either open source or use other libraries that are available to you. And that's the way I look at data, right? So that's an interaction with other pieces of code. So what we're seeing in data is that data is changing, data has kind of chemistry to it, has characteristics and that changes based upon condition. So real-time information highlights that. Mobile devices, connected devices highlight that. So companies that are really, really smart can get data two places faster, the right data at the right place at the right time. And two, using the properties of the data, the semantics, the chemistry, whatever you want to call it, into the application, that can change the game on the user experience. And to me, that's what I'm talking about. Using data in the development design process, the changing aspects of data, that requires some significant engineering to understand the data itself. And that is what I think is going to be the big breakthrough in the next three years, is understanding quantities, quality of data within the pile. And it's not about data mining, it's about intelligence, artificial intelligence, automation, metadata reasoning, all these things have to be developed. Yeah, you know, certainly you're seeing companies that develop software products and other internet-based applications using data to inform their product development, but we're even seeing companies like auto insurance companies using data now to essentially craft their products, the services they offer to customers with data now streaming off of or being collected off of movie vehicles to tell, you know, to analyze your driving patterns and are you a safe driver? Are you a higher risk? Based on your personal behavior, rather than just basically putting you a bucket and determining because of your, you know, where you live and your age and a few other factors that this is the likelihood of you getting in an accident, they're really using data to craft their products. And that's something that we haven't seen in traditional markets before. So this is really changing, starting to really move from the web-based companies, as we've talked about, to the more traditional enterprises. And you're just going to see that accelerate as companies like Vertica make it easier. As you said, John, to not worry so much about the underlying hardware and focus more on the software and the data and how that can impact the services you offer any customers. So another big day tomorrow, we're probably, you know, two thirds of a day. We've got infinity insurance coming on. George Kadifa will be here tomorrow. He runs HP software. He's, we've had him on the queue before. We've got the director of data architecture at the DNC, the Democratic National Committee is here. Shilpa Luwande, who is a vice president of software engineering at Vertica, has been at Vertica for a long time. We've got folks from Autonomy coming on. We'll also have Kurt Monash, who I've never met, but a big fan of his blog. He's one of the best writers slash analysts, you know, thinkers around in this business. And also Vinny Merchandani, former Gartner analyst. He's been on the queue before. He's got a new book out. He has got a company called The Deal Architect. He writes a lot of books. He's a really sharp analyst as well. And then you never know who else we're going to find. You know, we do that in theCUBE. We roam the hallways. We find really interesting people and bring them on. And as John always likes to say, we extract the signal from the noise and share it with you, our audience. So we appreciate the tweets. I'm at D. Vellante. He's at Furrier. Go to wikibon.org. Go to siliconangle.com. Go to youtube.com slash siliconangle. And watch us live at siliconangle.com. Yeah, and don't forget our new Twitter handle at theCUBE. So that's a new Twitter handle that's been in place for the past month at theCUBE. And of course, we'll be back here tomorrow live in Boston for more coverage from customers. And HP's really taking the bold stand here, letting the customers do the talking. That's important. We're going to hear more from you about use cases, how they're using it, and changes that they see going forward in innovations and disruption at the same time. So stay tuned. That's a wrap from day one at HP Vertica's user conference. Hashtag is HP Big Data 2013. See you tomorrow.