 Ed, welcome to theCUBE. All right, good to see you. Good to see you as well. Okay, Ed runs BizDev for Cloudera, industry veteran, worked at VMware. Ed, we've gotten to know you over the past year. You guys have been doing great. What a difference one year makes, right? I mean, tell us just, let's start it off with, what's happened in a year? I mean, you know, here at Hadoop World, Cloudera, the ecosystem, just give us your view of your perspective of what a difference one year makes. I think more than double is probably the fastest answer I could give you, which is, I mean, even looking around at the conference, it itself is literally double from what it was last year, but in terms of the number of partners that have entered the market and really decided to work with Cloudera, but also in general, just the scope and size of the ecosystem itself. Investors from every angle, you've got companies, really well-branded marquee companies like Oracle coming into the mix and saying, hey, Hadoop is the real deal and we need to invest here. Marquee companies like IBM and EMC also doing the same and of course, as a result, lots and lots of customer interest in the technology and Cloudera has been fortunate to have been in the market early and really made the right investments with the right team and so we're able to serve a lot of those customer needs. So it's been really, it's been a fantastic year for the company. So we had a great day yesterday with Cloudera. We had Kirk on, we had Amer on twice, who by the way went viral with his modern warfare review, but we had Jeff Amer-Bacher on. So we had pretty much the brain trust and Michael also, yeah, the brain trust of Cloudera. So we talked about the risk factors for Cloudera. So you guys are number one, you've been kind of had untouchable lead and then all of a sudden boom, competition. So Mike talked about that. So the strategy and the product side they addressed, you're on the biz dev side. So when you were number one, everyone wants to stand next to you and your phone rings off the hook from tier one partners all the way down to anyone who's just getting in the business who wants a big data strategy. On the execution now, what are you guys doing right now to continue your lead on the sales, marketing, biz dev? I mean, I know you get the partner program, but what's your strategy for going out and continuing that lead? The beautiful thing is honestly our strategy hasn't changed at all and I know that might sound counterintuitive, but we started off with a really crisp vision and what we want to do is create a very attractive platform for partners. And one of the core corporate strategy edicts for Cloudera is a recognition that at the end of the day, the platform itself, Hadoop, is an input into a solution and Cloudera is not likely to deliver the complete solution to market. Instead it's going to be companies like Dell for example, or it's going to be companies on the ISV side like Informatica, which you're gonna deliver not only a base platform, but also the BI or analytics or data integration technologies on top. And as a result, what we've done is we've really focused in on creating a very attractive platform to vendors to build on. And I think one of the biggest misconceptions that I'm excited about, that we are now having an opportunity to correct and that's a result frankly of the additional competitive dynamic and I think the Wikibon team pointed that out rather pointedly in their most recent articles. But is the lack of understanding around what CDH is and also some of the other investments that we're making to create a truly attractive platform for vendors to build on. And I think you may have familiarity with exactly what CDH is, but for the sake of the audience here, what I'd like to do is say first off, first and foremost, this is 100% free and Apache license open source, but more importantly, it is everything that we build on the platform, meaning it's completely full-featured. We put all of that out in the open. There's no turbo version of Hadoop that we've got hiding in the closet for our four-pay customers. We're absolutely making investment. But I think when you think about it from the vendor perspective and that's my bias. So I always think about, I treat all of the potential partners as really my customer. And when you think about it from that perspective, the things that matter most to vendors, number one, transparency. They need to understand exactly what our business model is, where we plan to make money and where we plan to don't make money. They need to know what we're really good at developing and what we're not so good at developing and sort of where we draw the boundaries around that investment. I think a testament to that, for example, is tomorrow we're hosting a partner summit. So after this event, there are gonna be over 60 individuals, but there's max two per vendor. So we're gonna have over 35 vendors attending this event. And what they're gonna hear from is our entire management team is as deeply as we can and as open as we can. And you know, it's funny. I think I saw this article in Forbes the other day about Clodara. It was this, the title of the article was something like spies like us. And what it highlighted was that some competitor of Clodara had actually hired a competitive intelligence agency to go on and try to engage with, and try to learn more about Clodara. And so they went onto Quora, which we have a lot of active engineers on Quora. And they went out and they asked a bunch of product related questions to someone on Quora. And our engineers immediately responded and they started being very transparent, completely open to what they're building and why they're building it. And the article basically summarized to say, hey, you know what, clearly some people aren't all that sophisticated in figuring out who they're talking to and it's really important to do that. And they got the absolute wrong conclusion. Our engineers are actually encouraged and in fact rewarded for being extremely transparent in the market because we believe that it's transparency that ultimately allow us to be that platform vendor. And that's what attracts me. Jeff Hammerbocker was active on Quora as well. He's recruiting there too. So you guys are out engaging the community. So just let me just review, because this is cool that you're addressing this because Hortonworks and others, and I'll say the name Hortonworks has been pumping up the PR and creating a lot of noise around open and kind of depositioning cloud era. So you guys are completely open, 100% Hadoop open source. Everything you build. In every way. In every way. You have engineers building core, you've got tools and all the other stuff is being built in cloud era and contributing into the community. Actually it's the other way around. We build it in the community at Apache.org. So all of our technology is built at Apache.org. It's developed there. It's initially shared there. And then we have another team inside our company that pulls down bits from Apache.org and then assembles them and integrates them. So it's a really key thing. And there's no, we have no bits that we don't develop at Apache.org that are part of CDH. So there can be no mistake that everything that is in CDH is everything we got. So CDH is free. It is free. And it's open source. It's open source. You charge enterprise edition. That's the only thing that's different. You guys charge. Which is your management console. Right. Management suite and all kinds of the tools. And that's not free and that's not open source. That's correct. It's pretty clear. Summer took us yesterday through, I don't know, half a dozen probably open source projects. And then the one is the management console and that's what you charge for. That's where you're going to make it. Yeah, we manufacture, essentially we manufacture two products, but we sell one. So we manufacture the Quaterra distribution including Apache adieu. That's free. It's free. And then we all open source and built it Apache and really heavily tested and well documented and well integrated. And then we also manufacture Quaterra Enterprise which includes support and indemnities and warranties for that full featured CDH product and also includes the Quaterra management suite. And that's a subscription. And that's a subscription. And so customers can run CDH. They can then buy and license Quaterra Enterprise and then someday if they decide they don't need Quaterra Enterprise for whatever reason if they're a team or scripting wizards and they've decided that they don't need the extra opportunity for being able to track all the things that Quaterra Enterprise allows them to. They can step off of Quaterra Enterprise and continue to use full featured Hadoop as a CFET. So take an example of one of your partners that you announced this week, NetApp. NetApp's gonna package your CDH and the subscription. Correct. To their customers. And then they're gonna let their channel either, they'll pre-bundle it or do a reference architecture. You'll get paid for that subscription that's bundled. NetApp will make money off of its filers. Yes. And the customer gets a package solution. Exactly right. And in fact, that's another important thing that's probably worth discussing, which is our go-to-market model. I don't know if you guys had a chance to talk with anyone yesterday on that, but I'm responsible for our channel strategy. And one of the key things that we've agreed to as a company is that we really are gonna go to market through channel partners. Yeah, we covered SGI, that was a great announcement. Yup. 100%. As close as we can get. Okay. Are you still doing the direct deals? You still have that belly-to-belly sales force because it's still early, right? So there's a mix of direct and indirect. Not a pure indirect. But that's only as we're able to, until we're able to ramp up our partners fully, in which case we really want the current team that is working belly-to-belly to really support our partners. So VMware-like, but I wanted to ask you. VMware-like, NetApp-like, very similar, yes. Very NetApp-like, NetApp probably 75% indirect. What are the similarities and differences with VMware and the ecosystem? You know it well. I do know it well, yeah. I spent several years working at VMware, and I think the first and most obvious difference is that when I think about platform, software in general, where there are a few different flavors of platform, one of the things that makes Hadoop very unique, very unique relative to other platforms is that it not only is it a patchy license, but it really is dependent upon other external innovators to create the entire full value of the ecosystem of the solution. So unlike, for example, so let's take a platform like everyone's familiar with like Apple iTunes, right? What happens is Apple creates the platform and they put it kind of in the middle. On top of, and behind the scenes is the innovator, the app builder. He builds it, he publishes it on Apple, and then Apple controls all access to the customer. That's not Hadoop, right? Right. Let's take VMware or Red Hat, for example. So in that case, they publish a platform, they own and control the absolute structure and boundaries of what that platform is. And then on top of that, application vendors build, and then they deliver it to the customer. But at the end of the day, the relationship really is from that external innovator straight down, and there's no way for them to really modify the platform. And you take Hadoop, which is 100% a patchy licensed open source, and you really open up the opportunity for vendors to take Hadoop as an input into their system and then deliver it straight to their customers, or for customers themselves to say, I want straight up vanilla Hadoop, I'm gonna go this way, and I'm gonna add on my own web app application. So we're seeing all sorts of variants right now in the market. Software is a service being delivered that's based on Hadoop. There was a great announcement a few weeks ago from a company named TideMark, previously known as Perfarian. They're taking all of CDH, but the customer doesn't know that. And what they're doing is they're delivering software as a service based on Hadoop. Yeah, so I mean, we're psyched that you're clearing this up because obviously we're seeing, we saw all that stuff, but I really think the indirect strategy is a home run. I said it when we talked about the SGI thing and it accelerates you guys you enable, but channels is an interesting business. I mean, you have to have pure transparency, as you mentioned, but people need confidence and they don't, they worry about competition. So channel conflict is always the big issue, right? She is cutting our gonna compete with us. So talk us through that strategy. So obviously the market's growing, new solutions are coming around the corner. These guys want to make money. I mean, channel is all about, what have you done for me today, right? That is exactly right. And you know what, that's why we decided on the channel strategy specifically around our product is because we recognize that each and every single potential channel partner of ours can actually innovate themselves on top of and create differentiation and we're not an obstacle to that process. So we provide our platform as an input and we're capable of managing that platform, but ultimately creating differentiation is all in the hands of our partners and we're there to help, but it gives them wide latitude. So take for example, the differences between Dell and NetApp solution. They are very different reference architectures leveraging the exact same platform. And they have to make money. The money making side of it is, people kind of don't really talk about that, but channel partners loyalty is all about who can help them make cash, right? I mean, so what are you hearing there in terms of the ecosystem? Has the channel developed in the partnerships? Are there more SIs? What's the profile of your partners? I mean, can you give us the breakdown of what they look like from Dell? We know Dell and NetApp, but they're here guys. So a big part of our strategy is to work with IHVs and then IHV resellers. So you're talking about companies like Dell, like SGI, like NetApp for example, independent hardware manufacturers. Another part of our strategy though, and a key requirement from our customers, is to work with a whole variety of IHVs, particularly in the data management space. So you've got really marquee companies in the database space like IBM's Natesa or Teradata. You've got companies like Informatica and Taland. You've got companies on the BI side like MicroStrategy and Tableau. These kinds of technologies are currently in play at our customers have made substantial investments and ultimately they want to be able to continue to leverage them with the data platform, whichever data platform that they end up choosing. So we invest considerably there. Big part of that has been our Clotera Connect Partner Program. It's an opportunity for us to help the customer to understand which technologies work and work well with our platform. It's also an opportunity for us to engage directly and assist the vendor. So one of the things that we created as part of that program is first off, immediate and absolutely discounted access to any part of our training. Second, lots of free information, access to our world-class knowledge base, access to our support team, direct access to our support team. The vendors also get access to a developer portal that we've created specifically for them. So if you think about it this way, Hadoop gets built at Apache.org but solutions don't get built at Apache.org. So what we're really trying to help our vendors do is be able to develop their solutions by having real clear visibility to the API level points of Hadoop. They're not necessarily interested in trying to figure out how MR2 works or contributing code to that that they absolutely are interested in figuring out how to run and execute their software on top of Hadoop. So when I think about the things that matter to create an attractive platform and at the end of the day, that's what we're really trying to do. First and foremost is transparency, right? Second, really ultimately is really clear visibility to the APIs and the documentation of that platform so that there's no ambiguity. The vendor, this is the user in this case, it's building a solution, can absolutely absorb all of that content really cleanly. And then ultimately, I think it's customers, right? Users of the technology and I think our download numbers are, they're something we're proud of. We're hearing good feedback. I mean, the feedback we hear from folks is, yeah, I love how they take away the complexity of handling versions and whatnot. So, I think totally is a great way. The CDH is a great bundle. The questions that we have for you is what are you hearing about the other products, the ones you're actually selling? Does that create the lock-in? So that's something that we ask them directly. Is that the lock-in and what happens when the deployments get so big? I mean, the way that- I don't really see an issue there, but that's what people are afraid of. I mean, that's kind of the, it's more of fear. I mean, so people can use that fear and play against you. I think what we've seen in other markets is that management tools are ultimately interchangeable and the only way that we're going to retain a customer is by out innovating the competition on the management side. The lock-in component, as you will, is not really part of our business model. It's very difficult to achieve within a patchy-licensed platform and a management suite that sits outside of that licensed artifact. So ultimately, if we don't out-innovate, we're going to lose. So we're working on the innovation. How's the hiring going on? I wanted to come back to that. You mentioned download numbers. Can you share the numbers with the audience? I can't share them publicly, but what I can say is that they've been on an incredible trajectory. And what we've seen is month-to-month growth rates. Every single month, we continue to see really significant growth rates. And then I had a follow-up question on you talked about the partner program. How do you manage all those partners? How do you prioritize them? I mean, the hardware vendors, it's pretty easy because there's a few big whales, but the ISVs, I mean, your phone, like John said, must be ringing off the hook. How do you juggle that? And can you do it better than VMware, for example? Well, we handle the influx of partner interest in two ways. One, we've been relatively structured with the Quadera Connect Partner Program and we make real investments there. So we have dedicated folks that are there to help. We have our engineering team that is actually feeding inputs and we're leveraging some of the same resources that we provide to our customers and feeding those directly to our partners as well. So that's one way that we handle it. But the other way, frankly is, I mean, customers help here. Having access to and a real customer population, they help you set priorities pretty quickly. And so we're able to understand what we track inside of our systems, which technologies our customers use. So we know, for example, what percentage of our customer base has SaaS installed and would like to use that with a dupe. We know which percentage of our customer base is currently running on Red Hat and which is not. So having queer visibility to that helps us to prioritize it. How about incentives? I mean, as the channel business is, like I said, very fickle people, you know the channel business, I spent almost a decade in HP's channel organization. And you have to provide soft dollars. There's a lot of kind of blocking and tackling. You guys are clearly building out that tier one with the SGI's of the world and other vendors and then get the partner connect program for kind of everyone else who's going to grow up into a tier one training, soft dollars incentives. You guys have that going yet or is that road map? We do, we do. And in fact, you know, in addition to the sort of more widely publicized relationships you see with companies like Dell and Clotera, we're actually building a very successful network of independent bars. And the bars in general, what we do is we prioritize and select bars based on the top level relationships that we have because that really helps them to hone in. They've got validation from, for example, someone that resells SGI is an organization that now has heard really loud and clear from SGI, the specific platform configurations that they're going to represent to their customers and they ultimately want to represent them directly. And how we make investments is we're, I mean, the investments we're making ultimately in our sales org, I'm going to lose the word direct from that conversation because our sales org is being built to help our partners succeed. And I think that's where you're- The end game is to go completely indirect and have all your support go into managing that channel. What's the mix of revenue generation from your partners? Obviously, as a, you know, with SGI, they pre-built channels that you're funneling in, you've got NetApp and they're wrapping their products and services around it. How much is services and how much is a solution specifically? Do you have any visibility or a feel for that at this point? I mean, services relative to, I mean, for Clotera in particular or for our partners? No, for the partner. I mean, if I'm a partner, I'm like, hey, okay, I'm going to use CDH, I don't mind paying you a wholesale. If I'm going to be able to throw off more cash on deployment of cloud and services, et cetera, and or if I'm a product manufacturer, I have a product, a solution, I bundle you in, I need to have that step up. Absolutely, great question. So depending upon the partner we're dealing with, they like to either monetize or generate their revenue in different ways. So for example, NetApp, NetApp is a company that has very limited services and their focus as a business is really on delivering hardware and software configured together. And they rely heavily on a services channel to fulfill. You take, in contrast to a company like, for example, Dell, which has a very successful services business and really is excited about having service offerings around Hadoop. So it depends upon the company, but when we talk about our VAR channel in particular, one of the things it's an internal acronym, but I'll share it publicly here, we call our VAR super vars and what makes them super and why we've selected the organizations that we are selecting right now to be our VAR is that they not only can fulfill orders for hardware and software, particularly data management or infrastructure software, but they also have a services team on hand because we recognize that there is a services opportunity with every Hadoop deployment and we want our partners to have that. So as an organization, we're structuring our services staff to facilitate and enable our partners not to be sold directly. Okay, so that's the follow-up that I had tomorrow when the partner asked, okay, what do you want to be when you're really growing up? Is it services? Is it software? Is it software company? Through and through. At its core. Well, we kind of got hammered, well, he didn't say it, but we said it's this operating system now. So given that, so given that, I mean, you can make money on services, right? People need services, so okay, great. Partners will make that money for you. Early on, you had to do some of that and you've been very clear about where it's going. It's hard to make money in software when you're giving all the software away free. Well, we're not giving all the software away free. I know, but you've got that piece now. Here's my question. As Hadoop goes into the enterprise, which is clearly doing, is that whole bundling, like what you're doing with NetApp, is that really ultimately how you're going to start to monetize and successfully monetize your software? Is by pushing it through. Yeah, packaging and that bundling, that solution. In other words, our enterprise customer is going to be more receptive to that solution package than say the fringe that has been using Hadoop for the last two weeks. I think there's no question about it. If you look at what Quad Air Enterprise does, I don't know if you've had a chance to attend any of the sessions maybe where Quad Air Enterprise is currently being demonstrated. We just had Alex Williams just on the air did a review. Okay, great. Yeah, he's been impressed with it. Yeah, there's no question about it. And Alex probably hasn't seen the new version that our team is working on and it's quietly working on in the background. Incredible developments and that's really a function of when you have direct access to so many customers and you're getting so much input and feedback and they're the kinds of access to the kinds of customers we ultimately want to serve. So real enterprises, what you get is really fast innovation from a really talented team that knows Hadoop well. I mean, we are years ahead on the management side. Absolutely years ahead. And so I was a guy who worked at VMware for several years and I can tell you that while the hypervisor itself was a core component to VMware success, the monetization strategy was very squarely around vCenter and we're not ignorant to that. Yeah, you can learn a lot from your VMware experience because the market changed significantly and... There were free hypervisors available all of a sudden. VMware itself had a free hypervisor. We had VMware server and we had also our VMware player products and those were all free and they were very good technology. They were the best available on the market for free and they were better, in my opinion, they were better than anything else open or not at the time. Our opinion too. Yeah, they were superior products in every way but yet how VMware was successful was recognizing that in the interest of running a production environment with an SLA, you need management software and they've also built the best management software and there's no question that we understand that strategy. And a phenomenal ecosystem and there's the similarities. They did and the ecosystem was in large part predicated on transparency, very clear access to the APIs and a willingness to help partners be successful with those APIs and ultimately drawing a very tight box about what the company wanted to do and didn't want to do. I mean, look, you're not going to lose friends when you make people money. That's my philosophy. I agree. So when you're in that business where you can come in and enable a channel and have options on your growth strategy, which you do, I mean, you can say, okay, bundling, I can go, you know, I can have this sold direct or at least as long as you've got the options, you can grow with that market. So, you know, again, it's a money making opportunity for the partnerships. But there's more than that, right? Because you mentioned Apple, iTunes, Oracle's another example and the way you make money with Apple and the way you make money with Oracle is different than the way you make money with VMware and presumably Cloudera. Yeah, I mean, our strategy is if you make this base platform easier to install more reliable and you make it ultimately, you know, really rock solid from an integration standpoint, more people are going to use it. So what happens when more people use it? First thing that happens is more solution, it's out there, so it's more solutions get built. When more solutions get built, then you see more clusters get developed. When more clusters are out there, they start to move into production and then they need an SLA. When they need an SLA, Cloudera and Enterprise gets purchased. But along that path, when those solutions got built, guess what else happened? More cloud units got sold, more servers got sold, more networking gear got sold, more services got created. You get ultimately more operating systems got sold, more databases got data into them, more BI clients got created. The ecosystem is deep and rich and a lot of people stand to make money. Hop in people, the water's great. What about support? Okay, so, you know, the other guys are saying, we're just going to make money on support. I mean, support, you guys still are doing support, right? I mean, you're selling support. There's no question that Cloudera Enterprise contains two things, right? The management suite and support. This is not uncomplicated technology and having a world-class support team is of value and customers do want to pay for that value, but we believe that support in and of itself is not enough and that ultimately when you want to deliver an SLA, being able to call when you have a problem is the wrong approach. You want to be proactive and understand the problem well in advance of it actually occurring. That's really important when, for example, if you're a customer, a lot of our customers have a data pipeline that they are building out, basically. I mean, it's new and emerging, so they're building out, it's not just support, they need other tools. Yeah, and building out I think is an understatement for where some of our customers are. I mean, when you have a thousand node cluster that you're operating, that it's mission critical to your business, I don't think that's building out anymore. I think that's an investment in a technology that's mission critical and what you want to see when you have a mission critical technology is you want to know early and often when a problem may emerge. Not, oh my gosh, we have a problem, now I need to go phone a friend. Phone a friend is kind of a last resort. We offer that, but what we really do is, and that's the beauty, that's why we don't decouple our support from our management suite. It's not about phone a friend. It's about understanding the operation of your cluster the entire way through 24 hours. And the other thing that people don't talk about in support is that with open source, a lot of support gets handled in the community as well. So like, so in a way, you're already pre cannibalized with the community. By us and by others, absolutely, but you will never see to that Forbes article I referenced earlier, you will not see, our engineers are not trained to withhold information and under any circumstances to anyone, free or paying. This is about getting- You don't want to hold back your business. I mean, you have nothing to hide. It's open. It's open source. We're here to help, we're here to help whether you're paying us or not. We really are. There's value to that anticipatory remediation. That's what you're packaging. Ed clearing up the air, great, great cube guest. You're awesome on the cube. We're going to have you more on because great to get the info out there. Really impressed with the channel strategy. Love the growth strategy with Cloud Air. You guys are really impressive. I'm really, really impressed to see that you guys got everything pumping on all cylinders. Kirk and you are cranking out on the business execution, we're in the team playing and the chest mask open. Perfect, so great congratulations. I'm just in the financing. Oh, thank you as well. Okay, Ed from Cloud Air clearing it up here inside the cube. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back with more video. Thanks, guys. All right, thanks, Ed.