 We're back here live at day two of HP Vertica's end user conference at Silicon Angle and Wikibon's theCUBE. We're day two live all day here. Yesterday we had a great day. Talked to all the top executives of HP. We still have the top executive EVP, George Kadeep, coming on shortly. Stay tuned to be on our next guest after this intro. I'm John Furrier with Silicon Angle and Dave Vellante at Wikibon.org. Dave, I want to ask you what's your take on yesterday, day one, we did the wrap-ups on YouTube now, but quickly, good day two, day one wrap-up and what do you expect for today? Well, John, day one here was all about customers, use cases, how people are using Vertica, from really good, strong testimonials. You know, you can kind of tell a good testimonial from one that's not so good. Not only on theCUBE, but also in cocktail receptions at dinner last night in interactions that we've had with practitioners. Very, very strong testimonials for Vertica. In particular, evaluating Vertica relative to traditional databases, relative to other emerging MPP databases, including, but not limited to, the likes of Teradata, Astrodata, Green Plum. We heard practitioners consistently telling us they were evaluating those. So I was impressed, John, with the passion that the audience and the practitioner audience in particular has for Vertica. And then the second thing is it's very clear that HP is embedding Vertica as part of it, a fundamental part of its software strategy. And that's really what leads us to Haven, which is what we're going to talk a lot about today. So I think one of the things that's impressive is that George Kadeep was up on stage today here. He's the executive vice president of the software group. And the software group has really done a great job, Dave, of looking at the future and setting the course for where the openness of the web needs to be. Couple major forces, in my opinion, driving this change to open source, although there's not a lot of open-stack conversation here, we're hearing a little bit about that. But more importantly, in the big data area, you're seeing the hardening of enablement platforms like hardware like Vertica. And where Vertica's not trying to be a lock-in spec, they're actually trying to be more of an enabling platform to eliminate all the complexities around managing systems and clusters of data. And the hard part is people want to bring in data fast, multiple data types and diverse sources, and write software. And I think the key to HP right now is that they're enabling multiple platforms, whether you want Hadoop, or you want another platform, or you want HP proprietary software, it's great. And I think that's where HP's going to win. It's kind of like the enterprise version of freemium. You have the public data that you can get off the web that's going to come in as unstructured. You obviously have enterprise data, existing legacy data sources, and other platforms like Hadoop and third-party applications. They build connectors to those. And then finally on the left, all the way to the other end of the spectrum is the HP's proprietary software, or their own software that they wrote. So, and they're offering that to customers. If you want a buffet of solutions, you can go public, social data, public data, enterprise solutions that pre-exist, and we'll build connectors for those, whether it's Hadoop on the open source end, or somewhere else on a proprietary end. And then obviously HP has Vertica, Haven, Idle, and a variety of other sources. So, to me, I think that's a really, really good strategy. They put in the choice into the customer. And the customers are responding. And the hallway we're hearing that, that's resonating well with customers, Dave. And I think that is something that I like about HP. And the other thing I like about what's happening with HP right now is that it's not a lot of grandstanding with HP. A lot of shows we go to, the vendors are pumping themselves up and promoting their wares and hyping up their capabilities. Here, they're downplaying HP and upplaying the customer stories. They're letting the customer speak for themselves, they're letting the customer's stories be the lead gen for more business. And it's producing results. And I was talking candidly with George Kedifa, and he's really happy. I can't really talk about some of the specifics because we're under non-disclosure there. But I will tell you, smiling, and we're going to hear from him shortly, Dave. And I think it's exciting for HP. Well, here's the challenge for HP software, is they've got a bifurcated business. They've got a legacy business, and they get this new business that they're trying to build around Vertica. And big data is a huge opportunity, but nobody's really making a ton of data, I'm running off of big data today, although George Kedifa did say, in their belief, HP is the number one vendor in big data. And he says they're doing billions of dollars in big data. So obviously, the market sizing is in the eye of the person who writes the definition for what big data is. So that's fine if they want to call some of the things big data. But we know, John, by definition, a lot of the action, a lot of the revenue and big data right now, specifically is around services. Now, HP has a big service as business, so does IBM, so do others like Accenture. But really, that's where all the action is. We've got HP as one of the top, I think. Two is, it's not number one in our numbers, but it's right up there. So it's vying for that number one slot with the likes of IBM. Now, to me, the key, John, is, as I was saying before, two years ago you're wondering, what the heck is HP doing with Vertica? Why are they not being more aggressive with this? And I think internally, HP was having some serious conversations. George Kedifa was coming in saying, all right, this is a jewel. Of course, we all know about the autonomy issues. But while they were dealing with that in public and dealing with all the fallout from that and the shakeup for that, internally they were figuring out how do we leverage this asset? The product people, that's not their problem to communicate to Wall Street. Their challenge is, okay, how do we leverage this to our advantage? So by combining Vertica with autonomy, bringing in the enterprise security piece and making it attractive to developers, voila, you've got a platform there. Now is it a fully baked out platform? Well, no, but nobody really has a fully baked out platform. You know, look at Pivotal. Pivotal kind of took what I call misfit toys, put them together and said, okay, we're going to do the big data platform for the next generation. Yeah, but Dave, that's a good point. The Pivotal thing, I think, highlights what's happening with HP. You've got a unified front with autonomy in Vertica. Vertica clearly putting themselves out on the front and leading, because that's where the hardened solution is. In my opinion, I think what HP struck gold with Vertica is. And this is, I don't think this was kind of by design. I think this is kind of, it just played out, this is where the wind just shifted at their back on this one, is that Vertica is a hardened platform for managing massive amounts of data at very, very high speeds. And that takes into account the cloud trends. So I think focusing on Vertica on the front end is really critical, because they don't have to push idle and then push autonomy for their customers. Let autonomy settle in where it makes sense. Harden out the access of data. That is a smart move by Kadifa, and I'm telling you, this is a good play for HP. And this kind of points to what Pivotal's trying to do. Focus on the software. Focus on the application developers. Focus on the application economy. Let the haven, let the Vertica work. It's very similar to Pivotal. Get cloud foundry, platform as a service. And in essence, Vertica is a platform as a service kind of hypothetically for big data. So when you look at the big players, EMC slash VMware slash Pivotal, Cloudera, Hortonworks, HP, IBM, and you lay those guys out, Oracle and IBM have big database businesses, and they're obviously trying to protect those. When HP bought Vertica, it really didn't have a database business, so it said, okay, hey, we've got this emerging, you know, high speed, massively parallel, columnar database opportunity. You know, let's go after it. Paradata, of course, is the other big one who bought Astrodata. So the big question, John, is this unstructured data, this new style of computing data, you know, the data behind the new style of computing, as Meg Whitman calls it, is it going to ultimately overwhelm the traditional relational database model? That's an interesting debate. That's something I want to talk to Kurt Monash about. George Kadifa, and we'll talk to him about this as well, is laying out in his total available market slide that he showed this morning a massive 100X opportunity, 100X larger than the traditional relational database market. So that's HP's strategy. You called it, you know, they got the wind in their back. They are trying to, so, you know, the old cliche, skate to the puck. They're trying to anticipate where the market's going. They're trying to put their resources behind it, build a platform out, and compete, in my opinion, head to head with the likes of Oracle and IBM. And that's a critical part of HP's software strategy. Without it, HP will remain a niche software company. Kadifa understands the software business. He's got a background at Oracle. He understands Oracle. And it's his intent, I'm sure, and speaking to him privately, that they want to be a major player in the software business. It's going to take some time, and I think, John, it's going to take some tuck-in acquisitions. That's why it's so critical that they pay down their debt and become an acquirer of technologies again. Well, I think one of the things that I'm excited about is obviously in the big data space. Dave, we've been covering, going back to, you know, the second Hadoop world with Cloudera when we were early on, and Cloudera had like 30 employees, Mike Olson and Elmer Awadala told me early on that, you know, the future will be different. We talked about this yesterday, and that they've seen the future. And a lot of the web scale companies like Yahoo were setting the standard. And you saw Yahoo spin out or let the core Hadoop guys go out to inform Hortonworks, which became a competitive Cloudera. And then you saw a massive competition in the big data space. Since that time, three years ago, what was it, four years ago? I can't remember. You're seeing the maturization of what's going on in the space. And that is, is that in the enterprise, you're seeing people wanting these unstructured platforms, but it's not mutually exclusive and not dedicated systems. You've got to be coexisting and interoperating with multiple sources. And that is fundamentally shaking out. And that's the way we called it. I think remember talking about early on, we asked Pat Gelsinger when he was at EMC, can there be a red hat for Hadoop? And his answer was no. And I think Pat absolutely was correct. There is not going to be a red hat for Hadoop. I think you're seeing that right now in the distributions of Hadoop. You got Hortonworks, you got Cloudera, you got Intel doing their own distro, you got MapR doing their own thing, which is more proprietary Hadoop. So. IBM, Fujitsu, and Disco. I mean, it's starting to have that. And HP's choosing not to do a distro, which John, I think is smart because the Hadoop distro is like the new hypervisor. I mean, it's a race to zero. It's like a device driver all the time. It's like, you know, I mean, I'm just oversimplifying. It's not like a device driver, but it could be coming on time. No, but in terms of how much money people are going to make out of it, it's going to make not much more than device drivers, right? You know, and I've always said, the Linux, the Linux pressure to create that standard around Linux was driven by the fact that at the time, Linux was at the point of crossing over to being critical mass standard, where Red Hat actually made a lot of money and went public, and we know the rest is history, was that there was a lot of pressure from HP, IBM's son with proprietary operating systems. And that was a call to arms for the open source community to come together around Linux. I just don't see that dynamic happening in the big data world. I don't see that threat. I think it's a completely green field opportunity. I think everyone can have their cake and eat it too. It's just different dynamics. So for that reason, that's why I think that you don't see that pressure for the open source community to consolidate. Now, Hortonworks and Cloudera are playing nicely in Apache to get the core system developed because of the pressure of fragmentation. That might be the way I see it coming together. Well, and the other thing too about Red Hat is it took a decade or more to play out and the industry largely left them alone. The big guys weren't sharpening their knives. They had support from guys like IBM who was funding open source. They had support from Oracle that wanted to bet the house on Linux. That's different now. You're seeing some major players say, hey, I want a piece of this big data pie. I'm not going to let Cloudera or Hortonworks run away with it. So we're here. This is SiliconANGLE, Wikibon's exclusive coverage of HP Discover. We're watching the hashtag, HP Big Data 2013. You can go to atthecube. That's our official hashtag now for SiliconANGLE, Wikibon's theCube, our flagship program. We've got the events extracted from the noise. Go tweet us, ask us questions. If you have anything about HP, we'd be happy to answer candidly. We love bringing our independent perspective to these events and get on the ground floor and dig in, extract the signal from the noise. We got a lot of scoops from this event, Dave. I'm happy to report that we have a lot of data that we're going to be reporting on SiliconANGLE.com once the quiet period lifts and we're allowed to talk about it. There's some significant innovations happening here within HP that we're going to be excited to talk about, excited to do the analysis on. So stay with us. Go to wikibon.org for free research. Go to SiliconANGLE.tv, continue to watch the stream and go to SiliconANGLE.com to watch continuous coverage. So we'll be right back with our next guest. We'll be George Kedifa in seven minutes. Come back and watch us at the top of the hour at 11 o'clock and eight o'clock Pacific. Executive Vice President of HP, the new leader of the software group, turn that ship right in the right direction. We're going to ask him some pointed questions around the strategy, the market opportunity and also the product strategy. So stay with us.