 Okay, welcome back. We are here live in Boston, Massachusetts. This is SiliconANGLE and Wikibon's The Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. This is HP's Vertica's end user conference. A lot of practitioners, a lot of experts here. And this is where, it's not a big event, not a lot, in terms of HP news and HP products about the customers, the ones that are on the front lines and all the innovative work. And Dave and I are pleased to be here with HP. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. And I'm joined by my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante at wikibon.org. We're here in Boston with Chris Sayland, who is the vice president of marketing, HP Vertica. This is really your show, you know? When you told me that you were going to do this in August, in the first inaugural event, I was like, okay, it's pretty ambitious. Thinking you might get a couple of hundred. You got 700 people here almost. Mostly practitioners, you know? Great, congratulations. Yeah, well this is, it's our show, but it's also our customers and our partner's show. Because we really wanted to feature the stories of what our customers are doing with the technology and what our partners are doing with the technology because their ecosystem is so important to us. So that's really what we, this wasn't even intended to be a show. This started as really user group meeting because we like to have our users talk to each other. We're building an online community where we've obviously got a in-person community. We said, let's get them all together. Boston, nice time to come in the summer. We took some of our customers to the socks game on Sunday, some who came in early. So it's been great. Thanks for being my junk folder, the invitation to the socks game. I missed any of my notes. I didn't want to go down there, stuck in Cape Cod. No, and also seriously, you have your wind at your back, Chris. I mean, you guys had a great HP Discover. You guys were headlining Meg's keynote in terms of the software group and the shiny pebble within the software group right now because the demand for big data is really, really strong. So hot product, hot market, turnarounds happening big time within HP. We're seeing that with sort of HP Discover. The customers here are not lightweight. You have some serious customers here. Yes, we do. Not kicking tires, but actually plowing the field in a modern era of computing. We had GM on earlier, he's talking about the mission and everything, but as a marketer, you got to turn that into the story. So when you look at that, what opportunity do you say to yourself, okay, I want to kind of dust off to make this a shiny pebble and showcase the customers. What do you look at? What are the core things that shine out to you that you polish up? Well, it somewhat depends on the customer, but I think in all cases it's how they really got value. I mean, I moderated a panel earlier today with a few customers about how did they get this by the CFO? And in many cases, the CFO was pushing them to do it because they, but where's that real business value, monetary value? It doesn't even have to be for a business. I mean, we heard from DNC this morning, how they used it to win an election. So it's really though, it's where is that tangible value, we're going to really show that this paid off for my organization. We had a customer, one of your customers come out here, and this is Candace, this wasn't a script, honestly, the cube is not scripted at all. And he said, quote, he said, quote, you know, I was skeptical. He goes, my, my appear was hostile. This is not happening. We're oracles kick ass. And then they were blown away. Is that consistent? And is there other anecdotal data points you can share around those kinds of testimonials? And this is not just some backend legacy shop. This is guys really innovating. Well, I can tell you, it's been a dream place to be as a marketing guy because I came in here, I joined the company about a year ago, and I came in here and I started talking to our customers. And because that's always what I've been about, you know, is let's kind of hear what the customers say. And the customer base here is, I mean, you're never going to have 100% satisfaction, but this is about as close as I've ever seen in my career. So it's great. And people really like the technology and they like what the technology can do for them. Well, they're innovating, right? I mean, it's not, a lot of times, you're talking in the DWBI world, it's like, oh, I can't make this stuff. Work, I'm patching stuff together. Last night at the reception, there was a lot of innovation going on. It felt like a startup mentality of a customer base. Well, we're really trying to retain the soul of a startup here. We really, really are. I mean, we're trying to leverage a scale of HP, but at the same time retain the soul of the startup. And it's, of a startup, I should say. And it's interesting because those are two very different types of environments, but I think we've done a pretty nice job of blending them. And you know, I know it's something that Colin's very much about. Colin and I go way back, and you know, this is really why I'm here too. And it's a great culture. It's a great culture, and our customers are part of it, and our business partners are part of it, and you know, you guys are part of it too, so we're really glad you're here. So Colin was saying last night to John, I mean, we had a conversation, he was saying, the great thing is, Meg's allowing you guys to be relatively autonomous, at the same time, you're trying to leverage the best of HP. So my question to you is competitively, how has that affected your ability to go up against the IBMs, the Oracles, you know, the Teradata's, maybe talk about the competitive environment? Yeah, well definitely, the work that we've done to leverage the scale of HP has really helped in what you would call the higher end of the market, the big enterprise deals, the big name customers. Guys that wouldn't maybe talk to you before. They would talk to us, but we definitely, you know, they're very focused on, first of all, they've already made significant investments in many cases in HP, you know, in some technology stack. They love the idea, by the way, that HP is not about forcing you into the HP stack, that HP is about openness. And so we have, you know, that's why we're featuring this open ecosystem. Many cases, our open ecosystem, or at least in some cases, you know, there's, it's businesses that HP is in and other parts of HP, but we really want to be about what's doing right for the customer. But yeah, no, it's definitely helped us to be able to leverage the breadth and scale of one HP. I mean, if you've been into the partner area, I know you guys have been over here filming, but you can see we've got a whole one HP area, but we've also got a lot of other partners as well. So, but that ecosystem, it's certainly the HP ecosystem itself, tremendously. It's a good vibe out there. Well, yeah, I have to say that from the customer standpoint, it's a good vibe, like I said, not, no, no, no lightweight's here. All heavy heavy hitters in terms of folks who know their chops on NoSQL, but also structured data also, you know, really pushing the envelope on BI and data warehouse and all the cutting edge stuff around business intelligence and competitive advantages. So props for that. But I do have to ask you about the Vertica is now integrating with HP, wins at your back, and you guys have a lot more resources, more muscle, as an organization, that Vertica. So, a great place to work, we've heard that from other people. But I want to ask you about the ecosystem. Every company has an ecosystem sly. Oh yeah, we're in the ecosystem. We got an ecosystem angle, but sometimes there's a lot of false promises in there. So I got to ask you, you're at the beginning of this kind of a clean sheet of paper, with legacy of partnerships that HP has a good reputation in, and channel integrates, et cetera. So what's your strategy? How are you going to put that together? And what's your message to people in the ecosystem, and what are the things happening? Yeah, well the ecosystem, I mean we've broken the ecosystem into multiple parts. I've always said you really have kind of three different types of partners. You have partners that you sell to, IAE, your OEM partners, and we've got a very big ecosystem there. You've got partners that you sell through, which is the reseller channel, which HP has effectively an unmatched reseller channel, and both domestically, internationally, and we've really been working to extend that. And then you've got the partners you sell with, which are the technology partners. And you're seeing a lot of them, I think you've probably had some of those on as well. So and then you can sub-segment that down, and you've got your professional services, your training partners, your global SIs. So really the answer kind of depends on what kind of partner. And so we've just put a lot of resources behind this and in trying to figure out how to work with these partners the right way. And but ultimately it's not even so much about the relationship with the partner, it's about the joint relationship that the partner and we have with the customer. And that's where we really put our focus. So, you know, it's sort of like I said, when we talked about when we announced Haven a few months ago, you said, well, how's it integrated? Well, it depends upon the solution we're trying to build for the customer, really. And it's sort of the same thing I would say about our partnerships and our partner ecosystem. But it's about going in together and doing the right thing. So on the go-to market, you have a direct sales force and indirect strategies, so direct and indirect, right? So you have the combination. You have a lot of legacy partners, and you're sponsored the lunch today, or some of the stuff on the security side that's pretty impressive and challenging for them to do. But you got to go out and you got to find some real easy to sell solutions for partners. What's the plans? I mean, is there special programs, anything in particular you want to share? We're investing very, very, very heavily in enablement and training because although you say easy to sell, I mean, that is one of the, I wouldn't say it's a challenge here. And in a way it's a good thing for the partners. It's a very good thing for the partners who are good at it because really making big data work. I mean, big data has gotten so big. I mean, everybody's calling everything big data right now. But the concept and kind of it requires actually a very consultative approach. And it's not necessarily an easy, easy sell. And it's not like there's necessarily a big data in a box solution, right? But that's not a thing for services for a partner, right? That's where the gross profit is. Absolutely, absolutely. So I mean, again, it depends on the type of partner. That's not universally true, but for a lot of partners it's absolutely true. So Chris, you mentioned Haven before. I mean, as an example of something where you're able to, I guess in theory you could have cobbled this together as a startup, but it would have been a lot harder and maybe wouldn't have had as a complete picture. So talk about Haven a little bit, how that all came together and where you want to see that go. You know, I'm actually, we could have cobbled it together with partnerships as a startup. I don't think any startup could cobble it together themselves, truthfully. No, absolutely. You know, I think the proof point for that has really been, and it was funny because I had, I had somebody asking one of the panels I moderated earlier and they started asking the customers about Haven and the customers don't really know Haven, but they do know that they are trying to figure out how to deal with structured data, unstructured data, you know, integrate Hadoop with their analytical systems and, you know, leverage your infrastructure, where does the cloud fit in? And so they're trying to figure out how to bring all of this stuff together, right? And make it work together and make it work the way it's always promised to. And they know, you know, these technologies should be working together and working together to solve problems as opposed to, you know, some predefined integration formatting that may work for one use case, but doesn't work at all for another. So it's really about flexibility and openness. And, you know, I talked about, I know I talked about this when I talked to you guys a couple months ago at Discover, about loose coupling of components. And so taking these capabilities, you know, unstructured data, we're getting a lot of questions and requests about that. That keeps coming up because, you know, we do a lot of work in areas like life sciences and telecommunications and, you know, media and entertainment where they're just dealing with more and more and more unstructured data, but they want to be able to, you know, interpret it. They want to be able to transform it, but ultimately you need to be able to analyze it. And so in a lot of cases, it's not just about analyzing the data, but it's also about transformation and then creating common repositories and, you know, places that you can sort of, okay, here's where we're running the analytics, but the data's coming in from all over the place and it's coming in all sorts of different forms. And so there's a lot of connecting and transforming that needs to go on there and that's very much what the Haven Umbrella is about too. So it's not just analytics, it's really about being able to take, you know, heard Meg say this morning in her opening comments, you know, it's about 100% of your data. And so that's really what we're trying to do. Well, so when you hear a lot of talk about data-driven organizations, and of course the great thing about big data is it's created this awareness of the imperative to be a data-driven organization. But my question is not one of technology, it's one of organization. How are your customers dealing with that imperative? You know, who owns the data strategy? Are they thinking about that? Or are they largely still leading with technology and they're going to figure that out sort of the back end? Yeah, well, you know, I've talked a lot and I talk a lot internally, I think I talked to you guys when I previously talked to you as well about, I've felt like, you know, I've just been a big fan of the book crossing, the chasm and the chasm group theories where they talk about how technology as it becomes more of a mainstream thing kind of goes from being more of an IT buy to more of a line of business buy. And I think truthfully where we are right now is right in that spot in the market because the short answer in our customers is they're kind of both. And it sort of depends. A lot of our earliest customers were very much technology visionaries. And, you know, if you talk to somebody like Dan McCaffrey at Zynga, you know, these are somebody who sort of can look at a, you know, extremely scalable, extremely high performance, next generation database five years ago and figure out cool things he could do with it, right? And so we definitely had more of an IT centric early buyer, like up till now, but we were absolutely seeing more and more and more and more a line of business involvement. And it may not necessarily be the decision maker and it may not necessarily be the ultimate buyer, but they're certainly becoming more influential because, you know, it's not just CIO anymore, CMO, CFO, CIO, you know, it doesn't have to be C level in many cases, it's not. Our customer, what you're seeing is people who are now like the VP of analytics is you're seeing these titles and they neither work for the business nor the IT organization, they play a big bridge role in between the two. And so, you know, it varies depending on the customer and it definitely varies depending on when they became a customer of ours because a lot of early customers did tend to have more of a tech centrism, but the market is absolutely going towards, and this is why, you know, initiatives like Haven and getting our customers together, not to just talk about speeds and feeds, but about what they're doing with it and how they're getting value out. That's why we set this meeting up in the first place. And it's always good to have end users talking to each other because you've got best practices, you've got this openness, it feels great for everyone to talk to each other. And it kind of erases some cognitive distance, everyone has that little doubt of the right thing, but, you know, you hear people saying, oh, you work at, you know, X, Y, Z company and oh my God, that's massive production environment, oh, you're laying BI on top of it, you're doing ETL in the back and what's, I want to do it. So, a lot of sharing going on is great. And they're sharing the issues they're having too and how they solve them, so. With you guys and the peers, which we love. And we're doing that online too, through my Vertica, so, absolutely. And it's obviously open source based principles, so that's all great stuff. But I want to ask you, on a personal question, you've seen the movie before, you're new to Vertica, we've known each other prior, you understand the enterprise. Money fall or another movie. You know, follow her literally on Twitter and friends. But you know, and also you've been an analyst, you've been studying the enterprise space for a long time, especially the enterprise collaboration 2.0, so-called 2.0, that seems to be happening every year in the past decade. What's changed now? I mean, there's always been that talk, and you know, we've talked about this with SAP and Vishal Sikha talking about SOA in 2001, service-oriented architectures, all happening now, right? So, but what's different now than as, just going back five, seven years ago, to now, what major things are in place, didn't happen, don't need to happen, and what's your view of the future? Well, you know, that's a, that's a big question that we could probably spend days talking about, we should have a conference on that, right? We have a crowd chat. But to me, actually, I think what it really is, is that technology is no longer threatening or frightening or scary or intimidating for non-technical users. And so, you know, we're now, there's a comfort level with technology in the C-suite, aside from the CIO, that wasn't there before. So, it's interesting, so it has some outcomes. One of the outcomes is, you can't just pitch some pure technology vision, without being able to back it up, and show how it's going to be used, and show how it's going to pay off, and then show customers who it's actually paying off for. So, I think, you know, one of the things about, you know, I mean, I was an analyst in the 90s, and there was a lot of pitching stuff that wasn't going to ship for two or three years, and it was the next big idea. And sometimes it became the next big thing, and a lot of times it didn't, you know? So, but now it's more, it's much, there's a much more pragmatic customer base, I think out there, that really, it's show me. You know, it's don't tell me, it's show me, but also show me where the value is. There's no more head fakes, basically. The information's a lot harder. It's a lot harder to pull a head fake, because the information's a transparency, social media, and whatnot. Because the customers can talk to each other, and say, hey, this is really working, or this isn't really working. And so the ability to sort of control the message, you know, marketers, and I'm a marketer, right? Marketers in the media, in the past, could kind of control the message, this is what's coming next, because the customers weren't really able to very easily interact with each other, and say, you know what, yeah, that actually works pretty well. You know what, that doesn't work at all. Now they can, very easily. And so I think it keeps us all honest. That's a major change. And two, in fact, you can actually measure and understand your customers. We've heard your customers say that. How are you going to take those two factors, just those two factors alone? The transparency, openness of information, the open source kind of concept, the credo, if you will. And then, obviously, measurement and data. I mean, they can now, as a marketer, what are you going to do as the VP of marketing? Using those two principles. I think the thing we're, you know, and again, it's what this event's been all about, that's why it's been so gratifying to see it, even early August, see so many people come to this event. I mean, we sold this thing out two weeks ago, and we had to like close the doors because the fire marshal was going to shut us down. We kept adding people. It was great. It was, you know, it's the first year we ran it, it was sort of unexpected, but I think- You always go to the convention center next door. Well, it's there. Well, believe me, that's, you know, we'll be back. And we know that because we like having it here, because the other nice thing about having it in Boston, by the way, is our developers can come eat our customers as well. That's been huge for us. Because you know, sometimes we can take a couple of events that are in other places, but here we can just bring them out and bring them in. And we've got the whole developer zone, going to the partner zone. But, you know, back to your question, it's really about, you know, getting the customers together and talking about them. I don't know, I feel like I'm repeating myself, but that's what it's all about. I mean, you get your customers talking to each other, you get them talking to you. And again, we're doing a lot of work online as well through MyVertica to really build our community there. And so, and that's really the participation rate on that has been skyrocketing. What's the URL for the folks out there? Well, it's vertica.com, and then it's my.vertica.com is the community, but the website is just vertica.com. Okay, my.vertica.com, vertica.com. Okay, great, exactly. Okay, Chris, thanks for coming on theCUBE, and finally, I'll give you the final word for the event. What do you want people to walk away from the folks who aren't here, tell them about the vibe here, and what you want people to walk away with about the... I really want them to walk away feeling like they're really part of a community. And I think for those of us in the company and our customers and our partners, at least I know I already have, because we really take it to heart, but I hope that everybody who comes here really feels that they built relationships and their personal relationships, their professional relationships, they're part of a community, and they're part of a community that wants to make each other successful. So that's, if people walk out of here, when we wrap things up tomorrow afternoon, feeling that way, we'll have been very successful, and we'll be back. So, hopefully... Okay, we'll use you guys too. We're here, we're obviously on the ground. We're sharing data. It's an open environment, very collaborative. This is HP. They're all about the stories of their customers, let the customers do the talking, literally walking the talk with customers, and obviously openness, and that's the HP way here. Live in Boston. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.