 Okay, hello everyone, I'm John Furrier with Silicon Angle theCUBE. You're watching a special edition on the ground inside the Palo Alto studio to reveal the Cube Madness 2015 Tech Athlete Region Cube Madness. This is our annual fun showdown between our Cube alumni. The best interviews in the Tech Athlete Division is going to be revealed today. This is our selection show. I'm Joe with Ariana Gradao with CrowdChat. We're going to release the Tech Athlete Region today. Yeah, get ready to bleed some Cube Madness. We're here. This is lots of fun, very exciting. How are you feeling about everything? I feel good. I think the Cube Madness really is our March Madness of our best of the best alumni. And we're going to reveal the selection. So why don't you start and show us the names. We'll do the analysis of the selection. All right, so we're going through the Tech Athlete Region. To begin, we'll start with Deborah Norville from CBS running up against Michael Dell, of course, from Dell. What are your predictions? What are your thoughts? Who do you think got the edge? Well, first of all, two awesome matchups. That's going to be interesting to watch. Deborah Norville had a great interview at Inforum by the Infor event. Obviously, Michael Dell, the founder of Dell Computer, that he starred in this dorm room. Two powerhouses. Deborah's Twitter card performance on Twitter was amazing. She's beautiful, an amazing interview. But Michael Dell has the most social mojo, so it's going to be an interesting matchup to see who has the most activation of their audiences. I think I might have to give that one to Michael Dell. So my prediction is Michael Dell will move forward. Deborah Norville does have a big following, though. We'll see. She's got the media. You may have the ever hand on that one. She's got the CBS platform, but Michael Dell has got the social mojo. All right, we're going to move on. We got Lone Jeffay of Syncsort versus Rob Bearden of Hortonworks. What are your thoughts? What's interesting is Hadoop Summit interviews from 2014, both technique techies, both in the open source. Obviously, Rob Bearden's got a huge following from the open source community. But Syncsort is kind of a niche software provider in the mainframe area, but two powerhouses. And I don't have to give the edge to, sorry, Rob Bearden, but Lone has got an amazing social media marketing machine. They retweet everything. So you've got one who's got the quality CEO, super busy public company versus Lone, the marketing Twitter machine. So unless the Hortonworks team gets activated and tweets away, I see Rob Bearden losing that one. All right. All right, coming up. We got Jim McHugh from Cisco. He's a bit he's a cube alumni, been on a few cube interviews versus Jack Norris of MapR. What do you think? That's a tough one. We have an old, old, steady player. Jack Norris from MapR has been on theCUBE many times, going back to the early days. But Jim McHugh is a new player. He had the Cisco event at Oracle Open World, which was a home run just in terms of overall traffic and reach. He's a strong player at Cisco. He's shaking the trees over there. I see Jim McHugh winning that one, hands down. All right. We got Amy Lewis from SolidFire versus Mario Maribel Lopez from Lopez Associates. That's a tough one. The women in tech battle right there in the bracket on that section of the tech athlete division. I have to give this one to Maribel Lopez. Being the analyst, she's got a huge following. Although Amy at SolidFire is solid, pun intended, at EMC World. Not sure SolidFire has the Twitter following that Maribel has. So I'm going to have to give that one to Maribel Lopez. Awesome. Yeah, both great interviews. OK, now we've got some fun ones. Mario and Fafa, a personal favorite of Jeff's, I know that one, from Gloven Boots, the blog, and versus Jerry Chen from Greylock. What do you think? That's two awesome interviews. One was a comedy bit at HP Discover that Dave Vellante did. That's probably one of the most funniest videos we have on theCUBE. Again, Jeff Frick loves that one. It's his favorite. Jerry Chen from Greylock has got the hot hand. I'll see Investor and Docker, the fastest growing cloud company. So you've got a venture capitalist, and you've got puppets. I don't know. It's a tough call. I think I might have to give that one to Gloven Boots. Jerry Chen, you've got some competition. Now I see Jerry Chen making that one, because he had some good showing last year, and he's very active online. And the venture capitalist, people follow the money, so I get to give this one to Jerry Chen. I might give that one to Mario and Fafa, because it's a great interview. It's going to be a tough call. Guy with the money, and the guy with the laughs. Who's going to win that one? It's a tough one. Let's interject really quickly. How are these chosen? How do you guys pair these up, these matches up? The selection committee process is confidential, and it's elaborate in nature. We go in huge lengths to decide who deserves to be in the bracket. And it comes down to the quality of the interview, the guest itself, overall content, the interview, the number of views, everything. It's a very complex algorithm. We apply machine learning and artificial intelligence to the selection. Of course, it's all about the data. All right. We got Mike Cordona. Cardano. Cordano from HGST versus Craig McLucky from Google. That's a tough one. The HGST event was pretty solid this year. They have really good presence online, but Greg McLucky from Google is a star in the tech community. He's Mr. Kubernetes. He's been on multiple times. And so I'm going to give that one to the Google guy. All right. He moves in advances. Flo Liebert from Mesosphere versus Sandy Carter from IBM. This is a tough one. You have a DevOps geek, and you have a Cloud Evangelist who also is involved in the developer program at IBM. She has got an awesome social media background. Sandy Carter wins this one hands down. That is unless the DevOps guys get focused, because those guys are heavily heavy on Twitter. So that's going to be a very interesting battle. It's going to be a tough one to call, but I have to give it to Sandy Carter. Awesome. Yeah, I've seen Sandy Carter trending. She's all over the place right now. She might have the upper hand on that one. All right. We've got Bobby Patrick from HP Cloud versus Alan Cohen from Illumino. Illumino. Yeah, so this is a battle of CMO. So this is going to be tough, Arianna. I got to say Bobby Patrick is young, strong at HP, Cloud Group. He's an emerging leader. And you know what? He's cool, and he doesn't hold it back any punches. Meanwhile, Alan Cohen is a pro. He is a marketeer, and he's got the hot hand at this company both. One was at Amazon Reinvent. Alan Cohen launched this company there, and obviously the HP discovered Bobby Patrick. So it's going to be very interesting to see. I think this one's going to be tight. I might have to give this one to Bobby Patrick on an edge. Alan Cohen's super busy, but he's got a huge promise. This is going to be potentially the upset one. I think I'm going to pick Bobby Patrick in an upset there. Yeah, and he's got a lot of Twitter followers as well. So that might be helpful. All right, well, that wraps up our tech athlete region. And we're really excited for this to continue. We have the official voting begins on March 19th this Thursday. So everyone should log in, give your own votes, give some insight on who you think will win, and we'll continue to check in throughout the week. It's going to be tough. I think the prediction will be, it's going to be a tough one. I think Sandy Carter is looking good out of that one. I like Jerry Chen in that bracket. And ultimately, I think it's going to be Jim McHugh meets Jerry Chen, we'll see, I'm not sure. I think that's going to be that one. I've had to pick one. McHugh and Dell are going to battle on the final four in that bracket versus Sandy Carter and Jerry Chen. I think it might be Jerry Chen and Michael Dell. And I think Jerry Chen takes that bracket. So that's my prediction. Jerry Chen from Greylock wins the Tech Athlete Division. That's my prediction. Really? All right. Okay, you're watching the selection show for the Tech Athlete Division. We'll be right back.