 Live from the Sands Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering HP Discover 2015. Brought to you by HP. And now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live here at HP Discover 2015. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. It's our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal noise, join the conversation, go to hpdiscover.social. The new engagement hub, trending stories, trending hashtags, crowd chats. That's where we get the live keynotes, Meg Whitman will be on shortly and all the other CUBE videos are there. Our next guest is Colin Mahoney, SVP general manager of the HP software group for Big Data. Welcome back to theCUBE. Great to see you. Thank you, yeah, good to see you guys. It's just a straight year. Good to be here, yeah, wow. It's been that long, amazing. What's new, SVP GM, what's going on in Big Data in software, a lot of changes going on with an HP right now, so give us the update. What's happening with your group? Products, team, execution? Yeah, so great, great things happening all around. You know, I'm a product guy, so I love talking about products and everything that we're doing around the Haven platform, whether it's our Haven on Hadoop, Haven in the Enterprise or Haven on Demand. You'll hear us talk about all three of those aspects a lot. They're all really important to us. A lot of our customers are going through that transition from on-premise to cloud. They obviously don't want to compromise and give up any of the functionality that they're getting on-premise. So a lot of what we've been doing is how do we help them in that transition from-prem to cloud, specifically around the analytic platform, as well as compliance, regulatory reasons that we need to make sure that that data is secure from the moment it's created to when it's stored, when it's analyzed and ultimately served out. But lots going on, you know, the theme that you'll continue to hear about is the data-driven enterprise. And there's really, I think, the last, probably since we got together, there's just so much more of a focus on the business outcome, you know, as a whole, especially of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, it's really just thinking about how do we deliver that business value when you think about our converged infrastructure, our services, our software, you've got to bring it all together and big data is where it comes together most. We've got to give you props for running earlier with Jason Newton and, you know, we were talking about Hadoop and Dave's speculating, hey, you know, Hadoop was going to be this big, only this big market never really happened. I'm like, well, Colin Mahoney predicted that three years ago, that Hadoop would be great, but not the only game it down. That became Haven, the vision continued, you said that on theCUBE. But now the digital transformation is data-driven enterprise. Okay, check the box, big data gets props there. But the other groups, too, hybrid infrastructure, digital experience, digital enterprise, and workspace productivity are all big data, too. They are. So are you sprinkling the big data, like heroin throughout the companies, different business units? I mean, what's going on with big data? Because you're also horizontal. Yeah, so I think big data permeates everything in an organization, and the good news is, I didn't have to tackle it. You know, if you look at the portfolio that we have, they came and dipped it into the trough themselves. Well, it's always been there. I think a lot of these products, like one of the things that was probably my greatest realization was when we took over this larger portfolio of big data products and we created the big data group in HP Software, so many of our products are storing massive volumes of data. And I thought, just coming from the vertical side, well, I know what big data is. I've seen petabytes and petabytes, but the truth is that a lot of our customers with some of the largest data sets are compliance customers, are archiving customers. And so I think what you're seeing is the data's always been out there, and what we bring to the table is, we know how to deal with compliance. We know how to deal with security end to end. We also know how to do the analytics. And so a lot of what we've spent time on is not just creating new products, which we continue to do, but how do we bring those technologies together and make sure that big data and the analytic capabilities that we have are permeating everything. And not even just software at HP, external partners as well as our hardware infrastructure as well. So it's a couple times you've now sort of alluded to governance-related things. And we've talked about this before, but you've got these big data projects spinning up all over the place. Many of them don't give any return, and few of them have any kind of governance structure. So this seems to be a big theme. What's going on there? And is it becoming a lucrative business for HP? I think, well, it's always been a great business for us, just working with data, looking at the lineage of the data, who has access to that data, the controls that you have to put around that data, the policy management around that data. That's always been a great business for us. And I think what we're seeing now is in some of the new frontier of big data, they're now starting to think about that stuff. They're now starting to say, wow, who does have access to this? We have a massive farm of information. Do we know what information is in there? Do we know where it came from? Do we know who has access to it? And so I think there's a natural progression there for the folks that are in the new frontier who've been doing some great analytics. They're now adding a lot of the compliance capabilities and for our compliance customers, they're now adding some of the great analytic capabilities. So I think it works well both ways. So you've always been, we met on a plane, flying off at least to discover, and I was picking your brain about Hadoop. You knew a lot about it then and you're even deeper into it now. And as John said, the world is not just Hadoop. Somebody said to us the other day, Hadoop's done. It's over, spark, real time, okay. So I wanted to, I said, I got to ask, he comes on, what's the state of Hadoop now? You guys got the relationship with Hortonworks, ODP now is this new kind of thing in the marketplace. Give us the update there. I don't, so first of all, I do not think Hadoop is dead. I think what Hadoop has done, and I think we talked about this a little bit last time, is Hadoop is morphing. And I think that's a very good thing for the market because I think what this is saying is, there are so many needs around data that the market has. So whereas Hadoop might've started off as MapReduce and while we may have been negative on some of the MapReduce aspects of it, it's really burgeoned into a lot of different things. It's storage, it's all sorts of analytic processing capabilities, SQL on Hadoop now is a killer app. Well, you know, we've been on that market. It's not a pure play, Hadoop. It's a variant that's been developed. It is. And I think the promise that the hope may be, the promise that everybody holds out for is, can you get the workload management? If you look at initiatives and some of the other things, because that ultimately is going to be the greatest challenge, right? Everybody wants a single place to put all their data, have every workload on that data and manage it. Easier said than done, but that's actually an area where HP brings an incredible amount from a hardware perspective especially, as well as software. That's an area I think we can really differentiate and we are differentiating. So I don't think it's bad by any means, but I think a thousand flowers are blooming in that ecosystem and it's taking this brand that is to do it. It brings up a great, good. I just want to follow up on that because when I heard this individual say that, I said, two people came to mind, you and Doug Cutting. I said, Doug, what do you think? But you're here, so I'll ask you. So how is it that Hadoop was able to morph and accommodate? It feels like it's an architectural thing that was designed in order to do that, properly to do that. Is that right? Or is it just ecosystem sort of forcing that? No, I think it's a combination. So I think there's a couple of factors at play. I think number one is it was designed to store and scale data massively. It was also designed to be open from a framework perspective so that you can have a lot of processing paradigms on top of the data, right? So I think that invites an ecosystem to try a lot of different things. I also think another force at play is that from a marketing perspective, we all know how difficult big data marketing is. So for all these small independent companies, a lot of them VC backed, rallying around something so that projects could take on that identity has been really important to that ecosystem. And you can question profitability models and all those sorts of things and some of them will take time probably to play out. But so I think there's a number of reasons why it's morphed in this way. And I think it'll continue to morph. And our perspective on it is, we love that ecosystem. We have a lot of products that make it better, help manage it, help create analytics on it, like the sequel on Hadoop offering that I mentioned. So we're going to continue to work with those vendors and partner up so that we can help in that ecosystem. Colin, I want to talk about developers. And one glaring kind of hole here at HP Discover is, it's not a lot of jobs, it's business conference. Customers and HP together. But you start to look at those pillars of transformation for the new style of business as Meg will announce. I mean, it's going to be developer century. All developer century. You've had a very successful event that you put on with Chris, Ellen, and team, the Big Data Vertica and User Conference. You have big names there, Facebook, Zynga, and we interviewed them all at theCUBE. That was a different, you went rogue on that. I mean, but you're doing it again. Well, they supported us, yeah. Well, I mean, not really. I mean, it was not conventional to do in the HP cadence of their events, but you saw a need early with developers and that's because you were in the throes of Big Data with Hadoop and OpenStores and whatnot. So now HP seems to be going down that path. Can you comment, are they going down that path? Absolutely. And will it be kind of a developer conference in the future and how would that look given the makeup of the new messaging and the new transformation? Yeah. So, yeah, great question. What would it look like? So we are having our Big Data Conference, the developer conference in Boston again this August, so early August. So the answer to that is absolutely yes. We're hoping it's bigger than ever. And the answer to HP and our commitment to developers is also 100% yes. And I think HP has always been committed to developers. You maybe just don't hear about it as much as you hear about it with some other communities, but it's something that we're growing in so many different ways. Not just having developer conferences, but if you look at the meetups that we're doing, all the activities, the hackathons, everything is really geared towards this community building, whether it's Haven or Helion, a lot of the communities we have, it is working. We absolutely, if you look at the numbers of developers that we have in our community, on our platforms, absolutely working. And that, frankly, is what makes us tick. I mean, we all want to aspire and sell to the CIO and believe that you can do these massive deals with the CIO and you can, but you need grassroots. You need both. Exactly. And that's what you need to do. And bottom up. You absolutely need both because when the CIO or the VPs and these companies go to their teams and they say, what do you think of this? They've got to be jumping up and down, saying we need more and more and more, and they only get that if you're giving them the community to try. Yeah, I mean, first of all, I mean, I'm not saying we're Google, Apple, Envy, but you look at Google I.O., amazing production. They had satellites all around meetups. You look at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference coming up. Now, granted, that's Android. It's kind of consumer flair to it. But I'm looking at you guys. I was talking to Bobby Patrick. Cloud has major developer momentum. Absolutely. You guys with Vertica and Big Data's developer momentum, a hardware company transforming into a software company with hardware was the new HP. I mean, I'm oversimplifying it. It's not on message, but that's really kind of what's happening, right? So I'm just trying to tease out where that developer, I mean, if you're winning the developers, you got to put a big tent together. Well, yeah, I mean, so, yeah, I can't really speak to whether and when that happens. Make a decision, will you? Yeah. But I think part of the power of the developer communities, too, is monolithic is not always a great thing to developers, right? The people that are interested in analytics may not be interested in cloud. They probably are, but as an example. And so we want to give them a vehicle to get everything they need for what they're focused on, but also make it really easy for them to get everything else they're interested in. And so I think if you look at that progression that we're paving with Helion, where we're putting a lot of developer effort, there's great things coming together there. And I think the developers are the ones that are telling us this is really useful. And then when you combine that with open APIs like Haven on Demand, some of the other things, very development-centric. So it's interesting, you say it's not monolithic that sort of developer mindset, and it's true, but we've been having a lot of conversations in the Wikibon community around sort of the move from systems of record to systems of engagement and now combining those with analytics and big data systems of intelligence. And the customers that we're talking to are saying that they basically, they can't throw away the old 90% of our revenue comes from there, but we want to create some kind of connection to the new. Do you see that going on in the customer base? And how are they approaching that from a developer standpoint? Is it still kind of stove piped? How are they transitioning the development side of things? So Dave, I see that every single day. And where I see it being very successful is they don't try to just create this massive solution that'll take three years, the sort of traditional enterprise data warehouse approach. Instead, they start with a data set, probably a new data set. They create an application around it and they know that they want to bring in the traditional data. They want to somehow join that to use a database term but it doesn't have to be a technical join. They want to bring that and marry it to their CRM data for a customer 360 view or whatever it might be. So you start with something small and then you start pulling in the feeds and all of a sudden before you know it, you have baked the intelligence as you're describing into the system. And I think that's what every organ, this is the data-driven enterprise. How do you bring intelligence to the business? Instead of forcing the business to go read a report or go to a dashboard, that's not going to work anymore. You need to insert that data and the intelligence right into the decision making so they don't really even think they're looking at BI and analytics. They're just doing their job and they're being informed by that intelligence. And they're putting that capability in the hands of business users who can make decisions, effect outcomes, near real-time, maybe not real-time, but near real-time, near real-time, before you lose the customer. A lot of them are real-time. Before you lose the patient. Yep. Yeah. It's exciting times and there is a, and I think there is a connection between that sort of data layer and the cloud layer. So maybe talk about how HP can connect those dots. Why is HP uniquely qualified to do that? Well, so if you think about that transformation and this goes back to what I was describing in the beginning, we, most of our customers are not brand new green field. They don't have the luxury of being able to say, we want to become a cloud company overnight or we want to become an analytics company overnight. We have some of those customers and they've done very well. But for most companies, I think they've got a lot of legacy and there's a lot of value in that legacy. There's a lot of data value in that legacy. And so what we help them do is manage that transition through our services, through our infrastructure, through our software in a way that is very pragmatic to them. And so I think that really is a unique value that HP brings. There's other cloud companies, there's other companies that might make infrastructure hardware, there's other companies that offer services. There aren't other companies that can do all three of those things and do it in that managed way that's seamless to the customer. So an example is we can take some of our customers and they can deploy on-premise their solutions with us. And then maybe they take a piece and they burst it out using Helion, using our cloud. And then they maybe burst out another piece and they can just try different ways of leveraging the hybrid. And that's really the value of hybrid. It gives you that flexibility without you having to forgo all the previous investment. I think that's a lot of what we're focused on and what we will be focused on. I want to also, I do, every time I hear these debates in the industry, I say, what would Colin think? So I want to ask you about ODP. Of course, you got a little bias with ODP. You got one of your big partners that's sort of leading the charge there. But you're also pretty pragmatic and open to different approaches that the customer decide. What do you think about ODP? A lot of people say it's not necessary. Others say it's game-changing. What's your take? You know, I don't really have an official take on it. I think that there's a role for consortiums to play to help bring some standards together, to help make things happen faster. And as you said, HP is an open company. We've always embraced open standards. We want a partner. One of our very close partners is integral to that. And so, we're open to it. You know, we're sort of, in a way, it's neither here nor there for us. And the most important thing for us, though, is when we talk to our customers, we're happy to work with them if they're part of it, if they're interested in it. We're happy to work with them on it. And that really is our sort of guiding light, is what does the customer want us to do? We haven't had a lot of customers come into us saying, you need to be part of this. And that's really what drives HP in most of the endeavors that we do. It's customer-driven. And so, if we're not part of something, maybe it's because there weren't enough customers driving it, but it doesn't mean we're opposed. We don't really have opinions on it, but I think in this industry, there is a need to pull together some of this complexity as multiple vendors. And we've got to work together to help these customers get through it, because it's a complicated time. There's a lot of different types of standards and technologies. And we've got to be able to embrace them all and really, truly remain open to it. What's going on with autonomy? We speculated three years ago when that act was to happen. Obviously, it is what it is. We don't want to go into the historical valuation issue, but it was clear that they embraced and they were sprinkling that around. And people were coming to the trough and taking some drinking from the trough with the big data technology, seeing it in printers. So with internet of things, with security, these are other areas. Again, big data needs are everywhere. What's the autonomy piece right now? Can you clarify where that's at? It's obviously they've run Twitter and Analyze. We'll see that out there. They're tweeting away. The A in Haven. You guys. Yeah, so it's still alive and vibrant and well, and it really is, and it continues to be sprinkled in a lot of different solutions, both the autonomy solutions that we have, especially around compliance, risk, our idle tech search analytics engine. So we continue to actually drive that as a core part of Haven, right? If you look at Haven, Vertica and Idle are really the two anchor pieces on Haven. And it is used in so many of our own applications as well as external third-party customer applications. And so we continue to do that. No major change strategy or anything. Just same old, same old. No, I think what we've been doing is realizing we've got all this amazing technology and an amazing team and where else can we leverage that? How do we leverage part of Vertica with Idle? How do we leverage part of Idle with Vertica? How do we leverage parts of both of those in Hadoop? And so you can see in the products that we've been launching, underlying those are these same technologies that we're talking about, from autonomy, from Vertica, et cetera. So I think that's going actually very well. Okay, so when you have your meetings with Meg, what does she talk about? She's, so, so give some insight into her management style and how you guys get along. Yeah. And she sees big data strategic, obviously. Cloud and big data seem to be the centerpiece of this show as well as other things, but yeah. So Meg, I mean, obviously she's a visionary. At the same time, she's very pragmatic. She knows what we have to do. She communicates incredibly well to everybody in the organization as well as externally. And we're all going down that path with her. And I think if you look at the pillars, big data is one of our key pillars. And you could argue that big data might be underlying some of the other pillars, whether it's mobility or cloud or security. We are, we are saying that. We are, absolutely. And Meg absolutely believes that. I think she also personally knows this better than a lot of people. Coming from the background she came from. She's from Silicon Valley. She was at eBay. She's seen the power of how you can transform an industry, recommendation engines real time. So from my perspective, it's great having that because it makes it a lot easier to really talk about the importance of what the mission is that we're on, especially around the platform and big data. All right, Colin, we're getting the hook here. I want to give you the final word. What's your goals for the show and what's your outlook between now and HP Discovered London? Yeah, so most important to me really is bridging that gap between the business and the data. And it might not just be the data, but it's also the developers. And so I think we have a huge hand in bringing that gap, closing that gap, as well as helping organizations with some of the greater transformations that are going on. Whether it's to a SaaS model, whether it's to a cloud business themselves, or frankly, a lot of our customers are trying to become data businesses themselves, taking some of the data that they have and figuring out how to monetize it. So my goal, you know, instead of talking about speeds and feeds and some of the other stuff that jazzes me up, it's really focused on what can we do to help our customers as Hewlett Packard Enterprise, as services, infrastructure and software combined together. I think that's what's really going to matter, especially between now and when we go to London. And what about the big data end user con or the developer status? Yeah, absolutely. So come to Boston in August. What's going on there? So same thing that we talked about, but very focused on exactly that pragmatism. Listening to our customers, we're barely going to be giving presentations ourselves. It's all about our customers, it's all about the users, it's all about the developers. So highly encourage you to come to that. Absolutely, absolutely. And I got to say for the folks, big data event in Boston, big data, what's the special title, big data? BDC, big data conference, yep. Big data conference, it's phenomenal. It's A-talents, A-players. But your point about customers is right on. It's customer centric, it's always very high quality content. And it's a good vibe, people sharing there. It's a real developer. It's very open. It's very good vibe, fantastic. And we'll do a hackathon most likely, right before it again this year, so. All right, Dave, get the legal seafoods that reservations ready for us. Cause I go oysters all in, get the lobster. All right, Colin Mahoney, C-President General Manager of HP Software, big data here inside the QB right back. Join the conversation. The live streams are coming up. Go to hpdiscover.social, crowdchat.net slash hpdiscover or go to the hashtag hpdiscover. Join the conversation. We'll be right back with more after this short break.