 At Big Data SV 2014 is brought to you by headline sponsors WAN Disco. We make Hadoop invincible and Actian accelerating Big Data 2.0. Okay welcome back we're here live in Silicon Valley for Big Data SV. This is our event covering all the big data innovation in Silicon Valley, covering all the news here also the Stratoconference going right behind us in the Santa Clara Convention Center and we're at the Hilton live all day for day three of our Big Data SV. I'm John Furrier the founder of Silicon Angle. I'm John my co-host Jeff Frick from Silicon Angle theCUBE. We're here with John Schweitzer EVP of Field Operations for DataStacks, a company we've been had on theCUBE many times. You know you don't hear a lot about DataStacks compared to all the other names out there but when you hear about who's got the traction that's top of the list. So John welcome to theCUBE great to have you on. Thanks John. We talk to Billy all the time and we always say hey you know how's business and literally every conversation over the past three years is business is great and it just seems to be moving the ball down the field. You guys are pretty humble company but doing great work on the high end. Give us the update on one house business. Big Data obviously is growth market now you're hearing in the Hadoop world as it matures people talking about budgets. You guys have kind of with Cassandra been tapping budgets for a while now so just share with us some of the updates. Hey look so we're rocking and we're having a good time you know at the same time business is great. Cassandra as you know is this always on fully distributed database and we're revolutionizing the online world. Online mobile applications are key to our customers loyalty with their customers and the expansion of their business and they're looking for new ways to engage with their customers and suppliers. You know we've always talked about when we did the Cassandra summit two years ago with the Q it was kind of a small geeky event all founders were there and a lot of the community is very tight. But one of the things that we identified was the movement of flash with the flash memory. You saw a real push towards kind of using commodity hardware and open source software to really tackle not POC but real high transactional environments and you guys were tapping that and that's been some success. I know you guys have some good reference accounts there. What's changed since then two years ago with Cassandra and some of the deployments that you guys are doing. So I think what's changed on the customer side is the SLAs keep going up. The service level agreements that our customers have with their customers and consumers in the market are off the charts. So our technology helps them engage with our customers in a different way to either decrease fraud, increase supplier relationship, or increase loyalty with customers. So what's the biggest use case that you're seeing right now? You talk to customers all the time. What's the big pain points? What's your key itch that they're trying to scratch? Is it high end? What's some of the market segments that you guys are winning in right now? It is. I'll just say we're now 400 plus customers in 38 countries, believe it or not. The trending industries that we're seeing are financial services, specifically retail banking and capital markets, media, telco. Some of the biggest brand names that you've heard from us are obviously Netflix. But most recently, I'm really psyched to learn more and more about how they're evolving their business with us. They introduced profiles not long ago on their site, and that sort of took up their volume by four or five times. And that means we're running a trillion transactions a day through our technology to help them engage our customers and us differently. You're the EVP of field operations. What does that mean? I mean, what is your job? What do you do? I mean, you travel a lot. I was brought here by Billy and the board to expand our international operation and our partnerships. I obviously have a ton of experience in field as well, most recently running a multi-billion dollar business at SAP. But my core focus at EVP is everything customer related. Customer engagement, sales, services, training, et cetera, making sure that our customers are happy. So, John, you were at Oracle for a while, big-time database in an SAP. So talk about a little bit of the evolution of the market with a company like Datastax and Cassandra and why you've left those big guys to come here. I had a good career at Oracle in SAP, but I came here because the opportunity was massive. I've been in the database market and data management for 20 years. I've been involved in disrupting relational databases two times. Once at a company called Arbor Software with OLAP Technology and then with SAP HANA, where we went head-to-head with Oracle and chipped that away. So while that's why they came to find me, I think the opportunity is huge and that's why I'm here. So where do you think we are then on kind of the evolution of some of these new technologies on the database side of the growth here, where before we talked about the show used to be a lot more sweatshirts and hoodies and now it seems to be a lot more suits and business guys. I mean, are we really kind of coming out of the experimental phase and really starting to get into some good production stuff and seeing the ROI? We certainly think so. Look, the market is nascent and growing and developing, but we're seeing more and more engagement with the line of business buyers. So while our community is highly engaged with the developer and the hoodie and will continue to do that, we're getting more and more traction with the line of business buyers because they need a different way to engage with their customers online. So what is the thing about the database market? We always talk about the trends, right, so that, you know, you've been there before. So put your industry hat on. Not so much your data stacks hat, although you might want to weave in some data stacks anecdotes in there, but, you know, we always talk about the database industry kind of being disrupted by open source and the diss on Hadoop has been in the early days, it's open source is not yet stable. Then it became great for storage, right, storing a bunch of stuff, like data lake, data landfill, whatever people call it. But now you're seeing this gold in those hills, right? So you're seeing that kind of move into the large enterprise. What is their large customers? How do they evaluate this new big data open source world? You're in there with Cassandra. What are some of the customer criteria for success? I mean, is it a database? Are we rehauling the database market? Is this a complete reconstruction? Or is it kind of like piecemeal, sequel here, Hadoop here, and Cassandra here? Is it a movement of best of breed come back to these database architectures? It's not relational or Hadoop for everything. And just to be clear, we're flanking what our Hadoop counterparts are doing in terms of sourcing information from them to do things like with eBay, where we source information from Hadoop to provide recommendations on their site. So it's a team sport at the database layer. It's not single threaded. It can't be any longer. The SLAs just won't be met by our customers without a different way of thinking. Do you think HANA was built kind of too early or too late relative to its use case? I mean, people have some successes with HANA. Some call it a Ferrari, you know, grave the roads, you can handle the speed. But people want different kinds of scale, not just one dimension. So what does HANA take on HANA? Is it positioned in pigeon hold or is it broader? What's the opportunity on HANA? HANA is a phenomenal invention by the management team, the inventors at SAP. It's reimagining the analytics world and has really taken it to the terror datas and the teases of the world. We're different. We're on the real-time workload, low latency side of things. We believe we're different there, not only than HANA, but than other databases. What would you say to the folks out there who are watching who want to know, hey, you know what, all the buzz on Hadoop. I've heard about Cassandra. I have friends that, you know, doing some Cassandra stuff. What should they know about the folks who should be looking at it? What do you say to them out there about Cassandra and what you guys are doing around it in terms of production and moving on value proposition? Yeah. So Cassandra is this always on fully distributed database and I'm talking about data stack specifically. It is the enterprise production ready version of Cassandra and we deliver secure enterprise ready management services, tools and services around it. And it is, you know, in most conversations there is a level of understanding starting to evolve where Hadoop versus Cassandra and understanding that Cassandra is delivering this value proposition across world time workloads and online applications. So I'm checking out the website and I love the new website. DataStacks helps attendees, Strata attendees and big data SV attendees navigate the big data maze. Put ops on autopilot. The dev center 1.0. So it sounds like simplicity is something that you guys are focused in on. Can you talk about what that means? I mean, obviously people want to get their hands on what are you guys offering there? What's a big aha for you guys with that? These management services and monitoring are key. So we heard from our customers about 8 to 10 months ago that we needed to improve here and the development team, our engineering team delivered. And so we need to make this technology extremely easy to adopt, acquire and install and make it inspiring at the developer level. It's critically important. So John, talk a little bit about the partner program which is what your primary focus is. So again, by this announcement that you need to deal with Accenture, I used to manage Accenture relationship for technology a couple of years ago. It's a tough partner to move because they're not going to come with you unless they see the real opportunity to build a business around that technology. So talk a little bit about that announcement and some of the other kind of ecosystem things that you're excited about building. Yeah, and so Accenture is tough to move but they only move, as you said, if there's interest in innovation happening. So what we announced here at Strata two days ago was the launch of DataStacks Partner Network. And what that really means is an engagement with our partners and prospective partners around enabling them to bring these great technologies to the market. We believe we're different in this space. We're providing free training and enablement to those partners a way for them to architect and build their go to market with us and around us and build this joint value proposition that will not only develop our business but theirs as well. Yeah, good. What's the update on the company? We've been big fans of you guys. We know Alisa Green was recently hired on the PR side and she came from HP. Clint Smith over there recently hired the general counsel. So Billy's got a great experience. What's the update on the company size, traction, give some of the stats. Give us an insight into what's going on with the company. Yeah, so the momentum is big in lots of different areas from employee growth where greater than 220 people today we're bringing on great talent as you point out. We're brought on up what I would call a celebrity CFO in Dennis Wolfe just recently as well. So Billy's done it. Don't have to be confused with the Wolf of Wall Street. Had to get that in there. No, Dennis from Fusion I.O. and MySQL. So he's seen this play before, right? He's a great guy. Definitely sees it. And he's going to help us sort of with his with us and chart our path towards where we want to go here. What do you guys think about the whole in-memory movement? Obviously you're at real, we thought about real-time and obviously Spark has got everyone's interest, you've got Storm, all these things are happening. How do customers deal with real-time? Obviously on the high end you've got in-memory data based stuff on the, financial services guys love this but maybe some of the hyperscale ad web server, web guys like it. Yeah. What does in-memory mean to the typical enterprise? I mean speed doesn't it? So we're not standing still on the innovation side. We have a launch of 4.0 coming up here at the end of this month. And on the in-memory topic I would just say keep yours open. So you've got some new stuff coming up. We're psyched about what's coming up. Where are your customers taking you guys? I mean obviously you have some good benchmark, you have some good successes. Where's the, where's the boat going to from the data stacks perspective? Where do you see your customers taking the product in terms of the roadmap? Yeah, most of the use cases we see are in areas where high customer connection or supplier connection exists. So things like messaging, the Internet of Things, or IoT, recommendations and playlists, fraud, which by the way is a trillion dollar problem in the world. We're seeing a significant amount of uptake there. For example, we've got one of the biggest banks in our country, in the world engaged with us helping, we're helping them fix this fraud issue just as an example. Final question, put a bumper sticker on this event this moment in time. Big data SV, you know, 2014, Stratoconference, a lot of buzz, a lot of new startups, some names I've never heard of, some will win, some will lose. People find in their position, you see in the Duke market kind of mature, you guys are exploding and going into a great direction. What should, what's the moment about? What should people know about what's happening right now in the big data industry as of this moment? Yeah, well we're seeing the normal growth from the US, the maturity of the US market could go over to Europe. For us, we'll continue to expand in Europe more broadly next year. Or this year. And we'll enter into Asia as well. I think what you're going to see in big data is that the name big data goes away. Big data is, data of all sizes, not just big data, the use cases need to be more prevalent, value-based. So you'll start to hear more about value proposition and ROI in 2015. And we were saying on theCUBE, Dave and I have been telling us all the time and even Ed Dunbell has been reiterating as well. E-Business was a big term kicked around in the 90s and no one ever talked about it anymore. It's just all on the web. So I think big data will be the fabric. The question will be what's the outcomes? And that's really kind of what we're folks on. Well John, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate it. Data stacks, you're hiring, you're doing well. Great guys over there. A bunch of alumni from theCUBE and on Billy and the team. Congratulations on your success. And this is theCUBE. We're here at Big Data SV at the Hilton Live. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.