 Live from Midtown Manhattan, the Cube's live coverage of Big Data NYC, a silicon-angled Wikibon production, made possible by Hortonworks, we do Hadoop, and when this goes, Hadoop made invincible. And now your co-hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Hi everybody, we're back, this is Dave Vellante, Wikibon.org, and I'm here with Jeff Kelly, who's the lead big data analyst also at Wikibon. We're here at Big Data NYC right on 6th Ave at the Warwick Hotel right across from the Hilton, where Stratoconf and Hadoop World are going on. This is our fourth year of covering this event. We're at a remote location this year, we've got some great guests coming in, so it's been really exciting. Ben Haynes is here, he's the CIO of Box. Ben, great to have you on the Cube. Thank you, great to be here. Newbie, first time on the Cube, right? Yep, first time. Awesome. You've taken the time out, and relatively new to Box as well, so congratulations on that move. Thank you. So what's happening there? Give us a quick update. A lot's going on. Four months of Box, for me my first role in the tech sector, so it's been an interesting ride after many years in CPG space. But yeah, Box is growing fantastically, and up to nearly probably 900,000 people, so we're getting big and lots happening. That's 902,000, not quite at 900,000 yet. No, no, no, that's in the plan. Good, so how did you find that transition from consumer package goods to high tech? Little bumpy at the start, what I found interesting was that even though it's consumer tech, we still have the same issues as the CIO. So we have lots of systems, we have to get the business done, we have lots of data, and lots of challenges. And so while we might solve them a little bit differently, a few high-level discussions, let's say, with our tech folks, we have the same issues. So lots to work through. So how much is domain expertise a critical success factor for the CIO? Would you say it's relatively low on the list of skills that you need? No, I think it's actually pretty high, and that was one of my biggest concerns. And a person... You're nervous about that coming over? Yeah, it was one of my personal challenges was how do I make that jump? Because in the CPG space, I had 12 years, I understand the route to market. Had a network. Had the network, rode the delivery trucks, understood it end to end how things got done. So big jump, big concern, and spending a lot of time with the business and getting up to speed as fast as I can. So while we're here at Hadoop World, so where are you at with that whole big data trend? What do you make of what's going on? How much have you dug into it, and what are you doing here? Yeah, so I've dug in quite a bit, especially over the last two years, I guess. There's been a lot of hype, and it's probably growing a bit. And the key for me is looking at how do we help the business? How do we move the business forward? And can the big data space help us do that? And so I classified it, especially at PapS, before Box. I didn't have a big data issue, but I had data issues. And there's still probably a lot of arguments around what big data really is, and it means different things to different people. To me, it's about solving a problem. And so we have data challenges, for sure, at Box, and dealing with a lot of siloed solutions. We're not maybe dealing with a huge amount of data. And I'm talking about the enterprise, not the Box platform. We have big data in that, for sure. But running the enterprise, we have lots of siloed solutions, best of breed. How do we bring all that together and make sense of things? So I'm looking at analytics tools, and that's really where the rubber hits the road for big data, is getting to actually making insights from that information. And talk about the nature of the data challenges, because data challenges used to be, I got so much data, it's so expensive to store, I got to back it up, I got to replicate it. I mean, all this sort of blocking and tackling and insurance related issues or cost. Yeah. It feels like the hype has at least flipped the mindset. Hey, think about data as a revenue source or a source of competitive advantage. And that's why people get so excited about it. And it is so hype, but there seems to be some merit to that bit flip as well. There is some merit. And the interesting thing for me is we've always, at least for my career, we've always had that thought pattern. It wasn't just about storing data. That becomes irrelevant. There's no value to the business. So what I'm hoping and seeing out of some of these tools is we make the barrier to entry a little lower, get our costs a bit lower. So yeah, we don't have to worry about storing all this stuff on really expensive proprietary hardware. And getting to those business answers a lot, lot quicker. So that's where I see the big data space helping us. But there's still a lot of hype. And the cost of doing that is a change in mindset, change in skills. So we need a whole different type of person now. I've seen a few traditional data people working in the SQL world just not make the jump across. They can't get their head around this unstructured and no SQL and all of that. It's a very, very different mindset. And ultimately we can actually drive that from the business people though because they're getting demanding. They've already always been demanding. But the speed to deliver is the number one thing that I'm looking at and how can we bring on new tools to help that happen? Well, and as costs come down, the technology becomes more accessible to business people. It definitely does, but it doesn't... And then they get really dangerous. Oh yeah, yeah. And it doesn't become valuable until you can get insight from that. Because until you do that, it's just data. And you might get it to some information and then how do you really get to insight on that? And so one big tool I've been looking at is a way to cleanse that and get it in and make it usable and prepared for an analyst to use. And that's a key input for us because you can put the previous graph up and all the latest visualizations. It doesn't mean anything. Automating the cleansing and the preparation. Yeah, automating and pushing through. Also enabling. So automating on the desktop and enabling our business people to cleanse. All right guys, we had on yesterday. Do this. Yes, pexata. We were talking about them offline. Pexata, right. Pexata. Okay, great. So I've been Haynes, CIO of Box. Thank you very much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate your time. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with big data NYC. This is theCUBE.