 Live from New York City, it's theCUBE at Big Data NYC 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsor, Juan Disco, with support from EMC, Mark Logic and TerraData. With hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Kelly. Welcome to the Big Apple, everybody. This is Dave Vellante and we are here live all week at Hadoop World and Strada and we call this Big Data NYC. As you know, this is our fifth year at Hadoop World and Jeff Kelly and I are really pleased to be here. Our other co-host John Furrier is back in Palo Alto working the crowd chat stream, but we've got a big set of events going on this week. We really have three things. Really, theCUBE is going to be broadcasting on today, Thursday and Friday. We are live at the Hilton Times Square at three o'clock today or four o'clock today, rather, we've got a capital markets event. We're inviting a number of our Wall Street clients and other friends and Jeff Kelly is going to be giving a presentation, releasing never before seen data on the big data market and then this evening at six o'clock we have the Cube party celebrating five years of Cube. Can you believe it? It's been five years, Jeff, that we started and I remember in 2010 getting the call from John Furrier saying, hey, we're doing Hadoop World. Get your butt to New York City and really the market has evolved in an amazing way since then. Hadoop back then was, most people didn't know what Hadoop was. What's Hadoop? That's a funny sounding word and it really has been a lightning in a bottle, hasn't it? It sure has. The ecosystem's exploded over the last five years and we're seeing this pressure being put on the industry heavyweights in the data management space by this crop of new and emerging companies that are leveraging things like Hadoop and open source software and a new commodity hardware scale out approach to data management, collectively called Big Data and it's really exciting. What evidence do you have that the pressure is being put on the big guys? I mean, what can you share with us that's sort of signs or examples of that? Well, Dave, as you know, we talked to hundreds of big data practitioners and data management practitioners, data warehouse managers and they consistently tell us that they are struggling with their data warehouse installations. They're starting to buckle under the pressure of increasing data volumes and data velocity. They're expensive. They don't allow for the flexibility that companies need today to really compete at the speed of business. So what we're hearing consistently from practitioners is that they're looking to these new and emerging methods of processing, storing, analyzing data to help them better compete. It's impacting the traditional world of data management in that a lot of these companies are baselining their spend in the EDW space. They're carving off a portion of their spend and putting that in R&D and things like Hadoop to try to figure this out because the reality is, despite the hunger for a new approach, this stuff is really hard. There's no question about that. But we are seeing a shift happening and it's real. So we're going to be unpacking this all week and one of the things that we're going to be looking at is really the effect of Hadoop and big data on the traditional enterprise software business but also how to play the big data space because the reality, Jeff, is there aren't a lot of public companies in the big data space. You've essentially got Splunk, Tableau and ClickTech and they're kind of sort of outliers to big data. You wouldn't call them sort of core big data even though Tableau's symbol is data. But there's not a lot of ways to play big data. So we're going to talk about that in the Capital Markets event and you've got some really interesting angles and I'll give you a little tidbit. The premise of the angle that Jeff's going to talk about today is really that big data practitioners are going to create more value than the supply side. But how do you find those people that are really good at doing big data? So that's something that we're going to look at. We've got people on the ground at the Javits Center trolling the floor, just talking to all the folks there, the practitioners, the technologists, listening in on the keynotes. So they'll be reporting back all day. We've also got wall-to-wall coverage of many of the practitioners, the technologists and the companies in this big data space that we'll be interviewing, getting their perspectives on what's happening. And then of course, as I say, we have the big CUBE event tonight celebrating five years of CUBE. So Jeff, I want to ask you, where are we at with big data? We've gone from the what is it to the how do I use it to what's all this scoop and hive and flume and yarn stuff. Are we finally in the stage of production where companies are delivering ROI on their big data spend? Well, yeah, I think we're past that early phase where as you said, people were just trying to figure out what some of these terms meant. Our data shows that early adopters, big data practitioners are starting to move workloads into production. Some feedback we got from our most recent adoption survey, 31% of practitioners told us they are supporting production applications with Hadoop and NoSQL and other big data systems. Another 28% or so, POC still kind of kicking the tires trying to understand how it works and where it's going to fit in the organization. But still a large chunk, 41% or so, evaluating the technology. So we're getting there, we're starting to cross the chasm as it's known, but I think it's still fairly early days. And from an ROI perspective, as I mentioned earlier, and it sounds simple, but the fact is this stuff is still really hard. And most practitioners that we talk to, the average I should say, are not realizing the full return on their investment yet at this point. You know, part of that's the nature of where they are in the life cycle. In terms of these investments are still pretty early and it's gonna take time to achieve that ROI. But the other thing is they're struggling with aligning things like IT in the business. There's a lot of data and technology related challenges. There's people in process related challenges. But the interesting thing that we see is that there are a handful of companies that are doing this and doing it well and making a profit. And you know, we think that those are the companies you wanna focus on from an investment perspective in terms of placing your bets in big data. So we're gonna be digging into those all week, Thursday and Friday today. We're gonna, you know, if John Furrier were here, if no doubt we'd Jeff be having discussions about who are the horses on the track. So we're gonna have those. John is on CrowdChat, so he'll be chiming in. Is there gonna be a red hat of Hadoop? Is your data warehouse a dinosaur? How can you take advantage of this emerging technology? How do you find the skill sets? Those are the things that we'll be talking about. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be right back. This is theCUBE, we're live from Big Data NYC. We're right back.