 We're back here live at HP Discover. This is Silicon Angles Cube. I'm here with John Furrier, the founder of Silicon with Dave Vellante at Wikibon.org. We have a very special guest here in this Cube segment, at least from my standpoint, Chris Sealin, the vice president of marketing at Vertica. Chris was one of the early participants at Silicon Angle back when we started, when we were just a group blog and great guy, great domain expert now running marketing at Vertica. Congratulations. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, it's great to be here. I like you too, John. I've been looking forward to this interview, but I don't know what Jeff gets like, I'm gonna do this, I'm doing this interview. No, you're an exciting role because Vertica kind of came in early. Obviously, big data solutions to start up was acquired by HP, kind of, not a big number. It's a healthy acquisition, good exit, good outcome for all the investors, but certainly not on the scale of autonomy. But yet, yesterday, Meg Whitman, really front and center, clear publicly. Vertica is a big brand. They are front and center. Vertica autonomy is kind of the messaging. You're in a good spot, and you guys have a lot of cool things they gave and well received yesterday. So, quick, give us the update around what's exciting level within Vertica. Well, Vertica's doing really well. We've seen a lot of success in the market, a lot of growth. We've got a lot of our customers here at Discover. We're doing our first user conference in two months. We've just got a lot of great things going on. So, the market is crazy, it's chaotic, it's competitive, but we're winning more than our fair share of business. We're growing the business and we're having a lot of fun doing it. So, I gotta ask you, I gotta ask you as someone who's been in the industry, you've seen the movies before, you've been an analyst, you've been in the trenches, you know the whole cycles and waves you've lived through. You know the enterprise 2.0, you know the collaboration market. So, you've kind of had your hand in a lot of different markets. And Big Den is kind of the center of the universe for all those kind of converged markets. What's your take on the landscape right now in the market? What's the confusion? Where do people getting confused? And just, let's straighten that out real quick. Well, I think that, you know, if you really look at market trends and as you said, I used to do that for a living and you still do it. You know, I still do it as a play one on TV from time to time. What's an analyst? Oh, exactly. Exactly. But you know, it's good to look at the big picture, right? When you step back and look at the big picture in our industry, you save every seven to 12 years or so, something happens that really kind of changes everything. And I do think big data is one of those things. So, you know, now having said that, I have a love hate term with the, I have a love hate relationship with the term big data because it gets people, the good news about it is that people get it, people gravitate it to, people remember it. And now what's really starting to happen and what I'm really excited about is it's not just IT. It's business, you know, it's CMOs, CFOs. Of course, the CIO has been interested for a while. COOs are now interested in big data. But the tough thing is that it's not just about big. You know, it really is about, you know, not just the volume, but you know, we can talk about the three Vs all day, variety, velocity, but there's a lot more going on than just more data. Meet the 4S, as someone said on Twitter yesterday, you know, scale, you know, all secure. Speed, right, exactly. I mean, so, you know, we always talk, we were at, Dave and I had a kind of the epiphany moment, like three years ago at Sapphire, SAP Sapphire, when you saw their mobility play with people outside base and the iPad crystallized to us when we saw big data hitting the boardroom, right? So that was simply a business benefit. It's nothing to do with tech. It was, hey, I can get real-time information. I want to instrument my business. That's kind of, that has nothing to do with tech. That's the style of doing business. Do you agree with that? And what have you seen now that's current that you can share with us that people are doing that's really compelling? I completely agree with that. You know, I joined Vertica last August as I've been on board a little less than a year. And I still remember one of the first leadership meetings that I went to was right at round Labor Day around the US Open. I don't want to give airtime to our competitors, but I went into the room and there were some people laughing because they had been watching this commercial on TV by one of our competitors who will go unnamed. That was talking about, big data was about analyzing Federer's second serve percentage on the iPad and everybody's like, ha, ha, ha, that's not big data. I said, you know what guys, that's a great commercial because what's happening is that's getting the attention of the CEO who's sitting in the stands at the US Open because that's what's going on right now is these non-technical types are saying, wait, I need a big data strategy and that has very little to nothing to do with big data, but at the same time it's an acknowledgement that the attention level has gone beyond that data. So it doesn't devalue IT, but it's gone beyond that data. And IT has always been the buzzword single pane of glass, a touchstone if you will to manage the business, but with dashboards and analytics. Now you can have a multiple dashboards or a single pane of glass concept where you can pull up dashboards on any specific point in a business. Supply chain, hiring, customer interactions, anything. So it's 100% measured. Make it visual, picture tells a thousand words, but also adapt those dashboards, the speed. That's really, that's been one of the great things for us because we offer such high performance that now it's not like, well wait, I want to change the dashboard. Well I have to go talk to an analyst in the IT organization and change the report so when they run the batch next Saturday, process the report Sunday and hand it to me Monday, it's different next week. It's like, no, I want it right now. So I'm looking at the data that way, I want to look at it this way and I don't want to wait five hours or five days or not even five minutes, I want it in five seconds. So much of this big data, so much of this discussion, touches consumers and CEOs and the CMOs and so forth, but at the back end, it's a complicated situation for a lot of people, especially when you start talking to Duke and with Sean Guido firsthand. I mean, trying to make this stuff work is very complicated and so now you come out with Haven. So somebody's going to win in this game. Maybe you guys, maybe somebody else, there's got to be, okay, great, good. So we'll talk about why, but so there's got to be a platform, there's going to be a platform that simplifies application development around these big data apps and that's really what Haven is all about, right? So talk about that a little bit more. That's exactly what it's about. It's about taking the combined capabilities of the different products that we have in our portfolio. Very unique, very powerful products, certainly Vertica is one of them. I know the best, Autonomy Idle, ArcSight, Logger, Core, taking the different connectors associated with those products, taking Hadoop, of course. Very powerful open source technology. You know our strategy for Hadoop is open partnership so we support all. We're not trying to push our flavor. We're basically supporting our partnerships and supporting the Hadoop ecosystem and taking the capabilities of all of these technologies and all these analytic and data processing engines and combining them and saying what kinds of solutions can you build to help solve these business and financial problems and answer these questions that the line of business wants to know. What does this mean to me? And show those visual interactive dashboards running in near real time to be able to sort of say, I want to look at customer loyalty, I want to look at churn, I want to make sure I'm not doing anything bad, like there's no fraud. I want to be able to solve business problems. So help us understand that a little bit in terms of Haven solution or Haven as platform. Haven as platform. Okay, so that implies plenty of flexibility. So let's break it down. So Hadoop, I can use Apache, I can use Cloudera, I can use Whosever, Hadoop I want, Wandisco if I want, okay. I'd pop it in, Intel's distribution. That's not a problem. Now, how about the other pieces? Are they sort of menu pieces that you can pick and choose? Do they come as a semi-package solution? How's that all work? Well, the integration happens in the context of the solutions. And as you may know, we announced a few Haven-based solutions that HP has built. We've also talked about a few that our partners have built. I mean, ultimately, some of the audience was we serve like IT management. We announced something called operations analytics and there's also a management console and dashboard. And there are a number of different on our service anywhere products. So for sort of the IT audience, the IT management audience, who's HP's core audience, we've built Haven-based solutions which we're demonstrating for that marketplace. For like dentist offices or something or these various vertical industries and these other industries where we may very well have some services and some products to offer them, but in many cases, it's a huge opportunity for our partners or system integration partners or channel partners to build solutions based on Haven, which is why we say Haven is a platform. And it's a platform that also brings in HP services and also HP conversion infrastructure as well. Cloud infrastructure, conversion infrastructures as supporting it. And as a platform you can build on and you build solutions that are big data-enabled, analytic-enabled solutions for these different vertical industries, different horizontal business needs. The markets we serve will build some of our own but we're just priming them. And the entries and exits into Haven is an open API, talk about that a little bit. Well, there's multiple APIs, there's multiple products. And again, I think I started answering your question and I probably didn't finish. How they get integrated and configured is going to really depend on this. Yeah, yeah, sure. So think of it as a loose coupling. So when you talk to technical audiences, they always want to know, well, how's the integration going? Well, it depends. I mean, if it's a fraud solution, it's probably going to look really different than a customer analytics solution and then a solution for dentist offices or something like that, right? So, you know, I'm just kind of making that up but we probably have partners out there somewhere who serve the dental market. So, you know, we don't, I don't know, maybe somebody at HP knows about the dental market. I certainly don't. But, you know, that's just kind of example. You know, we're very, very reliant on our partners and we think this is going to be great opportunity for our partners. And our partners are already starting to crisis, which is the most exciting thing for us. Chris, as you guys have evolved, obviously, you know, the mission is growing. We heard from Donatelli that three par was doing a hundred million in revenue and now they're on a run rate of over a billion dollars. It's the success of having HP as your mother ship takes Veronica from startup and turbocharges your opportunity. Havens have a start there. What are your challenges within your group that you're looking at in the market? Is it education? Is it Salesforce? Is it customer value proposition? What's on your to-do list? What are your challenges and your opportunities that you're going after? You know, I think the biggest one is education because there's so much, everybody's, you know, when I talked about it, the every seven to 12 year trend and I keep feeling like I'm giving IBM airtime, right? It was like e-business 12 years ago. Everybody called everything e-business and eventually it became so diluted and now everybody's calling everything big data. So what really is it? And as I said, you know, it's not just the CIO who wants to know anymore. It's now, you know, the business people, the financial people who really want to know kind of what's it going to do for me? You know, we're talking all the time in Vertica about how it's not like we don't want to keep talking about what Vertica can do, but more and more of our customers want to hear what can I do with Vertica? Yeah, big data is not a product. It's all kinds of solutions. Right, it is what it is. It's like Hadoop, we saw that early when Hadoop came out, right? We saw it trending, Hadoop was a big buzzword, then it became analytics. Now it's just, it is work. Yep. Well, if you say Hadoop to a CMO, they say it got bless you, right? So, you know, but it's not relevant to them all getting aside. It's relevant to the CIO. But big data is a solution that's relevant to CMO or CFO. So, let's clarify this because I think what I, Dave and I always talk about with Vertica is unique is because you guys look at things differently. So, you look at like Apache Hadoop from a cloud era or a work standpoint to you guys, you guys think differently because you have different architectures, different performance criterias, different environments you're selling into. The distros are kind of table sticks now. Do you agree with that? And what's going on the distros? Because you guys have complex, multiple parallel processing engines and columnar stores and then it's just a whole different mindset. It is. It's about the bad or good. It's about the solutions. Clarify this whole, I got this, someone's got that, does it matter and what not? There's been a lot of excitement about Hadoop and Hadoop is very powerful technology, but there was also, I think for a while, a bit of a, and I think that's starting to change now. If you believe like the Gartner hype cycles, they've been talking about this a great deal that now people are starting to realize Hadoop doesn't solve all problems, it solves a certain set of problems very nicely. It's a great way to store and catalog very large volumes of data, but we certainly believe it's very much complementary technology that, yes, their company's working on things like SQL and Hadoop and such, but right now, and I think there's market disruption happening there. There's no doubt about it. Well, it's open source, people can start new projects. You can, but also if you really look at performance, it really doesn't, it's not comparable at this point in time. So there's an evolution going on and there's a need for a portfolio approach. I mean, that's why Hadoop is very much a part of Haven, but it's not, it's a component. It's like Vertica, it's a part of Haven, because what you really need is a portfolio approach that provides you the ability to take these tools and use them for what they're good for and combine their capabilities and create a bigger home and solve problems. And make money. Okay, so you're like making money, I know. Absolutely, so you would expect that a lot of the use cases are going to be Hadoop related, but it's not a prerequisite necessarily. Yeah, yeah, we have a ton of customers using Vertica and Hadoop together and it works great. It's great for Batch, I mean, and in Paula's trying to do that with Clodera, it's trying to make it more real time, but again, it's like your view of the elephant in the room is different where you're standing, right? I mean, pun intended. Hadoop is a good thing, it's a lot of active developer communities, so it's not like it's dying, right? It's like, it's just, it may not be that one thing, it's just an element, it's a platform. It's an element, it's exactly. It solves a certain set of problems, it does it very well, and from where we sit, what it does is highly complementary, so. Well, we love the big data confusion because it's just good for us, our business, because we get to clarify what it is, but I mean, it is about solutions and it's evolving, so it's exciting to see new solutions, new capabilities, and the good news is some good stuff's happening, so. Well, also too, the collaboration between Vertica and Autonomy, I mean, two years ago we were here at HB Discover, I think it was two years ago, and Vertica didn't get a peep, now you get, you know, Todd mentioned, it was almost as though, you know, Vertica wanted to be this sort of separate entity, they didn't really want to play, but it's crazy, I mean, the three-par example is great, right? I mean, $200 million now, a billion dollar run rate. And Colin's done some good work, shout out to Colin Mahoney, obviously, you know, he's, you know, got everything stable, it's growing, expanding, and again, HP is an opportunity, right? I mean, you know, that is a huge, research, huge customer base, and you get other things you can go after internally. There's a huge amount of potential here, and you know, we are going to win, and there doesn't have to be just one winner, but we have every intent of being it. There's so much growth and opportunity here, but you know, our goal is just keep growing, and going, and getting more than our fair shares. So the final question, because we're going to break it, is who are you going to be buying? I can't think. The M&A's, could you share with us the acquisition program? Can I share that? No, I absolutely can't share that, so. It's something that you'll visit, exactly. It'll be like, that would be the end of that. No, I, you know, can't comment on that. We will continue to speculate. You can keep asking, but I'll just, you know, and I know you will, so. Well, Meg's paying down that debt, so it's just a matter of time. She told me at the analyst meeting, I'm not going to do a lot of acquisitions till we pay down the debt. Yeah, they got it. But once I do, we'll look out. I'll tell you what, leadership, leadership means everything, and you know, I was at a dinner last night, just people were talking about how inspired they are, by what she's been able to do, and what, and you know, and she, I'm sure would be the first one to say it's not just me, it's the whole organization, but it's all about leadership, and I think we've got great leadership, so. HB's got a spring in there, Steph Chris Seeland of EP Marketing at Vertica, again, a key part of the big data strategy is Vertica, obviously autonomy. Haven's the big announcement. This is theCUBE, this is Silicon Angles. Day two coverage of three days that HP is covering, but Las Vegas, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back after this short break.