 Okay, we're back here inside the CUBE, our flagship program, we've got the events, extract the signal from the noise, this is siliconangle.com's coverage of O'Reilly Media's Stratoconference in Silicon Valley, the heart of big data innovation right now, and that's Santa Clara, California. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angle, I'm joined with my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org, and we're here with Jim Stogdill, who is the general manager of the O'Reilly Stratoconferences. We've been at every Santa Clara O'Reilly conference, the Stratoconference. And one or two in New York, so first of all, Jim, thanks for having us, and thanks for coming on theCUBE. So the big franchise strata's really exploded, and just, I remember the first inaugural one, Maureen had us in the other hallway where the food was going by, and behind the camera was all the food trucks and the red phone. It was the only spot, it was already sold out, because it brought together the data science and geek community, but also it instantly attracted a lot of the business side of it, so I think we saw lightning in the bottle kind of at the same time. You guys saw that and expanded. So take us through the journey of the strata franchise and where it's come from and where it is now and what your plans are evolving. Yeah, so, well, we're doing four per year now. We're in London, Santa Clara, New York, and Boston now, this year. And we're beginning to sort of explore the verticals, so Boston is about healthcare, and it's just taken off like a train. And the point you made about the business part of it is really I think really interesting to us is that this is sort of our first series of events that really early on attracted a business audience. If we look at Oskan or others, that came later, but it was very much a developer audience early and often. From the very beginning, we've been attracting a business audience here. We did a data-driven business day yesterday, and 80% of the room was MBAs, which is different for us. That's a different audience, first of all. I mean, it's interesting. I mean, we had Tim on earlier and Tim, we love talking to Tim because we kind of can blend, like a helicopter, you go really high in the clouds and you get down into the weeds. And we're talking about this confluence of science, art, and math, and multi-disciplines. But at the end of the day, he said open source is where a lot of his thinking came from. So in an open source world, you have that skills gap issue. So you guys are putting on, in essence, kind of like MBA-like programs for people. And Hollister is taking us through the data-driven business side, and also an IT piece. They're like workshops. And so are you finding that the demand for the skills are a key driver? Is that one of these that's attracting people, or is it the business opportunities, the startups, all of the above? I think it's all of the above. I mean, people, there aren't enough people out there that understand how the stuff work. There aren't enough people that understand what to do with it. I think that's the real interesting part for the business people. It's not just sort of what are the technologies, how do they fit into our world. It's really what does it mean to our business model? You know, that everybody says over and over again the software eats the world, that quote. But I think people are starting to realize that what that means is that their business has to do different stuff. And, but they're having trouble conceptualizing it. You know, they sort of hear the tools who do, do, do. What does that mean in terms of how can our business model actually adapt? What do you see that's different in Europe? You've done the one conference in London, correct? And this will be a second upcoming. Are there market differences, or is it the great similarities now that we live in this global world? Each of our events does have some specificity in the audience. You know, like if we were going to call these things different names, you know, this would almost be like Strata Web. We have a lot of audience here for that. Strata Web, you know, I wouldn't call it that. We don't think of it that way, but you could almost think of it that way. It extracts that kind of demographic, demographic. Whereas in New York, for example, a significant part of the audience there is finance. Also, we get a lot of media there. London also has a fair amount of finance, but there's also quite a strong showing from sort of the government sector there. Government in UK is being doing a lot with open data, a lot with data analytics. Newspapers and the Guardian has done a lot with data journalism over there. So we get a big presence and focus from that. So London is probably the most interesting in terms of the melting pot. You probably get a little bit of all that rolled in there. Yeah, it has a little bit different flavor that way. Yeah, in Boston, obviously, with the pharma and life sciences, the healthcare piece is going to be very interesting. I didn't attend last year, but we'll be there this year. Rx has a, you should check it out. It's got a very different flavor. The feeling is, it's still a data meets a particular problem kind of play, but we get a chance to go much deeper into looking at genomics and things like that. And sort of it's an interesting subset of the world. So talk about some more about the evolution of Strata. I mean, you are general manager of the Strata events, right? And so a few years ago, this job didn't exist. That's true. Back over this job, just at the end of last year, I've been with O'Reilly since last May. So while I've attended every Strata, it was previously as a customer. I guess, first of all, it's not just the conferences. It's a whole practice area we're building around the research and all the other stuff you guys do. You know, publishing is still very active in the space as well, so. A big part of my job is to figure out how those things kind of fit together and serve this audience, and again, this new audience, which is the business folks. But in terms of the evolution, I mean, the number of people coming to these events. To take us through the range of the franchise. So obviously the events are key, because that's where a lot of the face-to-face interaction happens, and that's really positive. You have the online, I appreciate the website and all the resources online. And then you have the books. You also have the research side, we had Roger on. Is that also involved? Is that how the movement- It's a part of it, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's just- Did I miss anything? No, I think that's pretty much covered. There's some things in development, but yeah, that sort of covers what's currently going out the door. This practice is still mostly, the conference is sort of how we're getting to our audience here. The publishing is a big part of it, and we'll do some other things coming soon. And you guys live the social network. I mean, O'Reilly has a very loyal audience base. They have, obviously, the alpha geeks and just a great credibility authority. Are you guys looking at any kind of like social network stickiness at all? Bring in online or forums or anything like that? Yeah, I wouldn't call it social networks what we're looking at, but we are looking at ways to engage with the audience much more on an ongoing basis in sort of an association kind of style. How about data? I mean, we hear a lot about data-driven enterprises and how are you using data in your endeavor? Yeah, we're getting better at it, but there's a little bit of the cobbler shoes kind of story involved. Oh, really? Yeah, if you talk to Roger, you know our data wizard on staff. Yeah, he's phenomenal. We're getting a lot better at understanding who our audiences are, where they're coming from, and what we can do for them. Roger's great. We had him on yesterday, he was talking about the cognitive economics or behavioral economics around the crowd. And you know, he really... And clicking as a harbinger for that, which is really fascinating. He really has an interesting vision, and I think he's right on. We support him. We always kind of high-five each other on theCUBE. A love fest because we're on the same kind of mindset, but he has an interesting perspective on this whole social currency thing where you have these new relationships forming at these events. And the events are actually a key part of it more than ever before, because if you think about it, the content is sourceable. You guys are streaming everything, we're doing theCUBE here. But so yeah, there's some base information, but a lot of the intimacy of the face-to-face becomes a key part of it. So he's all over that. Yeah, I think one of the things we're thinking about really hard is the fact that demographically, we get people traveling to these, but the bulk of the people still come from reasonably local to each of these events. And the being face-to-face still really matters. So the question is, how do you get the entire audience of people that could be participating in something like this and replicate that face-to-face? Have you looked at like the, actually Ted does the TEDx things when they do Ted Silicon Valley? When I first saw that, I first thought, that could be a little bit of cannibalization, but do you think that has cannibalized Ted a little bit? Or is that just an extension of their brand? Or Riley has that level of brand value? Yeah, it's an extension. I mean, I think you'll see us do some things like that around Strata and or other events. We'll find ways to be local and out there. There's a lot of demand. I mean, there's a demand for the content in this market. I mean, it's really high. Because of just where it is on the evolution. I mean, you guys do any studies around kind of, I mean, we were just joking earlier, like the exponential growth curve is kind of like the normal curve. Where are we at the bottom? Are we still in the flat part? We see uptake, but the angle might be... I think there's a huge amount of growth because what's really key about this space is that the enterprise is going to adopt it full on. And it's not going to take 15 years like it did with open source for them to sort of let it sneak in as Linux through the back door. And I mean, this is coming in through the front door. It is forcing the enterprise to address right up front. We have to deal with open source because most of these things are coming in. The door is open source. Coming in the front door. But I kind of see this as like a giant wave in a football stadium. It's starting in Silicon Valley and it's moving east and it's across the Atlantic and it's into Europe now. Well, we are really proud to work with you guys. I just want to say the folks out there, O'Reilly Media has been really fantastic to work with. They've welcomed theCUBE in with open arms and collaboration has been fantastic. Glad to have you here. And the quality and the professionalism from the O'Reilly team has just been fantastic. We're impressed. I mean, you guys do such a great job, but it's only the beginning. So with that, my final question is as you look out on the horizon 10 years from now, the front door is going to be slammed with this wave, big data. There's a lot of other vectors going on too. You got the consumerization of IT. You have instrumentation and industry disruption. So it's not just one industry. It's not like, hey, it's a category. It's IT, technology. It's all things, banks, consumers, integration. So, you know, do you have a, can you shoot the arrow forward five, 10 years in your mind's eye and doesn't that mean just kind of your view of that future? Yeah, I think that what we're going to see is with this combination of sort of the networks and the data behind them and all this thing, what we're essentially seeing is the evolution of the corporation. You know, and I give this talk now and then that's sort of like, you know, you go from being an nematode to having a spine and to having a brain and there's reasons for homeostasis why that all happens. And what we're really seeing is this, you know, for a long time organizations just reacted, you know, the shelf emptied, they filled it and that was the sort of neural net happening inside the nematode. But we're at the point now where we're putting brains in these things and they're going to have behaviors that the people operating them don't understand. And that's really going to be a fascinating thing to watch unfold. Alistair called it a prosthetic brain. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, that's true. If you think about it too, I mean, one of the things we were talking about, like how everyone talks about all the distributions, the different distributions that Hadoop is a real popular news story here today. But from on the IQ scale, that's really kind of on the low end reminds me of the old IT days. How many ports do you have on your router? The speeds and fees, they talked about features. And now no one says, hey, how many ports are on your device? It's more, much more business value-centric. So one of the things we're seeing is acceleration to business value. You have a view on what that business value conversation is like these days and your experiences are because that is really at the end of the day, everything that's happening in this, the old way is changing the new way. If it doesn't have business value. Yeah, well, I was running the Accenture's big day to practice before I came over to O'Reilly. And I think where we are in that evolution is that we're still at the stage where we're focusing on infrastructure and we're not yet focusing on the solutions or even understanding what to do with them. We're getting to that point where we're starting to think that way. But the next step there is really to start getting the business people in these organizations to understand what this stuff's for. And that's where that answer comes from. And they're just knocking on the door. They're just crawling in the diapers at this point. To them, infrastructures are relevant. Yeah, I mean, we're out there talking. You know, if you go out that on the show floor in three years, what I would hope we'll see is a lot more of the sponsors will be coming with solutions for specific industries rather than the infrastructure that layers underneath them. You know, that's where I expect that would, where you'll see that manifest here. Yeah, Dave and I were talking last night as we were preparing for today, wrapping up yesterday and preparing today is like, you know, almost all of our CIO friends, if you asked them, if you could give your data center tomorrow, would you do it? Yes. You know, one comment I heard from the CIO is, I'm in power and cooling facility meetings, budget meetings all day long on just that. So their time is focused on a kind of mundane operation. And as a result, it's the business leaders or the functional areas that are driving all the change and they get dragged into it as opposed to driving it like they'd like to. Yeah, so we were talking about shadow IT. We've been talking about that. And one of the things we're seeing is that data has that same kind of institutional potential bottlenecks. I mean, we were on a chat this morning with about data governance, data quality, because now you can save everything from a storage. Now, is there a liability there? And then is that going to be a stumbling block? So where's the innovation come? So we're speculating, what's your take on that? Do you see shadow, like shadow IT, you see a shadow data market emerging? Yeah, I do. But I think it's a positive thing in a way. It's a driver, it's a driver to make change. And one of the things that the organizational models always follow behind the requirements and sort of big data, if you will, means that a lot of data is either co-accessible or co-located in ways that it didn't used to be and the organizations are still divided up. So it's going to take time for the organizations to arrange themselves so that you can actually do this stuff. Let me ask you a question on the services side because one of the things that Wikibon just put out is a market study on the big data market. I think what the number was, it's pretty massive, but 50% was services. Jeff Kelly put that out. 11.4 billion. 11.4 billion. But that's the supply side, right? That doesn't count all the value that's been created down the chain. You're at a center, so you know that world of services that require, it's everything from outsourcing to rolling out new projects, project-based rollouts. I remember the old days in the client service. That's a gravy train of business back in the day. Now, those acceleration cycles are shorter. How is that market changing? Because now you have new boutique firms coming out. We talked to InfoObjects earlier yesterday. There are services helping just on open source. So you have a new ecosystem of players. They're not Capgemini. They're not the big boys. Yeah, to me, the really interesting thing that'll happen is that as the enterprise space takes on the characteristics of DevOps and cloud computing internally and agility, sort of the short increments, it's going to create a completely different competition model for people that are trying to provide them services. It is interesting because these platforms will span more broadly in the organization, so it's a different kind of management model there. So they sort of have a bigger challenge. They have a bigger challenge platform-wise, but they want to get to a place where you could buy the services in much smaller chunks. So it's a weird kind of business. It is weird, because John and I have talked about this a lot, and for a while there, people were sort of predicting the wake-up call to the Accenture's of the world, but at the same time, guys like Accenture, Deloitte, I guess you'd throw in PWC and IBM, they have unmatched capabilities to solve really hard problems. So without divulging any secrets of your past employer, you have experience in that world. They are the gold standard, Accenture in particular, cut above sort of the rest. So I would see this as a huge opportunity for them, but they're just swarming to a guy kind of philosophy, right? I mean, these are for the big boys. But they're helping people reinvent. I mean, I think that's their opportunity is to go into, we always say, the practitioner's going to create more value than the suppliers. That 11.4 billion is going to 10x factor in terms of the user space. The thing that a company like them will struggle with or any of those right now is that the model for a very long time has been deliver solutions into a market that understands what the solution is. And today there are neither solutions or customers that understand what they would be for. So you are in a place where they're unfamiliar with her, which is delivering infrastructure and building custom solutions on top of it, which they haven't done for a long time. Yeah, so whether they're getting asked questions, okay, well, how do we monetize this data and turn it into value? And how do we become a data-driven organization? That's bigger. My final question is, just more, my final question was a while ago, but it's my final question. It's like 40 seconds. My final, final question. What's the coolest thing that you're seeing here? I know you've got to be kind of politically correct, but I mean, you're overlooking the brand of Strata, which is an internal operational role within O'Reilly, but you also have to have the 20-mile stair and look at the next valley you're going to conquer in terms of serving a marketplace in the mountains you have to climb to get there. So you have to have that 20-mile stair. What do you see out there for that look? I think there's some really interesting things going on. I mean, I think the notion of embedded analytics, which goes back to this idea of IQ and reaction in real time, where the organization starts to react without the people even realizing it is, I think that's really interesting. At the technology level, I think the stuff that's going on within memory is really interesting. Green Plum's recent introduction of a system that puts Hadoop and MPP database on the same physical hardware at the same time. It sort of was an inevitability, but I'd been waiting for it to happen. I think that's really cool. And in software too, they took the clients out of the equation. And I think one other thing along those lines, sorry, is I think we'll see a gradual and increasingly rapid combination of what we think of as big data and historically what was hype performance computing, sort of the MPI worlds matching up with the Hadoop worlds. Yeah, HPC meets big data, right? And we see some of that in the floor here. There's a company, DDN, we had on that comes from that high performance roots. A lot of similarities, more structure, but a lot of it applies. I think we'll see what we'll see is the ranges that we'll see systems coming out that are continuums across those things. So you can do that. Okay, Jim's talk deal with O'Reilly Media. Again, a very impressive group. An amazing ramp up of the Strata brand just from what, two years ago? It just seems like 10, because it's been such a journey for us. Thanks for having us in theCUBE. We're excited to be here. Three day wall-to-wall coverage here inside theCUBE, among other things. Keynotes are online at Strata Conference. They have talks, go on Twitter, a lot of great action in the community.