 Hi, welcome to CUBE Conversations. I'm Stu Miniman here at the Wikibon World Headquarters in Marlboro, Massachusetts. It's going to have a focus on big data. Joining me for this segment is my colleague, Jeff Kelly, our big data lead. Jeff, thanks for joining me. Let's do it, thanks for having me. So, Jeff, we've been going out to all the shows, extracting the signal from the noise, and here in the fall, you've got the Tableau conference coming up. Can you set the stage for us? I remember when I started looking at big data, the whole data visualization was always a hot topic. It's something that even us people that are relatively new to big data could comprehend and consume. So, why is this an important show? Well, yeah, if you think about what big data is all about, it's about deriving insights from large volumes of data, and how do you do that? Well, if you think of the stack, of course, you go down from the infrastructure up to the database, up to some of the application development tools, but ultimately, in many cases, you're going to have an end user, a person sitting in front of a screen trying to make sense of data, and how do you do that? You visualize it in different ways, and depending on the particular insight, you're trying to communicate. You might use any number of different types of visualization. So, really data visualization is a key component of the whole big data ecosystem and the whole big data approach. So, from the perspective of Tableau, now they came about several years ago in response to some degree to the dissatisfaction users had with some of the more traditional business intelligence tools, which were somewhat clunky, hard to use, not very user-friendly. Tableau came along with some relatively user-friendly, modern data visualization approaches, and the company really just took off. They really struck a nerve. They've been growing like crazy. That continues today, and now they're really riding that big data wave. Yeah, Jeff, so it's our second year of the show. They have one of my favorite stock tickers. It's just data, D-A-T-A, so that's cool. What's the update on the company in the last year? Well, the company's been, like I said, growing like crazy. So, they went public about a little over a year ago, so we have some actual financial data now to look at. They are, as I said, growing like crazy. They've added 2,200 new customers in just the last quarter. They have added a number of 1,500 new employees since last year, this time. So, they're growing like crazy. They're investing like crazy. In terms of their financial results, again, did about $90 million in revenue last quarter. Yeah, it still had a loss because of all that growth. They're investing in people. They're investing in engineering, talent, sales, et cetera, to really meet demand because they're in very high demand. And again, as I said, they're kind of riding this big data wave. So, I've noticed over the last year, they've been establishing and kind of stepping up the pace of their partnerships with a lot of the players who sit kind of below the data visualization layer. In some cases, that's the Hadoop players like Cloudera, the database players, analytic database players, HP Vertica, for example, and increasingly cloud players, Google and AWS, all of which we'll have on theCUBE next week at the show, kind of talking about how they look at data visualization and the role Tableau's playing with their products. Great, so lots of good partnerships. I'm excited to see what they say. How about the competition? Anytime you have success, everybody's chomping at your heels. That's true. So, as I mentioned, when they emerged, it was really, they were really seeing as kind of a modern approach to data visualization in comparison to the more kind of version one of business intelligence, business objects, Cognos, who, while, you know, certainly provided significant value to the enterprise there, adoption rates kind of stalled out around 20% in any given enterprise. And largely because they were not really user-friendly tools. They didn't scale well, any number of issues. So, Tableau came along and kind of was that new modern option in comparison to those more traditional approaches. Today, now that they've been around for a while, you're actually seeing the third wave, you might say, of data visualization and BI players coming along. So, that includes players who focus on a Hadoop ecosystem specifically, players like Datamir and Platfora. You've got more web-based applications around data visualization, like good data, like a company called Looker. So, there's this kind of new wave of data visualization tools and technologies coming along. And now they're trying to position Tableau as, well, that was kind of a good step forward, but now they're a little bit behind the times. And an example of that is Tableau, you couldn't run Tableau on a Mac until just about a month ago. They finally included that in their 8.2 release. So, there's plenty of competition. Others include Click, which is a company that often gets lumped in with Tableau. Again, a very user-friendly approach to visualization. Kind of trying to take IT out of the equation. So, you as a business user can actually start bringing in data and manipulating it without having to go to IT. So, plenty of competition there. And then the other thing from my perspective, and this is a challenge not just to Tableau, but to all of the visualization players who are more horizontal in nature. And this applies again to the traditional players as well as the newer players. One of the challenges with BI is that, again, it's a horizontal play, not necessarily focused on a vertical or even a more specific target of a user in a particular vertical market. So, it struggles when it comes to solving very specific problems that a user might have. So, if I'm a sales guy, I have a specific set of KPIs I want to look at, a specific type of data I want to visualize. A horizontal platform requires some level of customization to do that. So, we're starting to see, it's very early, but big data applications come along that are focused on specific business use cases. And so, again, that'll be one of the things we talk about at Tableau, and Tableau Conference on theCUBE, and how they're adjusting and adapting to that kind of shift. All right, so what are you going to be on the lookout, Jeff? What do you recommend? Why should they be watching from your research agenda and all the surveys you've been doing, talking to practitioners? What are you on the lookout for next week? Well, as I said, Tableau's riding the big data wave, and they're in a great position because everybody needs visualization, and Tableau really doesn't care who kind of wins the database war, the Hadoop war underneath. They are going to serve as that data visualization layer regardless of who wins. But one of the things I'm going to be looking at, as I mentioned, they're growing like crazy. They're scaling like crazy, adding lots of new customers. And one of the things that Tableau is known for, when you go to these events, the customers are thrilled with Tableau. It's like a revival, they love Tableau. So, you ask users, as I've done, why is that? And part of it's, of course, the product, they love the product, but also because, and I've heard this again and again, that Tableau is so responsive to their needs, their requests, the new features they want to see, the Mac feature I mentioned, people were talking about that for a while, and Tableau responded and added Mac compatibility. So the question is, can Tableau keep up that level of customer support and hands-on customer service as they scale and as they grow? So that's one thing I'm going to look for. I'm going to talk to a lot of practitioners, customers, ask them if they've seen any change, how Tableau is making this transition. So that's one thing. And then, of course, we're just going to have a lot of end users on. And we're going to hear a lot of great stories about how people are using Tableau to visualize data, to tell stories with data in new and innovative ways. So, as I said, visualization kind of lies at the top of the big data stack. It's all about translating those insights into actions and doing that in a visual way so people know what they've got to do next. What's the next step in a given business process? Data visualization helps you come up with that. So we'll be talking to users, hear what they're doing. And then, of course, as I mentioned, partners, we're going to have on a number of their partners, Cladera, HP, and then in terms of cloud, it's been just over a year now since Tableau announced and released their cloud offering, Tableau Cloud. So we'll talk about, is that getting any pickup? And we'll talk to their cloud partners about how the new offering is kind of helping their customers do new and innovative things. So those are some of the things I'm looking forward to. It's going to be a great week. All right, Jeff. So bring us home. What else can we look forward to from your travels in theCUBE in the coming weeks and months? Well, it is the start of a busy couple months here at theCUBE. So we are going to be, in addition to Tableau, we'll be the following week, we're going to be at Inform 2014 in for a really interesting company. Actually, probably one of the biggest enterprise software companies you've never heard of. They do a lot of really interesting things around applications and including some of those analytic applications I referred to a minute ago that are more focused on use cases. Infor is very focused on specific industry use cases. So that'll be an interesting show. We're going to be at, of course, Oracle OpenWorld. We're going to be at Splunk.conf. And then we've got our own event, Big Data NYC 2014 in New York in mid-October. We're going to be doing two days of theCUBE talking to people in the Hadoop ecosystem. That means users, practitioners, vendors, VCs, you name it. And then as part of that event, we're actually going to be doing something unique. We're calling it Wikibon Capital Market Stay where I'll be presenting findings from our recent Hadoop NoSQL forecast to an audience, an in-person audience, as well as to the CUBE audience out there at home, kind of walking through the forecast, some trends we're seeing in the market and where we see things going. And we'll follow that up with a panel of Big Data CEOs. We're going to have, for example, the CEO, Mark Logic, Gary Bloom on the panel, Abhimeda, CEO of Treseda is going to join us, David Richards from Wendisco, and potentially more CEOs join us on that panel. We're going to talk about what the market looks like from a vendor perspective, in terms of what are the challenges they're facing, whether it's scaling, whether it's integrating with partners. And again, all this is going to be broadcast on the CUBE, as well as an in-person audience, which is going to have a, we've invited a lot of Wall Street types. We've been getting a lot of inquiries from Wall Street sales side and buy side analysts, looking for some perspective on the Big Data market. So that tells you something about where this is going and possible IPOs in the coming year from a lot of these companies. So it's going to be an interesting week there. And I'm sure there's more that I've forgotten, but it's going to be a lot of fun. Yeah, there's Amazon re-invent coming up by the time we hit November and maybe another show or two that'll pop up. But boy, Jeff, busy time for, you know, I think everyone involved in the CUBE operation. Luckily, most of our viewers don't have to rack up the airplane miles to catch all of the good conversation there. So thanks so much for everything. Of course, be sure to check wikibon.org slash Big Data for all of the research and siliconangle.tv for all of our past and upcoming events. And thanks for joining us on CUBE Conversations and be sure to check us out at all the events.