 Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante. This is theCUBE and we're at the Tug event where we bring you the best guests that we can find. We extract the signal from the noise. We got a repeat guest with us. Eli Khan is the COO of a company called Squirrel. We introduced you to Squirrel last year, a company that's really bringing innovation to the Accumulo project, popped out of the NSA, bringing scale, bringing performance and bringing security to big data. Eli, welcome back. Thanks, really glad to be here, great event tonight. Yeah, it really is. Good crowd, probably about 900 to 1,000 people expected, entrepreneurs helping the greater good and helping the community. But really interested in the update on Squirrel. You guys have been heads down, hiring people, expanding the engineering team. You got new management coming in. I hear you're about to announce new products. So talk about what's new since we last talked at HackReduce. Yeah, so they don't let us out of the Squirrel Nest that much, so it's really nice to be out here and meeting other folks from the Boston startup community. But we've been in business now for about six months and have made some really exciting progress. This week, we locked down version 1.0 of Squirrel Analytics, which we're now starting to put in some pilot customers environments. And what we're doing with Squirrel Analytics is we're unlocking the power of big data. We're helping folks that have data that are locked in silos because of security reasons. And we're helping unlock the value in that data by making it really easy to build real-time applications on top of big data. So what we're seeing with our customers, our early customers, is that Hadoop adoption has gone mainstream. The first wave of big data was Hadoop adoption. Now we're about to capitalize on the second wave of big data, which is extracting value from all that data that's now in Hadoop. And Squirrel Analytics, our product, what we're doing is we're making it really easy to build real-time apps on top of all this big data. So a lot more to come, but some exciting progress over the last few months. Yeah, there's been a lot of experimentation. You're absolutely right about that. And the reason why people get into these big data projects is, like you say, they're trying to extract value from it. The practitioners that we talk to, oftentimes they're using Hadoop, they're using H-Base, but they're complaining about the complexities, potentially the lack of scale, and I think are looking out ahead saying, at some point, security's gonna become problematic, and performance is an issue for us. And that whole robust infrastructure that you're putting into place. And so it seems like the cumulo and products like that have a lot of viability, but they need the glue in between the developers and all that back-end infrastructure. Is that what Squirrel Analytics is? Yeah, exactly. So what we often hear from our customers is that they lack big data talent and skill sets. And what we're doing is we're bridging the gap between advanced big data scientists and normal web developers. And we're really helping companies unlock the power of their data by making it much easier to develop apps on top of big data. So no longer do you need to be a PhD-level data scientist to build an application across a distributed computing system. Using our platform, you can utilize standard web programming languages such as Python and Ruby and Java, and use those standard web development skill sets to build apps on top of big data, which from what we can tell so far is a real game changer. You know, we had our CTO, David Floyer, look pretty deep into Accumulo, and obviously the cell-level security aspects of it are very enticing. But what interests me about your strategy, Eli, is you're not going after just a security niche. You're really trying to help developers tap the scalability and the performance aspects and the reliability as well of this platform. I want you to talk about that a little bit. I want to test my premise. You seem like you're going for the big prize. Yeah, what we're finding is that folks want to start running mission critical applications on top of big data. They're moving past experimentation and they want to start mixing their sensitive data sets along with the less sensitive data sets that they're currently been pushing into Hadoop. In order to do that, security has to be a consideration. And what we're doing with Squirrel and utilizing Accumulo is we have the only platform that can apply very fine grain access controls and security controls onto this data in an unstructured or semi-structured format. So for the first time, folks can not only leverage big data, but they can also bring in sensitive security data sets and mix that with their big data to enable real-time applications that can solve really critical business problems for those companies. So that's interesting. So you're talking, you're saying that basically you can aggregate different data sources but fence off access to certain data sources using that security mechanism, but still get the value out of that aggregated data? Yeah, we let people be a lot more detailed and granular with their security models. Right now, folks need to use a sword and we allow them to use a scalpel to carve out the data that needs to be protected with greater levels of protection and open up the rest of the data to all the folks that need to see it. So it's an interesting inflection point that we're at here. Like I said, there's been a lot of experimentation, a lot of guys trying, you know, no SQL databases. Of course, HBase is out there and you got companies pushing that and others, there are many, many others. As we know, how do you appeal to the developer community? It seems to me that's a critical aspect of your strategy. So for a developer in the audience that may be using something like HBase, they're out there considering alternatives. Why Squirrel and what are you guys doing to help? Yeah, so our goal is to make it really easy to use our products. So, security should not even be in their thought. We try to make the security control as completely transparent and we try to make it so that they don't need to utilize the low level APIs that currently come with these no SQL databases. Instead, we extract another layer and we allow them to use standard web programming languages to interface with these tools and also give them some SQL capabilities to interface with these tools so that they can do this development in a much easier way than what they normally would. Awesome. Well, Eli, thanks for stopping by. We'll let you get back to the party, to the event. Really good to see you again and then good luck with the progress. Thanks a lot, appreciate it. Take care. Okay, keep it right there, we'll write back. This is Dave Vellante and this is theCUBE.