 Okay, welcome back to Oracle Open World. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE and Wikibon's flagship program. We go out to the advanced instructor, Suho Noyes. We're live in San Francisco right here on the ground for Oracle Open World. Big news today on day two of live coverage. Larry Ellison did not make the keynote. He skipped the keynote because he was out on the boat with his team, the America's Cup Oracle Boat B. The Kiwis again to tie it 8-8 final day tomorrow. If they run the table, it'll be an unprecedented comeback in America's Cup history. And if they do win, it'll put an exclamation point on probably the biggest party in Oracle history. Some are speculating that Larry paid off the Kiwis to start throwing the race to increase the ratings, although we're laughing about that. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante here inside theCUBE. My special guest, Mike Olson, who is the chairman of the board of Cloudera and Chief Strategy Officer and former CEO of the company when it was just a startup, now growing into a really fast growing venture. Welcome back. Thank you, John. Great to be here. Appreciate a chance to do it. And let me say, somebody ought to tell Larry, congratulations, man. Seven wins in a row has made what did not look like a very exciting race into a very exciting event. I'm keen to see what happens tomorrow. I mean, that one race they called, they were down, they were losing. They were out now. So like the Rip Currants and the Tides, great stuff here in San Francisco. Mike Oracle open world again. Still a bit sad without Larry today, but I mean, it's a sweet homecoming for you because you sold the startup to Oracle. So you know the beast here at Oracle. You've seen the inside of the animal of Oracle, but it's changing. So before we get into talking about some of the big data world that you're in, what's your take on Oracle now? I mean, obviously you have a deal with them, so with Cloudera, but they've really changed in the past four years. Well, you know, as you say, I spent a couple of years here beginning in 2006. After selling my last company, Sleepycat to Oracle, I really enjoyed the time I spent here. I met a lot of great people. We built some valuable relationships that I think have been beneficial to us in the time since. But if you look at the company that Oracle is today, the strategic focus on cloud, on big data, on really emerging IT trends, it's not the same company it was five, 10 years ago. Just a couple of years ago, Oracle shocked me by stopping its practice of calling out database revenues and its earning costs, right? Think about that. The biggest database company in the world doesn't separately report its database revenues. That says it's kind of not a database company anymore. It's a business software company, much larger, much more agile, and doing a wide variety of new stuff. You know, we're fortunate to be in that new stuff as a key partner. It's been great for us. So Mike, a lot of people may or may not know the insiders that are watching theCUBE over the years know that we started theCUBE in 2010. Dave was on the East Coast, Silicon Angle was really kind of born in the Cloudera office, and you guys were gracious to let us get some space there in your incubator in Cloudera Labs. I think you had like 28, 30 people at the time. Now you're over 400 in new space in Palo Alto. You were the CEO, then you built a great company. At the time, you were the only player doing Hadoop. You commercialized it. You created the category. Now, you know, Horton Morrison and others have been following the footsteps. How much has the world changed now? You know, you've passed the baton to the operating team. You're now chief strategy officer. How much has changed in four years? And what did you expect and what didn't you expect? What were some of the things that were just, took a weird turn or took a good turn? What were some of the things you can share, highlights? Well, let me say this very clearly to begin. Every entrepreneur you talk to expects great success. But when it actually happens, it's kind of like the dog that catches the car. It's not really how you saw it playing out. We're thrilled with where we are. Cloudera is, as you say, bigger than 400 people. We're growing dramatically. That's along, by the way, with the market that's kind of pulling us up, the way that we're riding. Five years ago, five plus years ago, we started the business. No one had heard of Hadoop. No one knew what that was. Big data was not yet a meme in the industry. We believed then that it would be, fast forward five years, look, I think that's come true in space, we used to evangelize technology. We'd have to explain how stuff worked, why it mattered. These days, most of the companies we talk to, they understand, pardon me, they understand what big data is and why it matters to them. Their question now is, tell me about the tech. It's, help me understand how to apply new tools, new techniques to my critical business problems. Sometimes those are old business problems that they just want to solve better than before. Sometimes they're new. We built a business that could do that. As you say, over the course of that growth, the company and the market changed. We've been remarkably successful. So were you surprised that, so what I hear you saying is obviously, it's a speeds and feeds, it's a tech game, obviously it's technology involved. So were you surprised about how fast a business value conversation materialized, or was that kind of, you kind of saw that car as you were chasing it? Because it sounds like that just, that business value conversation just appeared fast. Well, we were banging the drum for tools, applications, analytics, running on this new platform for years. We always believed that an ecosystem had to emerge, right, the platform can't dominate, unless lots of people are making money. I was a little frustrated by the several years that took those companies to emerge. We see no shortage of them now. Big, established, successful players, Oracle's a great example, but likewise, Informatica, MicroStrategy, SaaS, fantastic large companies, rolling out analytic and data tools on the new platform. But then in addition, emerging exciting companies, Pentaho, Zoom Data, Trifacta, new ways to get at data, to analyze data that weren't possible before. The emergence of those apps, the emergence of those tools, that's why we can start talking business value, because suddenly, business users have ways to get at data that they didn't have before. It's funny, I was hearing Joe Tucci on the stage, and he was talking about, Joe Tucci's a legend, right? I'm a big fan of Joe Tucci at EMC, but he's got that New York, Italian accent. So he was using the word cloud, the cloud era, and it sounded like cloud era. So I couldn't stop laughing, because the way Joe Tucci was talking about the cloud era sounded like cloud era, which if you break out the pen, it says cloud era, it's the cloud era. Ironic or? That was, we intended cloud era when we named the company. I have to say, we've gotten a lot of incidental promotion from big names like that. It is absolutely, and listen to Oracle's messaging, it is absolutely the era of the cloud. But that goes along with more data and new platforms to attack it. It really is a transformation of IT and information management and a tremendous opportunity. Even Oracle has entered the cloud era. So you got a mention from Mark Hurd yesterday, a brief mention of cloud era. You guys have a relationship with them. I wonder if you could just describe that a little bit and then my real question, Mike, is, you know, used to be at Oracle. A lot of Oracle relationships are one way streets. Do you feel that way with your relationship with Oracle and if not, why not? Well, let me explain what it is we're doing with Oracle first because I think that's a good question. And then I'll dive a little bit into the shape of the relationship, how it's felt. Great. Oracle sells a number of engineered systems. They've got their Exadata appliance for large scale data warehousing and relational database workloads and a collection of other engineered appliances. About two years ago, we began working with them on something they called the Big Data Appliance. So this is a place to land unstructured complex data, high volume feeds where you may have some data preening, data cleaning, data transformation you want to do, maybe some innovative analytic workloads as well, but it's part of your data management infrastructure. None of our customers stands up a new cloud era installation all by itself. We always go into data centers where there's database like Oracle running and applications like Oracle Financials running. And our customers need to be sure that our products integrate well with their existing infrastructure. What we've developed with Oracle in the Big Data Appliance is an Oracle branded engineered system, bunch of sun spark boxes with considerable storage and lots of processing capacity, running Cloud Era Enterprise, our world class Big Data Platform with high performance integration and connectors to move data to and from the Oracle Exadata Appliance. So the customers who choose to do it can roll out a Big Data Platform well integrated right alongside with all of their traditional Oracle infrastructure. So as a product offering, it just flat out makes sense. People ought to be able to buy in the form and from the vendor they want and we've done a good job of making that available with Oracle. Our relationship with the company is fantastic. Oracle has global reach and global account penetration that totally outstrives what we built at Clutter. But come on, we're still an emerging player. They give us credibility and reach we wouldn't otherwise have. I think we give them deep expertise in an excellent platform that would be much more difficult to build without us. I think we're both benefiting. We're seeing real interesting uptake and new deployments and I'm actually looking forward to a couple of upcoming announcements of joint customer wins and some of the stuff we've done. Some really, really exciting wins in the last quarter. So it's meant to actually revenue for Cloudera. Oh, absolutely. And then some. I want to ask you, did you envision this dovetailing? I've learned a lot interviewing you over the years and the first time we talked was probably four years ago when you gave us the Hadoop 101 back in the day. So I want to ask you, did you envision that because you can kind of juxtapose the Oracle integrated stack, proprietary approach versus the sort of prevailing Hadoop approach, scale out, open source, data is distributed, ship function. Did you envision that day that these two worlds would come together? Well, you know, I had an advantage. I did spend some time at Oracle. So I knew the players there and I knew the strategic thinking which was always pragmatic, best product delivered to customer fastest. So if we could help with that, I thought there'd be a good fit and indeed there was. But you know, Oracle does have sometimes, Oracle is sometimes criticized for its closed and not collaborative approach. I think if you look at it though, Oracle has been smart in open source from the early days. Oracle's relationship with Linux has been hugely valuable in both directions. I thought we had a chance to build something like that. Look, we believe that the opportunity for working with a world-class company like Oracle was great for us. Our point of view is leaders should do business with leaders and we're the best big data company on the planet. We should work with the best database company on the planet and deliver the best product jointly. If we couldn't make that work, then to some extent, shame on us. It meant we were unable to convince Oracle's leadership of our vision. We were unable to understand their vision. Fortunately, we've overcome any of those hurdles. I think we're well aligned and we're executing well on the field. Mike, I want to talk to you about entrepreneurship in this modern era, the cloud era, the social era, the big data era, the mobile era. Obviously, Ping Lee from Excel's on your board. You have Anil Bushri on your board, Workday, you have Scott. Scott Deetson on your board, just raised $150 million. You have some really big time investors and Dave and I were talking earlier about what it takes to be an enterprise player and we had Gary Blum on earlier, is Taleseo of Mark Logic. These are experienced executives who know what to do, right? So there's a lot of startups up there groping and trying to get a position in the enterprise, a little freemium model, do a little bit of this and move over. What's it take to be successful in the enterprise? In a durable way. And I know you, I haven't done any investigation only speculating, but there'll be a rocket science to figure out you probably had a few M&A offers coming your way over the past couple of years given your position in the marketplace. But you guys are building a durable company, obviously to go public. That's a marker that's around everyone's mind. We're seeing a public market now that's robust. Facebook's back up, LinkedIn's at two something. Twitter's going to go public. Pure's got $150 million, they're not going to give in. They're going the distance. And that's the end, that's the goal. Build a durable company. How do you surround yourself with these guys and you've been there, done that, and build the companies. What's it take for these entrepreneurs out there to be company builders? How do you build a durable company? It's a big question with a complicated answer, but let me hit what I think are some real high points. So the first thing is, right now we're in this hyper-competitive market with all the big guys entering and a bunch of venture-backed companies making noise in. And even though that is true, it's our job to stay focused on our strategy, which is to build the best product for our customers. And if you look at companies that have been great over time, Google, Cisco from the very earliest days, VMware, concentrating on delivering customer value and worrying about competitors second, third, fourth, is a winning strategy. So we've absolutely done that. We have been fortunate for sure in the board we've assembled. So you named Ping and Scott and Anil and Dick Williams from my past at Alustra, likewise on our board. We've got a lot of operational depth that I was able to tap as the CEO for advice, for guidance, for how we should build that company. They allowed us, by working closely with me and my management team, to think through tough issues and to position the company for long-term success. Nothing taken away from the management team. I think we've hired well and we've executed well, but I do think we've surrounded ourselves with smart people who could really paint a path for us, help us understand that path going forward. And you know, shout out to Scott. You make a point. He just raised a hundred and a hundred or a hundred billion. That's like going public right there. Well, he raised that money from public market investors from places like T-Rope Price, which is very smart money and a real endorsement. And that's a great example of a guy who could give in to the code market noise around them. You know, Pure was not on the radar. They were doing very well with great product and then they crossed the threshold, now kicking ass, taking names, and now they have $150 million and can go the distance. So, you do have to. We're fortunate to have found a market that is enormous and exploding. I think Pure's in exactly the same situation, right? Flash memory for storage will happen. There's no question. Scott's going to be successful if he can be the company that happens. I think he's done what he needs. Certainly, we're trying to do that. Well, somebody who knows the database business, you got to be looking your chops for, you know, getting rid of spinning disks. They call it spinning rust, right? I mean, it's a reflection point in the business. I listened to Larry's keynote from Sunday. The announcement of high performance in memory databases, I think it's just a no-brainer, right? That is effectively infinite transactions per second, right? Build a scalable, reliable fault-tolerant system where you don't have to move ahead over spinning rust. You could go way way faster. And you got the software paradigm on the persistent side of it too. You've got different software paradigms emerging around handling persistent. So, all of that is true for memory database. When we look at what's happening with big data in Hadoop, it's just the most interesting time to be doing enterprise infrastructure software database especially in my life. And, you know, 25 years building and selling relational products, it was never as much fun as the last five years because the entire planet's turned inside out. It's still just the beginning. I want to ask you, it's still just the beginning. I want to drill down on that and get your personal perspective. As someone who is a geek, a CEO, industry vet, and someone who has seen the history before, and you're hiring a lot of new guys at Cloudera, so you have access to talent, especially in the big data space where there's machine learning or whatever's going on in the big data world. So, I want to ask you, what's it like for the new guys? What are they looking at when they come in? You know, they didn't live the Linux revolutions. Like, huh, I got download patches? Java, what are you getting me? What do I want Java? Do I want, you know, should I do Java? You know, they're blind to the old baggage, right? So, one, what's the new generation looking at? One, for kind of environment. And two, what do you tell those people about how exciting this is? Who haven't seen this before? Like, their first experience is a major market inflection point. I think the people who join Cloudera get the excitement viscerally. The entire team is fired up. It's hard to walk into the room and not be affected by that. And we absolutely see it. I believe that we've got enough momentum. We've got a great enough team now that we're continuing to attract great talent. Just today, I published a post on the LinkedIn influencer blog about how we hire at Cloudera. And it's called Air Is People. A-I-R is people. Look it up, it talks a lot about how we think about attracting people and building our team. If we hire well, it's easier to continue hiring well. Basically, great people join your company, and then they go tell all the great people they know to come join your company and it just gets steadily easier to attract those great people. I think that the excitement permeates the team. I think we all realize that we're changing the world here. The one thing I'll say is, we hired a lot of people when we were 20, 30, 40 folks. Fresh out of college. I think those folks don't understand what it really takes to build and scale a startup. I'm an old guy, right? I've done this a number of times. I've flown the airplane into the ground once or twice. We've had a couple of tremendous exits. Some middling ones. It will look a lot easier to the generation that's seen exactly one outcome hours than to those that have been around for a while. Hey, tremendous problem for me to create for those guys. Well, also, too, in the capital markets, Silicon Valley, a lot of VCs are younger. They haven't lived through a cycle, so they don't know what to do in a growth or down in the scene. 2008, 2009, I mean, the financial downturn that basically shuttered Wall Street for a while, it was a bitter time on Sand Hill Road. The folks at Sequoia published a blog post back then called RIP Good Times. Yeah, yeah, I remember that. Yeah, man, it was brutal. I will say, ain't nobody given that talk today. The investors are eager to pursue big opportunities. It is growth, growth, growth in technology. I haven't seen a market like this in my life. It doesn't feel as bubbly as sock puppets selling pet food back in the zeros, right? It's got more mutable bone. The difference is there's real business value being driven. Because the last 10 years have been cut to the bone, do more with less, does IT matter? You're clearly seeing the big four, cloud, mobile, social, big data. We talked about flash underneath that. There's real business value being driven, and it's all around changing the way in which applications are delivering that value. Indeed, and the business problems and the social problems that confront us now are very big and very important to attack. We've got data that we could never have gotten our hands on before. From all the devices on the planet that are smart, that are connected to networks, we're able to ingest information about how crops are growing in field, what the sea surface temperature is, details about the health of an individual. If we can apply that data to designing better drugs, better crops, better, attacking meaningful problems, I think we're going to make a big difference, and we can. And it's not only competitive advantage. It's incremental value to the marketplace. I am almost fond of saying Nick Carr was dead wrong, even though I love Nick Carr, but so, Mike, I want to ask you about Search. One of the things that I haven't heard at this event is anything about, and Deca, about Search. Is that because Search is just fundamentally going to be embedded as part of applications? You guys announced Cloud Era Search. I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. What's your perspective on it? Yeah, well let me talk about how we think about our big data platform first, and then I'll talk about Search as a service for data management generally. When Hadoop was born, it was this one great big scale out storage system called the Hadoop Distributive File, HDFS, right? And then a particular engine for analyzing data. That engine was named MapReduce, and you know, don't worry about it, it's complicated, but it gave Google, Facebook, Yahoo, a new tool for analyzing data at scale. But really analyzing it in a particular way, large batch style interaction. If you wanted to serve data in real time, if you wanted to query your big data repository SQL, you were just out of luck, right? Those engines didn't exist. Cloud Era believed that those engines needed to exist, and over time we've created them. We believe we've defined the big data platform of the future by adding not just MapReduce, but high performance real time data delivery with HBase, SQL Search, SQL query access interactively with Impala. Most recently as you know, Search, fundamental, baked in, same repository, same data, run petabyte scale search in interactive time, right? Basically get Google style feedback to your big data, and still be able to MapReduce it, and still be able to query it with SQL. So as the platform gets more capable, it can take on more workloads, it can attack more of these valuable business problems that we're talking about, right? Oracle bought in Deca, because Search is fundamental, right? When you get lots of data, it doesn't matter how good you are at taxonomy, at creating folders, you can't find it when you need it. The way that we find it, we all know this because we use search engines is search, right? Rather than remember where I put something, I just search for it when I need it. That is the way that people will interact, locate data sets that matter to them, that they then go analyze or query or otherwise process. So those services need to be in a big data platform. We've been driving hard on that. We'll be making, I predict, more of those announcements, more ways to get our data over time. I tell you, we're running out of time, but we'd love to have you back at Hadoop World, John. We'd love to do that. We'd love to have you on our big data New York City, it's big data week in New York City. Mike, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Love the time here. Chief Strategy Officer, Chairman of the Board of Cloudera, I'll give you the final word. You on theCUBE, when we did our first Hadoop World, yeah, Cloudera was kind enough to have us there. You gave the Hadoop 101. Now that you're in Chief Strategy Mode, you have to look for the next mountain to climb for the company. What is the Hadoop 201 course? Please share with us. Five years later, I'm going to give you Hadoop 501. What matters going forward is solving meaningful business problems. Not the technology, not speeds and feeds, not features, but what is it? Bank, insurance company, hospital, that you need to do, that you can't do today. How are we going to bring new capabilities to you? That will be the important problem this year and next. Cusp of a new generation, the Cloudera, Mike Olson, former CEO of Cloudera, now the Chairman of the Board. Well, I think you're always Chairman of the Board before. Weren't you always Chairman of the Board? I know Chairman was a promotion I got when we made the change. Which means he manages the CEO for the folks keeping score there. Congratulations, we're in a new era. It's just exciting time for the folks out there that are younger than us. This is a special time to be in tech. With us at SiliconANGLE, of course we got the coverage from the signal from the noise. SiliconANGLE, we'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. Stay with us live from San Francisco, special coverage of Oracle Open World. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back. Thanks guys.