 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering HP Big Data Conference 2015, brought to you by HP Software. Now, your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. Here we are live in Boston. We're winding down day two of two full days of coverage. Special presentation of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's flagship program. When we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante of wukibon.com. This is our wrap up of the show, day two. Dave, great, great two days. And I think, you know, I would categorize the two days of CUBE as an ingestion of data. You know, we were sharing with folks to put the Big Data metaphor together. But really about customers, HP's new mojo is to let the customers to the talking. I think that's actually perfect for theCUBE. It may not have all the sizzle with the big names like Nate Silver, who didn't come on, although he was on theCUBE previous, Stonebreaker's on a couple weeks ago. But again, HP's got so many customers, they're telling the story for them. And HP Vertica, as it turns out, might be one of the most successful productive acquisitions in HP history in terms of value for the price that they paid. I mean, certainly compared to autonomy. I mean, 11 billion versus 300 million change. Vertica's crown jewel, certainly the intangible there which they saw was they had great DevOps people, real engineers because of the scale factor. And you got to give a hat tip to the columnar store, some of the work that they did early days of Vertica. That horse came home. Well, I agree with you first of all about the conference. The best conferences are those where the content is relevant, clearly it's relevant here. We're talking about data and analytics. Number two, where the content is predominantly presented by practitioners. Because those are the guys who really understand. And here you're talking about a lot of developers inside of companies like Etsy and Wayfair and Tapjoy and many others that are running Vertica. A lot of retail stuff, a lot of e-commerce sites. And so that makes for a good conference. It's intimate, it's 1,000, 1,500 people. So it's not a zoo, it's tabletops. It's not giant booths and all that kind of fanfare. But I would say that my hope, John, is that they can keep this conference intimate and really practitioner oriented. I think I want to talk to you a little bit about just Vertica, Haven, HP's big data strategy in general. I agree with you. Vertica, big winner, great ROI. I think the problem that HP had with Vertica is that the time to value on that ROI was delayed because the Leo Apatecker had no clue what was going on and didn't realize what he had acquired. It was just a small little thing that he didn't care about and he was so distracted with other things. And then when Meg came in, she just had such a mess to clean up, she couldn't give it the attention. And I think finally, they did the right thing, they put Colomahoni in charge. And then Meg said, wow, this is the future of the company. And they really drove Vertica as a linchpin, I think, of the software strategy. Here's the challenge, Haven, okay? So Haven's good marketing. Hadoop, autonomy, Vertica, enterprise security and N applications. Kind of a fuzzy concept when it came out. You don't buy Haven, right? What you do is you buy pieces of Haven. You buy Vertica, you buy autonomy, you buy security, N applications, really it's not an application development platform, it hasn't been, it's just becoming one. So what's the problem with that? It's good, like I say, it's good marketing, it's good slideware, but when you're selling, like let's put yourself in the sales motion. Okay, let's talk about Hadoop. What does that do? Hadoop, if I'm selling Vertica, I don't really want to talk about Hadoop unless the customer brings it up and says, hey, let's talk about how you fit into my Hadoop strategy. I don't really want to lead with Hadoop, right? I don't want to lead with a bunch of open source free software, autonomy. Well, what's the fit between autonomy and Vertica? And I think you can see by talking to the practitioners the ones that are doing autonomy, the idle. Oh, yeah, we're doing idle. You doing Vertica? Yeah, I was looking at it. You doing Vertica? Yeah, you doing idle? Oh, no. So the synergies are good on paper, but they're not really there in terms of the solution. So that has to evolve. I think excavators- Well, they've been working on that. They've been working on it, but it takes a long time, it's integration. You know how hard that is. I think excavator is designed to do some of that, but of course HP has to keep up with all the changes that are going on in the marketplace, like streaming, like Kafka. And then, oh, by the way, it has to accommodate Storm. It has to accommodate, you know, where the cloud era direction, the Hortonworks direction, which is a little bit of a fork there. Oh, no fork. No, it's a little bit of a, you know, changes. So they have to accommodate all that stuff while at the same time, taking the crown jewels of HP and positioning them. So I think that's a challenge for HP. And, you know, the marketing's nice, the Haven, it's a great little, you know, acronym, but to me it's not really a market changing solution. Vertica is, you know, Haven got a ways to go. I think, Dave, one of the things that's also happening is this composite application concept that's not new. Certainly composite apps have been around. You know, web services, you know, all the stuff's good. But what's happening now at a platform level is just seeing companies reuse. And it's really the open source ethos that's been driving this. And to have Vertica being used by startups with tier one VCs funding them, that's impressive to me, that's notable. And I think that to me is a signal to where this market's going and it's a time to value, race to value. Startups that can actually cross over and go from hackathon prototype, which looks good on paper. I've always said, you know, hacking not thongs of the new PowerPoint, show the value. But when you get to some critical mass, the system breaks. That's what we call a hack. Okay, great, hacks are great. Hacks show value, you double down on the value. That's agile. This is the new way to do software development. We've been saying it for years on the queue. What's happening now is they're turning to Vertica because the companies that get successful that are data full, that get a lot of data, they just turn on the Vertica engine and now Vertica's putting some more tooling around it. So SuperSpart moved by HP. We want to waste time building that. Not critical, it's 10 different versions. Let the customers choose. Kafka's getting some steam. Again, this is the new HP. The other thing I want to talk about is disruption. So we heard a couple of times from the HP folks mainly, but also from the practitioners that Vertica was a disruptor. And while I agree with that, it's certainly a disruptor of the traditional enterprise data warehouse, aka Oracle. It's really the gold standard there. Certainly a disruptor there. That whole space, that MPP space with the teaser, par Excel, obviously Vertica, et cetera, they had a little run, like the run on guards. I always use that example in the NFL draft, but it wasn't game changing. It was somewhat game changing. It didn't put Oracle out of business. It didn't unseat Oracle. So yes, it was disruptive, but to me, John, the real disruptor is Redshift. That is the major disruptor in the marketplace because what Amazon did is they took the, they essentially took the IP from par Excel, which now is owned by Acti, and Acti gets nothing out of this deal, by the way. And so, and they took that and they built their own database, a highly scalable, massively parallel database that they're now selling as a service. Redshift is kicking ass, we know that. It's very disruptive to models, including Vertica, certainly Oracle, but also including Vertica because it's in the cloud. So that's why you hear from a lot of the Vertica clients that they're running stuff on premise, right? Vertica guys are running stuff on premise. Redshift's disrupting the market. Now, yes, so now you can run Vertica on Amazon. Great, it's in the marketplace, but Amazon's pushing Redshift hard. And especially in small businesses, I see that solution from Amazon very difficult to compete with. Go ahead, sorry. Well, that's Redshift's disrupting everyone in this ecosystem saying, hey, if you want to quack like a BI tool, go ahead all day long. We're going to apply our disruptive rules, AKA AWS, to Redshift and put in the integrated stack. And look at what it's done. It's forcing everybody to move faster, again, to the value. If you don't show the value, you are not going to get traction. So again, this is where they're separate from the hype from the reality. The customers vote with their wallet. Well, and I think to the point we were making all week that what the cloud guys, the public cloud guys are doing generally, and specifically Amazon, they're building sort of an end-to-end data management, you know, solution framework, including a PaaS layer, including a database layer, you know, including the infrastructure services, you know, including streaming with Kinesis, all the components that you would, you know, envision, and they're offering it as a service available through an API. Now, it's simple. It's maybe not as functional, but it's certainly easy. Now, is it cheaper? Depends. We had one practitioner on today said it's $11,000 a month to go to AWS, Azure, Google, versus $2,000 a month with his own on-premises. So the economics is still a question mark, but again, for small businesses, I think it's a no-brainer. And I think, you know, the cloud guys will continually get more functional. So that's the challenge that HP, you know, really faces. Now, the flip side of that is Vertica's really doing well. It's growing. It's got traction. It's the crown jewel. It's the crown jewel. And frankly, you know, from HP, I would, I'd be leading with Vertica. Well, look at this event. This event speaks volumes to what Vertica's done. I mean, Vertica was an issue of the market, but, you know, the market pivots, and you got to go where the wind is. And, you know, Vertica might not have been the end game of Vertica, but they put on three consecutive years of a great event, Dave, and this is the DevOps. Again, what they had tapped into here, whether by accident or on purpose, doesn't matter, is that they bumped into lighting in a bottle. They hit the developer market where the engineering's getting done. And we said that on the cube. DevOps is engineering, okay? It's developing as well. Developers and ops, they engineer and they write code. So again, a unique breed, an elite breed, but also big data is powered by the infrastructure. Again, I've always said that, and that's coming to be true, and it's all playing out just the way I called it. And the thing is, there's so much more to do, right? Looker, you know, Lodgy, and these companies, you got startups coming out of the woodwork. This is going to be the beginning of a massive innovation cycle. And again, this might soften the blow, the real bubble that might pop. So, you know, in Silicon Valley, a lot of stuff going on, as you always know, and bubbles are out there, and this bubble might not be as a big of a pop because of all the action going on in the enterprise. So, the Saga ecosystem in HP, you know, partner-friendly, choice, open, I saw much more emphasis than open source. HP distributed our couple of other open source projects, much, much greater affinity within open source over the last four or five years for HP, so I give them high marks for that. The ecosystem, you know, continues to grow. Some come, some go, Tableau not here, kind of interesting. I think that's an interesting signal in the marketplace. I don't know if that's, you know, there's tension there. I don't know if that Tableau is going to be thinking about competing more with HP or vice versa, but certainly Click was here. You know, other visualization companies in the ecosystem, so that's, you know, interesting to watch. There's a nice little ecosystem growing up around Vertica. Again, to me, this conference is really all about Vertica and the innovations of Vertica. And you get some great guests on theCUBE and great action around the practitioner side. But so, let me come back to you, John. This is our third year here. What's your analysis? Of here or just Tech and General Silicon Valley, Boston? Well, I always love the Silicon Valley angle. I mean, I kind of can anticipate what you're gonna say. Well, Boston's a lot slower than Silicon Valley, so here's what's going on. Boston, you know, to me, is still in the minor leagues when it comes to tech. That's clear and across the board. Venture Capital, innovation. I think it's a different league. I don't even think it's in the same league. No, it's definitely AAA ball at best. So, Silicon Valley is just so much more action here. Boston, though, has got an engineering culture. I mean, it's just a different culture, right? Boston's got great engineers here, and the concern I have out here is there's so much churn and burn. You've got so much talent laying around. I've always said this is a ripe environment with all the universities for the data science. And I said that in 2010, when we first were down at MIT doing the MIT stuff, Boston could crush data business. If the funding market, venture capitalists, besides the Chris Lynch's, who's pretty aggressive, really funded data science. Boston could be a mecca for cloud and data science, and I think they're missing a huge opportunity. You know, Silicon Valley is a bubble machine right now. A lot of things are high, yet Uber, $51 billion. A lot of stuff, Google changing their name from Google to Alphabet, trying to go conglomerate, trying to be this spin-out machine, self-driving cars. But there is a bubble that will pop in Silicon Valley. And the question is, will you be sitting in a chair when the music stops? That's my analysis. I've seen this multiple times in the Valley over the past 16 years, and it's coming. Now again, the caveat is the enterprise business is going to soften the blow. Because the enterprise, cloud, mobile, big data, there's actual significant underlying technology change happening at the architectural level. That is a wealth-creating dynamic. So that is going to be interesting if that thing can be, you know, overlaid into the bubble popping. The bubble being this consumer company. You're already seeing people running for the hills on the media business, consolidation. You're starting to see a lot of these, you know, analytics companies consolidating, even in the BI space here, some consolidation. So this rapid consolidation happening in Silicon Valley and yet an expansion on the enterprise and real tech, life sciences and technology. So that's my take here. Now I think this show represents that trend. Vertica has attracted those kinds of developers. Guys who built Facebook, those kinds of guys. Guys who are working on large-scale infrastructure to power large-scale data analytics. And I think that's where the axe is going to be and I think the software piece is critical on that. So, you know, again, Google's changing the name to Alphabet. Interesting trend. More stuff's happening. So, ton of stuff on internet of things. We're still going to see the hype and a lot of things. So again, that's my take. You know, overall show here, you know, HP's got a lot of work to do. HP software is not known to be great in a lot of the companies. They're known as an enterprise company for data centers. But overall, their revenue portion, they know they got to win in software. And I think they can't do it like they did before. They have to win in software. They got to go all in. Vertica has, to me, the winning formula, right? I mean, it's all about adding value. What percentage of revenue is software? Not a big chunk. Tiny, I mean, it was when they were, the huge conglomerate before the split, it's going to be, what, six, less than 10%. So now when they split, maybe it'd be 12%. Two, I mean, I might even be aggressive and put cloud and software in one business unit. Well, well, I think that. That's interesting dynamic. I think it is, but I think those growth businesses should be maybe more tightly aligned. I mean, I think that makes sense. But I think that HP has, or HP Vertica, has the formula. And so I'm hoping that HP has learned from that and preserves that, brings some of that into the Discover mojo. We saw some of that, you know, prior to the split. It was going to be interesting to see, you know, HP Discover in London. There can be a lot of talk about the new HP. It's going to be presumably HP Enterprise. I mean, we were at the last HP as we knew HP. So, but overall, very high marks for this event. The keynotes were great. The speakers were great. Stonebreaker was fantastic. Ken Rudin from Facebook, really, really good. Poppy Crumb, just phenomenal presentations. Nate Silver, Nate Silver's very good. He gave the same presentation that he always gives, but he's still really, really good. The best part of his presentation I thought was Q and A. He took some questions and the audience said, so really, it was interesting to hear the audience. They were really asking like, can you help me with my problem? I mean, essentially asking him, well, how do you start the analysis? What variables should we be considering? Some really hardcore data science questions to a great statistician. So that was the best part of his talk, I thought. And I thought Colin did a great job, came across as a very CEO oriented. I thought Young Johns was very good too. Young Johns, I thought, did a good job. I was thankful or glad that he didn't just fly in. I mean, he was in and out, but he did a good job when he was here. He shook a few hands. He gave a good talk. I thought he was good. Well, I think they have to align with their audience, right? I mean, the audience doesn't want to hear sales pitches. They don't want to hear scripted bullshit. And they want to hear, okay, we love you. We're here to answer any questions. How can we help you be more successful? As engineers, that's like, I want access to experts. Pick up the phone when I call, or in front of my tweet, or whatever their vehicle is. And that's ultimately what they got here. Great developer environment here at the lounge. So overall, great event. I think class of it. The last thing I want to add, John, is my advice for Meg, in case you're watching. Oh, that segment now? In case you're watching, Meg. Well, just, I'm going to narrow it. This will be a longer conversation. But as it relates to Vertica in particular, she'll give bits and pieces, Meg and Kathy, on the calls. Of course, Kathy's going over to HP Inc. But they'll give bits and pieces on the earnings calls of guidance. Every now and then, talking about Vertica, how much it's going, I would like to see maybe to your point, put the growth businesses together and give us a consistent view of those growth businesses. So we can have, as outside observers, an understanding of what the trajectory is of those growth businesses. I just don't understand the rationale. I mean, if I was on Meg's tab, like Meg looking, let's get to some reality here. You put Amazon model on the table, let's put cloud under software, hide the ball until that thing's ramping up where we got to disclose it. You got to invest in the cloud. The cloud has to be a winner. HP software has good mojo data. They got Vertica, they got a market that wants analytics, they want software. So this is the time to make the move in my opinion. I think the cloud can be the Achilles heel for HP. They got a good team over there, a little bit kind of going in these directions here, something, or confused. You take away the confusion, just focus on growing that asset. And that's what I would do, take that whole cost out of it. Now that's my take. I think that's a good suggestion, John. I think we should make sure Meg gets that. But yeah, again, overall, I've always loved this conference, not just because it's in Boston, not just because it's run across the street from legal seafood, but because of the quality of the content. What do you think of legal food this year? Always very, very good, consistently, outstanding. I think they got a fried clam issue, personally. I think they need to work on their fried clams. Other than that, legal's as usually as always. Other than that, I'd say it was perfect. So my Apple watch is calling me, telling me that it's lobster time upstairs celebration. So great time, great job, guys. Great to be live in Boston. Great to be here. If you're watching, follow theCUBE. We've got a lot more events coming up. We've got OpenStack. We're going to be in Seattle. We're going to be in Silicon Valley. And of course, VMworld's coming up. That's the big show for us. So again, big cloud show, a lot of the stuff going on with VMworld. Again, on the ground, Cube Conversations. And again, go to wikibond.com for all the research, siliconangle.com. Reference point for innovation, all your daily news there. So live from Boston, this is Signing Office to Cube. Thanks for watching.