 at Big Data SV 2014 is brought to you by headline sponsors, WAN Disco. We make Hadoop invincible and Actian, accelerating Big Data 2.0. Okay, welcome back to Big Data SV. This is Big Data Silicon Valley. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angle. I'm joined by co-host for this segment, Jeff Kelly, chief analyst at wikibond.org. In Big Data, putting out some great reports. And our next guest is Bob Wilkinson, COO of Infinity DB. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks. You guys had a name change recently and some funding. Let's talk about the company update and share with the folks the news of what's happening, name change and funding. We'll get right into it. Sure, so this was really a continuation of some significant moves we made starting in fourth quarter of last year where we announced a broader open source strategy. We announced some native Hadoop integration. And this name change and this funding round is really about taking that to the next level. So we've consolidated our brand assets around the product name, which is now our company name as well, Infinity DB. You know, we're just, we didn't want to split that traffic between the website, social media and whatnot. You know, MongoDB had a similar situation. They were called 10 Gen, they called MongoDB. Makes sense. I mean, you want to brand what you're working on. It's just really easy to have those meetings and customers understand kind of the positioning of it. Makes sense. Let's talk about the funding. How many employees you guys have and what's on your agenda for this year for growth? Absolutely. So we're right around 25 employees now. And this funding is really about largely billing out sales and marketing. The, you know, we, Infinity DB has been in the market since 2010, but not really that widely known until now. We really feel like the product's ready. It's, it's ready to really make some, some waves and make an impact, especially in the sequel on Hadoop Space. And this funding is about taking that marketing and sales to a, to another level. So talk about the marketplace right now. The trends right now are obviously big data still rocking and rolling. You're seeing a lot more money being tossed around just yesterday on the queue. We were talking to folks like, hey, we're here and people talking about budget allocation. Still massive growth opportunity. You guys have a good product and good story. Talk about the dynamics that you guys are addressing. Absolutely. So I think one of the key trends we see, we've been saying sequel is sexy again. But, but, you know, what we see is that there was, there was a lot of momentum and, and noise in the market around this unstructured data. And, you know, you brought up Mongo. They, they made a lot of, a lot of noise there. And there's, there's a place for that. But we think there's a big place for sequel. You know, there is, there is just legions of developers that know how to use sequel. At the end of the day, a lot of the data that people want to do, analytics and big data is structured. And so sequel is the right tool to do that. And what we can do with the technology like ours is make that accessible. So make any sequel developer a big data developer. And we just don't think, you know, many, many companies or technologies can say that. And I think another trend that we see that is really important to us is a trend around performance. Performance matters. You know, I think there's, there's been, you know, as Hadoop has evolved and started to gain traction, people tolerated this, you know, batch mode and waiting for things for a really long time. But increasingly that performance matters. You know, that, that ability to get more of a real-time or conversational access to the data matters to businesses. And they're using that to drive competitive advantage for their, their businesses. What do you say to the folks out there that say, oh, the sequel guides, they're just not ready for, it's not ready for prime time. Startups have tried sequel on Hadoop, sequel unstructured. It seems like the, that energy is like pent up ready to explode because, you know, there's an educational issue, right? So, so talk about that, that critique of, hey, you know, sequel's been around. Can they, can they cross over and be the ninja unstructured, you know, agile insight acquisition kind of technology? Talk about that dynamic. Yeah, I think, frankly, I think they need to come back and take another look now. I think, you know, if you looked at the early technologies that were on Hadoop, you know, the many of the open source ones, I think you can see why people said that. And frankly, to this day, you know, you can still see that. If somebody tries to do Hive, they're just likely not gonna have a real good experience. But I think, you know, frankly, you know, Kledera was early with their Impala move and that product has been moving along. And, you know, now you have products like ours come into the space that really take that, take things to a new level. So because it's a product that, you know, it's a fourth or fifth generation product, it's mature, it's been in the space and now it's just bringing it into the Hadoop ecosystem as opposed to many of these other newer kind of open source entrants that are much more, you know, much less robust and much more immature. So I can see why people have that feeling. I think they really need to look at what's going on in the market now. And we have a sense too that it's just really getting ready to take off. So I wanna switch gears just a little bit. So, InfinityB, MPP, Columner, Database, Analytics Database, so you're competing with the likes of Vertica and Green Plum and things like that. But, you know, we've obviously seen, you know, the big data world, Hadoop and NoSQL, a lot of open source technology. But in that world, MPP, Database world, not so much, mostly proprietary software. Why the move to open source? Why did you guys make that decision and how do you think that plays in the larger big data landscape? So for us, it was really a two-prong move. One reason is that we felt like the market needed an open source technology, frankly, in the Columner MPP space. You know, there are a number of Columner MPP solutions like you mentioned, but there's really almost no open source options if you needed that kind of technology. So we felt like that was one. We also felt like this move to Sequel on Hadoop. You know, we felt, we saw this market momentum around Hadoop and then now Sequel on Hadoop. And we felt like that to really participate in that market in the way that that market expects, we needed to have an open source strategy as well. So that's, and it's been good for us. We've seen a lot of interest that we weren't getting before. People are out there looking for open source solutions and there just really weren't that many to find in this space. You know, I think the MONA2B seems to be one that came up some, but it's not really a very, you know, production-ready solution for many people. So let's dig into that a little bit. So from the perspective of the user, are you seeing people coming to Infinity B who want to actually tinker with the code or is it because it's open, it's easier to potentially integrate with some of these other products? What really is the advantage of the open source nature of an MPP database? So what I see and what I hear from customers is that it is really more about the business model and that people can wrap their heads around an open source business model. They understand it's a scaling model that they understand because many of these businesses are faced with hockey stick kind of trends on their data. And when you map that up with many of these, you know, proprietary solutions or appliance-based solutions, the math just doesn't work. But with an open source business model, they understand it. You know, it's much like they understand the commodity hardware model. It's, you know, okay, I know I may need to add servers and then I know I'm going to have to add, you know, some percentage of that maybe for my support services around a database or whatnot. But I think that's by far the number one thing we see. I think, you know, the development community is certainly something we'd like to see over time, but I think that's a secondary objective and a secondary priority from what we see in the market. Well, I think it's a good point about the appliance model specifically. When you've got these expensive boxes, you're talking, you know, really high performance and it's very effective solutions, but they're quite expensive and they don't really fit into that paradigm of the scale out commodity hardware approach that you see in Hadoop and some of the other open source big data frameworks. Exactly. So tell us a little bit more about, you know, customer attraction. What are you seeing in terms of, you know, some innovative use cases? What are you seeing out there in terms of people actually making this stuff work? Because we, you know, we've been covering this market here on theCUBE for years and of course a lot of the talk initially was around the tech. Yeah. But, excuse me, we'd love to talk about, you know, what are people really doing out there in the field that's driving business value? Sure. So I'd highlight a couple of use cases I think. So for products like ours, the best fit is for somebody that's got time series data and they've got this massive growth trend in the data. So they've got a lot of data now. They know they're gonna have, you know, 10 times that data soon. And so one good example is in the gaming space and more and more now these games, these AZs, especially mobile games are throwing off event streams. So essentially, you know, time series data that's logging everything that players are doing in the games. You know, when I start a race, when I win a race, when I buy something. All those things are events that are streamed off these games. And so literally, you know, you take up one of the more known players. They've got hundreds of millions of events per day that they'd like to do analytics on. And this is one of those, you know, this is one of those problem sets where you take a traditional solution and it doesn't really fit. But what they've been able to do with a product like ours is they've been able to take that data in. They've scaled out to 25 nodes now. So it's a pretty large system. And that's serving up analytics for a couple hundred analysts. You know, so every day, you've got more than a hundred analysts that are running ad hoc queries and whatnot against this dataset. And that's really focused, you know, for them, it's focused around player engagement and ultimately marketing and more dollars for them. I think another use case we see is in and around the telco and the networking space. So again, driven by, you know, mobile handsets seem to be this kind of mega trend that are driving everything from advertising to telco to gaming and whatnot. But in that space, you know, you have, again, you have this multitude of data that's coming off the mobile network infrastructure around, you know, where people are, what they're doing, what kind of service they're receiving. And so there's a number of customers in that space that are driving, again, driving analytics value off that data and helping them, you know, ultimately helping people in the telco space serve their customers better. You know, you'll hear the term customer experience management in that space. But ultimately, this is the technological underpinning of that, being able to do that at scale. Bob, I wanna ask you about, as we get wrapped up on time here, the competition, the marketplace. We've been following a lot of the sequel and Hadoop players and, you know, we're very bullish on a week. Agree with you that we think it's gonna explode. We heard Microsoft talking about HD insights with Board and Works. Huge educational opportunity, too, as well. You mentioned some of, you see the movement coming as well. What do you think the critical success factors are for being successful in the sequel Hadoop space? It really is kind of a cross in the chasm when we were kind of joking earlier. But there is mainstream adoption. Sequel, folks know Sequel. There's value there. There's institutional knowledge into Sequel. Yet the opportunities to get insights is what everyone wants. So talk about what people need to do to be successful, both as competition, your company, and also customers. I think the first thing is they need to make it accessible and easy to use. You know, it needs to be something that people can quickly, you know, get in place, get some data in there, and get going with it. You know, I think there's, you know, just with the, there's this cacophony of different technologies out there. There's so many out there that I don't think any, I don't see a lot of, you know, willingness for any one person to spend a lot of time trying to make some of the work because they know they can just go to the next one. So I would say that, you know, the first one is to have, you know, have a product that's simple, that goes in easily and somebody can start to derive value out of quickly. And then I would say, you know, I'm gonna come back to the performance thing again and say that I think the next thing I think is that people really are increasingly looking for that performance. So it's about having products that have the right performance characteristics in the right types of use cases. And then, you know, lastly, I think would be to have the right focus. So, you know, certainly there's the clear trend in the industry in general is to use the right technology in the right space. So, you know, don't try to use an analytic base in a transactional workload. So I think the last thing would be focus on the use cases that you really know and that you're good at. My final question for you is more like on the customer side, traction. Obviously you've got some funding. They do some due diligence. We know how it is. They're gonna go talk to customers. It can be painful, sometimes easy, depending on the space. But talk about the itch that your customers are scratching that you guys are solving. Talk about where you've been successful. What do you guys hit as the key value proposition for your customers and why have you been successful? Yeah, so the common thread between our customers is again when they have this, what's an intractable problem really. I mean they have data growth that's outstripping either their technologies both from a technical perspective and an economic perspective. And so they've got this intractable problem and we can give them an answer to that in many cases. So these people like the gaming company I mentioned like some of the Toko focused companies that I mentioned, they're able to build solutions that were never possible before. And they can do it in a way that's commercially viable and financially viable. So that's what's exciting to us. Final comment I'll give you before we end is what tell the folks out there the state of the sequel over the unstructured database market? What is the big bumper sticker this year for that market? What can you share to clear up any misconceptions or talk about the trends? Well I think the clear trends is that I think it's real, the technology is real now. You've had significant maturity and impolite frankly, which is a competitor of ours, but in all honesty they've come some way. You've had some new entrants like Presto come in which was another nice little bump over Hive. So I'd say that the space is really maturing and it's maturing rapidly. And you've also got Pivotal in there with Hawke as well. So you've got a lot of players, I think you've got a lot more solutions that are credible and ready to go into production. And so I think I'd say come try them out, try us out and see how our claims stack up against theirs. Congratulations on the funding, the name changed the branding, and it's a growth market. We were just commenting on that at the beginning of the segment valuations are high and opportunities are their value to be had and customers are paying now. So the rising tide floats all boats from Impala to around the industry. So congratulations. This is theCUBE, we'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. We're live in Silicon Valley for Big Data SV covering all the action in Big Data as well as the Stratoconference going on right behind us across the street. We'll be right back.