 I share knowledge with you and extract the signal from the noise. This is theCUBE. We go to all the top events and we don't care if they're engineers, CEOs, VCs, individuals. If they have knowledge, we want to bring that to you. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com and I'm joined with my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org. We're here live at Strata. We got a great guest, Eric Baldishweeler from Hortonworks, a founder, former CEO. Congratulations, you got the job that you really want. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So you guys, obviously we covered your announcement with Yahoo when that happened last year at Hadoop Summit, which now you guys are running and so we're excited to bring theCUBE to Hadoop Summit and that's going, Denise is working on that, so that's all going to happen. A lot of great stuff, right? Back then the conversation was, oh, Cloud Air is number one, now Horton's in here competing. Looking back now, you said, hey, you know, we're going to do this, we've got a great team, we're going to start a company, you have benchmark funding, you great firm, they brought in talent to help you, you said, hey, I'll be the CEO, but you're a technical guy, so you like to do a lot of the product stuff. So that's kind of the new news with you guys as a company, but as a marketplace, it's growing like crazy. So first share with us, one, what's going on at Hortonworks relative to your new role, the new CEO, or not new CEO, but a CEO who turns CEO, and then kind of the marketplace, what's happened in the past year for you guys and the market? Sure. In terms of what's happening at Hortonworks, it's not a big deal, right? I've been the technologist behind our team since its inception. Last year, as we were forming the company, the real focus was on getting our technology together and figuring out our tech strategy, and it just made sense, the CEO job and the tech job were pretty much the same. But now as we're planning to go to market, you've got to choose what you're going to do with your day. Rob and I have been pretty much two in a box since the company started, and we just decided it made sense to have him be the CEO face and do a lot of the things that were keeping me from doing the technical job that I think I'm frankly very good at and would like to do that. And the CEO job too is like, you've got to deal with the blocking and tackling of building a company, payroll, making sure you're hiring people. It's really product stuff, right? There's a lot of administrative and operational things that could be distracting for product geek, right? There's a lot to do and I'm glad to have helped doing it. So there was a lot of... Go ahead, sorry. I was just going to go to your other question, which is when you talked about what was happening at Summit last year, and what I said at the time was our focus at Hortonworks is really in growing the whole ecosystem. We think that there's a lot of room for everybody to succeed and I think that's what we've seen and that's what we're seeing. We're very excited to see so many new players coming in to the space and certainly the sorts of partnerships we've been able to announce in the last few days and months have really, I think, reinforced our message that we can add a lot of value by bringing our Hadoop expertise to the market with partners. So we've recently announced partnerships with Teradata. We're here talking about the exciting stuff we're doing with Microsoft and today we announced a partnership with Talon and if you look at what that brings, we've got Microsoft bringing all of their user tools and their user base to bringing Hadoop to all of them. I think that really democratizes Hadoop. It's exciting. We see Teradata. We see there's so much data in Teradata and so many people trying to figure out how Teradata and Hadoop products integrate. It's really exciting to be building joint reference architectures with them. We think that'll solve a lot of enterprise problems and, of course, Talon is the leading data integrator, leading open source data integrator and that's very exciting to have them committing to working with our product. Well, I just want to say while we're here on the air and formally on the record, I guess, since it's being recorded, I'm really impressed with you guys, Hortonworks. When you guys launch, there's a lot of controversy. A lot of people in the press were reporting, oh my god, competing with Cloudera. At that time, Cloudera really didn't have any competition. There was some things being said. You guys handled that very well and it turned out that you were correct. The market is growing fast. There's plenty of room for a lot of people. Growth does that. Growth creates opportunities. Room for everybody, if you will. By the way, it makes the overall ecosystem better because competition is a good thing. Congratulations on that. I think you guys handled that with class and I just want to say that formally that we appreciate that. So congratulations. Eric, I have to ask you. There was a lot of speculation when the management changes were made. One of the publications, I think it was a gig at home, came out with an article basically speculated that you guys had to pivot. You wrote a blog saying, no. Can we clear that up right now? Basically, you go to the website. Let me explain. For the audience that may not know, Hortonworks came out and said, we're going to make money by providing services. Everything we do is going to go open source, give it away for free, free use, all the licensing aspects associated with it. We're going to make money by providing services. When you came out with, public with Hortonworks, we talked on the phone and us and other analysts, I'm sure you talked about that as your primary strategy. That has not changed, correct? No. To be clear, our brand promises that we are going to provide a distribution which includes a completely free Hadoop platform. We believe that it should be complete and it should be free. That doesn't mean that in the future we won't provide other products under different licensing. But Hadoop, the Hadoop platform, we are absolutely committed. No change in strategy. It will be free. And this is completely consistent with what I said last summit. The board is completely behind it. There hasn't been any pivoting or change in strategy. So a lot of people who come into this market say, well, Hadoop is not enterprise ready, they'll say for example. You wouldn't necessarily disagree with that. You might have debate tone, but basically you're saying, so many would say it's not enterprise ready. As a result, we're going to put a layer on top of it and we're going to charge for it. Now what I'm hearing from you is, you may at some point do that. Not specifically with Hadoop. To be very clear, we're not going to put a layer on top of Hadoop to make it enterprise ready. We're going to make Hadoop consumable by the enterprise. We're going to work with the community to make that happen and with partners. So you might layer other things outside of Hadoop. Once Hadoop is established, there's lots of problems to solve in the universe. But the innovation around Hadoop will stay free and open source. That's your mantra and you're going to make money as it relates to that on services. Okay, so just to clear that up. Thanks for helping Claire. Yeah, you're welcome. We find ourselves correcting most of the times in the journal. Giga Ohm now, I guess. Now the obvious follow-up question there, Eric, is benchmark capital. I mean, there's a small little VC firm out here. Index as well. East Coast guy, index and others. So you got some serious juice behind you. It's somewhat rare that VC companies will back a services company with such high profile, right? Known for these huge revenue multiples and these frothy type of valuations. Talk about that a little bit. I mean, why is this a good investment for your partners? We are a services company in that we provide training and support. But to be clear, we're not a professional services company. We're not going in and building people's applications, right? I think Red Hat is a closer model, which is a successful company built on services. Ten billion dollar valuation. Who funded Red Hat? You guys, right? Your investors. Absolutely. I think they know a little bit about Red Hat. So, I mean, the key, for the reason I think they're so enthusiastic about, Hadoop is just because the opportunity is so immense. What we're seeing is that there's an opportunity for Hadoop to be the next generation data platform for the enterprise. Unstructured data is growing so much faster than the other data that enterprises need a new solution. The majority of data is going to be unstructured and Hadoop is sort of the default answer. If you look around the trade floor today, I think you see a lot of validation for that thesis. There's a lot of people out here talking about Hadoop. All right, so let's talk about, I'll be met on talking about HDFS. He believes in that. It's totally a good way to go. We also talked about HBase and the innovations around HBase. I asked him about Cassandra and other projects where, you know, the proprietary, not private, but different file systems. What's your view as Hadoop becomes standard and platforms maturing, application explosion on top, hence a lot more services in general across the board are going to be happening, and applications will be services in a way. How does that compare and contrast decisions that customers have to make around things like Cassandra versus Hadoop versus other BI and existing investments? How do you guys look at that from a technical perspective and reconcile that in the marketplace? It's a little early, I would say, honestly. I mean, there's a lot of things that can be done with the Hadoop stack, and we're talking to a lot of people who do great things with Hadoop stack and all those other products. So I don't think one precludes the other. Each of them has their sweet spots. I think that there are emerging reference architectures around Hadoop and HBase and those things, and I think we'll see a lot of that. But I think all these proprietary products and all of these other open source products all address niches and are going to do very well in those. As I said, it's a pie that's growing very quickly. So there's room for all these solutions, and I look forward to seeing how they work together. That's fair. I can buy that. Let me ask you a different question then. Along the same lines, what's the trend line or trends in the developer community around Hadoop specifically, because that's where you guys are playing, and you guys have a lot of experience there at Hortonworks. What is the trend line towards developers? Just in general, appetite for it. I'll see if it's high. What kinds of things are developers really kicking the tires on and getting deep on? What areas can you share with us that you see engineering and developers working on? Well, I would say that the newer, every time somebody brings in something that gives people more leverage, there's more interest. So HBase is an area where people are very excited because it gives you the scalability of Hadoop and a more immediate read-write model that they're used to in terms of managing data. So there's a lot of excitement around that. There's a lot of excitement around pig and hive because that again provides higher level data models. I think that my hope is that people are going to find as much value from the talent as we expect them to. We think that bringing in visual programming and all of that will again just democratize Hadoop. The work that Microsoft's doing, I think we're going to see a lot of tire kicking really quickly because that lets people use Excel against Hadoop. And there's a lot of Excel users in the world. A lot of JavaScript programmers, which is the other thing they're doing. Eric, what are some of the limitations of Hadoop that you're passionate about addressing through the open source movement? Limitations of Hadoop. Let's see. More challenges and opportunities, as they say. Absolutely. It's a growing market, so you've got to fix that. You talk to customers, they're like, come on, I need help, fix this for me. So if I look at what we're going to be really focused on in the next six months, we're really focused on two lines of development on what we call the Hortonworks Data Platform 1, which is Hadoop 1.0 based. We're really focused on management and management in general, both data management, which is the H-Catalog project. We're putting a lot of energy there. And the idea there is just to let people work at a higher level of abstraction with data so they can use Hive and Pig and MapReduce on the same sort of tables. And down the road, we want to really sort of generalize that. We think that there's a lot of leverage in that and a lot of opportunity to make it easier for people to use different programming models with Hadoop and to manage their data in a lot of different ways and still use the Hadoop programming tools. So that's very exciting. And then there's the Umbari project, which is providing a suite of monitoring and cluster management tools. That's just an intimacy. It's a project that we're investing in and that we think is going to add a lot of value to the community. So that's the short-term stuff. Long-term, we're very excited about the 0.23 work and new next-generation MapReduce. I think, in particular, it's going to just blow the doors off the kinds of things people can do with Hadoop. We're just inviting people to bring all of their new programming models and ideas to Hadoop. I think we're going to see just a whole new wave of innovation. Real-time explosion, subsequent. I think streaming and things like that will be really facilitated by that. Data mining, all kinds of things are going to just be possible. We're not seeing yet. Umbari is interesting. It's new. As you said, but it's potentially disruptive to some of the existing models where people are saying, hey, we're going to charge for that management. You're saying that that's something that you're going to do and that's part of your open-source promise. Absolutely. Yeah, so I see that as very disruptive. What kind of timeframe before we actually see some function that users can sink their teeth into? Well, with any new open-source project, I think it's going to... Definitely the first half of this year we expect to see people using it in production for some value, but I think it's going to take a number of years to evolve into everything that it could possibly be. The key focus for us is not to try to build something that replicates all the management features and all competing sort of products. The key thing is to open up the Hadoop with APIs that will allow vendors to integrate their existing management suites with Hadoop. There's lots of... I was talking to a bank CTO the other day who said we have 27 management consoles and we need another one. We don't need another one, period. Manager of managers of managers. The real thing for us is to open up Hadoop, open up the APIs, help people integrate their tools with it. Yeah, so you want to set the foundation that's like Abby Mast said. I'll make the APIs available and let the ecosystem do its thing. Absolutely. How's Arun doing? He was on theCUBE with us at Hadoop World. What's he up to right now? He's very involved in finalizing MapReduce, the next generation of MapReduce. Right now we are deploying that on real applications in Yahoo at scale and just learning a lot and getting some great early numbers. We're really focused on making that real. How is your relationship with the Yahoo thing going on? Because you have a service contract with Yahoo, is that correct? Yeah. So you get a lot of use case from Yahoo and you know the territory there, honestly. How is Yahoo doing? They still have a big Hadoop investment growing like crazy. They're huge Hadoop investors. They're bringing in lots of new hardware this year and they've still got more than a thousand active users and five million jobs a month and all that's just growing. So it's a great collaboration. I know that but there's still active investors in Hadoop as well. We are mentoring up a whole new set of committers at Yahoo who are working along with us on 23. Well I think what's great that people might not know about, I mean Dave, Volante's team, Jeff Kelly, the lead analyst in Big Data, put out the study of the market size and vendor revenue. You guys are now going to be going to market with Rob leading the charge. What people don't understand is that now there's a lot of different actors in this big data ecosystem. You've got existing vendors. Cloudera and Hortonworks kind of we call Pure Plays. Even though we put Vertica kind of in that because there's still kind of a sub and even with HP. You guys are actually, it's a good thing that more and more codes being contributed into the Hadoop community because no matter what the outcome is in the Hadoop open source community, Cloudera and Hortonworks and Yahoo are significantly contributing tons of code to that effort. That's true, right? That's a true statement. It's absolutely true that we're contributing tons of effort with ourselves and that our partners are and that Cloudera is contributing some and that there's lots of other people are contributing as well. So that's a great community. It's robust. It's vibrant. It's always kind of mud-slinging in communities but that's just nature of the beast. But overall progress is good and you guys are doing great work. Hortonworks is funded by Benchmark. Aggressive firm. Congratulations on all your success. Say hi to Arun and the team for you and we'll see you at Hadoop Summit. I'll do that. Thank you. Thanks for coming on. It's great to have you.