 Live from New York, it's theCUBE, covering Big Data NYC 2015. Brought to you by Hortonworks, IBM, EMC, and Pivotal. Now your host, Dave Vellante and George Gilbert. Welcome back to Big Data NYC, everybody. This is our event within the event, running concurrent with Strata and Hadoop World. This is theCUBE. The sixth Hadoop World in New York City. Jason Zintakez here, he's the new president and CEO, well actually new CEO, was president, now CEO of Platfora, a company we've had on and profiled in theCUBE several times. First of all, congratulations and welcome to theCUBE. Yeah, thank you. Very excited to be here. So, what's going on for you guys this week at Strata? Well, just about everything. Big Data is big. I'm tired, that's a lot, it's the end of the day. A lot of customer meetings. A lot of customer meetings exactly. We had a product release last week, so our 5-0 product release is new for us, showcasing it here at the conference. Lots of customer meetings, as you might imagine, and furthering just another year in Hadoop and Strata. So, actually a big change year over year in sort of what we're seeing. So, how would you describe that change? So, last year I think we saw a lot about big data with, big data as cost arbitrage. Getting rid of legacy BI systems and trying to reduce costs. So, merely just a cost play. This year it seems to be much more about the business use cases. Delivering real value to Fortune 100, Fortune 1000 companies. And so, I see that as the largest change, where the big data is becoming meaningful. The insights that people are gaining are more than just the cost savings. So, let's double click on that a little bit. Where you see in the value, what are customers telling you? Where are they pulling you, pushing you? So, for example, one of the largest insurers in the world just became a customer last quarter of Plattfora. And this large insurance company is using our software to look at fraudulent cases or submissions in claims. So, and a claim may just be a mis-filed claim, but their job is to actually reduce the fraud, which saves them billions of dollars. Well, billions might be an exaggeration, but hundreds of millions relative to looking for insights around fraud and mis-filed claims. And that's real business benefit. It's not just about the architecture of sitting on. That claims app is the heart and soul of the insurance company. Okay, so, what else are you hearing from customers at this event as you go? I mean, I know you've really been on for only a couple of months, but you've had experience in this business for a while. So, what else are you hearing from them in terms of their priorities? Yes, business value, you just gave a good example. How about some of their challenges? Sure, I think you mentioned to me off camera, there's a lot of vendors in the marketplace. It's crowded, it's confusing. A lot of tools, how do we do it? I think their question is speed to insight. Really, how can I get the insight faster? So, Plattfora offers a platform. We're not simply a tool. We start with the raw data and do discovery against that raw data from the data prep out of raw data in Hadoop to in-memory processing all the way to graphical visualizations and analysis of that data. And so that's the end to end, which is the speed to insight, taking the technical work out of the hands, making it accessible, usable for the business user. And to us, that's a value prop we're bringing to the marketplace where it becomes less technical and becomes more usable by a simple business analyst. Do you find yourself going in? We hear actually often that it takes often two years to go from proof of concept or production on Hadoop deployment. The struggle is skills and sort of what application they're going to use. Do you find yourself being pulled into customers who are like, okay, so help us get to that value point sooner? Yeah, geez, two years and it's a long time, right? We're actually, we have customers that do a proof of concept to evaluate us, our prospects I should say, and they're doing that proof of concept in a week or a day. And then to deployment, it's roughly one month. So I'm glad we're not in the two-year category. We're one month to value, quite frankly, from the time you purchased to deployed. Your comment around finding skilled employees to help, that's another big benefit but for in that we don't require those skillsets because we're making it natively accessible to a business analyst to actually curate and do the discovery of the data. And that again is the sort of the end user value of our tool. So taking that need for hiring Hadoop experts out of the equation. Sort of a less need for the data engineer who's going to clean up what's in that broad data lake and less need then for the data scientists to pull signal out of it. More something that traditional business analysts can explore and. That's correct. That's absolutely right. Okay. What, talk about your role at Platformer. So Ben, I've known Ben for awhile. Product guy. Yeah. So he got you to come, you know, run the company which is fantastic for, I'm sure he's thrilled. Gets to go back deep into product. Talk about your background, your role. What's, why'd you come to Platformer? What's exciting you about Platformer? Sure, yeah, yeah. Well Ben's not hanging out on a hammock in Hawaii but we're actually great partners. So frankly in that partnership is a representation of my commercial experience taking products to market and scaling companies. And Ben is a visionary product executive growing up in product. And so I think we're a wonderful compliment to go to market together and we do truly partner in that. My experience comes from large enterprise applications. Pardon me. I grew up at SAP. I spent roughly eight years at SAP. I then had, with partners, a consulting company that ultimately sold to Capgemini. And then I ran sales and marketing at various enterprise software companies like JDA software and most recently Responses which was an email marketing company where we sold to Oracle. So various enterprise software companies taking scaling companies from, you know, the Platformer is to be all the way up into Fortune 100. So we talked earlier about things being a little crowded. Platformer was early on. I remember interviewing Ben at one of the very first Hadoop worlds. You guys have been around for a while but you know, the VCs, you know, like sharks smelling blood and boom, they came in hard into this market space. So what do you make of it? You know, you got a lot of experience in both large and small companies. It seems overcrowded, overfunded. Not a lot of people making money. And, but, huge potential. So help us sum that up. How do you look at that? How do you analyze that? Well, the good news is we're making money so I'm happy about that. And we've been here for four years. I'd like to also tell you about our release that we just came out last week. But there's a lot of opportunity in the marketplace. So it's a great time for entrepreneurs to truly take advantage of a transformative technology. And that's why we're all here at this show. I'd say we have very strong momentum and the reason you asked me why I was attracted to the platform was because of the actual use cases. So when I see a solving real business benefit or having real business benefit with large hundreds of millions of returns to our customers, that tells me we've got something. And it is big logos. It's big, you know, the largest apparel manufacturers. It's the largest publishers and news companies. We have most of the financial institutions as our customers. So it doesn't sound like you're calling on a customer who's got a business intelligence budget or a business intelligence problem. And it sounds like you've got, you know, much more of a solutions oriented approach. Yeah, well, certainly we could and we do call on those people. And in fact, that's our best customers. But we start with this, whether it's IT or business we start with the solution in mind. What use case or what business problem are you trying to solve? We found that simply experimenting with the technology doesn't end up leading to implementation. But if we're trying to solve a problem, Riot Games actually was a customer of ours that was presenting here on stage at Strata. And their use case is interesting. They're one of the largest online gaming companies with League of Legends. And they simply want to improve the gaming experience for the user. And so they use platform to test and look for interruptions in service and if the game works to slow down, for instance. And how to find that improved performance of the game, ultimately making a better gamer experience. That's real value, that's their customer. So what's the 100 day plan? New CEO, new president of the country always has a 100 day plan. What's your 100 day plan? It's taken advantage of all this momentum in the marketplace now that we're past some of the technical evaluations and more into delivering real business value. It's scaling the company. We spent four and a half years building a rock solid product and just had our biggest release of the year, 5.0 come out last week. But now it's scaling that. So I'm actually doubling down. I'm doubling the field execution part of our company. And you're actually sort of net income positive at this point. I mean, that's considering all the competition that's being funded, that's quite an accomplishment. Yeah, the company's got a bright future. And so I'm looking forward to doing it. And I did mention 5.0. Yeah, what's the headline? Keep coming back to that. I want to talk about it. Yeah, let's talk about 5.0. Pardon me. You know, it's exciting. So 5.0 represented, it was actually speeded inside. I talked about that. It was largely around data prep and a lot of handspins around data prep. So actually we've been working with Spark for the last year and now Spark is native in the platform powering our data prep engine. We also, it's some about openness as well. So we now publish natively to Impala and Sentry. For example, we published Excel, we published a SQL. And a lot about this is making the platform usable for in a variety of ways. And then ultimately the combination of these are more options, more ways to deploy platform but reducing the time to, as you said, it's not two years, it's actually one month that we're deploying the applications and getting companies live with customer insights or fraud insights or data security. What about the visualization piece? We talked a little bit about that off-camera. I mean, you're not a head-to-head competitor with say a Tableau, but I could see bumping into them sometimes. Can you help us understand that a bit? Sure, well, I mean, I think we serve two very different markets. I mean, we have a visualization component of our product. It's a third of our product that obviously is the end result of your query. And it's good. But ours is against multi-structure data, large data. Whereas Tableau is against a curated smaller cube. So I think that's the large difference. And we could compliment Tableau, quite frankly. We could publish results to Tableau if that were the preferred method. But our visualization allows it to be closed loop and turn key. And that's, again, that's speed to value and simply put in the hands of a business analyst. They get their insights that much quicker. Well, it's one less thing to manage. That's precisely right. I mean, that's critical. So I mean, unless you want to just tinker. But like you said, it seems like people are kind of beyond the tinkering phase. Give me that business value. That's right. And I'd also say, you know, we're in, the majority of our accounts you asked about Tableau also have Platfora. And so they're different use cases for why you use Platfora versus Tableau. So we coexist in accounts. And if someone were curious, I'd invite them to ask us. And we'd love to sort of help people understand the difference or the compliment, if you will. Okay, so really focused on building out the field, go to market, maintaining that profitability? I mean, is that a priority? Or do you really need to sort of invest and get a bigger footprint? You know, it's a balance approach. So we're- Well, for some companies it's not. Some companies it's like- Yeah, no, we're not spending money. Spend three to get one. We're not spending money to go deep into debt and just to simply scale. I think it's, I just don't think it's prudent. You never know. Look, the economy's already turned. We want to be here 20 years from now. So we're going to be, we're going to have prudent growth and balanced relative to spend and profitability. But right now it is doubling down and getting more feet on the street to represent our brand because we have more interest. So we effectively can't even cover the interest with our current field, which is why I want to build out a field organization, not only on the sales side, but on the service. And I'm a big believer in customer success. We're in a renewal business. And so we have 100% renewal of our existing clients right now. So no attrition. Our job is a company is to keep those customers happy and adopting further the platform, growing it through the enterprise. And that's my number one objective. Jason, well listen, thanks very much for coming by theCUBE. Say hi to Ben for us. I will, I will. A pleasure meeting you. Thank you very much. I appreciate it, gentlemen. Jason, good to meet you. Take care. Keep it right there, everybody. This is theCUBE. We're live at Big Data NYC. Right back.