 From New York, it's theCUBE. Covering Big Data New York City 2016. Brought to you by headline sponsors, Cisco, IBM, NVIDIA, and our ecosystem sponsors. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. Welcome back to New York City, Big Data NYC. This is theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. We run Big Data NYC in current with O'Reilly, Strada, and Hadoop. We've been doing Hadoop world since 2010 is our seventh year. Dave Klumpkin is here as the director of Worldwide Sales and manager of Big Data at Cisco, and he's joined by Rex Backman, who is the lead senior solutions marketing manager for Big Data at Cisco. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, nice to be here. We're going to talk voice to the customer. We're going to talk a little baseball. We're going to talk Big Data. You got it. What's happening? You were talking off camera. Moneyball got us all started. Yeah, Dave and I were talking about it. Dave and I worked together for the past couple of years. We're both baseball fans. My team's the San Francisco Giants. Your team is? The Chicago Cups. So we're kind of- Is this the year? Yeah, we kind of go back and forth. We're hoping. And we're looking at customer trends and the adoption of Big Data, the adoption of analytics, the growth of data and customer sites. And we were thinking that really, the commercial birth of Big Data or the democratization of Big Data was really like when Michael Lewis's book Moneyball came out and then the movie. Because people started to say, oh, it's all about data. It's about analytics and analysis to drive business results. And the results for the Oakland A's were pretty good. So Big Data and Moneyball and Baseball, we talk about that. So how are your cups going to end up this year, Dave? So we won the last World Series in 1908. And we have a curse on us, but we won 100 games this year. And I was telling Rex that there's 22 teams that have won 100 games in Baseball and only two of them have won the World Series. So it's gotten me a little bit nervous. Well, so Moneyball is an interesting topic, right? Because I remember when that book came out, I said, why is Billy Bean spilling the beans like this? But now, having said that, and I'm a Red Sox fan, so the Red Sox sort of did the Moneyball thing for a while, and then they sort of lost the formula. But Dio Epstein is living that, I presume still with the Cubs, and I've fallen that closely, but it works. So does that translate into Big Data? Again, you guys are working with customers. Well, the cool thing is what's the analytics that nobody else is watching, right? That's the whole Moneyball theme. Everybody who was watching A, but really the value is in these other analytics and nobody ever put together. So what is the equivalent, where people are shifting their focus on the things that they either couldn't analyze, just missed, where now they're seeing some great new value in opportunities? There's such a proliferation of data out there. I mean, it's just incredible how much data is being collected now. And they said, I was at a meeting yesterday, and they said 90% of the data has been collected in the last two years, but only 1% of it's being analyzed. So the companies that can analyze that data and kind of get some competitive advantage out of it are the ones that are going to be successful. They're the ones that aren't going to become dinosaurs. They're going to become the ones that continue to grow and prosper. Right. Yeah, it's kind of interesting. Dave just mentioned dinosaurs. We hear that at Cisco Lot through our leadership team in terms of, at the higher level, it's the digital transformation and it's digitize or die. It's kind of a scary thing, but what we see is customers that are adopting the acquisition of their data streams and then utilizing that, storing that, analyzing that to find business value, business trends to improve customer service, improve profitability, finding competitive angles that they haven't seen before. One of our, one of the customer case studies that we've worked on recently is out of Australia, company called Quantium. They themselves are an analytics firm. Their service that they sell is analytics and they were struggling like a lot of our customers are. The growth of data is just very, very difficult and they were using a proprietary database from one of the leading database vendors. It just wasn't keeping up with them and they were looking at more flexible, scalable solutions and to your comment on, Billy Bean kind of opened it up and open sourced it. We at Cisco are kind of, we're all about choice and Quantium looked at particular configurations and now they've got a really good standardized data center that's based on some good Cisco technology, but aside from that, the value that they get is true scalability. Their data is just exploding 10 times a year and then the benefit they've received in terms of better service to their customers is they've seen like 90% performance improvement even as their data scale. So that's an example of a company that gets it. Is taking the data and their analysis of the data to their competitive advantage or for their competitive advantage. So what's Cisco's play here in big data? Can you describe that for us a little bit? I'll go. Okay, go ahead. And he'll follow along. He'll be the relief pitcher, so to speak, to keep the analogy going. Our team is primarily, if you look at it, we'll start off on the infrastructure side within the data center. So our Cisco UCS compute platform, very, very, really innovative fabric-based computing platform and then it provides the hardware scalability, the network scalability, the storage scalability performance that we then work with the leading big data providers on the Hadoop side. So a Cloudera, a Hortonworks, an IBM, a MapR and we work together to create validated and tested and supported reference architectures with them. And those are then sold worldwide to commercial enterprises, enterprises, governments, education, and then we might want to talk about some of the analytics that we've got going as well. Yeah, the other thing I would say about that is when you look at that, big data is changing kind of from a techie topic to a business topic, right? Customers are looking for SLAs, customers are looking for enterprise class solutions, ones that have high performance, ones that are scalable, and that's really what Cisco delivers with our pre-validated and tested designs. I mean, we've tested those. We actually have one customer that has 3000 Hadoop servers. So just think about the complexity of managing that and installing that and that's really what we do. We help customers with speed to market on those types of solutions. Okay, so that's all about infrastructure simplification so I can shift my resources from IT labor and patching and all these mundane tasks that don't add value to my business to driving value through analytics, right? I mean, and so, how does that work in your customer base? So you got infrastructure pros that are used to deploying compute or networking and then you're freeing their time. Are they being retrained? Are they just sort of DevOps guys that know how to do things in development and how are they adding value once that infrastructure problem is solved and you're taking that IT labor, reducing the IT labor complexity. What do they do next? So what I would say is, you know, I mean, our focus is not to look at it as a silo. So we look at, you know, if you're going to be successful in a big data project, it's IT, it's your data scientist, it's your line of business. And so we work with all three of those groups together and is what one of the things I would say is the workload doesn't necessarily decrease because the amount of infrastructure and the amount, the size of the solutions is expanding so rapidly. Data and use cases are expanding so astronomically right now that when we get in with a successful project, we're seeing those projects grow tenfold. We're seeing, you know, customers implement, you know, 10, 15, 30, 50 use cases. And so when you do that, it doesn't necessarily decrease the size of your infrastructure. So we're not seeing our IT folks go away, but they are very important in making sure that, you know, it runs like an enterprise. So because of the growth, you still need as many people to manage the, but you're managing a lot more. Exactly. So one of the things we've talked about a lot is it's funny data, it's data exhaust, right? It just goes up the back and let it go. Now it's an asset, right? And you guys used to be an expense. I had all the data, it's too expensive now. It's an asset that I can deploy in new ways. How is that narrative changing where now it's an investment in the data asset that's supported by infrastructure, not I got to buy a bunch more infrastructure to hold this stuff, which used to be just exhausted. I don't want to hold it all anyway. You know, I was talking to a leading insurance company here in the States a few weeks ago and like baseball, they're data driven and everything's a statistic and they have to have the data because that's the lifeblood of their business because the data drives their algorithms for risk, for pricing on policies. They don't throw any data away. So as their data grows, it's because their business grows or they get into new use cases or new types of business, maybe going from house insurance, home insurance to auto insurance or to other types of risk. They use that data to drive policies, to drive an understanding of what their risk tolerance is. Another example of the data that's growing and you're kind of asking, well, what, all this data's coming in, what's happening, what new ways are they utilizing data? Quantium in Australia, they had a little sideline project around the data that they were capturing and some interest in supporting a charity organization around human trafficking. So they used a lot of stats around human trafficking to like deliver some value and some interesting stats and information to the Australian government. So it was really, really pretty interesting what they could do and that's not their key business but it's the data that they had at the time because of the productivity to go work on that as kind of a pro bono kind of big data case. Interesting. We're out of time. I was going to say one other thing. Yeah, absolutely. The reason that those people don't mind investing in those assets is because a line of business is driving that. They're looking for all these different use cases. They're looking to use that data to have a competitive advantage. So you don't get as big a concern about like, oh, what's the cost of the infrastructure or the software or the services that support it because the line of business is driving that, that is a key part of their business now going forward. It's great because that's kind of the content. At what point does the data become a balance sheet item? And so now your infrastructure is really supporting a much higher value item that maybe drives a different type of a multiple. So it's a very different conversation. Now I need more infrastructure to support this higher value execution versus it's just another kind of racks and stacks and this and that. It's an asset, not a liability. Exactly. So we got to go, but I'll give you guys the last word. What's the one thing you want people to know about Cisco and big data, customers that they may not know? So I would say one thing. Customers need to consume and store vast, huge quantities of data. They have to store it somewhere, right? And they need processing power to analyze it. Cisco offers an enterprise class with high performance, huge scalability solutions that are specifically tailored to big data and our business has grown from almost nothing in three years to probably one of our largest workloads right now in big data and analytics. So it's really grown based on that strategy. Great. Very true. Nice TAM expansion for when Cisco got into the server business, I didn't really understand it but it really didn't get into the server business. It changed the game with convergence and it's been incredibly successful. So congratulations. I really appreciate you guys coming on theCUBE. Thank you for having us. You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. It's theCUBE, we're live from New York City. We'll be right back.