 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. We're live here in Boston, Massachusetts for a special CUBE presentation for HP's Big Data Conference. The hashtag is HP Big Data 2015. Join the conversation, ask us questions, go to crowdchat.net-slash-hp-big-data-2015. I'm John Furrier, it's looking at you. Dave Vellante, my co is wikibon.com and this is theCUBE, our flagship program when we extract the signal from the noise. Proud to have our next guest, Colin Mahoney, CUBE alum. Been with us all the way when he was at Vertica and then now part of HP, Senior Vice President General Manager of HP Software, which is now the full unit of all of HP. Welcome back. Yeah, thank you. It's great to be here. Always great to be here with you guys. Great to see you up on stage at a spring through your step. Thank you. It was like watching my proud brother up there. Proud of the Vertica success. You've had such a great run with Vertica. Probably one of the best acquisitions in HP history in terms of price to value. We always joke about that, but in all seriousness, it's become a real winner because this conference started three years ago under the Vertica brand, kind of as a gorilla, skunk works if you will. But you brought together some of the top customers in DevOps at the time, all pushing huge data. Now they're all hyperscales. That has gone mainstream. So this actually is one of the best conferences in the business. So congratulations and are you proud or are you feeling good about it? I'm so proud. I think every year we come back here and it has only been three years as you've said, but it's hearing those customer stories that is the most exciting part of this. And I think it gets everybody so jazzed. It gets our employees jazzed to hear it. It gets other customers jazzed. And the genesis of this show is just, we have so many customers that tell wonderful stories about the successes and some of them challenges as well, but let's bring them together so they can talk to each other. And so nobody thought we'd get as many people that first year that we did, we blew away the number and we've done it again, these subsequent two years. But for me, the most invigorating thing is the view with their customers, hear these stories and they give us so much feedback that informs us on what we need to do in the products and then we get to hear from them. So how's it working? It's almost like it's got its own identity problem in a good way. I mean, it's like half developer conference or engineering and kind of half business because of the convergence. So it really, you have big names here and it's not like intro to Spark, it's or intro to big data. These guys are really geeking out on a lot of this stuff. At the same time, having a business conversation. So it's not your pure here's the coding down in the weeds, it's kind of ranging. I mean, it's interesting audience. It is a really interesting, you're picking out something that I think is very true, which we're seeing just generally in the industry right now, which is the people that need to solve big data problems are business people, their developers, their IT. And so we actually used to have separate tracks. We had business tracks and technology tracks. And the feedback was every track should have both. We want engineers presenting, we want engineers part of it. We don't want it to be just a marketing presentation, but if it's not a presentation on how we actually solve a business problem, then we probably aren't interested in that either. And I think that is a microcosm of what we're seeing in the industry right now. Everybody is trying to tackle a, ultimately a business outcome. And data is just part of that solution. I think sometimes we talk about data as, data is the end all be all, data is not. The business outcome or the life you save. I did a quote on one of your slides was, data should drive the business. What was that? And then not the business, I forget how it went, let me look at that. Yeah, so business does not exist basically to drive data. It's the other way around, right? You need data to drive the business and data to help your business. And too often I think the conversation is all about getting the data, moving it around, managing the data. And what I hear from people all the time is, look, I want to stop searching, I want to start finding, I want to start getting results of analysis so that I can actually change things. And of course there's a lot of people with important jobs that have to manage it and have to do those things. But they look to us to say, please make that easier for me so that I can help become part of the solution. So I want to explore this notion of composite apps. You're talking earlier about, it's great to get feedback from customers that directly influences your roadmap. I know composite apps kind of came out of this. When you were presenting today, you talked about ERP, the early days, highly customized, and then it turned to packaged apps. And I thought you were going to say, we're going to the same path with analytics apps, but you had a little twist on it. Which was, we're not going down the exact same path, it's highly customized, traditionally, but we're going to these composite apps. What are those, what do you mean, and why composite and not packaged apps? Yeah, so I think that certainly in the packaged app space of ERP, financials, or HR, or CRM, there's a lot of overlap in what any of those products would do for any industry, any business. Obviously, different industries and businesses are different, but for the most part, you could package it up. The apps that people are creating now, especially for analytics, they want such uniqueness to those apps in terms of what their IP is going to do. I mean, they're looking at it as a competitive advantage. So I don't think you're ever going to have the same amount of, say, packaging that you had, but at the same time, they don't want to build these from scratch. They're looking to us to say, look, you can give us 70% out of the box. You can help us with these frameworks to mash up different use cases or to deliver a data model or to get us feeds of the data or get us the right reports that should go on it. So we're not trying to tell people that we're a bespoke application for a certain industry, but we are addressing it from a solution standpoint, and actually with our services, partners in our own services organization, many times we can deliver a whole solution, but from the technology platform standpoint, it's somewhere in between, and that was the nuance that I was referring to. So the competitive advantage comes from their ability to customize it for their particular needs, their industry, their use case, whatever it is. And so is your sense that that will sort of be sustainable relative to time to market? Because ERP, that gave competitive advantage, and it was really largely due time to market versus that customization I'm inferring from your premise that the componentized piece of this, the customization piece, will have longer legs, say, than did the packaged apps. Is that sort of what you're thinking is? I think it will, and really the thinking behind it is, so many of these apps are being used for what our customer's core business actually is. In other words, they're embedding analytics into how they do their business, and I think as a result of that custom aspect, it will be much longer lasting in terms of a competitive advantage, because it's not just to say, hey, we're closing our books, or we're doing financials. It's actually to say, we have fit this into our culture, our process, our systems, the way our employees work, and that is customized to us, and we're pulling the right data, and we might have better data than the other, maybe not, but building it into your own organization is the key there. And so as we looked around, and we talked to a lot of our customers, and we find out the use cases that they saw, we saw a fair amount of overlap, but then when we looked at the actual implementations, we also noticed that everyone was a little bit different in how they were using it. And so again, we didn't want to come out and say, we're going to be your end-all application solution provider, but instead, we're going to get you as much as we can and make it easy as possible and create a community where you can also share those ideas in and around the marketplace to build the app that you need. Okay, so there's also recognition that it can't be a bespoke services engagement every time either, or it won't scale. Exactly. All right, so the answer there is you've got a platform, and then so what's the precious commodity? I mean, is SQL, skills, is it data science? Well, I think the precious commodity, it's not just SQL, it's not just data science. I think each of the skillsets involved in data today are fairly scarce. There aren't enough people that know any of these programming languages or the statistical work behind it. And our job is to make sure that you don't have to be a statistician to understand some of the probabilistic predictions that might come out of the data, or you don't have to be an expert in SQL. You might just call a simple REST API, send it some data and analysis back. And so I think there's a lot of scarcity today. And even more scarce is the ability to pull all those things together and understand the business. And so everything that we're doing right now is not only to help close that technology gap, but also just the entire way that businesses deal with information to be successful. We're trying to address that as well. Now, when you were talking to Stonebreaker today, you inserted that, I could talk a little geek too. So I had to weed it out. You've got a unique combination of geek and wallet. So maybe we geek out for a second. So everybody's going crazy about Spark. Spark's going to kill Hadoop, Hadoop, back and forth, the Kafka. You've never been that concerned about the technology, right? You sort of, I have always said, Vertica kind of sits in the middle and can adapt. Maybe give us the lay of the land. All these technology changes are occurring. All this spike hype around Spark and Kafka and you know, SQL on Hadoop. What's going on? Well, so I think the first thing that you realize with all these technologies that have come out is that there's absolutely, the market is crying out that there's a need for something. Otherwise, this wouldn't keep happening, right? If every need was met, it wouldn't keep happening. And so, it'd be quiet, right? So I think that's the first thing to understand. There's a great opportunity. And then the second thing is, there are a lot of different initiatives and Spark certainly seems to be getting a lot of critical mass and momentum right now. And I think what we learn is you never want to fight these things. Instead, you want to go in and be part of the solution. And if you look at the announcements we made today around some of the things we open sourced out of Vertica, like our FlexZone, some of the contributions we make with our partners in the Hadoop community, like Hortonworks for our SQL on Hadoop, the Kafka work, our role is to embrace and extend as much as we can. And to the extent that we bring a pretty good history of core competency in this space that we think could help those communities, we bring it. And obviously it's in our interest to do so, but it seems like every week, practically, there's a new technology that comes out and some of them stay longer, some of them go, but a lot of the concepts that they bring are actually very good. And we've embraced and even incorporated many of those. So, Kong, talk about the importance of the platform, the slide you had up there today. And you really nailed that, I thought, kind of the way you put it in there, talking about API-based, having the connectors, layout divisions of the platform, because Shifla was on earlier and she also commented that, hey, good developer community, good ecosystem, our table stakes for good platform. There's a lot of noise in the market right now with platforms sending, they won't name names, but everyone wants to have a platform. Actually, to do it and pull it off is hard. So talk about the importance of the platform and then how do you tell the pretenders from the winners? Yeah, so first thing that's important on a platform is people who are developing on a platform or even on one particular aspect of your platform have to know that you as an organization are bought into it, you're investing in it, they can keep investing themselves in it, and they will be able to pull off more from this platform. So they might come in through SQL, but then they want to go into the unstructured or the REST APIs or they might come in from unstructured and go to a different direction. I think that's one really important thing that a platform does, gives people that peace of mind. Number two is we simplify some of these things that right now are just very complicated and we talked about some of the technologies that are out there, there's a lot of, well, how's that going to work with this or how's that going to connect to this? And what's unique about the way we're doing it at HP is that we're maintaining these open standards. If you want to use a piece of our platform and only one piece, we're perfectly happy with you doing that and we'd love for you to use our best of breed. If you want to use multiple pieces, we make sure they work together seamlessly. And I think you alluded to this, but some vendors want you to just take the whole thing or at loaded software, less composite, or I say Lego blocks is in here. Okay, so I got to drill down on a couple of points. I was here last night talking to some of the startups that were in the ecosystem here. Great reviews, you guys get a good feather in your cap. But there's one thing I noticed. There are tier one venture capitals investing in some of these companies. And they're OEMing, your engine. So you're a VC, used to be a VC. What's going on with that? That's not the VC playbook page 34. Do not rule 150. Don't OEM someone else's technology. That's the old way. Talk about that dynamic because I think that teases out this new platform model. You can be open and startups can build. So what's the risk with always, hey, I'm at Vertica software. I got to build my own. They're going to kill me. Big, that kind of thing. Versus now, what's the difference? Yeah, so. Playing that phenomenon to us. We have, I think people would be surprised if they knew how many OEMs we actually had that were embedding Vertica and idle and other technologies from HP inside. And I think part of what creates that momentum is, A, the products work. And they solve a real problem. And maybe you could build it yourself, but venture capitalists are actually pretty smart with numbers. And when they do the math of what it would cost to build that as a team, and that's not my core competency, let's just OEM it. Let's just take advantage of some of the best- There's no clause in there. You're not putting the clause into the company. I mean, you get paid for the product. We get paid. We get paid a very fair price for the products. And everybody knows what the economics are. We all want to be successful together. We're very well aligned. And I think it's a model where we're really easy to do business in that model. And we want to continue to do that. So a big part of the platform is embedded. We'd love to be embedded. Excuse me, another part of the platform is the end users coming directly and using the platform for different use cases. But we have so many companies that are, they're in the business of creating their business. They're not necessarily, even if they're technology companies. There's a buy-build model. It's a buy-build. It's a buy-build. Okay, Vertica's got the killer. Seagull on Hadoop. It's totally up and running, large scale. Facebook uses it. Apple uses it. Everyone's using it. Now no, Apple's using it. I think that has been disclosed, but say everyone's using it. Why build it? Why exactly? I waste time. And part of it for us is we have to keep innovating because we all know that the market isn't sitting still. There's a lot of open source projects, a lot of other projects that are closed source. If we don't continue this innovation, then we will lose. And that's the competitive part of it. So I have to ask the question. I'm going to start with a hard question to you. Colin, I don't trust HP. You guys might be folded into a different division. Give me confidence that you're going to support me as a startup, not leave me at the high and dry. Well, yeah. So the first- What's in it for me, the startup? I don't mind working with you, I'm open-minded, but a little cagey working with HP. You know, I think the first thing is, you look at our DNA, not just my Vertica DNA as a startup, but HP's DNA as a startup. And Meg talks about this a lot of times. Turns out that cultures, you know, they're really hard to change. And it's in our culture in a very good way. That DNA of engineering startup, you know, truly wants to help, truly wants to get other companies that can solve things. It goes all the way back to the days where we created an oscillator for the movie Fantasia with Disney. Like, we wanted to solve a problem for them. And you feel that everywhere you go in HP, even though you might- There's a lot of pride. There's a huge amount of pride from everybody that you meet. From the D, the ghost of Bill and Dave. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. Are still- The garage is still there. You know, it's still on the campus, but that's the first thing. And I think you don't even have to say that when you talk to companies, when I look at an entrepreneur in the eye, I understand everything that entrepreneur is going through. I understand what it's like to raise money. I understand what it's like when you got to pay the bills. I understand what it's like when you have to make your first sale, or you have to deliver your product on the deadline. So the first thing is, you got to just look at these people and you understand what they're going through. And then, I think the other things are, we have been around for 75 years. There's not a lot of companies that, you know, have able to been through so many shifts in economies and technologies. And we're a partner that actually has that staying power beyond so many other companies that have tried to do that. And I think that's a really important thing. So I think when you look at those two- So on the accelerator thing, this program for startups, was that done by your team? Who put that together? I mean, Chris? So Chris has been instrumental in it, but we're doing it as HP software. I mean, it's nice that we have big data. But did you spearhead that, or is it your group? It's a combination. I mean, yeah, there's many people inside of software that are really committed to, how do we enable these startups? And also, if you look at the people that are consuming data, some of the startups might be small by employee count or even revenue, but they're using a massive amount of information. I think you got a great opportunity with the platform. I want to ask those tough questions because I'm sure other entrepreneurs are probably curious. And they might be a little bit cagey with HP, with the split going on. And so what's your goals? We've got the program out there so they can go through this new, what's it called, its official name? Accelerator. Haven Startup Accelerator Program, yeah. Haven Startup Accelerator Program. We'll get the URL, we'll put it out on our blog. Any other color you can share in terms of the startups out there, how they get involved, is it support included? And what's your vision around this forward? So what we're trying to do is, number one, change the economics drastically for them. We know that cash flow and cash in general. Yeah, well, time to market is key, but also they have limited resources. So our job is to accelerate what they can do by either giving them the discounts or helping them get up and running. So that's a partnership we've been making with a lot of these companies here and many of them have grown up through it. And they, it's their feedback, they say you should formalize this program. So we've done that. But we want to continue to invest with them. We want to learn from them. We want to invest in some of these companies as your ecosystem. It's community. It's our community, that's the ecosystem. And it helps our customers as well. I want to ask you about your conversation, back to your conversation with Michael Stonebreaker, who was sort of throwing cold water in the height, not sort of, he threw a lot of cold, you never know what Mike's going to say. Yeah, never know. And so he basically talked about all this Hadoop hype and he said at the end of the day it's still all the data warehouse and it's just one big junk drawer. So, but it, and I was talking to some of the practitioners and they're like, well, wait a minute, you know, we've added a lot of value with our Hadoop infrastructure. It's not just, yeah, there's a lot of junk in that drawer but we've been able to filter things out that we never would have been able to do before because it was too expensive. So I wanted to get your take on what he said about the bit bucket and the junk drawer. You know, so I got to work with Mike for quite a while. And- He's a mentor of sorts on- He's a great mentor to so many people, even on the business side, he's a very astute guy. I think one of the things that Mike does and so many great people do this, they challenge people by saying provocative things at times and sometimes the way that you get challenged the most is somebody lays something out as black and white. And we all know that it's probably gray and it depends on a lot of things but to really make you think about it, and I'm sure everybody left that room, whether they agreed or disagreed, everybody was walking out talking about it. And he is incredibly effective at that, probably partially the professor in him used to teaching students, but it makes you walk out and really think about it and say, well, is it a junk drawer? Are we getting value out of it? Are we reinventing the wheel here? What is the big problem at hand? But these are the right conversation questions in my mind. I mean, they are. They might be over the top, but it brings out the conversation. It brings it out and it's- Versus noise. There's a lot of noise in the market. I think that's his point. He calls it hype. There's just a lot of noise and there's a lot of noise because there's a lot of interest and there's a lot of opportunity, but sometimes that signal to noise, you need somebody that makes it- That's why we're in business. Good for business. It's very good for business. So in our business. And Mike's whole career has been, how do I disrupt the sort of status quo? That's how Vertica came about, the whole column store thing. We had him on an MIT a few weeks ago and he basically said, look, Oracle database, it's got its place, but it is going to really struggle, it is struggling to handle a lot of these new apps. And so, of course, there's a line of thinking and I've even personally said, is the rich get richer in this business. The big whales like HP and IBM and Oracle, they buy companies, they bring in technology, they have huge cash flow and they just keep getting bigger and more successful. But he said something that was quite interesting. He said, Oracle uses the America's Cup strategy. They'll stay in front with their boat and then they'll look back and wherever the innovators tack, they tack too. So the guy can never catch up. What do you see as happening in that whole data world? Is not that Oracle can't compete, of course it can, it's got a lot of resources, but the traditional model of RDVMS, that is we've known it. For 30 years, where do you see that going? Is that status quo? Does that pick up pieces and extend? What's your take on that as a disruptor? So, take Vertica as an example, it's still a fully relational database management system. And I think that we underestimate how important having a transactional engine is. A lot of the new technologies coming out, they're not transactional. And so when you need them as a system of record or you really want to look up, how did I close my books? What are the numbers? You need transactions. Nothing is better than a database for transactions. The challenge is there's a lot of other limitations that are around some of these databases. Vertica certainly addressed the analytics side, the scale outside with massive parallelism, the compression, the encoding. But there's still work I think that you could say needs to be done on the OLTP transactional side. So I don't think the databases are ever going to go away, but I think you're right in that the incumbent database vendors, I don't think they're growing that much. I mean, you can see the numbers. The opportunity is really around the edge and where all this new data is. And once you get that new data, you can also start coming back in to the core and taking that out. So I think for a lot of the traditional database vendors, they're very threatened right now. And for us, the good news is it's just a massive opportunity that will continue innovating and going after. But I also think there's dynamics in the market that are very different. The developers buying these, they're instrumental in the decisions now. You can't just force down a database or really any other purchases from the top down anymore. Everybody wants to get comfortable with it technically. The businesses want to get comfortable with it. And I think that all favors companies that are really innovating with products. So you talk about systems of record, ERP and financials, and then the center of gravity moved to systems of engagement. Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and social. But it seems like these so-called systems of intelligence, if you will, are really the new epicenter. But it doesn't feel like it's a replacement for, as you just sort of articulated, it's really an extension of. So how do those two worlds come together? We talk about real time on Hadoop, for example, or bringing transaction systems and analytics systems together. So how do you see customers evolving their sort of traditional systems into these systems of record? Or systems of intelligence? Yeah, I can tell you on the analytics side, one of the things that we see a lot is customers will start with a new workload, as you're describing. We're not taking out what they have, they have a new use case, they have a new workload. So we start with that and then very quickly, they see that, wow, if they can do that, then, and they're this much cheaper than what I was using before, then why not use them over here? And then they start pulling away some of those traditional applications or traditional platforms, putting that business onto our database or our idle search. And so, you know, we never walk in the door and say, you know what, get rid of all the traditional stuff you have. That's just not practical. But at the same time, customers will try us in one area and then they start drawing us in saying, can you do this? And sometimes we have to say, like, actually, we can't do that. That's not our core competency. I think that's the way it's going to go down. And also, the other thing that's happening is these newer innovations will continue to evolve and their ability to do some of what those traditional systems did will get better. You know, Vertica has kept going through that with every release. And finally, we release products much more quickly. Like, some of these incumbents come out with a new release every two years. That is impossible. And way better economics. And way better economics. You got to be coming out with releases in days and weeks and that's the new model. So, you know, I think there's a lot of things. You push your 30 pieces of code a day? Like Etsy? Yeah, Etsy. They're not playing. Yeah. All right, so what's your growth plan this year? So what are you looking at? Obviously the splits happen. That's the big news. Enterprise, very focused organization. Software is going to be a big focus area. It's a pillar. It's not the shining star and HP numbers wise. A lot of opportunity. And that's clear from the top. Software is going to be a big part of it. So a lot of ground to make up or grow into, I should say. Yeah, a lot of opportunity for us. So what's your vision? How's that going to play out? Well, so if you look at big data, you know, this has always been for the last several years. This is one of our pillars. And it will continue to be a key pillar. And I think big data is actually part of every other pillar that we have in the organization. So we've got a huge role that we are going to play. HP is so committed to big data and to what we can do. But it's not fashionable. Big data is one of those things where it's a fabric like situation. It's going to be nested in everything. Yeah. Not so much a fashionable, friendly thing. I think what's fashionable for our customers is that solution. Ultimately, what is the business impact that we're going to have on their organization via big data or any of the other technologies that we bring to the table? And so the focus is, let's look at this as solution areas. You're seeing the investments that we're making in the product. You're seeing us evolve that platform. And we're going to continue to do that. But we're also going to continue to invest in the core of what we do and make sure our competency is differentiated that way too. And a big developer push. Huge developer push. Obviously for that leverage. Yep. I mean, that's what we need to see from HP because that's where you're going to get your huge scale and let you see your vision through. Yeah. And those developers, they're in our customers. They're in our partners. They're everywhere. And we've got great conduits to them, but we really want to keep pushing and helping the developer community. Well, and you got a good core base. I mean, the customers are developers, right? I mean, we've had many on today and they love the platform and they want to see more. All right. Well, Colin, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Thank you guys. You've been busy. Thanks for supporting us all these years. Thank you for supporting us. And we feel proud too because we were at the first event when it was Gorilla. The Cube came in and it's been a great ride. And again, met some great people here and got some things on LinkedIn and Twitter. Hey, sorry, I'm not going to make it this year. Some people had some commitments, but got a nice following. Congratulations. Huge success this event. Thank you very much. Looking forward to seeing you next time. Likewise. Colin Mahoney here inside theCUBE live in Boston Messages for HP's big data conference. We'll be right back more from Boston after this short break.