 We've been following these guys, and all of a sudden They started swinging at me. Nice to meet you. Great to meet you. Great to meet you in person. Thank you. We've been following you guys when you guys started up, and obviously when EMC snatched you up, we were at EMC World, and we had Pat Gelsinger on the Cube, and I asked him specifically about some acquisitions, and he said there's some things coming, and then I find out that Pat really likes the deal, and yesterday he was on, and so Pat Gelsinger's almost his one year, so I was only teasing you about selling out. You literally did sell to EMC, but we were following you with some of the open source side as well, and we were on the analyst call, and I brought that up, and you addressed it, so first question, talk about Green Plum. What happened? What evolved for the folks out there? Your company sold to EMC. Take us through that quick story, and we'll get into it. Yeah, I'll give you the, obviously the condensed version here. Green Plum was founded almost 10 years ago, actually, by Luke Lonergan and Scott Yarra, and the whole premise of the company was to their credit was that data warehousing and analytics was going to explode over time, and that the predominant view of how data warehousing was done at that time was around Teradata, and then at that time, Natisa was coming on board as well, but it was this integrated proprietary hardware platform with software to solve a specific, you know, what I would say is a niche problem of data warehousing, and a lot of times the CIO would be upset about that box coming into their environment, because it was a proprietary box didn't fit into their architecture of what they were trying to do. And so the simple premise was, if you believe this is going to be a big market and not stay smaller or niche-oriented, that history will prove that a software only play is the right direction. And so that's the premise of the company. Now, the challenge with that is building a world-class MPP database engine is non-trivial, right? And so there's just no shortcuts to hiring great people and getting kind of the world's best talent assembled in a room to go tackle that. And get some proprietary technology and do all that great stuff. Yeah, and so we took Postgres as the underlying database from the open source question at the beginning, and kind of ripped out the innards, if you will, to make it work in this MPP scale-out architecture way. And so that's what Greenblum's about. And so we came to market in 2006. And I guess the controversial decision, I hired in in 2006, my background was son. I had spent 19 years at son. And so the controversial decision we made, normally at a startup, you start small and then grow your way into the market. And we felt this market was going to explode quickly and that we had to take on, and our software was built for the world's largest data warehouse analytic environments. And so we went after the largest enterprise environments in the globe, and as a startup, that's a- Big challenge. That's a challenge and that's a tricky proposition. Now the lucky break we got, as we say, and this is a bit ironic, was that son microsystems, under the leadership of Jonathan at the time, had a box coming out called Thumper that Andy Bechtelstein had designed, and was looking for more applications and solutions that they could build on top of that. And so he got introduced to Greenblum at the time, and to their credit, they quickly embraced Greenblum as part of their data warehousing strategy. And so that was the break we needed because that gives you credibility to show up in larger enterprise clients and have a bigger vendor behind you. And so that's how we went to market in 2006, going after these enterprise class customers. And so the last three years have been focused on building that customer base and proving our technology and their environment. How much was EMC paid for you guys? Was that disclosed? That was not disclosed. You want to disclose it in the queue? I don't want to disclose it. I'll let Pat or Joe or someone do that. One of my clients, I would say we were undervalued. Of course. One of my clients described their problem in the data warehousing business intelligence problem, and they used the metaphor of a snake swallowing a basketball. And it sounds like that's the business that you guys are really in is helping address that challenge. Yeah, and I would characterize it a little bit differently, but I think the analogy somewhat holds. I mean, I think what's coming at every enterprise around the globe is the notion that data is critical to their future. And not just taking extracts of data. If you look at everything around the room here, everyone interacting with the internet, every one of those interactions contains some data that's probably useful to the business. And so historically, data warehousing has been about extracting the data and doing an extract or a summarization of that data, and then looking for insights in more of a batch-oriented way. We think that world's changing dramatically. It's like looking back in the rearview mirror. Yeah, it's looking in the rearview of the mirror for trends and analysis. And so we believe that you have to take much more of an internet-scale, agile kind of approach to data warehousing. That's the big change that's going to happen. And what's underneath that change is that the advent of commodity hardware, if you think about multicore technology, the storage technology that EMC and others bring to the equation, and then the advancement of interconnect and ethernet, so 10 gig ethernet, et cetera, those things have been advancing at a tremendous pace over the last 20 years. And yet data warehousing and analytics is still viewed as this big batch environment. And so what we believe is that this scale out being very agile from an analytics perspective will be the way that businesses start to do business. This won't just be about a data warehouse technology. This will be about how do I plug in to the existing infrastructure, and that's why it's timely here with obviously VMware and what's going on, to leverage a virtualized stack to allow data warehousing workloads to drive business value to customers. We had a guy from Excel Partners, big VC, invested in a company called Cloudera. That does a lot of Hadoop, commercializing Hadoop. Big clusters of commodity hardware you mentioned. You got the big data argument. We just had Fusion IO, they talk about fast, big data. What's your vision around this whole movement? I mean, you're right, Facebook is throwing off more data. People's gestural data, whatever you want to call it. I mean, it's being used. Dallas Cowboys are using data from real time data around promotions, concessions. So this business policy around data, it's very valuable. So talk about the Hadoop kind of world, big cluster farms. We were talking on a session earlier about power is going to be a big issue. It's going to be massive clusters. You need agility and speed, low latency data transfer. So where does that open source community fit in and where does the big EMCs kind of fit into that? Well, it's like any of these big movements along the way. So first off, we believe in it. We embrace it. In fact, we did a MapReduce interface into our engine. We know Mike Wilson, the Cloudera guys are pretty well. Great guy. Stay tuned, stay tuned for us working together. So we don't think there's one answer to the question around big data, right? There's still going to be lots of SQL access. Top of the first inning there? Totally, totally top of the first inning. And I don't think it'll stop at MapReduce and Hadoop. There'll be other constructs as well. And so from our perspective, we're providing an engine for that to run on. And then it's about provisioning and how do you start to get collaboration across that data? So we are embracing that. You're excited about that? We're very excited about that. And I think it fits in perfectly to where enterprises are going to go with their big data problem. Can we talk a little bit about the whole VMware play? Because I mean, a lot of the clients that I talk to say things like, we're not going to share this infrastructure. We need all the horsepower we can get. But we were talking earlier, you actually see, especially for data markets and the like, a real big opportunity to virtualize that infrastructure. Yeah, so there's two, two, and that's a really good question. There's two points going on here. So one, the point about sharing infrastructure, so it's the same infrastructure that you can use for multiple applications. So we believe that world exists and will continue to exist. If you think about my premise, that people are going to look for access to all types of data. And by the way, at the beginning of the day, they may not know what they're looking for, right? And so that evolves. So you've got to have that kind of agility. Secondly, you're right, in a lot of cases, when you're looking at workloads for data analytics, you want as much power as you can throw at it. So we're not talking about turning that off. We're talking about having a way to provision that automatically and have some user management around that. If you want to, if you've got a big problem you need to solve from an analytics perspective, you may want to throw 1,000 cores at it and 100 terabytes. But you also may want to scale that back tomorrow. Yes, right? And so when we talk about virtualized worlds, we're talking about being able to have that knob that you can turn to get that infrastructure and get that data quickly. And then give the power to the user some management around that. Obviously security, authentication, all those things matter. And then having the kind of the business management over the top of that, of getting the right resources to the right users. Okay, so this is, you're feeling that, based on what you just said, that will resonate with application heads, right? Because you're going to make their lives a lot better, more resources faster. Yeah, it's a funny world because in data warehousing, if you talk to most enterprises from a user community perspective, they'll say, it's really hard. I'm not happy with my CIO. I'm not happy how I get access to my data infrastructure. I say, I want a 100 terabyte data mart. And three months later, I may have it, right? And so what we're providing now is a bridge to the IT organization through partnerships like with VMware that you create these virtualized environments that people have access to. And now all of a sudden the business users are much happier, right? They've never had that capability. And also give them that knob that they can turn up the power and the performance that they need and the access to the data sources that they need. That's the other problem we're solving for is how do you do data integration? Right, better across the enterprises. We've got a couple minutes left. I know you got one question. I got one final question. Looking forward, I mean, you have a lot of history with Sun, you're at a cutting edge company with Green Plub, you're now with EMC, the leader in storage virtualization, number one, as Dave wrote about. What's the future look like? Give us your view, I mean, given what you know in your experience and kind of what cloud enables, how big is it going to be and what are some of the things that you might see? And not even related to the data business or your business, it could be, but what are the things will the world be seeing? I mean, Apple has a big announcement going on today. Apple's the epitome of edge robustness, the user experience, and the expected user experience now. So talk about from your personal perspective what you see unfolding. Yeah, I think what's going to happen is, so we think data will become core, to how applications get delivered, et cetera, both in your business life and in your personal life. And I think our job is to provide access to those data and engine that allows you to scale and provide those services in meaningful ways that we just can't envision today. If you think about all the things that are coming at people, about who you are and how you're interacting with these systems, I think just being that enabler from a technology perspective is going to be a huge trend. And I think it's fundamentally going to shift the way people think about their interaction with infrastructure. I think Paul talked about it the right way, right? That the fundamental shift that's going on around virtualized infrastructure is going to be critical and touch every aspect of our life. I think the other point that maybe is a little less visible is not only about moving infrastructure closer to data, if you will. It's also about connecting people to this new world, right? So how do people collaborate? People-centric model. People-centric model, totally, around who are the rock stars, insights, enterprises getting insights into their business? And how do they share that with the executives of the organization? Or how do I share that into my personal life, et cetera? Now, obviously to the earlier question, security, authentication, those things really matter. There's some minimums that need to be achieved. They have to be there, right? But that speaks to why you have to have this common infrastructure, like VMware is talking about. That speaks to the whole VMware proposition. Exactly, exactly. So you can think of us as really the killer app on top of that infrastructure, connecting data across different processes. Dataware has always been this weird, like, back room operation, like, what's going on back there, slow, archiving. And that's really what we're talking about. We're talking about bringing data to the forefront, to the masses, to the users. That's a agility message, too. It's the agility message. But it's also, as I mentioned, the power user to the executives, to the consumers, right? Making that work in a very seamless way. And this speaks to why, I think EMC, to give my boss a little credit here, to Pat and Joe, I think he had the foresight to see where this was headed and thought Greenplan was the right asset to put inside of EMC. Well, we want to congratulate you on the acquisition, your team, well done. You guys have been working hard. Now, of course, you've got more work to do. You got to start hiring people and ramping up. So good luck with that. Thank you. CEO of Greenplum, we've got Sanjay Mershandani, CIO of EMC coming up next. He's my customer now. Yeah, that's right. Okay, we'll be right back. Okay, thanks, guys. Thanks. Thanks. Enjoyed it. Thanks.