 end with all the data passing through the pipes. So Bill, we have a great audience. This is Bill Schmarzo. We've got a great audience here. We've got 4,000 people viewing live. And we're going to talk about basketball, right? Yeah, definitely. And baseball. So the most important thing to talk about right now is the Celtics lost. Sorry about that. Great game last night. I was watching the Memphis game. That was interesting to watch. The three-pointer at the buzzer. Bruins swept. The Flyers and Hockey, that was great. Dave, anything else? The Red Sox? You had seeded tickets? Last night, the Papal Bond almost blew the save, but they came back in one. I think two to one. Got some Minnesota twins, yeah. So we were talking about Oracle and Tech coming back to our baseball, which is tech, sport. Oracle is the evil empire out there. And you were just talking about how VMware's being supported in Oracle. Oracle, yeah. Oracle, they're very good at extracting rents. They're like a telco, as you go. I mean, I've called Oracle the telco of the tech business. They don't innovate. They extract rents from the marketplace. We love Oracle because it gives us a lot to talk about. Bill Schmarzo, you're a friend from Palo Alto. Your son plays professional baseball. I just a plug there. And I went to Palo Alto High School. You've worked at Yahoo. You've worked at a lot of tech companies. Your focus is big data. Business intelligence, analytics. This is your wheelhouse. It is. This is my sweet spot. Yeah, big focus. And my personal background has been a lot to do with big data and analytics since 1984. In 1984, we had sort of our first big data experience. I was working for a company called Metaphor Computers. And our customer was Procter and Gamble, who was one of these companies that was an innovator in data. And at that point in time in 84, industry was transitioning away from bi-monthly audit data. I'm not semi-monthly, but bi-monthly. Once every two months, they'd get this audit data in. And then, lo and behold, in 1987, along comes the scanner data. And also, you went from being able to trying to measure your data on six data points every year to be able to measure your data points literally every hour, every minute. And so, been there. So your role at EMC, you're new to EMC. You're the CTO on the consulting side in California with Green Plum. And these guys, you're developing the reference architectures and all the solution architecture technology for EMC. So tell us about what is that like? I mean, Green Plum is pioneering analytics. They have some technology that EMC acquired. They now introduced Hadoop, support for Hadoop. So that's interesting. Tell us what's going on with your sandbox that you're playing in. Yeah, fair enough. So the challenge is that in, with Green Plum, you've got an amazing technology. And the fact that it does two or three things uniquely that no one else does. And so the challenge we have with our customer is not to get them to think better, but to think different. For example, we really want customers to take advantage of the fact that it's got linear scalability. And so throwing away data now, you don't need to do that. And in fact, one of the big differences we find between traditional data warehousing companies and big data companies that we're seeing today is you typically had to aggregate data in order to analyze, make any sort of reporting work. Well, the minute you aggregate data, you wipe out all the nuances that are interesting from an analytic perspective. And so. I'm live, though. It's a really important point that you're making. You want to keep all the detail, because the detail is where all the nuances are. I mean, if minute you aggregate the data, it's like going wine tasting and slabbing Vaseline on your tongue. So all the key things in the data that make it both insightful and actionable are gone. So with Green Plum, you now have that ability. So this is a nuance that I think a lot of people maybe don't understand. The traditional data warehousing world, you might add to the data warehouse, maybe incrementally 10% every month or maybe even every day, who knows. But with the big data, you basically, you could redo the whole entire data set and operate on that data set every time. Exactly. And because you can load data so much faster, that's game-changing, right? We heard that, John, from Abhi Metta, from B of A. We've heard that from so many questions. Data factories. I mean, this is why data science is so important right now, because the business intelligence market's now changing to a different data set. And so the data set's the new developer environment where there's real science going on right now. And the science in the sense of, this is pretty complex stuff. It's not like slapping up a cloud and throwing a user interface on it. Right. I mean. What's also interesting is that, so you've got the ability to have this fine fidelity data, you have the ability to get access to that data in very, almost in real time, and you have the ability to have in database analytics. Those three combination allow you to address problems that previously you couldn't address. And that's kind of the aha moment. We're working with customers trying to help them envision what they could do with this kind of technology. So give us some examples of those types of problems. So let me give you a good example. So let's say that RFID chips, both in the shopping carts and in your loyalty cart, right? Walking through a retailer, allows you to track where they go in a store. You already know what they're buying, because you see that from the point of sales transaction. But what you now know is what products they picked up and looked at, what promotions they saw but didn't react to. So now you also, you always knew what they did, but now you know what they didn't do. And that gives you incredible insights into what promotions, what pricing, what stuff's not working. So it allows you to gain all kinds of insights from that. And when I was at Yahoo, same situation, right? We knew what people were clicking on. We also knew what ads they saw they didn't click on. And the data volume is 10, it's either a thousand to 10,000 times more and it did not do side than on a do side. Right, right, so you can take that did not do and figure out what to do so they do do. Exactly. And if your goal is to try to optimize your marketing spend, that did not do data, it tells you a lot of insights, it helps you get there faster. Bill, talk about the data obviously revolution is key and you're pointing out some great use cases that show the new business model. The question is, architecturally, things have to change. We're hearing things like cloud, cloud foundry from VMware is being pumped up big time. New things are going on. So what needs to be in place? Obviously there's big war around unstructured data, Cassandra, Hadoop, all these different, no sequel stuff going on. So there's a land grab. Okay, you know you're working with Green Plum now. So you know what's going on. What's got to be different in the architecture or what needs to change? Is it a re-architect, is it a tweak, is it a redo? What's your opinion? Oh, I think we're going to see a total re-architecture because of things you pointed out. The ability to handle a little granularity data, the ability to be able to integrate this unstructured data into your decision-making process, I think you're going to see a total revamping of the architecture that supports the decision that users are trying to make. So it's actually a pretty exciting time because everything that people have done so far, the learnings from that process are going to be good but what's going to happen is the architecture that supports the next level of learning has to change. The underlying infrastructure and underlying platform has to change. So let's talk a little bit about DMC's recent move, right? We've been talking about it all week. We had Pat Gelsinger on last night. He was saying that actually a lot of customers within the Green Plum community were using Hadoop and wanted to see this sort of integrated appliance model. That was news to me. Talk about that a little bit. Is that widespread? Is that just a couple of customers and you guys have a great idea and want to push this forward? And why is that? So the Hadoop marketplace today is actually a pretty small marketplace, right? It's primarily in the digital media space, people who have to deal with lots of unstructured data log files, for example, right? They have to be able to process those and those people have perfected their use of Hadoop to tease out insights into data. To me, the real aha moment's going to be when the data warehouse marketplace, the data warehouse practitioners and the BI practitioners who've been around for 15, 20 years all of a sudden start realizing what Hadoop can do for them and helping them to answer problems that previously they couldn't answer. And I think there's going to be a huge, huge flow, huge ebb in next nine months as we start pushing that kind of capability into the traditional mainstream marketplace. Dave, you're no stranger to DWBI as we say, data warehousing business intelligence. You've done a ton of research with EMC and with other folks. What's your take on what Bill's saying? You know, that's a little vendor positioning but he's got an industry perspective going back. He's new to EMC so he's not an EMC Kool-Aid drinker at this point. He's still fresh, right? I mean, so, sheer angle on that. I think the first point that I would make is that, you know, I've said this before, you know, a traditional data warehouse, whether it's Oracle, you know, pick your data warehouse to sure. That's not what I would consider big data, right? It's a, they're going after one version of the truth. It's a lot of accounting data. It's a lot of structured data. It's hierarchical. It's a lot of locking. I have it. Now you can take it. That's not big data. Big data is, I don't really care about one version of the truth. I want to draw inferences from all this masses of data and I want to operate on entire data sets. So, and I think that is compatible with what Green Plum is doing. You know, having said that, I think that, you know, Green Plum is a newbie in this business. You know, they really, you know, kind of, you know, the announcement we wrote on Wikibon EMC elbows its way into Hadoop. And, you know, it basically is kind of what you're doing and you got to build some street cred. And so. They got to play in the sandbox. I think, but the bottom line, as we heard from Pat Kelsinger last night is EMC sees this as a serious business. They're committed to it. They're going to put some serious juice behind it. Marketing, we know that EMC can market. And it's just a fascinating thing to watch. And I think that you got to earn your credibility in the open source community and you've got to come up with the use cases that have meat and we got to, the press releases are drying and now we've got a really Pat Kelsinger addressed the Hadoop thing yesterday clearly. Basically what he said on paraphrasing, we're marching forward big time into that space. So when we asked him about Cloudera and other things, he was just like, well, we're marching. And he wasn't really negative on Cloudera or anyone. He was just basically saying, we're going after it. It's the beginning. We see this as a major area that our customers are going to want to have product in and core competency. And I said, when we threw out the M&A question, which we talked about yesterday, you know, and which got a lot of play on Twitter about buying these companies. And he's like, kind of like, I guess, whatever plays out. So that's Pat Kelsinger. That's vintage Kelsinger, right? He gets the product, he gets the vision, gets the beachhead of these leans to be on and then they'll figure it out from there. So I did not get the vibe from EMC at all, Dave, that this was about war. So other blogs are saying, oh, war, it's so early. I mean, you've seen this movie before in DW way back in the day, right? Talk about that, Bill, if you could. Well, it's definitely, and I think the description of not being a war is a good, accurate one because it's such an abundance mentality right now. There is so much opportunity out there that it's really about trying to, as you said earlier, it's a land grab, right? How do we make certain that we get in front of the right number of customers with the right kind of message and enable them, enable them to take advantage of what Hadoop can do for them? Yeah, we know what the Googles and the Zingas and the Yahoo can do with Hadoop, but what about the Procter and Gambles, right? What about Wells Fargo's? What about? The government folks, right? Financial services, healthcare. How do we help them take Hadoop and understand how they can use Hadoop to really solve some really difficult problems we're trying to wrestle with? So we're here live, this is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host, John Furrier. We're at EMC World, we're with Bill Schmarzo, who's relatively new to EMC and Green Plum. Lot of data expertise going back into the 1980s. Really before- He's from Silicon Valley too, we can ask him the Silicon Valley question. Silicon Valley contact, so yeah, let's talk a little bit about Silicon Valley. John, you're out there, what do you see? Bill's a neighbor of mine, we're out in Palo Alto, California. I think you're a couple of years older than me with your kids and my kids are kind of right behind your kids. We talked about Silicon Valley. Pat Gelsinger said, the innovation in IT is in Silicon Valley, not Boston. That was a direct quote from Pat Gelsinger. Obviously he worked at Intel, we love Intel. I mean, what other company can you admire most than Intel? A one-page business plan to make DRAMs and they change the world. So that's Pat's mojo and you got Jeremy Burton out there and you got the new team kind of forming out there but EMC's an East Coast company. Silicon Valley is a hot bit. Share with the folks your view, you live in the same sandbox we do. Silicon Valley is our swing set, it's our playground. Describe for folks out there what it's like in Silicon Valley. Well, let me just share kind of a story, right? So, and you can walk into any Starbucks in the Palo Alto area and sit down and around you you can hear four, five, seven conversations of people starting new companies. Got new ideas, it's a really free form flow of ideas, sharing collaboration, very high energy and in a very, very tight knit community of people. So it's, I've never lived in Boston so I can't comment on Boston but it is an environment that really drives and rewards out of the box thinking and in my opinion, I'm a data guy, right? A big data guy. What better place to be located than Silicon Valley when all this big data stuff, whether it be at Google or Yahoo or Facebook or Zingo, right, these people, we're in the very heart in Silicon Valley of the big data revolution and what a better place to be than to be there and try to carry this message forward. Talk about those cycles of innovation. We've seen a few, you've seen a few cycles, we've been around the track a few times, good times and bad. The old expression is bunker down in the cold days or the down cycles and speed up and take advantage of the up cycles. Yes, yeah. More upswings. Are we in an upswing and what's the action like in Silicon Valley? Well, I clearly think that, at least in Silicon Valley, we're in an upswing. I mean, we're starting to see the housing prices jump, right? Traffic starting to get worse again. It's hard to get a seat at your local coffee shop in the morning, right? All the things that sort of picked the point to, you know, an upswing in the economy there. For Nio's pack in Palo Alto. All the time, all the time, right? That's a good barometer. Yeah, so I think things were in an upswing from an economic perspective. The number of new companies, I was at a startup company right before joining EMC. You know, everybody does that thing and we had a hard time raising money because the market went cold, right? What do you think of the cube, the ESPN of tech that we're calling it? I mean, and not to put you in the spot. I mean, we're looking for feedback. I mean, we like it. It's working, got thousands of people watching right now about our content and we're just shooting the breeze around the horses on the track. I mean, what's your opinion of media and future media? I think it's a great idea. To me, the analogy is it's taking kind of the feel of we get being in a Silicon Valley and reaching out to a broader audience. The idea that you can freely share, have people freely sharing ideas and thoughts, kind of providing a creative whack across the organization. I think it's a marvelous idea. I think it's ripe for exactly what we're trying to do in, especially in the area of big data, where we're trying to get the message out about the potential of big data and the combination of big data with analytics. The, some question came on Twitter earlier about the cube and they said, Silicon Valley's no longer the central sandbox. And I said, it still is, but it's just different. It's being syndicated. So for me, this cube is a knowledge, it's a knowledge extractor. We want to be sharing knowledge and extracting knowledge. This isn't 60 minutes. This isn't, hey, I saw you, you're dead, gotcha now. This is about knowledge extraction and sharing that. But what's happened with Silicon Valley since the 10 years, 12 years I've lived there is it was once closed, you know, Sand Hill Road. You've got your PowerPoints. You've got to raise money in your circle on a back channeling, deals were shared. Now it's open. Finland, for example, areas outside Silicon Valley is being replicated. Really, it's the first generation of broadcasting Silicon Valley. So to me, the cube is a peering relationship with folks outside Silicon Valley. And why not broadcast it? We got cameras. Why not capture it for six hours a day? And you got internet to distribute it, right? Yeah, and the channel gets turned off when we're done. It's like, come on, this channel's always on. So, John, I think the key point you said there is, it is sharing, right? If you think about what makes Silicon Valley such a great place to live is that you do see a free flow of ideas and sharing. And I think the cube is trying to extend that virtually across the entire community. Bill, another question for you on Silicon Valley. And we were talking this earlier about the future media, Silicon Valley, EMC's transforming its brand. You've been around the block. You've seen some of the big giants from HP in the early days in Silicon Valley to Google, to now Facebook. But there's a slew of companies that I would call internet 1.0 companies like Cisco. Like Intel. And Cisco in particular has been struggling lately. What is your take about Cisco? And I see with VCE, there's a relationship with EMC, but Chambers have been under a lot of pressure. I know a lot of people who work at Cisco, great people. But it's just, it's been sideways. It's almost like it missed the web 2.0 movement. Did it like get stuck in web 1.0? It's interesting, my opinion, and it's only my opinion, obviously, of Cisco is, I think Cisco made a classic technology mistake and thinking that they were a package goods company. And you think about how Procter and Gamble runs their business, right? They're always looking at brand extensions, adding more brands, flanking strategies. In our industry, you've got to be a technology company. You've got to be always looking to literally eat your old technology with new technology. And the minute you start getting outside of your sweet spot, you know, Cisco made some moves into the forays into the consumer marketplace. And they did not work out well because that's not their traditional space. That's not where their strengths are. And so I think what happens in a lot of technology companies, and I can say Yahoo did the same thing, right? Where you get away from your knitting and you get focused on things that are not what your strengths are. There's plenty of run in what Cisco does well to continue to focus there. And probably was not as much of a need to venture out into new marketplaces like they did. So they're not Procter and Gamble. They shouldn't pretend they're Procter and Gamble. No, they're Cisco. So let's talk about Yahoo. You worked at Yahoo and Yahoo was obviously the successful web property in web 1.0. They actually financed Google with their first major deal. So, you know, and could have bought, could have bought Google, could have bought Facebook. A lot of people don't know that, but Facebook had a deal on the table for $800 million. Okay? $800 million, Zuckerberg agreed to the deal. I think it was 800, it was like 700, 800, what's 100 million here or there? But it was under a billion, okay? The CEO at the time, what was his name, Terry Semmel, basically said, I want a better deal. Zuckerberg walked, had the deal done, and he wanted a better deal, had Facebook lost it. Fast forward to today, Yahoo sideways, Carol Barge is trying to shed costs, trying to reboot product, you were there. What does Yahoo have to do? I mean, is it spinning out the Hadoop business? I mean, that could be their VMware to EMC. Interesting play? It is an interesting play. I mean, they've got a lot of experience in Hadoop. You know, Yahoo has invested heavily in data scientists and a lot of very smart people, but I think Yahoo, much like Cisco, suffered from the problem of not knowing what kind of company they were. You know, they also got sideways in going into, you know, are they a media company? Are they an internet company? Or, you know, what was their base business model? And I think they struggled with that. You know, they've made some interesting acquisitions throughout their career, and a lot of those acquisitions, you know, Flickr and such, never really saw the kind of potential that they could have had. So even if they could have bought Facebook, for example, for $800 million, who's to say that Facebook would have gone on to be successful? They might have gotten buried by the Yahoo lack of focus for lack of a better perspective. Final question for you is, how is the venture capital market changing in Silicon Valley where we were talking really about injuries and horror. It's coming out of nowhere. Buying their way into a position, raising a huge fund, under pressure, sold Skype today with the Microsoft deal. They're the darling. I mean, they're up instantly in Driessen, Mark Driessen and Ben Horowitz went instantly up to that Sequoia Cliner level. Yeah, XL, instantly, pretty bold. Angels are out there, super angels, which is basically like a low-end VC firm. The deal flow is good, it's faster. What's changing? What's your opinion on that? The VCs and the angels that I see are most effective are the ones who don't just give you money. They're the ones who are also giving you expertise and are much more heavily involved in overseeing the business. They're helping to arrange partnerships and relationships. They're helping to get involved in some of the strategic decisions. So where I'm seeing a change is just their level of involvement. It's no longer just about the money. It's now, what else can I do? What else, who else in my portfolio can I bring in and partner with you to get sort of a synergy between your company and the companies that you already have in their portfolio? So I guess it's a lot more hands-on activity. Okay, Bill, thanks for coming into the queue. We really appreciate it. Great to see you, neighbor. Dave, thanks. That's been you.