 Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE at Tableau Conference 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsor, Tableau. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Kelly. Okay, welcome back. We are live in Seattle for Tableau's Conference Data 14. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. Join my co-host, Jeff Kelly, big data analyst at wikibond.org. Our next guest is Andrew Kreitzer, who's a manager at LinkedIn, but really he made his bones doing a Tableau specialist at UVA, went to Michigan, done some fraud detection work in between. But really to me, Andrew, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, I'm happy to be here. The thing that I like about what you've done is, is that you're the new generation. Jeff and I always talk, I'm a little bit older than you, but like, the new, there's a whole new generation of managers coming in, guys in college using things like Tableau and other tools. And the mobile generation is really tailored perfectly and the web natives, I'm a web native, you're like a mobile native. Your whole generation in school right now coming out is the new talent. Yeah, we're realizing that it's not enough to just have some business knowledge, but you actually have to have some analytical skills. And that's really what I've been trying to drive forward is having those tangible skills moving forward, yeah. So in the old days, you had hammer and a nail, calculator, paper, pen, now in college, business schools, all kinds of tools. Explain to the folks out there what you did at UVA and the business school. Really interesting stuff around Tableau. Give a taste of some of the things that are going on and how that's changing the curriculum, how people are doing their cases, how people are doing their work. Right, so I'll start and say that I had a pretty close relationship with one professor, Casey Lichtenahl, and he inspired me to bring Tableau into his class. So his class is brand new. It's called Data Science and Business. And basically, he describes Tableau as a headlamp. A headlamp is to someone doing caving as Tableau is to data. It really helps you see what you need. So we partnered and rolled out really three different strategies to bring Tableau to UVA and to the Darden Business School. First is workshops. So we had workshops in and out of the classroom. At first, I thought this would appeal to only people in tech, but actually it appealed to people in consulting, marketing focuses. It was really much broader than I expected. So I would lead some of those and we also brought Tableau on site to lead those. The second is coursework. So we wrote cases specifically tailored around visualization and made it part of the course curriculum to have projects that absolutely didn't have that. This is pretty disruptive. This is pretty disruptive. You come into school, I can imagine everyone sits in the last row, professor rotates doing the pit thing in business school. What did you do? How did you get Tableau in? The professor inspired you. But how did you execute that? Did you just like one day just download the software? How'd you get the data? What data did you use? Did you have to do a training session? Give us the details. Yeah, so my background, I've been using Tableau since 2008. So I started, I was in a fraud investigation, litigation consulting space, where we needed to use Tableau for exploratory data analysis purposes. And so that was actually the angle at which I brought Tableau into the first class, which was a marketing class. We were using Amazon Turk to send out surveys and we were gathering 300 survey results and it was in a messy Excel file from Coltracks or whatever it is. And so we would take that, bring it into Tableau and I would run a course of how do you analyze the raw information from your survey? That really caught on and just led to more and more opportunities. So it snowballed from there basically. People got the data addiction, heroin of data and playing with the data. And so like, so what happened next? So then you just say, hey, you want to teach a class? So that was the first year, the second year I was the president of the technology club. So I really had an opportunity to use club funds and resources to push that initiative. I worked with a professor to write a case that included a visualization element. It was actually on the Obama Clinton primary and whether you could predict which zip codes or which areas would go to which candidate. So part of that case was presenting to the class and there was actually a contest at the end. Whoever had the best visualization would win a prize. So motivating people with prizes is never a bad thing either. This, as John said, this is really disruptive. Maybe we could take a step back. What's, get your big picture view on how data, science, analytics, visualization is changing, is going to have an impact longer term on, corporate boardrooms and the C-level suite around America in the next five, 10, 15 years as people of your generation were really starting to understand the power of data, move up the ladder and make their way to that corporate suite. I think last year, if you go to a big conference and you say how many people have heard of big data ever raised their hand? How many people have heard of Hadoop 75% raise their hand? You ask them something like, how many people have heard of a K-means analysis for customer segmentation and they're like, I don't know what you're talking about. And it's, these things are not difficult to understand. They just need to be incorporated into curriculum so that organizations can be empowered by people that know what they're doing. So once you can have those conversations at the corporate level, I think you start making even more, even greater decisions, even better decisions. Well yeah, it's interesting, you hear today about the CEO will read in kind of American Airlines magazine something about big data and say, are we doing something with big data? And then five, 10, 15 years from now, it's not going to be the CEO reading it in the magazine, it's going to be a practitioner who's gone through their career using data, understanding some of these concepts. So it's really going to have a dramatic impact, I think, on the way corporations are run. Yeah, and I completely agree. What I've always said is that the people who have their hands on the core information will be the first to notice something different. So in my previous role doing fraud investigation, if you weren't touching every single phone call record of key swipe or security trade, you really didn't fully understand what you were looking at. And so it's the people that are connected to the information that are going to be able to make the best decisions. I will say that that will get easier and easier as, Tableau is one of the tools making it easier certainly, but those end source tools are also getting easier, the core tools. Andrew, I just tweeted you, you represent the kind of new generation of talent using their own crowd chat, so we're getting a little conversation going there. So some of the questions people are asking is, okay, so what are the toolings, tools that the young kids use, young talent use? I mean, when we were in school, PowerPoint dominated, you had Office Suite. I mean, all my kids, they use Google Apps, I don't even download Microsoft. But the data wrangling piece that you're bringing in, basically you're wrangling data with Tableau. That's a mindset. Is that prominent? Are you seeing more pickup in college? And is that going to be a tool you think that's going to be required like a PowerPoint? You know, I think it is. Some of the tools that we're using and seeing a lot of promise are open source tools. So R is really taking over. You can quite easily install any package off the internet to complete any job in a matter of minutes. And that's becoming even more approachable over time. Other than that, I will say that just the ability to use cloud infrastructure to access information is making it easier. So for instance, UVA as a result, or Darden actually as a result of this class, the next case we're setting up is going to analyze Fannie Mae loans to predict non-producing loans. And that's a 50 million row record set. Wouldn't really be, we wouldn't really be able to distribute that via Excel if it wasn't for cloud infrastructure. Jeff and I do a lot of cute presentations and discussions at Strata and these big data events. And Dave Vellante, my other co-host is not here. One of the things that I find interesting is that there's always a weird angle that someone sees that no one else sees that really wasn't possible for. Now with the tooling, you know, whether it's someone mangling some databases together, mashing them up and like doing some really bad ass analysis. Like, whoa, I never looked at demographic data, meets income data, meets healthcare, emergency room. It's just like people are doing some really awesome stuff by mangling up data sets. And that's a creative issue. So that was the theme yesterday. What's your take on this? I mean, do you see that as well? A couple of things. I'm really excited about the web analytics, the web data sources that Tableau's bringing in. I think that over the years, that's going to be really important. This year, or this past year, two projects really come to mind that combined external data sources to make better decisions. One is a small business. It's my friend's ice cream shop. He used weather data to start understanding his business better and how to staff it on cold days, how to staff it on warm days. Really impactful work, easy to understand, and it was actually visually beautiful as well. The other, the other way. So that demo last night about the sandwich shop, that's legit. I mean, that's what people are using Tableau for. To look at their business and say, okay. If you are in college right now and want to do an operations project, go collect some data from a local business and bring it into Tableau. Why wouldn't you do that? Yeah, it's just right there. It's awesome. And it's easy to do. So for the folks out there that are kicking the tires on Tableau, how complicated is that project to do? Let's just say I am an operations student and get my MBA and I want to get some data. Or I'm an intern somewhere. How easy? Take us through what it would take. Yeah, I mean, I think it depends where you want to get it. There's certainly open data sources around the internet that are very easy to tap into. But if I were going into a business and I wanted to understand their sandwich sales, I would ask for their point of sale information. I would ask for it over a period of time so I could do time series analysis. And I would say that I won't share this without your permission and we can sign an agreement to that effect just to make them feel comfortable that they're not losing control. And then just get the data, whatever form you need. Yeah, yeah, just get it. They have it in a file. They can just download it, Excel or... Yeah, it should be pretty straightforward after that. What do you think about Tableau? I mean, obviously you're pretty pumped about Tableau. You get the Kool-Aid in your days there. Because it's impacted your life. So how has it changed your career and your life and what would you share with folks out there about Tableau and what they should know about it? You know, I think it's a platform to build part of my career as an analysis leader. So I'm a sequel guy. You know, I know some of the backend stuff. You know, learning a lot about Hadoop and Pig and all that. Tableau is the reason that I learn it because why would I just want a spreadsheet of a bunch of information that I can then give off to someone else to analyze when I can do the end to end work myself? So I feel like it's something that's, it's really powering my career. It's also allowing me to teach. It's really important for me to be able to teach others. And it's easy to learn. And there are opportunities to master it as well. So it's not a basic software. And I think those opportunities to master it provide really good teaching opportunities. So what does your take on Tableau the company? So, you know, we saw, we heard yesterday in the keynote from Christian Shabbo, the CEO, that they're going to invest over the next two years in R&D more than they've invested in R&D over the last 10 years. So obviously they're pumping a lot of their revenue back into the company. They're growing quickly, very quickly, but they're not throwing off a profit yet again because they're reinvesting that. I'm guessing as a user, that must excite you. What do you think about Tableau the company in terms of their strategy? So in terms of their strategy, I think their mission is strong and simple and easy to follow. So that's great for almost everyone involved. I think that there are R&D, some of the things that they announced yesterday in the keynote that are exciting. The web services, very exciting. The performance enhancements, very exciting. Notably, the new mobile software, I think is a great way of prototyping new ways of interacting with data. So really, I'm impressed with their ability to come up with new ideas quickly and get them out to market. And I'm also impressed, and I'll probably take this as a personal note if I ever start a business in a similar space of their ability to create community. It's absolutely incredible meeting the people at this conference and talking about similar experiences. And also just any question you have going on a forum and having five different approaches, it makes it a really attractive knowledge base. Yeah, we talked a little bit yesterday on theCUBE about how they've been able to foster this community. Obviously, the customers love the product, but also the fact that they're sharing their use of Tableau and their best practices. I feel like Tableau, the software Tableau the company kind of gets users 80% of the way and then the community kind of picks up that last mile. And with Tableau Public and Tableau Online, sharing, here's what I did in a certain very vertically focused use case. And maybe this can apply to your use case. And sharing that freely. And I think that's very disruptive to the more traditional enterprise software companies. Yeah, I'm constantly inspired by other people doing things in completely different spaces. So how did you deal with a problem where you wanted something to show up and something to be obscured? How did you deal with an executive level presentation where the instructions need to be clear? It often comes down to all the nuances that someone else has thought about and just copying them. Mm-hmm, yeah. And what about their partnership strategy? So we're going to have on later today, Google, AWS, and they're specifically around the cloud. You might take, and I'm curious if you agree with this, think I'm off base, is that Tableau is a little slow to move kind of the cloud model. I would say that even likewise, a little bit slow with mobile. I was really impressed with the announcement yesterday around Project Elastic. I think that was important. It was one of the things I was looking for. But what is your opinion on Tableau's partner strategy specifically around the cloud? Do you think they're doing a good job there? Do they need to do more? What's your take? So I think in some ways, they're making the software so powerful, the actual desktop software, that it's facilitating more partners. Like you can imagine a web services company that's catered to Tableau users in certain ways. I think the ability to connect to cloud data systems is absolutely critical and I don't really know when they're missing right now that's major. So I used Redshift this past year, connected just fine. Could do everything as if there were any other data source. So I think their strategy is quite sound there. Redshift is, that's good. I mean, Amazon has got the killer platform. What's your take on Amazon? You mean near a fan of Amazon? It's interesting. Actually, when I compare Tableau's strategy to Amazon's strategy, it's get the product out there, don't charge an exorbitant amount for it. And then I look at Amazon, get the product out there, it's a thin margin. Keep innovating. Keep innovating, get a large user base. It actually, maybe it's just a Seattle thing. But, you know. It's a great coffee in legal marijuana that makes things go around. No, but I mean, I think that's the freemium model. I mean, now we're in an age where people don't want to overpay for functionality. They don't need buy by the drink, whatever you want to call it, cloud that mindset of freemium or easy to get into, not going to kill your wallet. Yeah. It works. I think it does. I think it's interesting to compare a software company that does require a bit more of a ramp up period to something like, you know, like LinkedIn that's more of a, you can plug and play right away. Andrew, it's great to have you on theCUBE. Really appreciate your insight. You're the young gun coming into the market. I got to ask you the question though for the parents out there. And for the young kids who are in high school going to the college, what advice would you give them? If you can go back, knowing what you know now for those folks that are thinking about going to college or in college, thinking about getting an advanced degree or just getting a job, what advice would you give those folks? I would say learn to corral and gather your own information. It's that simple. Hording data, it's going to be a special on HPL. Yeah, don't overload your Dropbox, but definitely get the information you need to make decisions and like you'll be the one making them eventually. So data trumps everything. Yeah, I mean, it's knowledge. It's external knowledge for me, so. Yeah, slicing and dicing the data. We are getting the data here on theCUBE and sharing that with you. We'll be right back on our next guest here. Live in Seattle at the Data 14 Tableau Conference. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Kelly. We'll be right back after this short break.