 I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joining my co-host Dave Vellante, co-founder of wikibon.org. We're live from Barcelona, Spain, and we're excited to have our next guest, Colin Mahoney, vice president, general manager of HP Vertica, big dataman. Great to have you on. We knew you when you were a startup. Then came into HP. You guys are doing some amazing things. Congratulations. Thank you. Welcome back. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Welcome back to the Cube Cube alumni. Awesome to be here. I love hanging out with you guys. We love talking to you. You're like kid in a candy store, which Dave and I always say. Because you have the entrepreneurial spirit. You're in a big company in HP that now has an entrepreneurial spirit. A lot of action going on. Big day at the center stage. You got the pick of the litter of resources. Great sales force. So give us the update on the business. Obviously, some surprises coming on the keynotes, which Vanille got hurt a little bit of a room when we won't go in there. What's going on? Give us a quick update. Prior to the keynote, George Padifa is going to go on at 2 o'clock between 2 and 4 here in Europe. But give us a taste of what's new since we last talked. Yeah. So definitely don't miss the keynote. We've got some great, very exciting news. A wonderful customer of ours will be up there with George. But I think you summarized it well, John. I think things are going well. I am a kid in the candy store and no better candy store than right here in Barcelona, Spain at the Discover show. There's just so much innovation happening here. And as you guys know, knowing us when we were a startup, we always had hard time getting hardware or getting services resources or getting reach into the global markets. And that's not a challenge for us at all. And so, whether it's HP IT, using Vertica internally, us learning from them, whether it's us working with the Enterprise Group, Antonio Neary with the new appliance that we have, the Converged System 300, Enterprise Services offerings around our haven, big data platform. It's just so fun. You know, we always sometimes get called, we're critical of HP. You know, some guys, we have a critical analysis, but we're very pro-HP as you know. But I got to say, the HP mojo right now with the people that are working in the company is very entrepreneurial. You can see the hustle, right? And you know, part of the entrepreneurial sphere is hustle. And you see a lot of great hustle from a lot of the HP employees, executives like Antonio Neary, we were talking about he's going to be coming on theCUBE. We had Johann on earlier. Good people, really, really kind, high integrity. So congratulations. Great to have a great work environment. So with that hustle, what are you guys knocking down in the marketplace? Give us a taste of some business updates of what you guys are winning. How's the product doing? How's Haven doing? What's new? What's new with the product? Yeah, so things are going great. On the Vertica side, we shipped Vertica 7 yesterday, a massive release for us. We introduced something called FlexZone, which is basically a drop zone for data, flexible schema capabilities. You don't have to do a lot of rigid work to get the data in. So our methodology is store, explore, and serve. And Vertica 7 has just so many great things. Also, some really tight Hadoop integration. As you know, we already did a lot of that. Improved security with Hadoop and a whole bunch of other things, like our Java SDK. So Vertica's going great. And then as you've known, as you mentioned, Vertica is a critical part of the Haven big data platform at HP. And we're doing some phenomenal work with Autonomy and Enterprise Security, as well as services and building out some of the end applications. We already have probably about 10 applications by HP software, by the various groups that are powered by the Haven infrastructure. So that's going great. And I think, you know, as you mentioned with HP, there is a lot of excitement. I think the employees are happy. I think our CEO, Meg, empowers us to innovate. At the same time, she wants us to focus on the key opportunities and really execute. And that's what you're seeing right here. A common feedback on Meg is that she's not beating employees with fear, but more enabling, giving a little more positive encouragement, although there's still, you know, not fear, but like deadlines, P&L. So you can feel it. You can see it through the organization. Yeah, I think the communication that comes from the top and works throughout all the regions, all the product groups in this organization has been tremendous. And what happens is, when you get that communication, groups start working really well together. And I think that was a historical challenge of HP, getting the business units to work together. And now we come up with joint solutions around Haven, around appliances, focusing on some vertical markets with what they're trying to achieve with big data, as opposed to just speeds and feeds. Yeah, go ahead, David. So Colin, when we first met, we actually met on the plane. I remember it well, because I learned a lot from that conversation. But I had asked you at the time, everybody was announcing Hadoop distributions. John joked in the cube that SiliconANGLE was announcing a Hadoop distribution. And you said to me, we're not going to do that. That's not our game. You know, we've got a different view. We're going to go up the stack and create a platform. And I wasn't really sure exactly what that meant. Maybe I'm not sure. You were sure at the time. But you had that vision. And that's what Haven has become. So I wanted to talk about the marketplace a little bit. The sort of the Hadoop players, there's been a little bit of consolidation. You're seeing, you know, Cloudera say, well, we're not really even in that business. We're completely competing against, you know, other people. Yeah. You know, the Hadoop network is doing its thing. And so I think it was smart for you guys to stay out of that. But I kind of wanted to revisit that a little bit. But talk about, you know, sort of the Haven vision. And as John said, where are you knocking down, you know, business? We were at the Vertica user conference in August. So we had a lot of really good customer examples. What's new, you know, since then. So we can start with sort of the marketplace, where you're playing, you know, where that Haven layer fits and where you're having success. Yeah. So the first thing I'll say is H in Haven is for Hadoop, right? So we're big believers in Hadoop. We have lots of customers. They're leveraging Hadoop and Vertica. We invest a lot in that cross link. But as you said, we support all of our partners there, whether it's Cloudera or it's Hortonworks or it's, you know, MAPR or it's the Apache distribution or Intel. So we really have been open about how we want to interact with those vendors. And obviously, you know, Hadoop kind of continues to evolve. As it should. But for us, I think the way you put it of sort of being a layer above and being that is part of a larger platform that we're building. And when we talk to our customers, they want it all. You know, they want unstructured data. They want structured data. They want MapReduce. They want SQL. They want Java. They want web services. And so we are giving that to them both from an integration perspective also from an interface perspective. And so I think it's really important, especially as HP, that we don't get locked into we're only going to have this one flavor. HP is always pride of itself on best in class, but still open standards approach. What about cloud? Where does cloud fit in there? Because everybody you talk to, whether it's the guys at Pivotal trying to get into the business, they got their cloud play. You know, other guys like Cloud Air, they have, you know, whoever cloud you want, you guys have HP cloud. What's your cloud angle on this whole thing? Because they seem big data clouds just seem to go together. Yeah, they do go together. I think the only challenge for big data with the cloud is just how do you get all your upload to the cloud if you have a lot of data because of just the transport side. But HP has public cloud. We've got private cloud. You probably saw us in some of the analyst reports. We're just dominating, especially in the private cloud space right now. And so we are leveraging all those organizations in here to offer again, choice to our customers. If you want us on the public cloud, we can do that with HP. We can do that externally. If you want us with a private cloud, we can do that. And if you want to set up a hybrid, you might want some things on your private cloud or on your private infrastructure, others on the public. So we support it. We are investing in our platform to make that better, that experience better. And I think there's no question about it with mobility, cloud, security, big data is basically the aggregation of, in many ways, all of those things together. And it's a big part of your, we had Robert, young John's on earlier, was talking about the big push toward developers. I mean that seems, John and I talk about all the time, to be a critical aspect of attracting developers is even if it's in startup, proof of concept, test and dev phase, having that developer community, those guys are all going to want to develop it in the cloud. Yeah, and that's right. I think that's where apps can't be developed in nine months anymore. You've got to be able to quickly prototype these things. And Vertica's always had an incredible developer community, with our community edition, our downloads, you guys were at the user conference. I mean you saw our user community, not just data scientists and business analysts, but we have a lot of applications and programmers tying in. And that is the community that's building these next generation and apps. And that's why, you know, Robert, myself, George, Meg, everybody believes those are critical for us as developers. So what is your developer conference? The next one will be in August. It'll be our second one. And it's going to be broader. It's going to be... User conference or developer conference? It's the user conference. How about programmers? It's a great, great question. So the second user conference that we're doing this year is going to have a huge focus on the developers. Because that is one thing that we realized last year is... Your users are developers. Well, users aren't, they're not exactly the same. And there was great feedback from all of them. And some of the developers wanted more of the hardcore show us the inside. And we didn't want to put everybody through that. So we'll have the tracks as we're getting larger as you know. So you get a mix bag, a mix of things. A geek out deep on day one, even? Yeah, yeah. Something extended with a geek out. We look forward to covering that with you guys. So I got to ask on that. What are you seeing for big trends? Last week, I was in San Francisco for Spark Summit. Yep. A lot of attention coming out of Berkeley. Data bricks. It's still the talk. And this hallways is about calling their data stores. I roll my eyes and laugh inside because, you know, his vertical, you know, good call. But Spark's getting a lot of in-memories, getting a lot of attention. Seeing these new communities explode, what are you seeing for trends out there that you're keeping your eye on? Well, we've always been working with the memory side. And we're in a great position here at HP because we're leaders from a hardware perspective in that. For us, it's been a combination of... What do you think of Spark real quick? You know, I don't know. I don't follow it that close. I probably couldn't comment on it. It's always dangerous when you ask a software guy to make those kind of comments. But for me, we believe that the way information goes is you're going to have a hybrid. You're going to have some on disk, some on magnetic disk, some on SSDs, some pinned to memory, depending on the size of your data. And at petabyte scale, which we deal with often, it's not realistic yet to put it all in memory. And so we want to make sure that we can leverage all those things as we do today. But I think in-memory computing is absolutely big. Streaming is obviously popular. Streaming's always been popular and there's a lot of innovations getting in. People ask me, what do I think about? How do I think about our roadmap? For me, it's number one, make it easy to get the data in. FlexZone and Vertica 7 does that. Number two, do a lot more with the data once it's in there. So store, explore, analyze it in more ways. And number three, deploy it anywhere. And that's the cloud. It's the appliance. It's software only. And we're absolutely committed to scale out software only. But we've got to mix it up and make sure that people can consume it. I think the biggest change right now from, say, last year is there's not as maybe as much, even though big data is still all over the place. When I talk to CIOs and when I talk to business people, they know exactly their projects that data can help them with. And I think a year ago, they didn't exactly know how is this going to help. We just did an announcement with Conservation International. A lot of NGOs, in fact, know exactly what they want to do with the data. They might need help and resources, you know, which we love giving them. But they know exactly what they want to do versus a year ago where it was much more missionary. Let's talk about the App Store. So we were talking to Robert about that and there's a lot of coolness coming out of the Vertica autonomy and the big data haven model and all this good stuff, all goodness coming out of it. So the developers will naturally be attracted to you guys. So it's clear that you guys have that on the roadmap. Double down on the user conference on your end, fix that. Autonomy is looking at a developer conference as well. Yep. So how are you going to get developers? What's the value proposition for the developer? Is it the distribution? Is it monetization? Well, I think so. How do you guys talk to developers? Developers need a couple of things. First of all, I think one of the things they like the most is the community. Both to contribute and to gain back from the community. So we're making sure that if you look at our marketplace, that community experience is very rich. And fortunately for us, it's another area where HP just had phenomenal assets when it comes to the app store, the marketplace, those types of concepts that we're leveraging. The second thing is I think you've got to give them an area to display what they're doing if that's what they want to do. A lot of our partners have already said, we've developed all these libraries, SDKs that could plug into the Vertica platform. We'd love to share those with the world and let people know about them. So you're like any marketplace, you're giving them a spotlight, whether or not they want to charge for it or not. And we want to let them monetize that. And then thirdly, I think it's learning about something that you don't know. So you're a structured data person but you want to tie into some of the unstructured. How do I do unstructured? Giving that teaching and education and training through the community and that marketplace developer zone is really important as well. I remember the first year we had you wanted HP to discover. I think it was 2011. I remember John, one of the talk tracks on the Cube was why aren't they talking more about Vertica? And we were thrilled yesterday Meg talked incessantly about Vertica which is the right thing to do. But the most impressive thing was your CIO, John Hinshaw talked about, I'm sure a lot of you have data warehouses, old data warehouses. I had a lot in my old job and I have a lot in my current situation too. And then he talked about how HP is bringing in Vertica. So I wonder if you could talk about your relationship with HP IT and how it relates to what you're doing with other customers. Yeah, so HP IT has been amazing for us. I mean we are a Fortune 15 corporation so you can imagine we've got an amazing IT organization and having them as a customer, having them as a product management feedback mechanism and as you saw here at the show, having them as sort of stewards and helping us advertise the mission is really important. I think you're absolutely right when we were first acquired. I don't think many people knew about Vertica or what we were. And our belief is if we focus on building great products and we deliver it and we partner internally and externally, eventually water will find its own level, word will get out, we will solve problems and it will get recognized. And I think kudos to the Vertica team for continually creating great product, great solutions. And what HP IT does for us is they give us that rapid feedback. So we have a safe environment although it's a real environment to test ideas off of them and these are the real users. These guys are doing things with data that you couldn't imagine from a data warehouse perspective to every other type of analytic application. So that's been a great partnership for us as well. So I've got to ask the question as a customer, right, as a euphemism for a customer, is my data warehouse, my legacy data warehouse, is it a dinosaur? I mean is that essentially what you guys do is it makes sense but a lot of the things that you were trying to push your data warehouse to do that it couldn't do, was never designed to do even though a lot of the marketing promised it would do that, you guys can fill that space around it, you and the ecosystem. Is that what's happening in the marketplace or are a lot of these data warehouses being sort of pinned back and pigeonholed into what they were originally architected to do? What's the future? Do we have too much money and chances are that your performance is not where it should be? Does that mean you should just go into the core and replace it right away? No, there's investments that have been made and we get that. But what we are doing is absolutely taking out traditional data warehouse vendors and this is slightly a change. Two years ago I think when we talked about this that wasn't the market we were going after but we're being drawn into that by CIOs that are sick of writing these ridiculous checks and so we have a disruptive technology that forms orders of magnitude better at a fraction of the cost so there's value there and we're going at that market in fact we've been pulled into that market we're still doing all the other innovative clickstream analytics all the new data and frankly that new data is the biggest challenge to these very dinosaur like old EDW. It's interesting you guys some startups and companies they target market to them you guys got pulled in because you're the aspirin for the problem and then they see the new opportunities with the new data. One's reporting and one's revenue. Which one do you want to focus on? So you can kill two birds with one stone you probably should charge more. That's a good product. That's called product market fit as they say in the business. So I want to ask you a different question to end the segment. Tell us in your own words something that's a few things that have surprised you in the past six months what went out in the marketplace what relative to HP, Vertica, big data. What's a few things that really caught your eye and surprised you that you didn't think was going to happen? Well, so certainly the topic we just discussed is one surprise the fact that so many folks are reaching out to us saying I know you told us that you want to do this but we really need you to come help us here and that's a temptation for any product solution provider and we have to be careful which areas we focus on but it has been a surprise. I've been amazed at the market and if a lot of people have the same big bright problem that's a market it's a broader market opportunity. It is. I think the other second surprise to me is just how challenging it is to find people in this space. I think finding great people who understand the business and they understand analytics and data it's challenging and you guys know all about the data scientist type and nobody knows what that job role really means even though it's critically important but another shock is in this economy which isn't our best economy over the last few decades this is an area where you are guaranteed a job and it's challenging to find great people. We always say grow your own. That's exactly what we do a lot of. Grow your own data scientists I like that. No it's good to get the apple in the barrel that's out there for a while or go pick one fresh from the tree out of the college. At the end I have to go down that road. What computer science programs are you looking at? That's another great thing about Vertica the roots of Vertica came from universities. This started as an academic project so we were always tightly embedded. We're working with so many universities. University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon, MIT up in the Boston area, Tufts Brown, UMass Amherst University of Wisconsin Stanford the list goes on and on and on we just want great people who love what they do have passion want to come in work with us in some of the coolest customer environments and have fun. We're on a mission and we are looking for great people to jump on board. Colin Mahoney VP general manager of HP Vertica great to have you inside the cube thanks for sharing your perspective just great to see you guys being so successful great product it was one of those products that just was like an engine and now the car is being built out around you congratulations and we'll stay in touch. This is the cube I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante we'll be back for our next guest after this short break we're live here in Barcelona Spain this is the cube we'll be right back with our next guest