 Live from the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, California, it's theCUBE at Big Data SV 2015. Welcome back everybody, this is theCUBE. We're live at Big Data SV in San Jose, California. I'm Jeff Kelly with Wikibon. I'm joined by our good friend John Chrysa of Hortonworks. Jeff. VP of Strategic Marketing. And a first time CUBE guest, Shemun Mertza, who's the CTO in charge of Big Data at BMC Software. Thanks for joining us guys. Shemun, let's start with you. I think this is the first time BMC has joined us on theCUBE. Why don't you talk a little bit about the company, introduce yourself to the CUBE audience. And let's say a little bit more about that and then we'll get into the relationship with Hortonworks. Sure, so BMC Software has a white portfolio of products, but really what we are is focused on IT operations management. So when we look at the industry and we see how this digital change, this digital revolution almost is taking place across our customers, we really see our role as helping them make that transition as quickly, safely and in the best way possible. So that's really, in that spirit, we've been working on the big data space and seeing how we can enable our enterprise customers to adopt this technology quickly, safely, and in the most efficient possible manner. And what are you hearing from customers in terms of their thinking around big data? You know, we cover the market pretty closely and we see a lot of the large enterprises adopting Hadoop. Sure. But we hasn't really kind of hit the mainstream market yet. I think it's moving in that direction. What are you seeing? What we see is there's tremendous excitement and this will to do big data. Everybody knows they have a feeling and this is something that would help them and will get their business to better. But because it's somewhat of a new technology, they're certainly seeing certain challenges in being able to build their talent, being able to build the infrastructure and be able to really ingest and really get value out of it as quickly as possible. And that's why, you know, when we look at Hortonworks and those kinds of solutions, we see a tremendous opportunity in working with them and enabling our customers to adopt those technologies and make use of them and really get value out of them sooner and faster than otherwise. And John, from Hortonworks perspective, what's the, where does the value come in between the relationship of Hortonworks and BMC for your joint customers? Sure. It's been a great partnership so far and the products that are offered by BMC help our customers with their operational aspects of running Hadoop, certainly one of the areas where there are open source components. Obviously Mbari is the main piece and that's the piece that has integrated with BMC to help reuse the skills that they have, right? There's existing skills within the technology, helps reach a broader part of the market and help drive the overall adoption of the technology. So it's been a great partnership so far and we know one that we continue to want to work in deep. So you mentioned Mbari, so maybe talk a little more detail about the technical aspects of the partnership as we talked about engineering, the key foundation for all Hortonworks partnerships out there and it's really important in the big data space. What are some of the, let's go a little bit deep on the tech, where are you guys? Sure. So the way I would categorize kind of, because really I think in terms of use cases is that's what customers think of. One thing that we do is we increase the time to value by making it easier to actually access and get value out of Hadoop. And the way we do that is typically if you were going to use MapReduce or any one of these other methods to actually get the data, you end up, developers end up having to write some scripts and some of their own kind of structure around it to do things like exception handling if something happens outside of Hadoop, right? And when you write that, that's kind of overhead that doesn't really add value to the business, it's really just infrastructure. So what we do is we enable you to really focus on the business logic and getting value out of Hadoop and being able to say, listen I wanna analyze the data this way or that. And all of the infrastructure around that we just take care of. If for some reason the job is running longer than they expected or maybe they have multiple jobs running which have different priorities, we will actually make the judgment for them, make sure they hit their SLAs. And if need be actually, say listen this analyst is just trying a theory out, he can wait, let's get this production job, go first and then we'll run this after. So that's one of the things, that one of the angles that we do which is really in the end, just shrinking the time to value when it comes to getting value out of Hadoop. Yeah, well and of course that's one of the things we hear over and over from enterprise practitioners is how do we shorten that time to insight, that time to value. And the reality is you've gotta move fast in this market. You can't, the idea of waiting for query results and your analysis to come in for even hours in some cases is too long. So it's critical that you kind of optimize the environment so that you're answering questions in a timely fashion. Doesn't always have to be real time but it's what's necessary based on the use case. Well I think the prioritization is what's important there, right? That the system knows which jobs need to take priority over others and make sure that they get the appropriate resources and I think that kind of operational aspect of making Hadoop more practical and functional is a key value at that BMC is providing here. So let's talk a little bit more about kind of your joint customers. Can you share some more examples of some of the things you're doing, some of your customers are doing and where they're driving value? Sure, I mean we, when we look at kind of the Hadoop so we have a number of really interesting case studies. The one that is one of my favorites is when I look at Carfax. So Carfax is really in the end a data company, right? They have over 34,000 data sources that they get data from on a daily basis. All of that has to be collected, it has to end up into Hadoop. Then they run their analytics and they're very serious about that part of it. It is their core business. In fact, the analytic patterns that the user are patented specifically for them. So what our product control and BMC product that integrates with Hadoop, what it gets you is it helps you kind of orchestrate all this flow of data into Hadoop and then getting it out of it. So really what we, when we look at Hadoop we want to, we want it to be a full card bearing citizen of the ecosystem. Like it shouldn't be treated as oh this is a new thing or it's an island. No really, the more it's integrated the more it acts as that data hub the more value it's actually going to drive into the customer. So when we look at that kind of a problem for Carfax, that's where we say okay that's the role we want to play. We want to be able to make sure that the data gets all the way into Hadoop so that you can maximize the value get out of that. Yeah I completely agree. I mean the idea of creating yet another data silo is kind of not only does it defeat the purpose I mean that was the purpose of Hadoop in some sense is to break down those silos. And the whole concept of that data lake. If you've got multiple data lakes that are not connected then you've just you've got the same problem now at a larger scale right. So talk a little bit about BMC in terms of the ecosystem and getting involved in the big data space. How has that been for you guys in terms of there's a lot of players out there obviously partnering with Hortonworks but if you go out to the show floor at Hadoop we're a lot of different vendors out there. How has BMC kind of started this journey in terms of getting really involved in the big data space obviously? Sure Hortonworks partnership what else are you guys doing to kind of make your move in this space? Absolutely so it's certainly we have been around for a long time. So in some cases we found when we surveyed our customers and we talked to them we found that a number of them had already been using our products for big data without us even knowing it because they would just write the scripts and of course we know how to run scripts. And that's kind of where we're like no no no we've got a much better way for you to do that. So a lot of the traction I would say one is just through our traditional customers. But when you look at big data it is a different kind of market. A lot of the projects actually do come out of not IT but in one case one of our customers they really they report up into the CMO who actually is driving the big data project. So we're seeing a lot of those kind of markets happen. And that's where our partnership with Hortonworks really comes in because what we really want to do is access those customers and be able to provide them the same kind of value that they might not even be thinking about. Just earlier I was having a conversation with an analyst and we were saying it's really a matter of when we look at our customers they're two types. They're ones who anticipate the pain they will have if they don't figure out these kind of more infrastructurist things around their Hadoop project. And then there are the other ones who wait for the pain to happen and then they go around saying whoa this is I don't want to deal with this. There's got to be an answer somewhere and then they go out looking for us. So that's really what we're seeing in the market. So it was the idea you want more of your customers to start thinking about it ahead of time so they're ready to deal with it or you're happy to help in either scenario. No we want them to anticipate that and part of that is educating the customer and making them more comfortable with the whole prospect of big data. Big data in my sense and we run into a lot of customers and we know for example that one of the biggest issues or one of the biggest challenges in going into production with a big data project based on a number of surveys is the how do you prove your ROI? Because they say okay I have this data but I'm not sure how do I do this? Oh I've got to go production wait a minute how do I deal with compliance and security and then the operations people get involved and they say well you did this on your own. I don't want anything to do with this now you figure it out. So there's a lot of that going on. So one of the roles that we are playing and we're trying our best to get the message out to the customers and working with partners like Hortonworks to get the message out about this is the right way this is the best practice of how you deploy this. Then you're proving the ROI becomes a lot easier because you focus on your actual like the part that actually drives value. Looking at the data and figuring out how do I apply this to either my existing business model or maybe I can create new business models and new products because of the insights I just got from the big data. But then not have to worry about the infrastructure and the operational aspect of it. So a lot of that has to do with education like I said it's kind of a new area. There's not that much talent out there there's a shortage of talent. And I think the key thing for vendors like us is to really provide our customers with the tools and the knowledge to be able to do it with absolute confidence. Running it is not a problem. The investments I make aren't gonna go towards figuring out how to run this but more into figuring out how to get value out of it. And that's what it's all about in the end right? Sure. It's getting value out of your data. I think the partnership and the integration of the tools and everything is critical sort of right at this time in terms of Hadoop adoption like if you think in terms of it you're really starting to get more into the mainstream it's really important that there are tools integrated with it that help it move from that kind of POC to production phase. I mean there's lots of tire kicking that's gone on with Hadoop and more organizations are really looking at and asking the questions how do I get it into production and this is the kind of integration the kind of tooling that really helps them do that. So it's an important component to have and be available and for the market to hear about right now as more customers are saying okay let's get this thing out there and get more value out of it and help it drive new business opportunities like you said through new analytics and things you're using it for. And Shabun mentioned kind of developing best practices. From your perspective how do you, I mean you've got a broad portfolio of partners how do you approach that helping kind of develop best practices around not just the technology itself but how do you use the technology to help enable more adoption? Bunch of different ways both of course through our own experience in helping customers implement it but as well with our partners when we jointly implement it making sure that we take and get that knowledge back out into the market there's a bunch of different ways that we can do it. Some are driven by marketing some are driven through training some are driven through other forms of education but really making sure that we try to programatize the capture of that information and get it back out because the more that they're learning about what we're doing and the success we're doing together and what those best practices are the more that others can learn from it and drive greater usage and greater success. So looking ahead so next year we're back here at this table what's on the roadmap? What will we be talking about? What do you think will be kind of top of mind for you guys in the big data world and what are some of the things in your roadmap that you can share at this point? Sure. So when I look at big data the one thing that is really amazing about it is the speed at which innovation is taking place. So one of the things that we're doing is that when we look at our traditional world that BMC has dealt with things didn't change really that often like even if you look at traditional databases you know Oracle would come out with a major release every few years and that would be kind of the place where something new would come out. But now we're looking at like almost every quarter there's new things coming out so what we're doing is we've accelerated our innovation and our release cycles to make sure that as new projects come out as new versions come out and new features come out we will keep on kind of keep up to pace with them but the challenge I think is that to be honest if I told you exactly what's gonna happen a year from now I would just be wrong. So really what I would say is it's like a mobile app, right? It's not just a matter of supporting new platforms but also constantly learning how people are using it and actually providing new use cases providing new functionality that works best for them and that's really what our focus has been. We've been working very closely with partners as well as customers and we will continue doing that. So what will it be a year from now? I think it will be a lot more awesome, isn't it? Yeah, but you make a really good point. The innovation is coming so fast, it's so curious. But part of the job of vendors such as yourselves is to make that consumer for the enterprise which isn't always ready to adopt the innovation at the speed that it's coming out. And depending on the organization you're talking about and when you're specifically talking about enterprise adoption they tend to be, depending on the industry and the type of company, a little more risk averse. So you've gotta balance those things that you mentioned kind of speeding up the cycles inside of BMC and you've gotta do that but you've also gotta balance the needs and the consumption patterns of your customers. And the only thing I would add is one key thing is, you know, actually they were mentioning the keynote as well, I do believe like flexibility is a big thing, agility and not in terms of agile development but like the English word agility. That is true not only for technology but it's actually a fact for the businesses. And for the businesses to be agile they need their technology and their systems to be agile along with them. So in that area one of the things we are looking at is making our product more flexible and allowing our customers the ability to write their own kind of content and manage more of their own stuff within the same ecosystem. So be able to say, you know, I have, okay I have Hadoop I'm running with and I got FTP this file over first and then do the CTL but I have this custom app that I also use and I gotta get some data out of that. And we're basically looking at enabling our customers to actually just write their own logic and plug it in as another module equivalent to Hadoop or Oracle or anything else. All right, well very good. Well guys, thanks so much for joining us on theCUBE again today. We appreciate it. Thank you so much. Great to have BMC on and become a, you know you're now a CUBE alum. So thank you for joining us. He'll be back. You're gonna get a badge on. Yeah, it's actually a tattoo that you get. So thanks again guys. Appreciate it. Thanks for watching everybody. Stick around and we'll be right back here live at Big Data SV with our next segment right after this.