 News and analysis from Big Data SV 2014 is brought to you by headline sponsors, Actian, accelerating Big Data 2.0. And WAN Disco, we make Hadoop invincible. Okay, welcome back everyone to Big Data SV, Big Data Silicon Valley, that's the hashtag Big Data SV. Go to crowdchat.net slash Big Data SV to join the conversation. This is theCUBE, we're live in Silicon Valley covering all the trends and Big Data, all the news at the Stratoconference behind us across the street at the Santa Clara Convention Center. We're live at the Hilton in Santa Clara, this is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE and founder of CrowdChat. I'm joined by co-host Dave Vellante, co-founder of wikibon.org. And we're going to go in and dive into all the news and analysis here at Stratoconference and also here at Big Data SV. We have Jeff Kelly as well joining us and we'll be drilling down. So Dave, I want to get in touch with your thoughts here because one of the things that's interesting is all the Big Data trends. So I think John, as we talked about yesterday, we're definitely seeing a lot of focus on partnerships. People trying to expand the market, people trying to essentially broaden their channel of distribution and hone their go-to-market strategies. We're not seeing as much as we have in previous Big Data events around technology innovations. Although, of course, we haven't had a Roon Murthy on yet. If and when he comes on, we'll talk about geeking out. Other than that, having said that, the one exception is WinDisco. We see WinDisco bringing its active, active nonstop capability to HBase. So that's a good example. And there are others, but generally speaking, this is a show about partnerships, distribution, and I think it underscores where we are in Big Data. The thing that we were talking about yesterday, Dave, the segmentation of the market, we heard from Cloudera with their positioning, Alan laying out the positioning. And Cloudera's on the straight and narrow with the positioning, Enterprise Data Hubs, classic product positioning, entry-level mid-range flagship products, trying to simplify it, clearly moving away from Hortonworks's model of button-down straight, open-source support. Cloudera's more going the Oracle model, big enterprise competing with IBM, big pond efficient, a lot of competition, and you have kind of MapR charging the license fee. So again, courses for courses, or swim lanes, as they say. So you're seeing the competition, Jeff, what do you think about those moves? Well, yeah, they're pretty, they're different approaches to this market. And when you look at all three, what they haven't come in is the, I think the end goal is similar amongst the three the Duke players that is providing a full-fledged big data platform. The difference is of course in the execution, whereas you said Cloudera is taking more of the Oracle approach, where they want to build the enterprise data hub, as they call it, with the spokes emanating from that. And all of that focused on their products and solutions. Hortonworks, by contrast, open-source, focused strictly on the Duke layer and partnering with companies like Teradata, Microsoft, and others to provide kind of the other capabilities you need to build a true big data platform. MapR, they've got a similar approach, I would say, probably to more similar to Cloudera, but a little bit more open. They've got, they'll actually let you run Impala, which is a Cloudera's product on top of MapR's distribution. So they're not quite as dogmatic about that, but ultimately the end goal is of course to make the Duke really a foundational technology in a big data platform and enable multiple types of applications on the platform. Let's get to some of the news and some of the analysis. So when Disco, we talked about non-stop age space, we already covered that yesterday. Vertica and MapR strike the strategic partnership. That's interesting, you're seeing MapR and Vertica aligning. We talked, I talked to the CEO, John Schroeder last night, over cocktails at their party. Great news, he presented the Goldman Sachs and investment meetings. The Wall Street loves MapR's model. Good old licensed revenue, nothing wrong with that. Very good predicted business model. Open source support. Will there be a red hat for Hadoop as Pat Gelsinger was speculating? We'll see, so that's interesting. So what's your take on the Vertica MapR news? I think it was a good move for both companies. As I said, MapR is taking the approach where they're a little bit more, they're not as dogmatic when you talk about a little bit above the Hadoop stack when it comes to the sequel on Hadoop. They've got their own, well they've thrown their backing behind Apache drill, but they'll also support Impala. They'll support something like Presto, which came out of Facebook. Now they've got Vertica involved in the, or you can just deploy Vertica in the same cluster, makes it a little bit easier to manage. And it gives them an opening into that user base. And the other interesting thing is they can leverage Vertica's developer contacts to kind of help build out some more applications on MapR. And obviously the strategic news, obviously one of the big news of the show was Horton works with Red Hat, deepening their relationship and their relationship with Microsoft as on the cube yesterday, evident with the GM of Sequel Division. I mean, come on, Horton works got two big players there. Are they locking up that one? Well, I mean, there's two big operating systems, Linux and Windows, and they've got both of them on board. So, great move, makes a lot of sense. I mean, Red Hat is really one of the unsung beneficiaries of the big data movement. So you're seeing the swim lanes develop for these so-called swim lanes. You got Horton works trying to be underlying the HDP platform. You got Linux and you got Microsoft with OS vendors. Cloudera going in to have outcome-based conversations very much like IBM and MapR doing their thing. What I like about Cloudera, first of all, I think is a great move to simplify the pricing. And the three basic layers, small, medium, and large, anytime you can reduce confusion in this market, that's good for customers. So that's a good move. And having talked to Alan about their approach and some of the feedback they're getting, when you can up-level the conversation from the technology to the business outcome, that's when this market's really gonna start to take off, and that's what this enables them to do. So it's hard to pick a winner, as you've said before, John. There's a lot of beachhead here, so there doesn't have to be just one winner and two losers. I mean, there's a lot of room in this market as we've sized it, it's gonna be a pretty big market, 50 billion by 2017. Some other news. Obviously, Trisada, a friend of the Cube, Abhimata's company has some discovery capability on Spark, real-time networking, the data factories. Those guys doing some amazing work. And DataStacks announcing a network partner program with Accenture, Google Cloud Platform, and others. Let's start with Trisada, and let's then talk about DataStacks. Well, Trisada, we've been following for years now with Abhimata, one of the Cube rock stars coming on, always some great thought leadership from Abhimata. And what I like about them is they're focused on the application. They're focused on solutions, not necessarily the underlying guts of the platform. And they're benefiting from all the work that's been put into Hadoop as a platform leading up to this. So now they can go into big banks and big retailers who have a Hadoop cluster or two already deployed, you know, talking about how are we gonna really make use of all this data? Abhimata and his team can come in and say, well, we've got these applications we've built out. And they tell a great story about monetizing data. So good for them, looking for big things for them. DataStacks, obviously without a CMO right now, it's a company, it's obviously a great company. We know them and follow them. You know, Billy Bossworth, great CEO. It comes from a great pedigree background, understands the business. Cassandra, quietly mopping up the high end of the market. Certainly they got traction. I know they just hired a new PR comms person, Lisa Green, who came from HP. They've also added some other talent. They're hiring some great people. I know they just hired a great general counsel, friend of mine, but no CMO, big, big hole to fill there. They gotta get that marketing up. I mean, what's your take on DataStacks as a company and obviously the challenge of having no marketing person? Well, they had a good year last year. They really, their revenue started to really pick up. They started to gain some traction. Of course, they're competing with companies like MongoDB, who's kind of the darling of the developer set, but Cassandra and DataStacks have a good reputation. I like the partnership moves. As we talked about a little bit today, in 2014, I expected to see a lot more partnership and integration announcements rather than technology features and new products. And so the key really is for a lot of these startups to start expanding. And how do you do that? You do that through partnerships with SIs and Vars. This is really the year where we're gonna see some real revenue take off, and that's one way to go about doing it. So good moves from DataStacks. Interesting, so continue on the news. We've got some time left here. One surprising company that I was kind of pleasantly surprised with, new on my radar in terms of looking under the hood is Splice Machine. Raised 15 million dollars on a Series B, real-time data applications. We had Montagion here in theCUBE yesterday. Very impressive entrepreneur. They're doing some interesting things, and that is really, I like this startup. I like him. I like what they're doing. I know some folks that have gone to work there. They're just quietly kind of silent running, doing their business, staying to their knitting. 15 million dollars, not a lot of money on a Series B. I like his philosophy as an entrepreneur, very capital efficient on the front end, not taking over a lot of much cash. I like his style. I like the opportunity. What do you think? He's an impressive guy. Monty's got some interesting opinions, but I like the company. I like the approach. They're really going for, he's got a good vision in that he understands that his best customers are gonna be business people that have a significant problem, a pain that needs to be a leave. So they're going in when applications, new applications, I can't scale on Oracle or MySQL, and they're going in and mopping up some of those accounts. I said last night, it is a little bit of a challenge to build a business on what could be called just a feature SQL on Duke. That said, if you're solving business problems, there's always room in the market for a company like that. People need to learn how to ride a bicycle in the new world, and if they can make those SQL guys do it, that's a good deal. All right, quickly, Alpine data labs. Obviously Bruno, a lot of flair, great guy, friend of the cube. If you put all that flair aside, they have some interesting stuff. X screen plumb, your take on Alpine. Well, I noticed they released a product called Chorus a couple of days ago, which kind of rang a bell and I realized that's from doing a little research. That's actually the green plum product Chorus that was released a few, about a year ago. So that's an interesting play. We'll have them on tomorrow. It'll be interesting to learn more. They're doing some interesting things with kind of the data transformation and the advanced analytics, so we'll see. So let's talk about revolution analytics. They have a revolution now, a service on AWS Marketplace, which brings two questions, one, that announcement, but also the role of Amazon. We haven't heard a lot about it. We've heard of InfiniDB, had a little Amazon action going on there, so the little cloud, two questions, that deal and other news around that. And Amazon, what's going on with Amazon's show here? Well, I haven't heard a lot about Amazon at this show and I think the reality is it's still very early for big data in the cloud, whether it's Amazon or Savus, now CenturyLink or whatever the case might be. Those are ramping up. So a lot of the big data workloads that we do see on AWS right now are kind of those test and dev situations where people will kind of start tinkering with new applications they might be building on Hadoop or some of the other big data capabilities that AWS offers and then the next step is, well, what do they do? Do they move to production workloads? Do they bring that back in-house or do they expand that in AWS? And that remains to be seen, which way that's gonna go. As for revolution, R very popular, obviously with the data science crowd, the challenge with R is it wasn't designed really as a big data solution, it's not as scalable, so revolution's done a lot of work to make R scalable, being able to deploy that in Hadoop environments. So it'll be interesting to talk to hopefully some end users at the show and other places to hear if that's really working. It's getting some credibility in the marketplace. Overall, your take on Stratoconference, what we might take is, well, Riley does a great job with these conferences, they try to make a geeky conference kind of a festival, but they cannot escape the fact that, a lot more sponsors, a lot more startups, they're making a lot of money, no doubt about it, God bless them, but the reality is, can they handle the tsunami of business interests? Because normally the Stratoconference has been designed for their core community of developers, machine learning, they have a lot of great talks, but the demand and the interest guys on business value, this is going absolutely mainstream, more suits than hoodies, as we heard yesterday, what's your take? Well, it's a challenge, you know, the hoodies don't always take kindly to the, to the suits kind of invading what was their territory at a show like Stratoconference, and the challenge for Riley, of course, is to make the show relevant for both communities. You know, that's a challenge, it's gonna continue to become even more challenging over the next few years, this really goes mainstream. So, you know, from what I heard, you know, there's so-so marks on the data science track yesterday at Riley, we'll see, I mean, it's a challenge, there's a lot of room in this market though, you know, who knows, maybe they break it out due to a couple of different conferences. Dave and I were talking this morning about valuations, obviously the market's high, looking at the growth opportunities, significant big data marketplace, your report, right on track to that $50 billion market, a lot of growth potential, this thing is busting out at the seams, day evaluations are obviously high, expectations are high, I think you're going to start to see people drop out, tap out, you're going to start to see when the valuation and the expectation is high, and the customers are voting with their wallet now, with budget, you're going to start seeing separation. Well, the big question I have is, I mean, you saw what Acti and did, putting together, you know, companies like Pervasive and others and taking columnar database technology and bringing it together to build a platform. My question is, what are some of these large companies going to do? Is IBM's portfolio built out? I mean, IBM's got all the piece parts, you know, but still very services driven. What about Oracle? You know, we often talk about, you know, will Oracle buy Cloudera? Who's going to buy Hortonworks? Are these guys acquisition proof? That to me is the big question. Unlike as we were talking about earlier, John, unlike the social media space where it was really pure plays, new companies, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, et cetera, you've got in Jeff's report, you're seeing the whales predominant. I think the first Jeff five or six companies in your market share leader are big giant multi-billion dollar firms. So what do you think? Do you think they will acquire and these pure plays will disappear or will one or two of them or maybe three or four or five emerge as large, well-funded, maybe, you know, billion dollar companies with multi-billion dollar IPOs? Not unlike what we've seen with Splunk and Tableau and ServiceNow and Workday and Cloud. I think you'll see a couple to three or four of these companies that are these pure plays that are in the Hadoop market and the kind of the adjacent analytics market will survive and thrive, I think, as independent companies. But you're gonna see a lot of acquisitions and you're gonna see a lot of, unfortunately, for some of these startups, a lot are gonna go out of business. So- Really, I mean, take a look at the Hadoop distro companies. The big three. Big three. Cloud Era, Hortonworks and MapR. What would it take? I mean, Cloud Era is working toward an IPO. So, I mean, you gotta have at least a billion dollar valuation, John, right, to do an IPO. I mean, if these little flash vendors- Well, you know, Twitter filed the confidential minus under a billion, you can file IPO. We've seen that in the past. You know, I think the IPO is kind of an end game. I think the liquidity equation for the VCs are driving it, but ultimately, you're seeing that the fact is these companies are valued very, very high. I personally am surprised by the M&A market not being as frothy. We talked about that yesterday. The M&A market should be on fire. I'm expecting to see huge kind of mid-range acquisitions where the guys who are out of touch on the valuation side, like a Cloud Era, like a Hortonworks, they're literally untouchable unless you're talking in the Bs, right? So, significant numbers. You might see someone kind of tuck up there. So I think the 300 to $700 million range is a beautiful number of what we're seeing in the data and what we're hearing on the street, Dave. I think that's the action. If you're a startup and you don't think you're gonna make it, start getting dressed up for that market, because I think it's gonna be hot. So who should buy whom, Jeff Kelly? You said you're predicting some acquisitions will happen and they're rich for short revenue. I mean, not buying them for revenue, right? Obviously, buying them for strategic advantage. Who should buy whom? Well, when you look at what I think you'll probably see more likely than an acquisition of maybe a Cloud Era, a Hortonworks, or a MapRs. You might see some of the larger vendors pick up some of the more strategic, I should say some of the more tactical plays in something like SQL on a dupe or some of the companies that are focused more on a feature rather than a platform where these companies can fill in some gaps in their portfolio. IBM probably actually not one of the companies likely to make a big acquisition because as you said, they've got all the pieces. Their struggle is to kind of integrate it together. But I look at a company like Actian as kind of the model. They pulled together in a very deliberate way, pervasive in Park Cell and some other companies before that to build out their platform play. So I think we'll see some more acquisitions. I wouldn't be shocked if we saw maybe somebody like Pivotal make a couple of Tuckin acquisitions. I think Oracle may make, probably needs to make a few acquisitions in this space to really, if nothing else try to buy some credibility in the big data space. So we'll see. It's gonna be interesting as this plays out because John, as you said, the valuations are so high in some cases that it makes it a challenge for these companies to be acquired. Okay, that's the news break here. We try to knock down some news. A lot of other news going on in the world. Obviously, Cloud Mobile and Social at the top of the heap, you're talking about Google, you're talking about the big players, Microsoft. Huge, huge shifts happening, tectonic shifts. The sea change is happening, the transformation, whatever you wanna call it. Big data will be part of the fabric of change, enabling new applications, powering some of the new engines under the hood. This is super exciting. We love this as the cube. It's our fifth season here at Silicon Valley and East Coast in the Boston area, Silicon Angle, Wikibon. And we're excited to be here covering Stratoconference and big data in Silicon Valley. Hashtag is big data SV. Go to the hashtag big data SV. Go to crowdchat.net slash big data SV and be part of the conversation and check out our new CrowdChat application. We'll be right back with our next guest after the short break.