 Hi, welcome to Cube Conversations. I'm Stu Miniman, and joining me is Jeff Kelly here at the Wikibon Home Office in Marlboro, Massachusetts. Deep in the heart of winter, Jeff, I've been getting calls from people all over the country, are you guys okay? And the Wikibon office, we're still open. There's a lot of big snow banks, but a lot going on. There's a few mountains of snow out in the parking lot, but so far so good, although I hear we're getting another storm this weekend. Yeah, and Jeff, you know, you're going to be able to escape from some of the snow because we've got a big event, big data, Silicon Valley SV coming on next year. Is this the second year of SV or the third? That's a good question, Stu. I believe this is our second year doing big data SV. We've also done big data NYC, kind of our two shows, our spring and our fall show, focused on all things big data and analytics. So this is our second year doing SV out in, and this year actually in San Jose. Last year we were in Santa Clara, so we're at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, broadcasting for three days. Of the Cube, live interviews with practitioners, with vendors, with VCs, and other thought leaders in the big data space. So looking forward to it. All right, so Jeff, this is your first time on theCUBE this year? Why don't you bring us up to date? What's in your court? What's the research look like? And has you excited leading up to the show? Absolutely. So yeah, we were talking, you know, before we went on, this is my first time back on theCUBE in 2015. So good to be back. So you're working on a lot of different things. So, you know, related specifically to the show coming up next week in San Jose. That's February 18th to the 20th, just for people watching. You know, we're focused on a few different themes at the show. One of the themes is follow them, follow the money, follow the big data money. Where's the funding going? Where's some of the acquisitions? Where are those happening in the big data space right now? You know, we all know that the Hadoop vendors are very well capitalized. Most of the NoSQL vendors, the leading NoSQL vendors likewise are pretty well capitalized at this point. So we're interested in seeing, where else is there activity and innovation happening? And where is some of that funding flowing to? All right, Jeff, give us a little preview. You know, I know in the spaces I cover, it's always great when you hear some of the new companies come out of Stealth where they've got, you know, their angel funding their first day or B round funding. There's been a lot of acquisitions. We just, a recent one, a Pentaho was acquired by HDS. You know, where are the real hot spaces or, you know, is it all over the place these days? Well, I think we're seeing, from an acquisition standpoint, we're definitely seeing activity happening in the business intelligence and visualization space. So, you know, the BI space is not new. It's not necessarily, quote unquote, big data. But it plays an important role in the big data pipeline, if you will. It's at kind of the end of the pipeline where you're visualizing all these insights you've created using technologies like Hadoop and machine learning and whatever the case might be. So, what we're seeing is a few acquisitions happening where some of these smaller open source-based business intelligence companies are getting scooped up by some of the larger vendors. So, we saw Microsoft acquire Revolution Analytics, which is more of a data science, data mining play. That happened earlier this month and then just recently, just yesterday as a matter of fact, an announcement from DatuData that they are going to acquire Pentaho, which is another open source business intelligence and data integration company. So, we're seeing some acquisitions happening there. Jeff, you wrote a really good article about the Revolution Analytics acquisition. Can you give us the nickel tour of Pentaho? I know people in the storage world. I mean, HDS is one of the top players in storage. We know that the analytics market and BI space uses a lot of data, but what's the fit? Well, what's happening here, I think, and this fits very much with what we're going to talk about next week is that the focus on the big data space up to now has largely been on the infrastructure and somewhat what I would call maybe infrastructure software, which is where I would put something like Hadoop in that bucket. But the question then, of course, is sure you want to store all this data that's being created, which HDS has a role there with the infrastructure. You need to crunch it. You need to process it. That's where Hadoop comes into play. But ultimately, you need to do something with all that data, analyze it, visualize it. So you can actually find some insights and take some actions. So what we're seeing, I think, is some of the infrastructure plays starting to make acquisitions further up the stack in the BI space and try to create more of a complete, if not quite end-to-end big data solution portfolio closer to it. So with the HDS and Pentaho deal, HDS was already an OEM partner of Pentaho, vice versa. So they were already tying Pentaho software to the HDS infrastructure. Now with the acquisition, they're going to be able to do that even tighter and offer clients kind of a one-stop shop for both the infrastructure layer as well as the data integration and the business intelligence layer. Alright, Jeff, yesterday you had, as a preview of what's going to happen next week, you were doing a crowd chat. For those that don't know, crowd chat is an online social engagement tool. It really, in my viewpoint, takes tweet chats and makes them really useful. You don't have to be a Twitter user. It's LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. It's a conversation that happens in real time. And afterwards, it's a good asset that people can link to. You can embed it. You can do a lot with it. Talk a little bit about what you saw. I mean, it was really robust conversation with lots of threads from lots of environments. It was a great crowd chat, if I do say so myself. So we went into it. The topic essentially was what we were just kind of talking about in the last question you asked around where's the activity happening, where's the innovation happening, kind of beyond Hadoop and NoSQL and the big data space. Talked a lot about the acquisitions that we're seeing in the BI space. We talked a lot about what's happening in the cloud space as well. You're seeing cloud-based big data services start to become a little bit more popular. I think you're seeing that in part because a lot of the early adopters of technologies like Hadoop are struggling to kind of move from these proof of concepts into larger scale production deployments. Part of that is, you know, how do you actually scale this thing out from an infrastructure perspective, from a manpower perspective, and cloud plays a role there. But it was a really lively conversation, talking a little bit about it as well. The challenge is, but also the opportunity that some of the mega-vendors face in this space. Companies like Teradata, for example, which is synonymous with data warehousing, but they're making a play, they made a number of acquisitions in the Hadoop space. And to Teradata's credit, I think they understand that the times are changing and that they're going to have to maybe move up the value chain in terms of how they monetize their products and services. So it was a pretty interesting conversation about the different trends happening there. And it was, yeah, it was great to have so much participation from, you know, we had vendors, we had data scientists, we had a whole number of types of people that joined the conversation, it was great. And you can check it out. You know, it lives perpetually on CrowdChat.net. You can go back and kind of walk through the conversation. That was on the Big Data SV hashtag, correct? Correct, Big Data SV. Okay. That was the hashtag. We're going to go through now the Big Data SV show. What can we expect? What can people actually participate in? Well, so a few different elements to what we're doing next week. So we've got theCUBE, which I think everybody knows and loves. We're going to be doing three days of broadcasting starting Wednesday, February 18th. We're going to broadcast all day, February 18th, 19th, and 20th. We're going to be broadcasting live from the Fairmont San Jose Hotel. You're going to see, on that program, you're going to see, obviously you're going to see some vendors. You're going to see also some practitioners. We've got the chief data scientist from Halliburton coming on to talk about what they're doing with Big Data and Hadoop. We're going to have a data scientist from... Halliburton knows everything that we're doing everywhere, right? Well, I'll find out. I will ask him that question. We're going to have a data scientist from Simply Hired, which is a career site, which just is ingesting massive amounts of data around people's job searches, their resumes, things like that. So we'll talk to some practitioners. We'll talk to some vendors. In addition to the broadcast, we're also doing an in-person live event. It'll also be simulcast on theCUBE, so you can watch it if you're not there in person. But if you are there in person, I encourage you to join us at the Fairmont San Jose. This is happening Wednesday night, February 18th. We're going to kick off the event. I'm going to be presenting around this topic we've been talking about. Where is the innovation happening in Big Data kind of beyond Hadoop and NoSQL? What are some of the other interesting areas? We'll talk a little bit about that during my presentation. Following that, John Furrier from Silicon Angle is going to host a venture capitalist panel. So we're going to have three big data venture capitalists talking about, again, the same topic, where they're seeing the innovation, where they're placing their bets in the big data space. And then following that, everybody's most exciting night of the year. The CUBE party at Big Data SV takes place after that. Everybody loves the CUBE party. I've been getting notes. Everybody's asking who's going to be there and what's going on. I mean, we've got hundreds of registrants already, so a lot of fun. It's going to be fun. We've got hundreds of registrants. It's going to be a good party. It's going to be a lot of fun that night. We're going to be making some announcements around what we're doing here at Wikibon and Silicon Angle and the CUBE around some of our new web properties and some other things. So you'll get an update on kind of what we're doing if you're able to attend. But it should be a fun night, looking forward to it. And looking forward to getting out of the snow here in Boston. Yeah, Jeff, I mean, as some people have looked, we've done a soft launch of some of what's gone on. People that follow the CUBE, just the quick update. The company is actually Silicon Angle Media and we've got three primary brands. There's Wikibon, analysts like Jeff, myself, David Floyd, Dave Vellante. The CUBE, which is our live broadcast, which we all participate in. Silicon Angle, the media side. So we'll actually be unveiling all the new websites. We've already been priming the research side with some of our content there. And it's just premium.wikibon.com. Always going to have, you know, the vast majority of our content is going to be out there for all to be able to read and comment and give feedback on. You know, want to stay true to our open source ethos that Wikibon was founded on. And we're going to have some premium content on there, which, you know, and Jeff's presentation is going to give, you know, give some peeks into some of what's going on there. So it's been exciting times here at the office. I know Dave and John will be unveiling some new things we're going to be offering here in 2015. And we've got a full complement of the team going out there. Absolutely. It's going to be a fun time. All right, Jeff, I think the last thing I want to just wrap up on is, you know, 2015 now. You know, you've been covering, you know, the BI and the analytics space for many years. You've been all over big data. We call you our senator of big data here at the Wikibon office. You know, as you look at the space and kind of sit back for a second, you know, what are the hot items on your plate for 2015? You know, what do we have to look forward to? Well, I think for me, it all boils down to what our practitioner is able to gain from all this new technology that's being created, all the innovation that's taking place. You know, Hadoop, NoSQL, kind of the poster child technologies, but there's also, you know, a lot of other technologies associated with quote-unquote big data. So for me, in 2015, and this isn't necessarily different from 2014, but I'm interested to see how the story progresses, is how practitioners are actually taking advantage of this. How are they actually adopting this technology? What are the barriers they're running into in terms of making a go of it? What does it actually look like on the ground? I mean, we talk a lot about these different components, and we talk about the big data stack when you bring all the components together, but big data doesn't live in isolation, and we talked earlier maybe we need to retire that term even, because it's got to live in your larger infrastructure. So I'm interested to see how people actually operationalize big data, bring it into their environments, integrate it with what they're already doing. You don't want to create kind of a silo, a big data silo where you're doing something totally separate and just not connected to your larger organization. So to answer your question, I'm always interested to see what users are doing. How are they driving value? What are the challenges that they're running up against? And how can we as an industry help move this forward? So we're actually getting a lot of value out of big data and not just talking about, you know, buzzwords, or focus just on the technology and the components, because ultimately the technology is just an enabler. It's all about what you do with it. Yeah, Jeff, that's a great point. It really ties into the stuff I know, I, and the rest of the team that work on cloud and infrastructure, is the big data analytics is a primary use case of a lot of the new architectures that are going out there. We've been looking at how flash has been really changing infrastructure and cloud from consumption models. So in the surveys that you did a big survey the end of last year, I did a survey on infrastructure as a service, you know, end of last year that's going out this quarter, and looking at, you know, how the interaction is between cloud, big data and infrastructure. And that's really with primary focus of what we've been doing here at Wikibon is, you know, those destructive technologies and the intersections between those areas. So lots of good stuff. Jeff, I want to give you the last word, you know, the show, what you're working on, and, you know, how do we want to close it? Ray, I would just encourage everybody to, you know, if you're there in San Jose next week to join us in person if you can. If not, you know, obviously you can always watch us live on theCUBE and, you know, look for us from a big data perspective in terms of the upcoming research. You'll see shortly after the show we'll be publishing our annual big data market forecast and vendor revenue report where we break down all the different vendors, what they're actually doing, we actually bring a new account. What revenue are they actually driving from these new technologies? And we also provide a good deal of qualitative analysis in that report as well of some of the Uber trends that we're seeing in this market. So stay tuned for that. That'll be coming towards the end of the month. And then following that, you mentioned surveys. Your survey is now out and available to Wikibon clients. And then we'll be embarking upon our annual big data adoption survey starting around in March. Kind of start that process and look to publish later in the spring. So keep an eye out for those two items. Great. So, you know, just leaving it on that, you know, we always welcome the feedback from the community. Our Twitter handles have been up on the screen. I'm Stu. He's Jeffrey F. Kelly. At Wikibon is the Wikibon handle. We've got the cube and silicon angle as part of, you know, our family of solutions out there. Always feel free to reach out to us. Love to hear feedback and, you know, what other content you want us to look into deeper as well as what events we should be at. We've got, you know, the new websites to look out for premium.wikibon.com, siliconangle.com, and more. I've got a list of all the events we'll be at. Lots of big data shows, cloud shows, infrastructure shows. And appreciate you tuning in. This is Stu Miniman with Jeff Kelly. We will talk to you next time.