 Okay, welcome back. We're live here in Boston, Massachusetts. This is SiliconANGLE and Wikibon's exclusive coverage of HP's big data conference, HP Big Data 2013. This is the Vertica users conference. This is SiliconANGLE and Wikibon's 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 I'm joined by my co-host. Hi everybody, I'm Dave Vellante of wikibon.org. We're here in Boston. We're going wall-to-wall for two days. John and I are just really excited to be here. Paul Lillford is here. He is with Tableau. He's a person who works with the channel and partners. Tableau is everywhere. We first, John, remember we first heard about Tableau? At least I did, with our friend, Abby Metta, at one of the first- Hadoop 2010. Hadoop World. Hadoop World 2010. And he said, you guys know Tableau? And he started describing Tableau at the time. He was with B of A. You guys just, like I say, did an IPO. Fantastic to have you on, Paul. Thanks very much. Great. Excited to be here, guys. Very excited to be here. A lot of interest in your sessions and those birds of a feather, you guys are packed, how it's sold out. No more slots available. The technology sessions. Visualization really is odd. People can collect data, but how they show it is really interesting. That's a hard challenge, isn't it? Yeah, it is. And you know, I think one of the things at Tableau is because we built our product from a different perspective. We built it from the idea of visual cues and looking at how the human mind works and building it from that ground up where we're well-positioned in that. But ongoing challenge with the size of data, the disparity of it, and all the sources that are out there. So what is the biggest challenge you find right now with current customers? Because obviously you guys went public, big successful company now, in terms of getting funded as a startup. You get to lift, and obviously going really supernova as a company. But you're building a big business at Mach 100. It's a rocket ship, as everyone says. But there's the market still early and there's still a lot more innovation coming on multiple data sources. The challenge is making things dynamic, agile, fast. Yeah. And you know, search and all this stuff's happening on the Duke site. So what else is going on? You guys have to kind of be Switzerland and work with a lot of folks out there. So what are the challenges that you guys face right now and with customers and technology change? Yeah, we definitely have a, you know, obviously the growth rate and the speed at which we're moving is one of them. But you know, I think from a customer challenge perspective, John, it's really about, you know, getting to the size of data, the all the sources of data, all the scale of things that are out there and making good decisions based on it. So, you know, we're obviously a very data-driven company. But you know, historically, we look at it as most people make, you know, some data decisions, but then they go hunch-based. And I think the thing with big data that makes big data interesting and it's going to make it real is all around combining these sources quickly, making more and more data decisions driven at a detailed level. So the scale of it's important, but it's also the where it comes from. So whether it's social or web, third-party data, internal ERP data, doesn't matter. It's the joining of all of these things. And it's really the thing that I think is going to make the EDW space something that's consumable for business users. So they have three tracks here, business technology and ecosystem. Honestly, the technology piece is interesting. You guys are a big part of that with the tech and we're going to other tech players. But the ecosystem's new for HP. They have the marketplace going on here with my.vertica.com. You're in the channel's business. What is the channel opportunity in general in this emerging space? Because it's a shifting sense, a moving train, it's a growth market. All those things create opportunities, but challenges. At the same time, on top of that, there's a huge services opportunity. That channel part is love because that means gross profit. Yeah, yeah. So talk about the emergence of the ecosystem and who's doing what. You know, so I think there's a few challenges in that for sure. You know, one of them is, you know, there's so many players. Everyone says, I'm big data this and everyone's kind of glommed onto the big data word and said, this is big, we got to do it. In terms of making a tangible, palatable and simple, which has been a mantra we've had for a long time, helping people see and understand the data, doing it in an ease of use paradigm that is unmatched. For me, it's how do you keep this complex thing simple? How do you in some ways hide the plumbing but then have an ecosystem, a partner base that actually delivers the scale and speed and all the things that this means, right? Because the thing with any analytic, if I have to wait for my report, if I have to think about what it's doing, while it's doing it, I probably check out and I find another way to do it, right? If I'm a business guy. So how do you keep it simple? I mean, everybody wants to work with Tableau. Everybody's integrating with Tableau. Every time you go to a conference, there's a new press release. Oh, we're doing Tableau. Everybody's demos you use as Tableau. What is it that makes Tableau kind of that gold standard and how do you make it so simple? What's the secret sauce there? Well, you know, I think our mission hasn't changed in 10 years, right? So I think when you look at our mission from the early days, we were probably ahead of where the market was ready for visual. And in a lot of ways, I think we've helped create that space, but I think keeping it simple and talking about seeing and understand data, that's been part of what Tableau's message is from the very beginning, connecting to any source, leveraging the data where it sits, allowing you to mash it up, do some iterations on it. That's all part of keeping it simple. But then even to the way we interact with partners, I think we're brutally open with our partners, and it's a true partnership, right? So for our strategic guys, we really want to be pushing each other to excel and deliver better for our customers. And it's a key part of it. So you guys, I mean, you've been around for a long time. You predate Hadoop. And so you pointed out, Paul, that your philosophy was always in any data sources, but you couldn't predict what was happening with big data and Hadoop. Subsequent to the big data wave coming on generally and Hadoop specifically, how has that, I mean, it obviously has positively affected your business, but how has it changed the way in which you look at whether it's partnering or has it created a need for change or were you that prescient that you were able to anticipate? No, I mean, I don't know that anyone could have anticipated the way it hit, right? But I think the way we've done it is our product has been core to what we do, we're a product company first, we're a customer-centric company first. So we've evolved the product as the space has evolved based on customer input. And I think because we've stayed on the pulse of that and we like to talk about ourselves as freakishly friendly as a company, and because we've kind of tried to keep that mentality even in the pace of our growth, I think we've stayed well on top of it, but we hear it from our partners, we hear it from our customers, and we try to incorporate that into our product. So given that everybody wants to work with you, how do you prioritize, how do you manage all the demand? That's the wrong term, but I hate the word demand management, but nonetheless, how do you balance and juggle all the pressure in your time? You know, frankly, Dave, that's really one of the biggest problems. I mean, I've got a growing base as to all the other pillars of our channel. So I'm the director of technology partners, I have a global responsibility, and we have partners coming up from every angle you could imagine, but I think because our mission is clear to us, we don't debate that, this is what we do. We really can focus on what the partner's bringing to the table and how they service the customer, but that scale issue, I don't know that we fully resolved it yet. I think as we continue this growth rate that we're seeing, we're going to have to get better at it, we're going to have to get faster at it, we're going to have to get more agile. I don't think we ever sit back on how it's happened. I think we now look at what's ahead and how to evolve and how to do this better. We think only a small percentage of the space has been realized, and we think we've got a nice part of that, but at the same time, it's... Well, it's true. And what percent of actual end users are actually touching Tableau, it's a relatively small percentage. That's right. It's an enormous potential TAM, I had to say. So Dave, we have, people can't see it here, but Billy Bean is going to give a keynote here, we're going to break for that when he gets on and we're going to go in and get some notes there. We can't film it, it's confidential. There's some proprietary information he'll be sharing, but you can hear some of the crowd coming in, it's exciting. Billy Bean obviously, Moneyball, named behind Moneyball, and that's a visualization opportunity. You got crunching through the data. People, whether it's sports or business, talent acquisition, finding customers, servicing customers, understanding data is the concept of visualization, how to present the data. So, again, you guys are at a rapidly growing market. Congratulations for everything. I'd like you to comment quickly about, before we wrap up and get the keynote, about just about startups out there, other people innovating around visualization. There's not one silver bowl, there's a variety of approaches, people are taking one, you guys have a unique one into the human aspect of it, but what are the different approaches to visualization? Obviously you have the R on one end, and then you have complete GUI on the other. Yeah, I mean, I think when you look at that one, it's based on maybe your role in an organization or your perspective on that, but I think there's a more sophisticated, if you look at the data scientist and the visuals that they may need, versus what an IT professional might need, versus what a marketing person or a sales person might need. And our view is we have a tool that we can think can support all of those. But as this evolves, I think you're going to see new visuals come out, whether it's us breaking from the Cartesian grid, you're going to see those things and that creates good noise, bad noise, but you're going to continue to see that evolution in it. So talk about the company, you guys have a show coming up, I believe, right? You have your own conference, user conference, or is that like a conference conference, how's that? Yeah, so we have our North American user conference at the beginning of September in Washington, D.C. And we are looking for this to be another significant milestone in our company, but mostly it's a way to interact with our customers, partners, and build a more violently wild user base. So first week of September? Yeah. Okay, so after VMworld. It's the fifth through the seventh. Okay, Wolfram's doing a summit down there, as well. Yeah. Is that part of the same event? Wolfram Alpha? No. No, but it's in D.C., right? Yeah, we're at the Gaylord. How big is that event going to be? We're leaving north of 3,000 is the number I can tell you. Oh, so it's pretty bitch to me, thanks. It should be our biggest user event in the history. So we got to talk about getting the cube there. We'd love to cover that. Yeah, absolutely. In D.C., because there's such a big need for data, analysis, visualization within the federal government. I mean, it's just they're big consumers. Yeah, I know it's going to be a fun market to be in because the federal presence will be there and won't have to travel distances to go. I think they'll attend and we have partners that service that space well and customers that are in that space. And so I think it's going to be a really fun event and I think it'll be the next evolution in our step. Well, we'll have to get you guys management aware, bring the cube there. Tell them the cube wants to be there. We'd like to cover the show. Let us know. Great. Obviously, we love to, we're open source. We can go wherever, we go where the action is. We all go there. That's great. Paul, thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate it. Again, congratulations, Tableau. Changed the game. You're first in with a real innovative visualization. The market just blew up right underneath your feet. You guys rocket ship. Continue to innovate. Congratulations and look forward to possibly being at your event and congratulations on your success. I really appreciate it, John. Thanks. Okay, this is the cube, extracting all the signal from the noise and there's not a lot of noise here. A lot of signal, a lot of customers. This is HP's kind of, it's kind of a private event. It's not a big, big conference where they're doing a lot of showboating on the announcements and technology, intimate conversations. We're capturing some of that hallway conversation. We'll report that back to you when we get the embargo lifted. But more importantly, great customers. Not a lot of what lightweight's here. All heavy hitters doing some great work. HP Vertica's making some real moves. We're right back in depth conversation. We're going to go watch Billy Bean's keynote. Dave and I, big fans. We interviewed him, we interviewed him before. Remember we had a little social cam? We had Billy Bean on at Oracle Open World. You kind of did a, you know, guerrilla. That was a big week for you. Yeah, we had the guerrilla Benny off. We had guerrilla coverage of Mark Benny off and Billy Bean. Anyway, we're right back. This is the cube. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back after this short break.