 Okay, we're back live in New York City with all the actions. This is Big Data Week here on SiliconANGLE.tv and Big Data Week with New York City and it's a great opportunity to drill down on big data. This is SiliconANGLE.com, SiliconANGLE.tv's the cube, our flagship program where we go out to the events and extract a signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com and I'm joined by my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org where peers go to solve challenging problems together, go to the Wiki, read the research. It's all open source and free hit edit if you want to contribute. And we're here with Herb Cunitz who's the new president of Hortonworks, a company that we've been tracking for quite some time now. Herb, welcome to the cube. So you're new to Hortonworks, so you might have heard that we broadcasted Hadoop Summit. Great event, great event and we had a chance to talk to a lot of Hortonworks folks as well as customers and people in the industry and Jeffrey Moore was crossing the chasm with the industry as he did the keynote. It was just a great event. And so Hortonworks is now the big player in the market with Cloudera and Apache and you guys are doing great. So the question is, the folks want to know, this is your first time on the cube and first time on the video with us. So just share with us why join Hortonworks. Take us through your thought process, Herb. What drew you to Hortonworks and why did you join? Great question. So a couple reasons of why I looked at Hortonworks and why I joined and just recently joined Hortonworks as president. So when I look back, it probably helps to understand where someone's going but some of where they were prior. So prior to this, I was at VMware for the last three years but prior to that was at Spring Source, an open source development framework. And what I had seen at the time was the opportunity to have a transformational effect on development and open source development and saw Spring Source as that opportunity and had a great time going to build that out with Rob Bearden as others and then as we move that into VMware, continue to go scale that business. As we come to this point, I see the same opportunity for transformational change in data and I think big data is where that's at right now in terms of the opportunity in the open source community to help change the face of data. And I feel Hortonworks has that opportunity to go do that. So inflection points are all over the place but we're living one now, you mentioned transformation, we were just talking earlier in the segment then our commentary, my opinion is that this revolution is building a whole new industry that we've never seen before almost like from scratch and it's as disruptive as I said as the PC revolution and client server combined and you're seeing impacts across the board. Every vertical is exploding with new use cases, green field opportunities for developers and for businesses. So I want to get your take on the strategy of open source. You've lived some generations of open source, you have a team of folks over there at Hortonworks who have been on the Java, Jboss side going back and so what is the Hortonworks view of this major inflection point because open source is a key enabler there but it's a little bit different. It's not like Red Hat, it's not like Jboss. There's some similarities and some differences so just talk about that. Talk about the similarities and differences between those environments with Hadoop and where we are today. It's a great question. And open source as a technology and how it's developed and distributed and as a business model has been changing as well and has been transforming over time. In many ways we look at where we are right now with open source as in some ways we're in open source 2.0. Where the business model has changed and adapted to what you need to do to be successful to help support the community and to be able to build a business around it so you can continue to take those dollars and invest it back in the community. And when I look at that, we look at it as Hortonworks and say there's probably two elements that are really important in open source right now. One is you have to build great technology that helps the community. But one aspect is everything you need to do should be put back into the open source community to go support them. And if I even look at what we did at Spring Source we followed a model which was more of an open core model with you at an open core with proprietary extensions. I think that market has changed where the market wants now is 100% open source as something they can support inside of their business. And where that becomes critical is in the ecosystem of providers that are out there. As you look at all the other companies that are tangential, that interface to an open source technology is like something in big data you want to make sure that you are supporting all of those ecosystem providers and you're helping them do their job and making sure that big data just slots into that ecosystem and you're not asking any of those providers to change. That's a big piece of our approach on what we're doing in strategy. You guys are insanely dogmatic about that. Right? I mean, Rob was at the Wikibon office a month or so ago and really hammering home that point. But I want to follow up on that. What's wrong with taking a little bit of open source code maybe making it a little better, going out to market and just doing some business? What's, why is that antithetical to your philosophy and why do you so tightly cling to that vision? Well, let me use an example and it's a recent announcement we made just this week with TerraData, right? Where TerraData is taking our distribution and embedding it in their Astra appliance as they take that to market. So now you look at it and say, I make TerraData user already today and I have that technology in place. I know how to do queries through TerraData already. I'd like to be able to use the same tools that I do queries today but also be able to access Hadoop data. Or I'm an administrator and I am managing the console and I know how to manage everything around TerraData. Do I really want another pane of glass to look at and how I'm going to go manage my environment? Do I want to go to the same place I'm used to but also be able now to manage those same Hadoop environments? We look at it and say, if you're really going to go help the ecosystem you want to make it easy for TerraData users on the query side and on the management side be able to get simple access to what they're used to and not have to change how they work. That's an example of why we believe that manifests itself. So if we put everything back into open source and tie into those providers it makes it much easier for them to do their job. Now the relationship that you announced with Microsoft and Microsoft put out a release today saying that relationship was expanded. I don't think you guys have announced that yet but maybe you have on your side, I just haven't seen it. That was key in our view because there was still the risk right of forking the Apache code and Microsoft was like the last big whale to say okay we won't do that we're going to align with Hortonworks. Talk about your relationship a little bit like I said say Microsoft made an announcement today what's that all about? Windows server looks like it's got a lot of great potential we're going to see that brought to the Hadoop world fill us in on that. So it's a very exciting announcement with Microsoft and one we're very excited about to have the opportunity to partner with them and work with them. So what Microsoft is announcing is the ability to be able to get access to a Hadoop workload to the same tools we normally use and to be able to do that in the cloud through each HD insights for Azure or on-premise HD insights for Windows server and be able to get access to Hadoop workloads under there. That's one piece of it. Second, and if you're able to see their demonstration today you look at their demonstration and say effectively what's the number one business intelligence tool? Hold on take us through the demo for a second because that was being talked about so I'm going to put the pause button on there don't stop that answer but share the demo what happened with the demo because it got a lot of buzz today a lot of people talking about this. The demo was really interesting if you think about what the number one BI tool on the planet is today, it's Excel. Right. And now look at it and say if I'm a normal Excel user and if I truly want to be able to bring Hadoop to the masses if I can say I'm an Excel user and I have the ability to go get access to my normal SQL data but now I can also bring in my Hadoop data and through the same UI I can figure out how to go manage and organize all that information and rich it with other information from Hadoop and then visually present it back in a way that I can get insight from that data and do all of that through Excel that's powerful. You've now taken Hadoop which is a collection of different technologies and made it available to the masses through a very simple and easy to use tool in front end interface. That's the power of the Microsoft announcement. Now am I right? Did you guys not make an announcement today around that? We have announced it so it's actually on our blog on site as well. So we do have that on there. So this was a simultaneous announcement. Correct. I just got to. So on our blog on our website we have announced specifically what we're doing with Microsoft and talked about it from our perspective. What do you make of this trend? We've seen a lot of it today. I'll call it Unify, right? Bring together the old and the new. You just gave a good example. The SQL and the NoSQL, the sort of existing tools. You talked about Teradata, you talked about Microsoft. It started with connectors and now it's starting to get more integrated. I'll call it more native. Where do you see that going? What's your perspective on that? So part of this ties back to our overall philosophy which is how do we continue to help make Hadoop easier and easier to use, easier to consume which means easier to install, easier to manage, easier to develop against, et cetera. So if you start looking at and say the data's one aspect of now the programming model with Excel we're starting to get into some of the analytics to make it easy for the ecosystem of analytics providers. We already work with many of the other analytics providers. We announced a free tool around ODBC integration so you can do things such through Tableau, MicroStrategy and others and get access to their BI and analytics tools. So it's starting to extend that up the stack to another class of ecosystem partners who can start to work with Hadoop data and provide that and send information back. One of the things that Dave and I always talk about and we talk about it frequently on theCUBE is we're old enough now that we were there at President Creation during the open source movement. When it was Gorilla and free software, it was cool. And then enterprises that dab in the web came along, et cetera, et cetera. But now we're in multiple generations later. Open source, X.0, it's more mature as the ecosystem built around it. But we always talk about it's hard to be a red hat for Hadoop, mainly because during the Linux days you had hardware guys who were clutching on to those workstations and Unix, it was out there this war around licensing and so everyone wanted to build free software but you had Microsoft who was spending billions of dollars trying to kill Linux, right? So one of the things that we were talking about is it's hard to make that comparison today because there's no one spending a billion dollars to kill Hadoop. Yet, as you mentioned, there's two roads. I want to be the platform for everything and have a land grab, or as you mentioned there's a lot of providers out there who want to use Hadoop. So there's no real war against Hadoop. In fact, people want Hadoop, right? So, Karak, can you talk about that and how that affects your strategy? Because it sounds like you're saying, hey, you know what, we'll do open source all day long, 100%, but that yields benefits because we're embedded with the providers. Does that, am I getting that right? You are 100% on target with our strategies because we think in this market, you have a couple choices from a business model. You can say, I want to build out the entire stock top to bottom and I want to provide all of those components and be a sole source provider of that information. A platform, I want to be that next platform. That is a viable strategy you can take forward. Candle, it's not one we think is a long term winning strategy. And not your strategy. And not our strategy. Which is why we're focused on being that provider to the community and the provider to the ecosystem and let them do what they do well on top of it and consume Hadoop to provide a value added service back. We were just at IBM's IOD. We did the liveCube there for two days, Dave and I, and IBM's like, hey, we do a lot of stuff with information management. Now it's called big data. You put a burrito around it called big data. But they target a lot of production customers like a lot of mainframe still business and they have a lot of virtualization. They get what's going on at the high end and they embrace Hadoop. So is that an example of a provider that that kind of profile like, hey, there's many use cases and you guys are going to support that? Is that where you make your money on the support there? Is it more embedding? I mean, take us through that logic. Sure, sure. So from a business model perspective, the place we make our money that we can invest back in the community is one by supporting the customers that are using Hadoop and are using the Hortonworks platform for Hadoop. So we're using HTTP and we provide support. And because this is around data and data that's critical to their business, companies want to know there's a trusted provider who will support that with standard commercial terms. One, our response times, et cetera, as if something goes wrong. That's one. Second, they want to know that everything that gets fixed for them gets put back into the open source trunk so they don't end up on a fork or they don't end up off the trunk over time. They want to know that that's put back into open source so they can stay consistent and on target with what's happening there. And they're okay with that. And they're absolutely okay. And in fact, they would, they embrace that and they prefer that. And that's why, and I made the comment of, in some ways, this is the business model of open source 2.0. That's where we believe the market is moved to, which is how do you have 100% open source support model? So, that is the key question, right? Everybody wants to know, how do you make money in open source? No, there's some examples. Rob Bearden's been involved in some of them. Let's go through Red Hat, JBoss, Spring, MySQL, some of the biggest successes, right? So. And all slightly different in how they did it. So, how should we think about, I mean, you just told us sort of how you're going to make money by supporting the community. That sounds good from a reference model standpoint. Which of those do you think you're most like? Out of those? I don't know that we're like all of them. It's a new category. We're like all of them that they all have an open source foundation. So, in that case, we're all consistent. That dog mother I was talking about before, yeah. The business model on what we do from there is slightly different. And again, even if I compare it to Spring source, where we had, take something we had called TC server, which was open source Tomcat, with proprietary extensions of management monitoring on top, bundled as a commercial license. Very different what we're receiving the market now with Hadoop, which is if you provide 100% open source distribution, and again, you make the money that you can invest back in the community on support. And if the community is large enough and the adoption is broad enough, there is plenty of money there to go grow a business that supports. So, a lot of investors would look at that model and say, eh, you know, won't drive the kind of multiples that we want. That wasn't the case with you guys. You were very easily able to raise a ton of dough. Why do you think that is? It's just because the size of the market, the growth of the market. I think it's three things. If I look back at why are investors put money into Hortonworks and what they see, is they see three major assets. One asset is the quality of the technology team, the experience they have from what they had at Yahoo, and how they've worked with Hadoop over the years. That is an experience that's hard to match. Two is a team that has done this before in terms of how do you build a business around that to support the community. And that starts with everyone from Rob Bearden on down, right, and having the experience and how to do that. And third is a business model that they believe is the winning business model for how you need to build a company today. So, if you look at those three things, that's why the investors are very excited, and that's why we haven't had any issue raising money, and have been able to go build our business out and invest that in the partnership we saw today with Microsoft into areas like that. So, Her, I just got it, guys, we're wrapping up this segment. I want to get a couple final questions. One is, people want to know how Hortonworks is doing. So, share with the folks what's going on with the company because you went through the, you know the guys there, you recently joined the company, you did your own due diligence, right? So, it's not like you just woke up one day and said, hey, I'm going to join Hortonworks. You had to kind of figure out for your own. So, you had a fresh look at Hortonworks, and internally and outside. So, just share with the folks and now that you're the president, you got some data. If you can share that too, that'd be great, but this is theCUBE, it's all friendly, but share what's going on with Hortonworks. Share with the folks, how's it doing performance wise, relative to the goals of what you guys are trying to do. So, to your comment, you know, joining Hortonworks, I did a lot of due diligence on the overall space and all of the companies in the space, right, in terms of deciding where's the appropriate one, you know, for me, for the rest of my career in terms of what I want to do. And when I look at how Hortonworks is doing, I look at it in three phases, right? Phase one was just get the technology working and develop successfully to be able to take that to market, so you have good technology. Check that's done with HDP. Part two was once you have that technology in place, how do you build some of the partnerships to validate that this business model works and the partners truly do want to build on top of HDP as a distribution platform? Check with Microsoft, with Teradata, the work we've done with others. So, that part is borne out. Now it's really about how do we start to work with the end user customers, the direct companies, and provide the same level of value to them. So, a big piece of what you'll see us doing from a strategy now is building off a field force of how we go work with customers and support them in the field. And that is, I'll call phase three in terms of what we're doing right now. And that circles back to revenue. And that feeds the open source contribution. Exactly. That's called the business model. There you go. Yeah, it's a nice business model too. And it's one that's working so far. A lot of people don't know who aren't in the tech business who aren't either in Silicon Valley or deep inside the ropes, understand how business model, like I say, has said for open source work. So, great, glad to hear that out. Well, we have a pure open source model too, a Wikibon and silicon engine. Yes, you do. We believe it. We know banner ads on the site. We say, how are you guys going to make money? We say, we got the cover. So, you're practicing what we're preaching. That's right. That's great. Everything we do is open source. Open source content. Use our content, make mashups, use it. We're tracking you either way on our proprietary tracking H-based technology. My final question for you is, you're new, you're driving the ship, working with Rob who's got engineering and finance, and manufacturing and finance. What's your goals? What's your goals for the next year? So, next year, when we sit down, we can kind of review those. So, what's your goals for the next 12 months? So, if I look over the next 12 months, I'd say one, it's putting a team on the field who can go work with the companies that are out there. If I look and say, what is one of Hortonworks' challenges going forward is, we're in some ways, from a market perspective, thought of as the new guys in the game. So, how do we get our name out there and let people know what we actually have to provide them to offer? So, it's how do we be loud and proud around that, and how do we get our name out, and then how do we make sure we're able to support the customers that have real use cases they need to go deliver. And that's what we're bearing out now with the companies that we're working with. If we look back 12 months from now and say, we've put that team on the field and we've supported the customers who've come to us in ways they can go build a real business and get value, get insight from the data, we've delivered what the market needs. And that includes application developers as well? Absolutely. Okay. Application developers, analysts, data modelers, data scientists, all those people. Well, the market's hot people want the demand for open source and or software for big data's hot, whether it's an age base or graph database or time series database, doesn't matter, it's hot and it's great that you guys doing all that work. So, Herb, inside theCUBE first time, we're back with our next guest, we have the short break, this is SiliconANGLE, Wikibon's theCUBE, we'll be right back. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.