 Okay, we're back here live in Boston, Massachusetts. This is SiliconANGLE and Wikibon's exclusive coverage of two days of live coverage of the HP Vertica user conference. They're top customers, their top users are here. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. This is theCUBE, our flagship program throughout the events, extracted from the noise. I'm joining with my co-host. Hi, everybody, I'm Dave Vellante at wikibon.org, because John said we're here in Boston. Lobster, Chowda, the socks. Billy Bean, Oakland A's, how do you get here? Yeah, Billy Bean, when I first saw this, I thought the A's were in town, but no, he's coming out just for this. Andy McBean is here. Andy is the Vice President of Vertica Ecosystems and Solutions, Andy, welcome to theCUBE. Yeah, thanks very much, thanks for having me. You know, we heard, you're welcome. We heard Colin this morning talking about the emphasis of this conference and he talked about, hey, this is not about us, it's not about HP, it's not about Vertica, it's all about our customers and it's about our ecosystem. That's going to, good props for you and what you're doing in your role. So you must be happy. I mean, you guys sold out, it's August, this is the first time through, maybe you were a little nervous a couple of months ago, but boy, you knocked it out of the park. No, I think that's actually totally fair. I mean, we looked back at the success of this, sort of like going back five months when it was originally planned and we went from kind of nowhere to sort of like saying, can we hold a user conference and get it done? And our primary plan was to get our partners in to actually sort of like sponsor everything with us, come along, show that they support Vertica and we were on the fence about whether or not we'd be able to sort of like book everybody, but if you look at the exhibition floor, you'll find out we had excellent attendance from our sponsors. Every one of our partners wanted to attend. We could have sold, we could have done a great job selling more space if we really wanted to, but we are so happy with basically the floor. The booths are always attended and we really, really can't be more happy how it turned out. So talk about why that is. We know theCUBE goes to a lot of conferences, right? And sometimes it feels like it's saturated, but in certain spaces, maybe big data is one of them, there seems to be just unlimited demand. So why do you think you were able to have more demand than supply? Well, I think really it's just that, so there's so much buzz still around Vertica. I mean, we're doing very, very well. The technology is very hot, we're in a hot space and a lot of our partners are actually sort of like looking to go with us as we get better. And we have so many partners that now just are looking to us to sort of like open their market for them to, so they see us as a vehicle by which they can actually sort of like get their own market sharing, market growth by working with us. So everybody over the last couple of years, and this is one thing that HP's really done well for Vertica, was it opened up our market to a lot more customers that originally when we were just a start-up company, prior to the acquisition, may not have considered working with us, but because we're HP now, we attracted a whole swathe of everybody that may have thought about working with a start-up to actually wanting to come and work with HP. So talk about how you look at the ecosystem, how you and HP Vertica have architected it, what's the strategy, and how would you describe it? So the whole of our ecosystem is around sort of like obviously end-to-end data deployment, data delivery, and getting insight into the big data space. So our partners are all aspects of our ecosystem, and our partners are around sort of like getting data into Vertica, getting data out of Vertica, deriving value from that data in Vertica, and we have partners that are developing upon Vertica, tool sets that actually enable our users to develop in Vertica, and manage Vertica. There are many, many accesses to the way that our partners can actually get involved with us. So there's not one single access of our ecosystem where we have a lack of partnerships right now that people want to work with us. And so we just want to make sure that we've got a full 360-degree coverage around every area that works with us. And to date, we have really no area where I feel we're deficient in terms of sort of like having a partner that can actually answer a task for our customer. And you talk about the challenge in the marketplace you have out there, and you actually have a marketplace that you guys are launching with your ecosystem. And obviously you have a lot of growth in the marketplace, and you talk about technology partners. A lot more innovations coming down the pike relative to new things. Speed, new software, new software architectures, conversion, so new technology on top of market forces where the customers have new demands. So how do you manage an ecosystem where you have massive growth and innovation on the product side and demand on the education services side? Because partners, whether they're a reseller, OEM, SI, or a technology partner, training and being enabled to wrap their own services or software around things, it's really, really important then to hire margins. So how do you manage those two things? It's very, very hard. Especially when you look at the way that we've grown over the last couple of years, we're still essentially a small unit within HP. We have an ecosystem that looks like we were from a company much bigger. So I look at that. HP gives you a little bit more muscle for that being the start of Vertica that you work. It does, but it also attracted us more business. So for me personally, so obviously my team therefore gets a little more stretch when we're actually having to service those guys. But it's a challenge on data, as we roll out more and more features in Vertica, then obviously each of our partners want to know about it. So my team and I have a great team that work under me on this area that basically have to go and evangelize that Vertica new features to those partners and then hopefully those partners will adopt that new technology into their product line. And so my goal is to actually make sure that we can actually get that information to them to actually enable them to actually adopt our technology as we develop it. We covered this a little bit with Colin Mahoney, who's the general manager. We also have Chris Salem as well. And for the folks out there, it's my.vertica.com is kind of the community, I guess portal. Is that the marketplace? Explain this new marketplace that's developing. You guys call the Vertica marketplace. Certainly, the marketplace isn't one of my areas. And that's actually sort of like one of our sales channels has been developed on a marketing team. So it's not really my main area of responsibility, but it's actually from an ecosystem standpoint and where we're going to take it. We actually see that as a vehicle by where we have partner technology that we believe can be easily web deployed or web downloadable. Like connectors and things that I'm not sure who you've been talking to. Well, we're actually even looking up to sort of like people that might have premium sales models related to their applications, where they're prepared to actually let us, where we believe that they actually have a very good value add for Vertica. So you guys become distribution for other partners. Exactly. So we actually become a. Your app store. It's true. It's just a true app store. Not in the sense of an app to obviously do it to mobile. Solution store. Solution store related to. Like the app store for Apple, but you guys, it's more technical version. Yeah. It's a front page where our customers can go to get Vertica value add from our ecosystem. And that's good for partners too, because they can then mix and match their own stuff. Yeah. Certainly in a premium sales model from our partners, there's obviously then that gets their products in front of our customers. It gets our customers the benefit of their tools. And at some point then, obviously, we can work with the partners to actually, if there's an upsell opportunity for either for them or for further development of our customer. Obviously the growing market, product market fits pretty strong with Vertica right now. So there's got, and you got market growth and demand in general. So that's kind of rising the tide, if you will. It's floating all the boats. Traditionally, when you deal with ecosystems, you need incentives to get people to kind of buy in to the technologies, whether it's soft dollars, incentives, some sort of. Would you guys, any of that kind of programs going on? I actually don't think we've needed them. There's so much demand. We have not needed them yet. So we actually have, so if I could, I can't relate to it. I can't give you a specific name, but we had two or three companies where we could not make any form of penetration or get any kind of interest with Vertica to be integrated with these customers. With these large companies. I think we know who that is. So over time, as that sort of like we got into HP and our growth has continued and it wasn't stymied, then rather than us having to chase partners, the partners are actually coming to us. Just grab that environment for us. It's a sophisticated environment. Is that a classic enterprise or both? You have multiple use cases there. Oh, we have, so we have, we have SMB plays and we have full enterprise plays both from all of our partners. We had, there really is no, we don't specialize in sort of like big partners, small partners. It's pretty much, we have startup companies that want to come work with us. In which case we actually fully endorse startups. That's where we came from. And also we work with very, very large enterprises, so. You know, Dave and I were talking about, we did our intro about the caliber of the people here. A lot of heavy weights, no light weights on the tech side. And actually one of the customers came on theCUBE and said, you know, and he's a senior tech manager in IT, he's like, I was very skeptical of Vertica. And then he goes, my, one of my direct reports, the Oracle guy said absolutely no F and W, this is going to happen. You know, totally hardcore, no Vertica, like hatred. Boom, converted both of them. And that was, I mean, that's consistent from other things we were hearing. That's the kind of pull you're getting right now, isn't it? I think that's even reflected back through our partners. It's one of these things that is like, when we actually, we opened up a sort of like a performance center for our partners right now where we actually, if they obviously can't invest in building a hardware environment where they can test the scale that we can deploy. So we actually get the baseline integrations done with those guys. And then we actually open up our equipment and our hardware and our data center for them to come and test on. And that's when they start to put their product on top of what we can do. And all of a sudden they see their product in a whole different light because their products are now performing at a level above where they would normally wouldn't see it because of basically the speed of our product. And we've also had lunch, we heard from Accenture and what I find mind-boggling also is that on the partner side, the system integrators are becoming more like developers. So you're seeing on the security side, we heard from Accenture and they're like, hey, you know, we're seeing all the security threats. We need rapid agile response. We don't have time for ETL and BI old systems. You know, I put that out of the patch. We need faster stuff now because they have to make priority decisions every day when they walk in. So just the business dynamics are changing significantly. So that requires new software. What's happening on the software side above Vertica? I mean, now you guys create good clustering, good infrastructure that enables speed. We've heard that. What's on top of Vertica that you've seen on the BI side that's been compelling? That's a different model than ever seen before. Well, it's sort of like BI has, it's kind of, you've got like a, there's kind of two types of, it's sort of like the BI, BI applications out there. They've got like people that have their own kind of in memory cubes or they have to suck the data up into in memory and then they can do really fast work on top of their own in memory profile. And those are kind of the darlings of a few years ago where the databases weren't fast enough to service those guys. And then there's always been people that have actually just pushed the queries down to the database. So now that time has moved on, the database technology has now leapfrogged, the old database technology. And it's also leapfrogged the guys that tried to do it with a sort of like a pure kind of in memory cache. I mean, I'm not talking about in memory databases. I'm talking about BI in memory place. So those guys now are starting to sort of like, also see that change that they actually can't suck up the volumes of data that we have to handle into that kind of cache to actually get performance. So you see that the BI market actually now shifting back to where they have to actually push down into databases, whether it be ours or our competitors, because to actually handle the size and scale, they have to rely on the underlying databases. So the caches were built for old databases, but now the databases now are spread out horizontally. It's not quite built for, but it was obviously built there to actually gain performance around sort of like, and actually provide a lot of- Make up for the limitations of databases. And now you have to basically look for the partners now that are prepared to push down into us and leverage our power. And you're coming at this from an architect's view. You had an architect role, now you're sort of transitioned into a sort of partnership and ecosystem role. That's talking about that transition. I just have an interest in career path. I've been in and out of, so I started in support. I've been through presales. I've been through consulting when I was in the UK. And I've been in and out of development jobs. This is actually my second time being acquired as a, from a startup company at HP. So this is my second time to HP, but I'm now a 10 year HP employee. Three years of which we're with Vertica. To keep all your performance reviews on file from the old days, best of them is best of them in the system. The same employee number? The same employee number. Nice, that's good. So it's been, and I can certainly- I hope they shred my performance reviews from 1988 to 97. Obviously they didn't throw me out when I came back. So it's been a good second time round. I wonder if we can talk about OpenStack a little bit. You know, it's obviously a big push for HP. Is there a play with Vertica and OpenStack? And if so, what is it? So we actually are looking towards obviously HP's endorsing OpenStack as a cloud delivery platform. So it's a natural fit. There are a couple of initiatives going on with an HP related to OpenStack. At least a couple. At least a couple. And so there's actually also extensions to OpenStack to support databases that you'll see that our cloud services division is actually championing and we're massive contributors into OpenStack. We see a natural fit for the way that the cloud itself will, or at least not Amazon Cloud, we're developing the partnerships around OpenStack. And we see it have a very valuable play on top of our platform. It gives us a nice neutralized way of actually addressing our clusters. So what's your vision? I mean, it's the inaugural conference. You got to be really pleased, sold out. Could have sold more. What's your vision for the ecosystem? Obviously a conference like this is great for the ecosystem. It validates what you're doing. It actually puts a frame around it. It says, wow, you can actually feel it and touch it. And other people can see it and you create this buzz. So what's your vision for the ecosystem and the direction that you want to take? So I think really, if you look at, we obviously, we want to continue to grow our partner base, regardless. And we actually want to actually sort of like be able to sort of like grow our business alongside our partner's businesses. So we're looking for all of the partners that want to actually adopt our technology and run with us. And we believe that if we actually can, for the companies that actually want to work with us, that there'll be a very, very good future for both them and us. We actually see it growing over time. And I think if you listen to Colin's keynote this morning on the stage, you'll have found out that we actually still, we actually value diversity of our partners. So we won't pigeonhole individual BI companies as favorites, we endorse them all. And the partners that want to run with us and actually adopt our technology may do better than others. So we open that as a challenge for those guys. Andy, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate you. I want to get you to the last word and I want you to share with the folks out there your vision and plan for the ecosystem. What should they expect? Obviously we heard from Chris, VP of Marketing, openness, customer stories. You know, really nice, really nice message of a leader like what you guys are doing at Verti, but from your standpoint, what's your objective next year? So I just expect to see a much better breadth of, I mean, increased breadth of companies that work with us. And I think you'll see a large number of companies that will actually just be endorsing the Vertica technology and HP's general big data portfolio. And I look forward to the couple of years ahead, especially as I look back to where we were two years ago and I look forward to where we're going to be two years time. And I think it's going to be a radically different picture and I'm very, very happy with it. You know, we've been watching Vertica since it's been a startup. And I got to say really, really psyched to see you guys break through and really get the credibility of the alpha geeks out there. A lot of the guys here have chops. We talked to a bunch of them last night at the reception and you know, they're out there. They're doing something they're writing code, there's data science, a variety of breadth of kind of cutting edge. So like they say in golf, it looks good off the tee, right? Middle of the fairway. See how you guys can finish out and continue the growth plan. Hopefully no Mulligans. No Mulligans. No lifesavers as we used to say, right? Dave, that's a wrap. Okay, for here and thanks for coming on The Cube. Appreciate it. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We'll be right back with our wrap up after this short break. Thank you.