(techno music) >> (announcer) From Berlin, Germany it's theCUBE covering DataWorks Summit Europe 2018. Brought to you by Hortonworks. >> Well hello, welcome to theCUBE. We're here on day two of DataWorks Summit 2018 in Berlin, Germany. I'm James Kobielus. I'm lead analyst for Big Data Analytics in the Wikibon team of SiliconANGLE Media. And who we have here today, we have Alan Gates whose one of the founders of Hortonworks and Hortonworks of course is the host of DataWorks Summit and he's going to be, well, hello Alan. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Hello, thank you. >> Yeah, so Alan, so you and I go way back. Essentially, what we'd like you to do first of all is just explain a little bit of the genesis of Hortonworks. Where it came from, your role as a founder from the beginning, how that's evolved over time but really how the company has evolved specifically with the folks on the community, the Hadoop community, the Open Source community. You have a deepening open source stack with you build upon with Atlas and Ranger and so forth. Gives us a sense for all of that Alan. >> Sure. So as I think it's well-known, we started as the team at Yahoo that really was driving a lot of the development of Hadoop. We were one of the major players in the Hadoop community. Worked on that for, I was in that team for four years. I think the team itself was going for about five. And it became clear that there was an opportunity to build a business around this. Some others had already started to do so. We wanted to participate in that. We worked with Yahoo to spin out Hortonworks and actually they were a great partner in that. Helped us get than spun out. And the leadership team of the Hadoop team at Yahoo became the founders of Hortonworks and brought along a number of the other engineering, a bunch of the other engineers to help get started. And really at the beginning, we were. It was Hadoop, Pig, Hive, you know, a few of the very, Hbase, the kind of, the beginning projects. So pretty small toolkit. And we were, our early customers were very engineering heavy people, or companies who knew how to take those tools and build something directly on those tools right? >> Well, you started off with the Hadoop community as a whole started off with a focus on the data engineers of the world >> Yes. >> And I think it's shifted, and confirm for me, over time that you focus increasing with your solutions on the data scientists who are doing the development of the applications, and the data stewards from what I can see at this show. >> I think it's really just a part of the adoption curve right? When you're early on that curve, you have people who are very into the technology, understand how it works, and want to dive in there. So those tend to be, as you said, the data engineering types in this space. As that curve grows out, you get, it comes wider and wider. There's still plenty of data engineers that are our customers, that are working with us but as you said, the data analysts, the BI people, data scientists, data stewards, all those people are now starting to adopt it as well. And they need different tools than the data engineers do. They don't want to sit down and write Java code or you know, some of the data scientists might want to work in Python in a notebook like Zeppelin or Jupyter but some, may want to use SQL or even Tablo or something on top of SQL to do the presentation. Of course, data stewards want tools more like Atlas to help manage all their stuff. So that does drive us to one, put more things into the toolkit so you see the addition of projects like Apache Atlas and Ranger for security and all that. Another area of growth, I would say is also the kind of data that we're focused on. So early on, we were focused on data at rest. You know, we're going to store all this stuff in HDFS and as the kind of data scene has evolved, there's a lot more focus now on a couple things. One is data, what we call data-in-motion for our HDF product where you've got in a stream manager like Kafka or something like that >> (James) Right >> So there's processing that kind of data. But now we also see a lot of data in various places. It's not just oh, okay I have a Hadoop cluster on premise at my company. I might have some here, some on premise somewhere else and I might have it in several clouds as well. >> K, your focus has shifted like the industry in general towards streaming data in multi-clouds where your, it's more stateful interactions and so forth? I think you've made investments in Apache NiFi so >> (Alan) yes. >> Give us a sense for your NiFi versus Kafka and so forth inside of your product strategy or your >> Sure. So NiFi is really focused on that data at the edge, right? So you're bringing data in from sensors, connected cars, airplane engines, all those sorts of things that are out there generating data and you need, you need to figure out what parts of the data to move upstream, what parts not to. What processing can I do here so that I don't have to move upstream? When I have a error event or a warning event, can I turn up the amount of data I'm sending in, right? Say this airplane engine is suddenly heating up maybe a little more than it's supposed to. Maybe I should ship more of the logs upstream when the plane lands and connects that I would if, otherwise. That's the kind o' thing that Apache NiFi focuses on. I'm not saying it runs in all those places by my point is, it's that kind o' edge processing. Kafka is still going to be running in a data center somewhere. It's still a pretty heavy weight technology in terms of memory and disk space and all that so it's not going to be run on some sensor somewhere. But it is that data-in-motion right? I've got millions of events streaming through a set of Kafka topics watching all that sensor data that's coming in from NiFi and reacting to it, maybe putting some of it in the data warehouse for later analysis, all those sorts of things. So that's kind o' the differentiation there between Kafka and NiFi. >> Right, right, right. So, going forward, do you see more of your customers working internet of things projects, is that, we don't often, at least in the industry of popular mind, associate Hortonworks with edge computing and so forth. Is that? >> I think that we will have more and more customers in that space. I mean, our goal is to help our customers with their data wherever it is. >> (James) Yeah. >> When it's on the edge, when it's in the data center, when it's moving in between, when it's in the cloud. All those places, that's where we want to help our customers store and process their data. Right? So, I wouldn't want to say that we're going to focus on just the edge or the internet of things but that certainly has to be part of our strategy 'cause it's has to be part of what our customers are doing. >> When I think about the Hortonworks community, now we have to broaden our understanding because you have a tight partnership with IBM which obviously is well-established, huge and global. Give us a sense for as you guys have teamed more closely with IBM, how your community has changed or broadened or shifted in its focus or has it? >> I don't know that it's shifted the focus. I mean IBM was already part of the Hadoop community. They were already contributing. Obviously, they've contributed very heavily on projects like Spark and some of those. They continue some of that contribution. So I wouldn't say that it's shifted it, it's just we are working more closely together as we both contribute to those communities, working more closely together to present solutions to our mutual customer base. But I wouldn't say it's really shifted the focus for us. >> Right, right. Now at this show, we're in Europe right now, but it doesn't matter that we're in Europe. GDPR is coming down fast and furious now. Data Steward Studio, we had the demonstration today, it was announced yesterday. And it looks like a really good tool for the main, the requirements for compliance which is discover and inventory your data which is really set up a consent portal, what I like to refer to. So the data subject can then go and make a request to have my data forgotten and so forth. Give us a sense going forward, for how or if Hortonworks, IBM, and others in your community are going to work towards greater standardization in the functional capabilities of the tools and platforms for enabling GDPR compliance. 'Cause it seems to me that you're going to need, the industry's going to need to have some reference architecture for these kind o' capabilities so that going forward, either your ecosystem of partners can build add on tools in some common, like the framework that was laid out today looks like a good basis. Is there anything that you're doing in terms of pushing towards more Open Source standardization in that area? >> Yes, there is. So actually one of my responsibilities is the technical management of our relationship with ODPI which >> (James) yes. >> Mandy Chessell referenced yesterday in her keynote and that is where we're working with IBM, with ING, with other companies to build exactly those standards. Right? Because we do want to build it around Apache Atlas. We feel like that's a good tool for the basis of that but we know one, that some people are going to want to bring their own tools to it. They're not necessarily going to want to use that one platform so we want to do it in an open way that they can still plug in their metadata repositories and communicate with others and we want to build the standards on top of that of how do you properly implement these features that GDPR requires like right to be forgotten, like you know, what are the protocols around PIII data? How do you prevent a breach? How do you respond to a breach? >> Will that all be under the umbrella of ODPI, that initiative of the partnership or will it be a separate group or? >> Well, so certainly Apache Atlas is part of Apache and remains so. What ODPI is really focused up is that next layer up of how do we engage, not the programmers 'cause programmers can gage really well at the Apache level but the next level up. We want to engage the data professionals, the people whose job it is, the compliance officers. The people who don't sit and write code and frankly if you connect them to the engineers, there's just going to be an impedance mismatch in that conversation. >> You got policy wonks and you got tech wonks so. They understand each other at the wonk level. >> That's a good way to put it. And so that's where ODPI is really coming is that group of compliance people that speak a completely different language. But we still need to get them all talking to each other as you said, so that there's specifications around. How do we do this? And what is compliance? >> Well Alan, thank you very much. We're at the end of our time for this segment. This has been great. It's been great to catch up with you and Hortonworks has been evolving very rapidly and it seems to me that, going forward, I think you're well-positioned now for the new GDPR age to take your overall solution portfolio, your partnerships, and your capabilities to the next level and really in terms of in an Open Source framework. In many ways though, you're not entirely 100% like nobody is, purely Open Source. You're still very much focused on open frameworks for building fairly scalable, very scalable solutions for enterprise deployment. Well, this has been Jim Kobielus with Alan Gates of Hortonworks here at theCUBE on theCUBE at DataWorks Summit 2018 in Berlin. We'll be back fairly quickly with another guest and thank you very much for watching our segment. (techno music)

>> Announcer: From Berlin, Germany, it's the Cube covering Datawork Summit Europe 2018. Brought to you by Hortonworks. (electronic music) >> Hello and welcome to the Cube on day two of Dataworks Summit 2018 from Berlin. It's been a great show so far. We have just completed the day two keynote and in just a moment I'll bring ya up to speed on the major points and the presentations from that. It's been a great conference. Fairly well attended here. The hallway chatter, discussion's been great. The breakouts have been stimulating. For me the takeaway is the fact that Hortonworks, the show host, has announced yesterday at the keynote, Scott Gnau, the CTO of Hortonworks announced Data Steward Studio, DSS they call it, part of the data plane, Hotronworks data plane services portfolio and it could not be more timely Data Steward Studio because we are now five weeks away from GDPR, that's the General Data Protection Regulation becoming the law of the land. When I say the land, the EU, but really any company that operates in the EU, and that includes many U.S. based and Apac based and other companies will need to comply with the GDPR as of May 25th and ongoing. In terms of protecting the personal data of EU citizens. And that means a lot of different things. Data Steward Studio announced yesterday, was demo'd today, by Hortonworks and it was a really excellent demo, and showed that it's a powerful solution for a number of things that are at the core of GDPR compliance. The demo covered the capability of the solution to discover and inventory personal data within a distributed data lake or enterprise data environment, number one. Number two, the ability of the solution to centralize consent, provide a consent portal essentially that data subjects can use then to review the data that's kept on them to make fine grain consents or withdraw consents for use in profiling of their data that they own. And then number three, the show, they demonstrated the capability of the solution then to execute the data subject to people's requests in terms of the handling of their personal data. The three main points in terms of enabling, adding the teeth to enforce GDPR in an operational setting in any company that needs to comply with GDPR. So, what we're going to see, I believe going forward in the, really in the whole global economy and in the big data space is that Hortonworks and others in the data lake industry, and there's many others, are going to need to roll out similar capabilities in their portfolios 'cause their customers are absolutely going to demand it. In fact the deadline is fast approaching, it's only five weeks away. One of the interesting take aways from the, the keynote this morning was the fact that John Kreisa, the VP for marketing at Hortonworks today, a quick survey of those in the audience a poll, asking how ready they are to comply with GDPR as of May 25th and it was a bit eye opening. I wasn't surprised, but I think it was 19 or 20%, I don't have the numbers in front of me, said that they won't be ready to comply. I believe it was something where between 20 and 30% said they will be able to comply. About 40% I'm, don't quote me on that, but a fair plurality said that they're preparing. So that, indicates that they're not entirely 100% sure that they will be able to comply 100% to the letter of the law as of May 25th. I think that's probably accurate in terms of ballpark figures. I think there's a lot of, I know there's a lot of companies, users racing for compliance by that date. And so really GDPR is definitely the headline banner, umbrella story around this event and really around the big data community world-wide right now in terms of enterprise, investments in the needed compliance software and services and capabilities are needed to comply with GDPR. That was important. That wasn't the only thing that was covered in, not only the keynotes, but in the sessions here so far. AI, clearly AI and machine learning are hot themes in terms of the innovation side of big data. There's compliance, there's GDPR, but really innovation in terms of what enterprises are doing with their data, with their analytics, they're building more and more AI and embedding that in conversational UIs and chatbots and their embedding AI, you know manner of e-commerce applications, internal applications in terms of search, as well as things like face recognition, voice recognition, and so forth and so on. So, what we've seen here at the show is what I've been seeing for quite some time is that more of the actual developers who are working with big data are the data scientists of the world. And more of the traditional coders are getting up to speed very rapidly on the new state of the art for building machine learning and deep learning AI natural language processing into their applications. That said, so Hortonworks has become a fairly substantial player in the machine learning space. In fact, you know, really across their portfolio many of the discussions here I've seen shows that everybody's buzzing about getting up to speed on frameworks for building and deploying and iterating and refining machine learning models in operational environments. So that's definitely a hot theme. And so there was an AI presentation this morning from the first gentleman that came on that laid out the broad parameters of what, what developers are doing and looking to do with data that they maintain in their lakes, training data to both build the models and train them and deploy them. So, that was also something I expected and it's good to see at Dataworks Summit that there is a substantial focus on that in addition of course to GDPR and compliance. It's been about seven years now since Hortonworks was essentially spun off of Yahoo. It's been I think about three years or so since they went IPO. And what I can see is that they are making great progress in terms of their growth, in terms of not just the finances, but their customer acquisition and their deal size and also customer satisfaction. I get a sense from talking to many of the attendees at this event that Hortonworks has become a fairly blue chip vendor, that they're really in many ways, continuing to grow their footprint of Hortonworks products and services in most of their partners, such as IBM. And from what I can see everybody was wrapped with intention around Data Steward Studio and I sensed, sort of a sigh of relief that it looks like a fairly good solution and so I have no doubt that a fair number of those in this hall right now are probably, as we say in the U.S., probably kicking the tires of DSS and probably going to expedite their adoption of it. So, with that said, we have day two here, so what we're going to have is Alan Gates, one of the founders of Hortonworks coming on in just a few minutes and I'll be interviewing him, asking about the vibrancy in the health of the community, the Hortonworks ecosystem, developers, partners, and so forth as well as of course the open source communities for Hadoop and Ranger and Atlas and so forth, the growing stack of open source code upon which Hortonworks has built their substantial portfolio of solutions. Following him we'll have John Kreisa, the VP for marketing. I'm going to ask John to give us an update on, really the, sort of the health of Hortonworks as a business in terms of the reach out to the community in terms of their messaging obviously and have him really position Hortonworks in the community in terms of who's he see them competing with. What segments is Hortonworks in now? The whole Hadoop segment increasingly... Hadoop is there. It's the foundation. The word is not invoked in the context of discussions of Hortonworks as much now as it was in the past. And the same thing for say Cloudera one of their closest to traditional rivals, closest in the sense that people associate them. I was at the Cloudera analyst event the other week in Santa Monica, California. It was the same thing. I think both of these vendors are on a similar path to become fairly substantial data warehousing and data governance suppliers to the enterprises of the world that have traditionally gone with the likes of IBM and Oracle and SAP and so forth. So I think they're, Hortonworks, has definitely evolved into a far more diversified solution provider than people realize. And that's really one of the take aways from Dataworks Summit. With that said, this is Jim Kobielus. I'm the lead analyst, I should've said that at the outset. I'm the lead analyst at SiliconANGLE's Media's Wikibon team focused on big data analytics. I'm your host this week on the Cube at Dataworks Summit Berlin. I'll close out this segment and we'll get ready to talk to the Hortonworks and IBM personnel. I understand there's a gentleman from Accenture on as well today on the Cube here at Dataworks Summit Berlin. (electronic music)