>> Narrator: Live from San Jose, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE! Covering Data Works Summit 2017. Brought to you by Hortonworks. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host George Gilbert. We are live on day one of the Data Works Summit in San Jose in the heart of Silicon Valley. Great buzz in the event, I'm sure you can see and hear behind us. We're very excited to be joined by a couple of fellows from IBM. A very longstanding Hortonworks partner that announced a phenomenal suite of four new levels of that partnership today. Please welcome Asad Mahmood, Analytics Cloud Solutions Specialist at IBM, and medical doctor, and Linton Ward, Distinguished Engineer, Power Systems OpenPOWER Solutions from IBM. Welcome guys, great to have you both on the queue for the first time. So, Linton, software has been changing, companies, enterprises all around are really looking for more open solutions, really moving away from proprietary. Talk to us about the OpenPOWER Foundation before we get into the announcements today, what was the genesis of that? >> Okay sure, we recognized the need for innovation beyond a single chip, to build out an ecosystem, an innovation collaboration with our system partners. So, ranging from Google to Mellanox for networking, to Hortonworks for software, we believe that system-level optimization and innovation is what's going to bring the price performance advantage in the future. That traditional seamless scaling doesn't really bring us there by itself but that partnership does. >> So, from today's announcements, a number of announcements that Hortonworks is adopting IBM's data science platforms, so really the theme this morning of the keynote was data science, right, it's the next leg in really transforming an enterprise to be very much data driven and digitalized. We also saw the announcement about Atlas for data governance, what does that mean from your perspective on the engineering side? >> Very exciting you know, in terms of building out solutions of hardware and software the ability to really harden the Hortonworks data platform with servers, and storage and networking I think is going to bring simplification to on-premises, like people are seeing with the Cloud, I think the ability to create the analyst workbench, or the cognitive workbench, using the data science experience to create a pipeline of data flow and analytic flow, I think it's going to be very strong for innovation. Around that, most notable for me is the fact that they're all built on open technologies leveraging communities that universities can pick up, contribute to, I think we're going to see the pace of innovation really pick up. >> And on that front, on pace of innovation, you talked about universities, one of the things I thought was really a great highlight in the customer panel this morning that Raj Verma hosted was you had health care, insurance companies, financial services, there was Duke Energy there, and they all talked about one of the great benefits of open source is that kids in universities have access to the software for free. So from a talent attraction perspective, they're really kind of fostering that next generation who will be able to take this to the next level, which I think is a really important point as we look at data science being kind of the next big driver or transformer and also going, you know, there's not a lot of really skilled data scientists, how can that change over time? And this is is one, the open source community that Hortonworks has been very dedicated to since the beginning, it's a great it's really a great outcome of that. >> Definitely, I think the ability to take the risk out of a new analytical project is one benefit, and the other benefit is there's a tremendous, not just from young people, a tremendous amount of interest among programmers, developers of all types, to create data science skills, data engineering and data science skills. >> If we leave aside the skills for a moment and focus on the, sort of, the operationalization of the models once they're built, how should we think about a trained model, or, I should break it into two pieces. How should we think about training the models, where the data comes from and who does it? And then, the orchestration and deployment of them, Cloud, Edge Gateway, Edge device, that sort of thing. >> I think it all comes down to exactly what your use case is. You have to identify what use case you're trying to tackle, whether that's applicable to clinical medicine, whether that's applicable to finance, to banking, to retail or transportation, first you have to have that use case in mind, then you can go about training that model, developing that model, and for that you need to have a good, potent, robust data set to allow you to carry out that analysis and whether you want to do exploratory analysis or you want to do predictive analysis, that needs to be very well defined in your training stage. Once you have that model developed, then we have certain services, such as Watson Machine Learning, within data science experience that will allow you to take that model that you just developed, just moments ago, and just deploy that as a restful API that you can then embed into an application and to your solution, and in that solution you can basically use across industry. >> Are there some use cases where you have almost like a tiering of models where, you know, there're some that are right at the edge like, you know, a big device like a car and then, you know, there's sort of the fog level which is the, say, cell towers or other buildings nearby and then there's something in the Cloud that's sort of like, master model or an ensemble of models, I don't assume that's like, Evel Knievel would say you know, "Don't try that at home," but sort-of, is the tooling being built to enable that? >> So the tooling is already in existence right now. You can actually go ahead right now and be able to build out prototypes, even full-level, full-range applications right on the Cloud, and you can do that, you can do that thanks to Data Science Experience, you can do that thanks to IBM Bluemix, you can go ahead and do that type of analysis right there and not only that, you can allow that analysis to actually guide you along the path from building a model to building a full-range application and this is all happening on the Cloud level. We can talk more about it happening on on-premise level but on the Cloud level specifically, you can have those applications built on the fly, on the Cloud and have them deployed for web apps, for moblie apps, et cetera. >> One of the things that you talked about is use cases in certain verticals, IBM has been very strong and vertically focused for a very long time, but you kind of almost answered the question that I'd like to maybe explore a little bit more about building these models, training the models, in say, health care or telco and being able to deploy them, where's the horizontal benefits there that IBM would be able to deliver faster to other industries? >> Definitely, I think the main thing is that IBM, first of all, gives you that opportunity, that platform to say that hey, you have a data set, you have a use case, let's give you the tooling, let's give you the methodology to take you from data, to a model, to ultimately that full range application and specifically, I've built some applications specific to federal health care, specifically to address clinical medicine and behavioral medicine and that's allowed me to actually use IBM tools and some open source technologies as well to actually go out and build these applications on the fly as a prototype to show, not only the realm, the art of the possible when it comes to these technologies, but also to solve problems, because ultimately, that's what we're trying to accomplish here. We're trying to find real-world solutions to real-world problems. >> Linton, let me re-direct something towards you about, a lot of people are talking about how Moore's law slowing down or even ending, well at least in terms of speed of processors, but if you look at the, not just the CPU but FPGA or Asic or the tensor processing unit, which, I assume is an Asic, and you have the high speed interconnects, if we don't look at just, you know what can you fit on one chip, but you look at, you know 3D what's the density of transistors in a rack or in a data center, is that still growing as fast or faster, and what does it mean for the types of models that we can build? >> That's a great question. One of the key things that we did with the OpenPOWER Foundation, is to open up the interfaces to the chip, so with NVIDIA we have NVLink, which gives us a substantial increase in bandwidth, we have created something called OpenCAPI, which is a coherent protocol, to get to other types of accelerators, so we believe that hybrid computing in that form, you saw NVIDIDA on-stage this morning, and we believe especially for deploring the acceleration provided for GPUs is going to continue to drive substantial growth, it's a very exciting time. >> Would it be fair to say that we're on the same curve, if we look at it, not from the point of view of, you know what can we fit on a little square, but if we look at what can we fit in a data center or the power available to model things, you know Jeff Dean at Google said, "If Android users "talk into their phones for two to three minutes a day, "we need two to three times the data centers we have." Can we grow that price performance faster and enable sort of things that we did not expect? >> I think the innovation that you're describing will, in fact, put pressure on data centers. The ability to collect data from autonomous vehicles or other N points is really going up. So, we're okay for the near-term but at some point we will have to start looking at other technologies to continue that growth. Right now we're in the throws of what I call fast data versus slow data, so keeping the slow data cheaply and getting the fast data closer to the compute is a very big deal for us, so NAND flash and other non-volatile technologies for the fast data are where the innovation is happening right now, but you're right, over time we will continue to collect more and more data and it will put pressure on the overall technologies. >> Last question as we get ready to wrap here, Asad, your background is fascinating to me. Having a medical degree and working in federal healthcare for IBM, you talked about some of the clinical work that you're doing and the models that you're helping to build. What are some of the mission critical needs that you're seeing in health care today that are really kind of driving, not just health care organizations to do big data right, but to do data science right? >> Exactly, so I think one of the biggest questions that we get and one of the biggest needs that we get from the healthcare arena is patient-centric solutions. There are a lot of solutions that are hoping to address problems that are being faced by physicians on a day-to-day level, but there are not enough applications that are addressing the concerns that are the pain points that patients are facing on a daily basis. So the applications that I've started building out at IBM are all patient-centric applications that basically put the level of their data, their symptoms, their diagnosis, in their hands alone and allows them to actually find out more or less what's going wrong with my body at any particular time during the day and then find the right healthcare professional or the right doctor that is best suited to treating that condition, treating that diagnosis. So I think that's the big thing that we've seen from the healthcare market right now. The big need that we have, that we're currently addressing with our Cloud analytics technology which is just becoming more and more advanced and sophisticated and is trending towards some of the other health trends or technology trends that we have currently right now on the market, including the Blockchain, which is tending towards more of a de-centralized focus on these applications. So it's actually they're putting more of the data in the hands of the consumer, of the hands of the patient, and even in the hands of the doctor. >> Wow, fantastic. Well you guys, thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE. Congratulations on your first time being on the show, Asad Mahmood and Linton Ward from IBM, we appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> And for my co-host George Gilbert, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live on day one of the Data Works Summit from Silicon Valley but stick around, we've got great guests coming up so we'll be right back.

>> Narrator: Covering Data Works Summit Europe 2017 brought to you by Horton Works. (uptempo, energetic music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Germany at Munich for DataWorks Summit 2017, formerly Hadoop Summit. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Mike Merritt-Holmes, is senior Vice President of Global Services Strategy at Think Big, a Teradata company, formerly the co-founder of the Big Data Partnership merged in with Think Big and Teradata. Mike, welcome to The Cube. >> Mike: Thanks for having me. >> Great having an entrepreneur on, you're the co-founder, which means you've got that entrepreneurial blood, and I got to ask you, you know, you're in the big data space, you got to be pretty pumped by all the hype right now around AI because that certainly gives a lot of that extra, extra steroid of recognition. People love AI it gives a face to it, and certainly IOT is booming as well, Internet of Things, but big data's cruising along. >> I mean it's a great place to be. The train is certainly going very, very quickly right now. But the thing for us is, we've been doing data science and AI and trying to build business outcomes, and value for businesses for a long time. It's just great now to see this really, the data science and AI both were really starting to take effect and so companies are starting to understand it and really starting to really want to embrace it which is amazing. >> It's inspirational too, I mean I have a bunch of kids in my family, some are in college and some are in high school, even the younger generation are getting jazzed up on just software, right, but the big data stuffs been cruising along now. It's been a good, decade now of really solid DevOps culture, cloud now accelerating, but now the customers are forcing the vendors to be very deliberate in delivering great product, because the demand (chuckling) for real time, the demand for more stuff, is at an all time high. Can you elaborate your thoughts on, your reaction to what customers are doing, because they're the ones driving everyone, not to create friction, to create simplicity. >> Yeah, and you know, our customers are global organizations, trying to leverage this kind of technology, and they are, you know, doing an awesome amount of stuff right now to try to move them from, effectively, a step change in their business, whether it's, kind of, shipping companies doing preventive asset maintenance, or whether it's retailers looking to target customers in a more personalized way, or really understand who their customers are, where they come from, they're leveraging all those technologies, and really what they're doing is pushing the boundaries of all of them, and putting more demands on all of the vendors in the space to say, we want to do this quicker, faster, but more easily as well. >> And then the things that you're talking about, I want to get your thoughts on, because this is the conversation that you're having with customers, I want to extract is, have those kind of data-driven mindset questions, have come out the hype of the Hadoob. So, I mean we've been on a hype cycle for awhile, but now its back to reality. Where are we with the customer conversations, and, from your stand point, what are they working on? I mean, is it mostly IT conversation? Is it a frontoffice conversation? Is it a blend of both? Because, you know, data science kind of threads both sides of the fence there. >> Yeah, I mean certainly you can't do big data without IT being involved, but since the start, I mean, we've always been engaged with the business, it's always been about business outcome, because you bring data into a platform, you provide all this data science capability, but unless you actually find ROI from that, then there's no point, because you want to be moving the business forward, so it's always been about business engagement, but part of that has always been also about helping them to change their mindset. I don't want a report, I want to understand why you look at that report and what's the thing you're looking for, so we can start to identify that for you quicker. >> What's the coolest conversation you've been in, over the past year? >> Uh, I mean, I can't go into too much details, but I've had some amazing conversations with companies like Lego, for instance, they're an awesome company to work with. But when you start to see some of the things we're doing, we're doing some amazing object recognition with deep-learning in Japan. We're doing some ford analytics in the Nordics with deep-learning, we're doing some amazing stuff that's really pushing the boundaries, and when you start to put those deep-learning aspects into real world applications, and you start to see, customers clambering over to want to be part of that, it's a really exciting place to be. >> Let me just double-click on that for a second, because a lot of, the question I get a lot on The Cube, and certainly off-camera is, I want to do deep-learning, I want to do AI, I love machine learning, I hear, oh, it's finally coming to reality so people see it forming. How do they get started, what are some of the best practices of getting involved in deep-learning? Is it using open-source, obviously, is one avenue, but what advice would you give customers? >> From a deep-learning perspective, so I think first of all, I mean, a lot of the greatest deep-learning technologies, run open-source, as you rightly said, but I think actually there's a lot of tutorials and stuff on there, but really what you need is someone who has done it before, who knows where the pitfalls are, but also know when to use the right technology at the right time, and also to know around some of the aspects about whether using a deep-learning methodology is going to be the right approach for your business problem. Because a lot of companies are, like, we want to use this deep-learning thing, its amazing, but actually its not appropriate, necessarily, for the use case you're trying to draw from. >> It's the classic holy grail, where is it, if you don't know what you're looking for, it's hard to know when to apply it. >> And also, you've got to have enough data to utilize those methods as well, so. >> You hear a lot about the technical complexity associated with Hadoop specifically, but just ol' big data generally. I wonder if you could address that, in terms of what you're seeing, how people are dealing with that technical complexity but what other headwinds are there, in terms of adopting these new capabilities. >> Yeah, absolutely, so one of the challenges that we still see is that customers are struggling to leverage value from their platform, and normally that's because of the technical complexities. So we really, we introduced to the open-source world last month Kaylo, something you can download free of charge. It's completely open-source on the Apache license, and that really was about making it easier for customers to start to leverage the data on the platform, to self-serve injection onto that, and for data scientists to wrangle the data better. So, I think there's a real push right now about that next level up, if you like, in the technology stack to start to enable non-technical users to start to do interesting things on the platform directly, rather than asking someone to do it for them. And that, you know, we've had technologies in the PI space like Tableau, and, obviously, the (mumbling) did a data-warehouse solutions on Teradata that have been giving customers something, before and previously, but actually now they're asking for more, not just that, but more as well. And that's where we are starting to see the increases. >> So that's sort of operationalizing analytics as an example, what are some of the business complexities and challenges of actually doing that? >> That's a very good question, because, I think, when you find out great insight, and you go, wow you've built this algorithm, I've seen things I've never seen before, then the business wants to have that always on they want to know that it's that insight all the time is it changing, is it going up, is it going down do I need to change my business decisions? And doing that and making that operational means, not only just deploying it but also monitoring those models, being able to keep them up to date regularly, understanding whether those things are still accurate or not, because you don't want to be making business decisions, on algorithms that are now a bit stale. So, actually operationalizing it, is about building out an entire capability that's keeping these things accurate, online, and, therefore, there's still a bit of work to do, I think, actually in the marketplace still, around building out an operational capability. >> So you kind of got bottom-up, top-down. Bottom-up is the you know the Hadoop experiments, and then top-down is CXO saying we need to do big data. Have those two constituencies come together now, who's driving the bus? Are they aligned or is it still, sort of, a mess organizationally? >> Yeah, I mean, generally, in the organization, there's someone playing the Chief Data Officer, whether they have that as a title or a roll, ultimately someone is in charge of generating value from the data they have in the organization. But they can't do that with IT, and I think where we've seen companies struggle is where they've driven it from the bottom-up, and where they succeed is where they drive it from the top-down, because by driving it from the top-down, you really align what you're doing with the business and strategy that you have. So, the company strategy, and what you're trying to achieve, but ultimately, they both need to meet in the middle, and you can't do one without the other. >> And one of our practitioner friends, who's describing this situation in our office in Palo Alto, a couple of weeks ago. he said, you know, the challenge we have as an organization is, you've got top people saying alright, we're moving. And they start moving, the train goes, and then you've got kind of middle management, sort of behind them, and then you got the doers that are far behind, and aligning those is a huge challenge for this particular organization. How do you recommend organizations to address that alignment challenge, does Think Big have capabilities to help them through that, or is that, sort of, you got to call Accenture? >> In essence, our reason for being is to help with those kind of things, and, you know, whether it's right from the start, so, oh, my God, my Chief Data Officer or my CEO is saying we need to be doing this thing right now, come on, let's get on with it, and we help them to understand what does that mean, what are the use cases, how, where's the value going to come from, what's that architecting to look like, or whether its helping them to build out capability, in terms of data science or building out the cluster itself, and then managing that and providing training for staff. Our whole reason for being is supporting that transformation as a business, from, oh, my God, what do I do about this thing, to, I'm fully embracing it, I know what's going on, I'm enabling my business, and I'm completely comfortable with that world. >> There was a lot talk three, or four or five years ago, about the ROI of so-called big data initiatives, not being really, you know, there were edge cases which were huge ROI, but there was a lot of talk about not a lot of return. My question is, has that, first question, has that changed, are you starting to see much bigger phone numbers coming back where the executives are saying yeah, lets double down on this. >> Definitely, I'm definitely seeing that. I mean, I think it's fair to say that companies are a bit nervous about reporting their ROI around this stuff, in some cases, so there's more ROI out there than you necessarily see out in the public place, but-- >> Why is that? Because they don't want to expose to the competition, or they don't want to front run their earnings, or whatever it is? >> They're trying to get a competitive edge. The minute you start saying, we're doing this, their competitors have an opportunity to catch up. >> John: Very secretive. >> Yeah and I think, it's not necessarily about what they're doing, it's about keeping the edge over their customers, really, over their competitors. So, but what we're seeing is that many customers are getting a lot of ROI more recently because they're able to execute better, rather than being struggling with the IT problems, and even just recently, for instance, we had a customer of ours, the CEO phones us up and says, you know what, we've got this problem with our sales. We don't really know why this is going down, you know, in this country, in this part of the world, it's going up, in this country, it's going down, we don't know why, and that's making us very nervous. Could you come in and just get the data together, work out why it's happening, so that we can understand what it is. And we came in, and within weeks, we were able to give them a very good insight into exactly why that is, and they changed their strategy, moving forward, for the next year, to focus on addressing that problem, and that's really amazing ROI for a company to be able to get that insight. Now, we're working with them to operationalize that, so that particular insight is always available to them, and that's an example of how companies are now starting to see that ROI come through, and a lot of it is about being able to articulate the right business question, rather than trying to worry about reports. What is the business question I'm trying to solve or answer, and that's when you can start to see the ROI come through. >> Can you talk about the customer orientation when they get to that insight, because you mentioned earlier that they got used to the reports, and you mentioned visualization, Tableau, they become table states, once you get addicted to the visualization, you want to extract more insights so the pressure seems to be getting more insight. So, two questions, process gap around what they need to do process-wise, and then just organizational behavior. Are they there mentally, what are some of the criteria in your mind, in your experiments, with customers around the processes that they go through, and then organizational mindset. >> Yeah, so what I would say is, first of all, from an organizational mindset perspective, it's very important to start educating, not just the analysis team, but the entire business on what this whole machine-learning, big data thing is all about, and how to ask the right questions. So, really starting to think about the opportunities you have to move your business forward, rather than what you already know, and think forward rather than retrospective. So, the other thing we often have to teach people, as well, is that this isn't about what you can get from the data warehouse, or replacing your data warehouse or anything like that. It's about answering the right questions, with the right tools, and here is a whole set of tools that allow you to answer different questions that you couldn't before, so leverage them. So, that's very important, and so that mindset requires time actually, to transform business into that mindset, and a lot of commitment from the business to make that happen. >> So, mindset first, and then you look at the process, then you get to the product. >> Yep, so, and basically, once you have that mindset, you need to set up an engine that's going to run, and start to drive the ROI out, and the engine includes, you know, your technical folk, but also your business users, and that engine will then start to build up momentum. The momentum builds more interest, and, overtime, you start to get your entire business into using these tools. >> It kind of makes sense, just kind of riffing in real time here, so the product-gap conversation should probably come after you lay that out first, right? >> Totally, yeah, I mean, you don't choose a product before you know what you need to do with it. So, but actually often companies don't know what they need to do with it, because they've got the wrong mindset in the first place. And so part of the road map stuff that we do, that we have a road map offering, is about changing that mindset, and helping them to get through that first stage, where we start to put, articulate the right use cases, and that really is driving a lot of value for our customers. Because they start from the right place-- >> Sometimes we hear stories, like the product kind of gives them a blind spot, because they tend to go into, with a product mindset first, and that kind of gives them some baggage, if you will. >> Well, yeah, because you end up with a situation, where you go, you get a product in, and then you say what can we do with it. Or, in fact, what happens is the vendor will say, these are the things you could do, and they give you use cases. >> It constrains things, forecloses tons of opportunities, because you're stuck within a product mindset. >> Yeah, exactly that, and you're not, you don't want to be constrained. And that's why open-source, and the kind of ecosystem that we have within the big data space is so powerful, because there's so many different tools for different things but don't choose your tool until you know what you're trying to achieve. >> I have a market question, maybe you just give us opinion, caveat, if you like, it's sort of a global, macro view. When we started first looking at the big data market, we noticed right away the dominant portion of revenue was coming from services. Hardware was commodity, so, you know, maybe sort of less than you would, obviously, in a mainframe world, and open-source software has a smaller contribution, so services dominated, and, frankly, has continued to dominate, since the early days. Do you see that changing, or do you think those percentages, if you will, will stay relatively constant? >> Well, I think it will change over time, but not in the near future, for sure, there's too much advancement in the technology landscape for that to stop, so if you had a set of tools that weren't really evolving, becoming very mature, and that's what tools you had, ultimately, the skill sets around them start to grow, and it becomes much easier to develop stuff, and then companies start to build out industry- or solutions-specific stuff on top, and it makes it very easy to build products. When you have an ecosystem that's evolving, growing with the speed it is, you're constantly trying to keep up with that technology, and, therefore, services have to play an awful big part in making sure that you are using the right technology, at the right time, and so, for the near future, for certain, that won't change. >> Complexity is your friend. >> Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, we live in a complex world, but we live and breathe this stuff, so what's complex to some is not to us, and that's why we add value, I guess. >> Mike Merritt-Holmes here inside The Cube with Teradata Think Big. Thanks for spending the time sharing your insights. >> Thank you for having me. >> Understand the organizational mindset, identify the process, then figure out the products. That's the insight here on The Cube, more coverage of Data Works Summit 2017, here in Germany after this short break. (upbeat electronic music)