>> Live from San José, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE! Covering DataWorks Summit 2018. Brought to you by Hortonworks. (electro music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of DataWorks here in sunny San José, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, James Kobielus. We're joined by John Kreisa. He is the VP of marketing here at Hortonworks. Thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you for having me. >> We've enjoyed watching you on the main stage, it's been a lot of fun. >> Thank you, it's been great. It's been great general sessions, some great talks. Talking about the technology, we've heard from some customers, some third parties, and most recently from Kevin Slavin from The Shed which is really amazing. >> So I really want to get into this event. You have 2,100 attendees from 23 different countries, 32 different industries. >> Yep. This started as a small, >> That's right. tiny little thing! >> Didn't Yahoo start it in 2008? >> It did, yeah. >> You changed names a few year ago, but it's still the same event, looming larger and larger. >> Yeah! >> It's been great, it's gone international as you've said. It's actually the 17th total event that we've done. >> Yeah. >> If you count the ones we've done in Europe and Asia. It's a global community around data, so it's no surprise. The growth has been phenomenal, the energy is great, the innovations that the community is talking about, the ecosystem is talking about, is really great. It just continues to evolve as an event, it continues to bring new ideas and share those ideas. >> What are you hearing from customers? What are they buzzing about? Every morning on the main stage, you do different polls that say, "how much are you using machine learning? What portion of your data are you moving to the cloud?" What are you learning? >> So it's interesting because we've done similar polls in our show in Berlin, and the results are very similar. We did the cloud poll pole and there's a lot of buzz around cloud. What we're hearing is there's a lot of companies that are thinking about, or are somewhere along their cloud journey. It's exactly what their overall plans are, and there's a lot of news about maybe cloud will eat everything, but if you look at the pole results, something like 75% of the attendees said they have cloud in their plans. Only about 12% said they're going to move everything to the cloud, so a lot of hybrid with cloud. It's how to figure out which work loads to run where, how to think about that strategy in terms of where to deploy the data, where to deploy the work loads and what that should look like and that's one of the main things that we're hearing and talking a lot about. >> We've been seeing that Wikiban and our recent update to the recent market forecast showed that public cloud will dominate increasingly in the coming decade, but hybrid cloud will be a long transition period for many or most enterprises who are still firmly rooted in on-premises employment, so forth and so on. Clearly, the bulk of your customers, both of your custom employments are on premise. >> They are. >> So you're working from a good starting point which means you've got what, 1,400 customers? >> That's right, thereabouts. >> Predominantly on premises, but many of them here at this show want to sustain their investment in a vendor that provides them with that flexibility as they decide they want to use Google or Microsoft or AWS or IBM for a particular workload that their existing investment to Hortonworks doesn't prevent them from facilitating. It moves that data and those workloads. >> That's right. The fact that we want to help them do that, a lot of our customers have, I'll call it a multi-cloud strategy. They want to be able to work with an Amazon or a Google or any of the other vendors in the space equally well and have the ability to move workloads around and that's one of the things that we can help them with. >> One of the things you also did yesterday on the main stage, was you talked about this conference in the greater context of the world and what's going on right now. This is happening against the backdrop of the World Cup, and you said that this is really emblematic of data because this is a game, a tournament that generates tons of data. >> A tremendous amount of data. >> It's showing how data can launch new business models, disrupt old ones. Where do you think we're at right now? For someone who's been in this industry for a long time, just lay the scene. >> I think we're still very much at the beginning. Even though the conference has been around for awhile, the technology has been. It's emerging so fast and just evolving so fast that we're still at the beginning of all the transformations. I've been listening to the customer presentations here and all of them are at some point along the journey. Many are really still starting. Even in some of the polls that we had today talked about the fact that they're very much at the beginning of their journey with things like streaming or some of the A.I. machine learning technologies. They're at various stages, so I believe we're really at the beginning of the transformation that we'll see. >> That reminds me of another detail of your product portfolio or your architecture streaming and edge deployments are also in the future for many of your customers who still primarily do analytics on data at rest. You made an investment in a number of technologies NiFi from streaming. There's something called MiNiFi that has been discussed here at this show as an enabler for streaming all the way out to edge devices. What I'm getting at is that's indicative of Arun Murthy, one of your co-founders, has made- it was a very good discussion for us analysts and also here at the show. That is one of many investments you're making is to prepare for a future that will set workloads that will be more predominant in the coming decade. One of the new things I've heard this week that I'd not heard in terms of emphasis from you guys is more of an emphasis on data warehousing as an important use case for HDP in your portfolios, specifically with HIVE. The HIVE 3.0 now in- HDP3.0. >> Yes. >> With the enhancements to HIVE to support more real time and low latency, but also there's ACID capabilities there. I'm hearing something- what you guys are doing is consistent with one of your competitors, Cloudera. They're going deeper into data warehousing too because they recognize they've got to got there like you do to be able to absorb more of your customers' workloads. I think that's important that you guys are making that investment. You're not just big data, you're all data and all data applications. Potentially, if your customers want to go there and engage you. >> Yes. >> I think that was a significant, subtle emphasis that me as an analyst noticed. >> Thank you. There were so many enhancements in 3.0 that were brought from the community that it was hard to talk about everything in depth, but you're right. The enhancements to HIVE in terms of performance have really enabled it to take on a greater set of workloads and inner activity that we know that our customers want. The advantage being that you have a common data layer in the back end and you can run all this different work. It might be data warehousing, high speed query workloads, but you can do it on that same data with Spark and data-science related workloads. Again, it's that common pool backend of the data lake and having that ability to do it with common security and governance. It's one of the benefits our customers are telling us they really appreciate. >> One of the things we've also heard this morning was talking about data analytics in terms of brand value and brand protection importantly. Fedex, exactly. Talking about, the speaker said, we've all seen these apology commercials. What do you think- is it damage control? What is the customer motivation here? >> Well a company can have billions of dollars of market cap wiped out by breeches in security, and we've seen it. This is not theoretical, these are actual occurrences that we've seen. Really, they're trying to protect the brand and the business and continue to be viable. They can get knocked back so far that it can take years to recover from the impact. They're looking at the security aspects of it, the governance of their data, the regulations of GVPR. These things you've mentioned have real financial impact on the businesses, and I think it's brand and the actual operations and finances of the businesses that can be impacted negatively. >> When you're thinking about Hortonworks's marketing messages going forward, how do you want to be described now, and then how do you want customers to think of you five or 10 years from now? >> I want them to think of us as a partner to help us with their data journey, on all aspects of their data journey, whether they're collecting data from the EDGE, you mentioned NiFi and things like that. Bringing that data back, processing it in motion, as well as processing it in rest, regardless of where that data lands. On premise, in the cloud, somewhere in between, the hybrid, multi-cloud strategy. We really want to be thought of as their partner in their data journey. That's really what we're doing. >> Even going forward, one of the things you were talking about earlier is the company's sort of saying, "we want to be boring. We want to help you do all the stuff-" >> There's a lot of money in boring. >> There's a lot of money, right! Exactly! As you said, a partner in their data journey. Is it "we'll do anything and everything"? Are you going to do niche stuff? >> That's a good question. Not everything. We are focused on the data layer. The movement of data, the process and storage, and truly the analytic applications that can be built on top of the platform. Right now we've stuck to our strategy. It's been very consistent since the beginning of the company in terms of taking these open source technologies, making them enterprise viable, developing an eco-system around it and fostering a community around it. That's been our strategy since before the company even started. We want to continue to do that and we will continue to do that. There's so much innovation happening in the community that we quickly bring that into the products and make sure that's available in a trusted, enterprise-tested platform. That's really one of the things we see our customers- over and over again they select us because we bring innovation to them quickly, in a safe and consumable way. >> Before we came on camera, I was telling Rebecca that Hortonworks has done a sensational job of continuing to align your product roadmaps with those of your leading partners. IBM, AWS, Microsoft. In many ways, your primary partners are not them, but the entire open source community. 26 open source projects in which Hortonworks represents and incorporated in your product portfolio in which you are a primary player and committer. You're a primary ingester of innovation from all the communities in which you operate. >> We do. >> That is your core business model. >> That's right. We both foster the innovation and we help drive the information ourselves with our engineers and architects. You're absolutely right, Jim. It's the ability to get that innovation, which is happening so fast in the community, into the product and companies need to innovate. Things are happening so fast. Moore's Law was mentioned multiple times on the main stage, you know, and how it's impacting different parts of the organization. It's not just the technology, but business models are evolving quickly. We heard a little bit about Trumble, and if you've seen Tim Leonard's talk that he gave around what they're doing in terms of logistics and the ability to go all the way out to the farmer and impact what's happening at the farm and tracking things down to the level of a tomato or an egg all the way back and just understand that. It's evolving business models. It's not just the tech but the evolution of business models. Rob talked about it yesterday. I think those are some of the things that are kind of key. >> Let me stay on that point really quick. Industrial internet like precision agriculture and everything it relates to, is increasingly relying on visual analysis, parts and eggs and whatever it might be. That is convolutional neural networks, that is A.I., it has to be trained, and it has to be trained increasingly in the cloud where the data lives. The data lives in H.D.P, clusters and whatnot. In many ways, no matter where the world goes in terms of industrial IoT, there will be massive cluster of HTFS and object storage driving it and also embedded A.I. models that have to follow a specific DevOps life cycle. You guys have a strong orientation in your portfolio towards that degree of real-time streaming, as it were, of tasks that go through the entire life cycle. From the preparing the data, to modeling, to training, to deploying it out, to Google or IBM or wherever else they want to go. So I'm thinking that you guys are in a good position for that as well. >> Yeah. >> I just wanted to ask you finally, what is the takeaway? We're talking about the attendees, talking about the community that you're cultivating here, theme, ideas, innovation, insight. What do you hope an attendee leaves with? >> I hope that the attendee leaves educated, understanding the technology and the impacts that it can have so that they will go back and change their business and continue to drive their data projects. The whole intent is really, and we even changed the format of the conference for more educational opportunities. For me, I want attendees to- a satisfied attendee would be one that learned about the things they came to learn so that they could go back to achieve the goals that they have when they get back. Whether it's business transformation, technology transformation, some combination of the two. To me, that's what I hope that everyone is taking away and that they want to come back next year when we're in Washington, D.C. and- >> My stomping ground. >> His hometown. >> Easy trip for you. They'll probably send you out here- (laughs) >> Yeah, that's right. >> Well John, it's always fun talking to you. Thank you so much. >> Thank you very much. >> We will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of DataWorks right after this. I'm Rebecca Knight for James Kobielus. (upbeat electro music)