>> Narrator: Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE covering PentahoWorld 2017. Brought to you by Hitachi Vantara. >> Welcome back to sunny Orlando everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, and this is our second day covering PentahoWorld 2017. theCUBE was here in 2015 when Pentaho had just been recently acquired by Hitachi. We then, let's see, around September timeframe we saw Hitachi rebrand, Hitachi Data Systems rebrand as Hitachi Vantara, bringing together three components of its business, the Hitachi Data Systems business, the Hitachi Insights business, and of course, the Pentaho Analytics platform. We heard yesterday from Brian Householder, the president and COO of Hitachi Vantara, what the strategy was. I thought he was a very crisp, clear presenter. The strategy made a lot of sense, it resonated. Obviously a lot of execution to be done. And then subsequently at the last two days we've heard largely from Pentaho practitioners who are applying this end to end analytics platform to really transform their businesses, to really become data driven supporting those digital transformations. So pretty positive story overall. A lot of work to be done. We got to see how this whole edge to outcome plays out. Sounds good. There's got to be some execution there. We got to see the ecosystem grow for sure. These guys got a great story. This conference should explode. >> It's really a validation for Pentaho. They've been on the market for more than a decade now as the spearhead for the open source analytics revolution in business analytics, and in predictive modeling, and in data integration, all of it open source. And they've come very far and they're really a blue chip solution program. I think this show has been a great validation of Pentaho's portfolio presence in the market. Now Hitachi Vantara has a gem of a core asset. Clearly, the storage market, the data center converged infrastructure, the core Hitachi Data Systems product lines, are starting to experience the low growth that such a mature space experiences. And clearly they're placing a strong bet on Hitachi Vantara that the IoT, that the edge analytics market, will just boom wide open. Hitachi Insight Group, which was only created last year by their corporate parent, was chartered to explore opportunities in IoT. They've got the Lumata platform. They had, Hitachi Next, their conference last month, focused on IoT. I think that's really the capstone, the Lumata portfolio, in this overall story. Now, I think what we're hearing this week is that great, they've got the components, the building blocks, of potential growth, but I don't think they're going to be able to achieve takeoff growth until such time, Hitachi Vantara, they have a stronger, more credible reach out to the developer community, specifically the developers who are building the AI and machine learning for deployment to the edge. That will require to have credibility in that space. Clearly it's going to have to be the new set of frameworks, such as TensorFlow, and MXNet, and Fee-an-o, and so forth. They're going to need some sort of a modeling framework or abstraction from it that sits on top of the Pentaho platform or really across all of their offerings, including Lumata, and enables a developer to using, the mainstream application developer to use code, whether it be Python or R or Java, whatever, to build the deep learning and AI models at the highest level of abstraction, the business level of abstraction, then to automatically compile those models, which are computational graphs, down to formats that are optimized and efficient to run on devices of all sorts, chip sets of all sorts, that are increasingly resource constrained. They're not there yet. I'm not hearing that overall developer story at this show. I think they've got a lot of smart people, including Brian, pushing them in that direction. Hopefully next year's PentahoWorld or however they may rebrand this show, I think they'll probably have more of that put together, but we'll keep on waiting to see. >> And that's something that I pushed on a little bit this week. In particular, that requires a whole new go to market where the starting point is developers and then you're nurturing those developers. And certainly Pentaho has experience with community editions, but that was more to get enterprise buyers to kind of try before they buy. As you know well, Jim, the developer community is, they're very fickle, they're persnickety, they're demanding, and they're super smart, and they can be your best advocates or they'll just ignore you. That's just kind of the way it is with developers. And if you can appeal to them you can get a foothold in markets. We've seen it. Look at what Microsoft has done, look at what Amazon has done, certainly Docker, you know, on and on and on. >> Community marketing that's full bore (mumbles) user groups, developer days, hackathons, the whole nine yards, I'm not seeing a huge emphasis on community marketing in that really evangelistic sense. They need to go there seriously. They need to win the hearts and minds of the next generation developer, the next generation developer who actually won't care about whether it's TensorFlow backends or the other ones. What they will care is the high level framework, and really a collaborative framework, that's a solution provider gives them for their teams to collaborate on building and training and deploying all this stuff. I'm not hearing from this solution provider, devops really, here this year. Hopefully in the coming years there will be. Other vendors are a bit further along than they are. We see a bit further along IBM is. We see a bit further along like Cloudera and others are in putting together really a developer friendly ecosystem of components within a broader data lake framework. >> Yeah, and that's not been the historical Pentaho DNA. However, as you know, to reach out, have a community effort to reach out to developers requires resources and commitment, and it's not a one shot deal. But, it also requires a platform, and what we're seeing today is the formation of that. The reformation of Hitachi into Hitachi Vantara with a lot of resources that has a vision of a platform, of which Pentaho is a critical component, but it's going to take a lot of effort, a lot of cultivating. I presume they're having those conversations internally. They're not ready to have them externally, which is I presume why they're not having them. But that's something that we're going to certainly watch for in the coming years. What else? You gave a talk this afternoon. >> Yeah, AI is Eating the Edge, and it was well received. In fact, when I prepared my thoughts and my research about a month ago for this event I was thinking, "Am I way too far ahead?" This is Pentaho. I've been of course familiar with them since their inception. I thought, "Are there other users? "Are there developers? "Is their community going deep into AI "and all the IoT stuff?" And the last day or so here at this event it's like, "Whoa, everybody here is into that. "They know this stuff." So, not only was I relieved that I wouldn't have to explain the ABCs of all that, they were ahead of me in terms of the questions I got. The questions are, once again, what framework should we adopt for AI, the whole TensorFlow, all those framework wars, which I think are sort of overblown and they will be fairly soon, it'll be irrelevant, but those kinds of questions. Those are actually developer level questions that people are just here and they're coming to me with. >> Well, you know, I tell you, I'm no expert in frameworks, but my advice would be whatever framework you adopt you're probably not going to be using that same framework down the road. So you have to be flexible as an organization. A lot of technical leaders tell me this is look, technology is going to come and it's going to go. We got to have great people. We've got to be able to respond to the market requirements. We have to have processes that allow us to be proactive and responsive, and that your choice of framework should ensure that it doesn't constrict you in those areas. >> And you know, the framework that actually appeals to this crowd, including the people in my room, it's a wiki bot framework, it's also what Brian Hopkins of Forrester presented, the three tier architecture. There's the edge devices. There are the gateways or hubs. There's the cloud. We call them primary, secondary, tertiaries. Whatever you call them, you put different data, you put different analytics on each of those tiers. And then really in many ways in a modular fashion then you begin to orchestrate with Kubernetes and so forth these AI infused apps and these distributed architectures, like self driving vehicles or whatever. And the buzz I've been getting here, including in my session, everybody is saying, "Yeah, that's exactly the way to go." In other words, thinking in those terms prevents you as a developer from thinking that AI has to be some monolithic frigging stack on one single node. No, it actually has to be massively parallel and distributed, because these are potentially very compute intensive applications. I think there's a growing realization in the developer community that when you're talking about developing AI you're really talking about developing two core workloads. There's the inferencing, which is where the magic happens in terms of predictions and classifications, but even more resource consumptive is the training that has to happen in the cloud, and that's data, that's exabytes, petabytes intensive potentially. That's compute intensive. Very different workload. That definitely needs to happen in the cloud primarily. There's a little bit of federated training that goes out to the edge, but that's really the exception right now. So there's a growing realization in the developer community that boy, we better get a really good platform for training. And actually they could leverage, we've seen it in our research of wiki bot is that, many AI developers, many deep learning developers, actually leverage their Spark clusters for training of TensorFlow and so forth, because of in memory massive parallelism, so forth and so on. I think there will be a growing realization in the developer community that the investments they've been making in Hadoop and Spark will just be leveraged for this growing stack, for training if nothing else. >> Well, in 8.0 that was sort of the big buzz here. And you and I talked at the open with Rebecca, our other co-host, about 8.0 A lot of incremental improvements. But you know what, in talking to customers that's kind of what they want. They want Pentaho to do a good job of incorporating, curating, open source content, open source platforms and products, bringing them into their system, and making sure that their customers can take advantage of them. That's what they consistently kept asking for. They weren't freaked out about lack of AI and lack of deep learning and ML and Weka is fine. Now maybe it's a blind spot, I don't know. >> No, no, actually I've had 24 hours since they announced to chew on it. In fact, I have a SiliconANGLE article going up fairly soon with essentially my trip report and my basic takeaway. And actually what I like about 8.0 is that it focuses on streaming, bringing open source analytic streaming more completely into the Pentaho data integration platform, in other words, their stronger interoperability with Spark streaming, with Kafka, and so forth, but also they have the ability within 8.0 to better match realtime streaming workloads to execution engines in a distributed fabric. In other words, what I think that represents not only in terms of Hitachi Vantara's portfolio, but in terms of where the industry is going with all things to do with big data applications whether or not they involve AI is streaming is coming into the mainstream, pun intended, and data at rest platforms are starting to become marginalized in a lot of applications. In other words, Hadoop is data at rest par excellence, so are a fair number of other no SQL platforms. Those are not going away. Those are the core of your data lakes. But most development is being developed now, most AI and machine learning is being developed for streaming environments that increasingly are edge oriented. So Pentaho, Hitachi Vantara, for 8.0 have put in the right incremental features for the market that lies ahead. So in many ways I think that was actually a well thought out release for this particular event. >> Great. Okay, some of the highlights here. We had a lot of different industries, gaming, we had experts on autonomous vehicles, we had the NASDAQ guys on, that was a very interesting segment, the German police interview you did, the chief data officer of community colleges in Indiana. So, a lot of diversity, which underscores the platformness of Pentaho. It's not some industry specific system. It is a horizontal capabilities platform. Final thoughts on the show, some interesting things that you saw, things you learned? >> Yeah, on the show itself, they did a really good job. Hitachi Vantara, of course it's a new brand, but it's an old company, and it's even an old established set of product teams that have come together in a hurry essentially, though it's really been two years since the acquisition. They did a really good job of presenting a unified go to market message. That's a good start They've done a good job of the fact that they had these two shows in a rapid sequence, Hitachi Next, which was IoT and Lumata, but it was Hitachi Vantara, and now this one where it's all data analytics. The fact that here in the peak of fall event season they had these two shows really highlighting their innovations and their romance for those two core of their portfolio, and have done a good job of positioning themselves in each case, that shows that the teams are orchestrating well in terms of at least go to market presenting their value prop. I think in terms of the actual, we've had a lot of great customer and partner interviews on this show. And I think, you mentioned gaming first, I wasn't actually on the gaming related CUBE interview, but gaming is a hot, of course it's a hot, hot market for AI increasingly. A lot of AI that gets developed now for lots of applications involves simulations of whatever scenario you're building, including like autonomous vehicles. So gaming is in many ways a set of practices that are well established and mature that are becoming fundamental to development of all AI, because you're developing synthetic data based on simulation environments. The fact that Hitachi Vantara has strong presence as a data provider in the gaming market I think in many ways indicates that they've got ... It's a crowded marketplace. They have much larger competitors and deeper pocketed, but I think the fact is they've got all the piece parts needed to be a roaring success in this new era, and they've got strong and very loyal customers I'm discovering, not discovering, I've known this all along. But, since I've rejoined the analysts' space it's been revalidated that Pentaho how strong in blue chip they are. Now that they're a new brand in a new era, they're turning themselves around fairly well. I don't think that they'll be isolated by ... Clearly, I mean, with AI ... AI right now belongs to AWS and Microsoft and Google and IBM to some degree. We have to recognize that the Hitachi Vantaras of the world right now are still a second tier in that arena. They probably have to hitch their wagon to at least one of those core cloud providers as a core partner going forward to really prevail. >> Dave: Which they can do. >> Yeah, they can do. >> Alright. Jim, thanks very much for closing with me. Thanks to you all for watching. theCUBE puts out a lot of content. You can go to SiliconAngle.com to see all the news. theCUBE.net is where we host all these videos. Wikibon.com is our research site, so check that out, as well. We've got CrowdChats going on, CrowdChat.net. It's just unbelievable. >> Unbelievable. >> Rush of content. We're all about the data, we're all about sharing, so check those sites out. Thanks very much to the crew here. Great job. And next week a lot going on. We're in New York City. We've got some stuff going on there. Want to thank our sponsor, without whom this show, this CUBE show, would not be possible, Hitachi Vantara slash Pentaho. >> Thank you to sunny Orlando. It's great and wonderful. >> This has been theCUBE at PentahoWorld 2017. We'll see you next time. Thanks for watching. (techno music)