>> Announcer: Live from midtown Manhattan, it's the Cube, covering big data New York City 2017. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media and its ecosystem sponsors. >> Welcome back everyone, we're here live in New York City for the week, three days of wall to wall coverage of big data NYC, it's big data week here in conjunction with Strata Adup, Strata Data which is an event running right around the corner, this is the Cube, I'm John Furrier with my cohost, Peter Burris, our next guest Jacque Istok who's the head of data at Pivotal. Welcome to the Cube, good to see you again. >> Likewise. >> You guys had big news we covered at VMware, obviously the Kubernetes craze is fantastic, you're starting to see cloud native platforms front and center even in some of these operational worlds like in cloud, data you guys have been here a while with Green Plum and Pivotal's been adding more to the data suite, so you guys are a player in this ecosystem. >> Correct. >> As it grows to be much more developer-centric and enterprise-centric and AI-centric, what's the update? >> I'd like to talk about a couple things, just three quick things here, one focused primarily on simplicity, first and foremost as you said, there's a lot of things going on on the cloud foundry side, a lot of things that we're doing with Kubernetes, etc., super exciting. I will say Tony Berge has written a nice piece about Green Plum in Zitinet, essentially calling Green Plum the best kept secret in the analytic database world. Why I think that's important is, what isn't really well known is that over the period of Pivotal's history, the last four and a half years, we focused really heavily on the cloud foundry side, on dev/ops, on getting users to actually be able to publish code. What we haven't talked about as much is what we're doing on the data side and I find it very interesting to repeatedly tell analysts and customers that the Green Plum business has been and continues to be a profitable business unit within Pivotal, so as we're growing on the cloud foundry side, we're continuing to grow a business that many of the organizations that I see here at Strata are still looking to get to, that ever forgotten profitability zone. >> There's a legacy around Green Plum, I'm not going to say they pivoted, pun intended, Pivotal. There's been added stuff around Green Plum, Green Plum might get lost in the messaging because it's been now one of many ingredients, right? >> It's true and when we formed Pivotal, I think there were 34 some different skews that we have now focused in on over the last two years or so. What's super exciting is again, over that time period, one of the things that we took to heart within the Green Plum side is this idea of extreme agile. As you guys know, Pivotal Labs being the core part of the Pivotal mission helps our customers figure out how to actually build software. We finally are drinking our own champagne and over the last year and a half of Green Plum R&D, we're shipping code, a complete data platform, we're shipping that on a cadence of about four to five weeks which again, a little bit unheard of in the industry, being able to move at that pace. We work through the backlog and what is also super exciting and I'm glad that you guys are able to help me tell the world, we released version five last week. Version five is actually the only parallel open source data platform that actually has native ANSI compliance SQL and I feel a little bit like I've rewound the clock 15 years where I have to actually throw in the ANSI compliance, but I think that in a lot of ways, there are SQL alternatives that are out there in the world. They are very much not ANSI compliant and that hurts. >> It's a nuance but it's table stakes in the enterprise. ANSI compliance is just, >> There's a reason you want to be ANSI compliant, because there's a whole swath of analytic applications mainly in the data warehouse world, that were built using ANSI compliant SQL, so why do this with version five? I presume it's got to have something to do with you want to start capturing some of those applications and helping customers modernize. >> That is correct. I think the SQL piece is one part of the data platform, of really a modern data platform. The other parts are again, becoming table stakes. Being able to do text analytics, we've backed Apache Solar within Green Plum, being able to do graph analytics or spatial analytics, anything from classifications, regressions, all of that, actually becomes table stakes and we feel that enterprises have suffered a little bit over the last five or six years. They've had this promise of having a new platform that they can leverage for doing interesting new things, machine learning, AI, etc. but the existing stuff that they were trying to do has been super, super hard. What we're trying to do is bridge those together and provide both in the same platform, out of the gate so that customers can actually use it immediately and I think one of the things we've seen is there's about 1000 to one SQL experienced individuals within the enterprise versus say Haduk experience in individuals. The other thing that I think is actually super important and almost bigger than everything else I talked about is we're the, a lot of the old school postgres deriviants of MBD databases forked their databases at some point in postgres's history, for a variety of reasons from licensing to when they started. Green Plum's no different. We forked right around eight dot too with this last release of version five, we've actually up leveled the postgres base within Green Plum's 8.3. Now in and of itself, it doesn't sound, >> What does that mean? >> We are now taking a 100% commitment both to open source and both to the postgres community. I think if you look at postgres today, in its latest versions, it is a full fledged, mission critical database that can be used anywhere. What we feel is that if we can bring our core engineering developments around parallelism, around analytics and combine that with postgres itself, then we don't have to implement all of the low level database things that a lot of our competitors have to do. What's unique about it is one, Green Plum continues to be open source, which again most of our competitors are not, two if you look at primarily what they're doing, nobody's got that level of commitment to the postgres community which means all of their resources are going to be stuck building core database technology, even building that ANSI SQL compliance in, which we'll get "for free" which will let us focus on things like machine learning, artificial intelligence. >> Just give a quick second and tell about the relevance of postgres because of the success, first of all it's massive, it's everywhere, but it's not going anywhere. Just give a quick, for the audience watching, what's the relevance of it. >> Sure like you said, it is everywhere. It is the most full featured, actual database in the open source community. Arguably my SQL has "more" market share, but my SQL projects that generally leverage them are not used for mission critical enterprise applications. Being able to have parity allows us not only to have that database technology baked into Green Plum, but it also gives us all of the community stuff with it. Everything from being able to leverage the most recent ODBC and JDBC libraries, but also integrations into everything from the post GIS travert for geospatial to being able to connect to other types of data sources, etc. >> It's a big community, shows that it's successful, but again, >> And it doesn't come in a red box. >> It does not come in a red box, that is correct. >> Which is not a bad thing. Look, postgres as a technology was developed a long time ago, largely in response to think about analytics and transaction, or analytics and operating applications might have actually come to and we're now living in a world where we can actually see the hardware and a lot of practices, etc. are beginning to find ways where this may start to happen. With Green Plum and postgres both MPP based, so your, by going to this, you're able to stay more modern, more up to date on all the new technology that's coming together to support these richer, more complex classes of applications. >> You're spot on, I suppose I would argue that postgres, I feel came up with as a response to Oracle in the past of, we need an open source alternative to Oracle, but other than that, 100% correct. >> There was always a difference between postgres and MySQL, MySQL always was okay, that's that, let's do that open source, postgres coming out of Berkeley and coming out of some other places, always had a slightly different notion of the types of problems it was going to take on. >> 100% correct, 100%. But to your question before, what does this all mean to customers, I think the one thing that version five really gives us the confidence to say is, and a lot of times I hate lobbing when the ball's out like this, but we welcome and embrace with open arms any terradata customers out there that are looking to save millions if not tens of millions of dollars on a modern platform that can actually run not only on premise, not only on bare metal, but virtually and off premise. We're truly the only MPP platform, the only open source MPP data platform that can allow you to build analytics and move those analytics from Amazon to Azure to back on prem. >> Talk about this, the terradata thing for a second, I want to get down and double click on that. Customers don't want to change code, so what specifically are you guys offering terradata customers specifically. With the release of version five, with a lot of the development that we've done and some of the partnering that we've done, we are now able to take without changing a line of code of your terradata applications, you load the data within the Green Plum platform, you can point those applications directly to Green Plum and run them unchanged, so I think in the past, the reticence to move to any other platform was really the amount of time it would take to actually redevelop all of the stuff that you had. We offer an ability to go from an immediate ROI to a platform that again, bridges that gap, allows you to really be modern. >> Peter, I want to talk to you about that importance that we just said because you've been studying the private cloud report, true private cloud which is on premises, coming from a cloud operating model, automating away undifferentiated labor and shipping that to differentiated labor, but this brings up what customers want in hybrid cloud and ultimately having public cloud and private cloud so hybrid sits there. They don't want to change their code basis, this is a huge deal. >> Obviously a couple things to go along with what Jacque said. The first thing is that you're right, people want the data to run where the data naturally needs to run or should run, that's the big argument about public versus hybrid versus what we call true private cloud. The idea that decreasing the workload needs to be located where the data, where it naturally should be located because of the physical, legal, regulatory, intellectual property attributes of the data, being able to do that is really really important. The other thing that Jacque said that goes right into this question John, is that ultimately in too many domains in this analytics world, which is fundamentally predicated on the idea of breaking data out of applications so that you can use it in new and novel and more value creating ways, is that the data gets locked up in a data warehouse. What's valuable in a data warehouse is not the hardware. It's the data. By providing the facility for being able to point an application at a couple of different data source including one that's more modern, or which takes advantage of more modern technology, that can be considerably cheaper, it means the shop can elevate the story about the asset and the asset here is the data and the applications that run against it, not the hardware and the system where the data's stored and located. One of the biggest challenges, we talked earlier just to go on for a second, we talked earlier with a couple of other guests about the fact that the industry still, what your average person still doesn't understand how to value data. How to establish a data asset and one of the reasons is because it's so constantly co-mingled with the underlying hardware. >> And actually I'd even further go on, I think the advent of some of these cloud data warehouses forgets that notion of being able to run it different places and provides one of the things that customers are really looking for which is simplicity. The ability to spin up a quick MPP SQL system within say Amazon for example, almost without a doubt, a lot of the business users that I speak to are willing to sacrifice capabilities within the platform which they are for the simplicity of getting up and going. One of the things that we really focused on in V5 is being able to give that same turnkey feel and so Green Plum exists within the Amazon marketplace, within the Azure marketplace, Google later this quarter, and then in addition to the simplicity, it has all of the functionality that is missing in those platforms, again, all the analytics, all the ability to reach out and federate queries against different types of data, I think it's exciting as we continue to progress in our releases, Green Plum has, for a number of years, had this ability to seamlessly query HGFS. Like a lot of the competitors, but HGFS isn't going away, neither is a generic object store like S3. But we continue to extend that to things like Spark for example, so now the ability to actually house your data within a data platform and seamlessly integrate with Spark back and forth, if you want to use Spark, use Spark, but somewhere that data needs to be materialized so that other applications can leverage it as well. >> But even then people have been saying well, if you want to put it on this disk, then put it on this disk. Given the question about Spark versus another database manager is a higher level conversation than many of the shops who are investing millions and millions and millions of dollars in their analytic application portfolio and all you're trying to do is, as I interpret it, is trying to say look, the value in the portfolio is the applications and the data. It's not the underlying elements. There's a whole bunch of new elements we can use, you can put it in the cloud, you can put it on premise if that's where the data belongs. Use some of these new and evolving technologies, but you're focused on how the data and the applications continue to remain valuable to the business over time and not the traditional hardware assets. >> Correct and I'll again leverage a notion that we get from labs, which is this idea of user centric design and so everything that we've been putting into the Green Plum database is around, ideally the four primary users of our system. Not just the analysts and not just the data scientists, but also the operators and the IT folks. That is where I'd say the last tenant of where we're going really is this idea of coopetition. I would, as the Pivotal Green Plum guy that's been around for 10 plus years, I would tell you very straight up that we are again, an open source MPP data platform that can rival any other platform out there, whether it's terradata, whether it's Haduke, we can beat that platform. >> Why should customers call you up? Why should they call you? There's all this other stuff out there, you got legacy, you got terradata, might have other things, people are knocking at my door, they're getting pounded with sales messages, buy me I'm better than the other guy. Why Pivotal data? >> The first thing I would say is, the latest reviews from Gardner for example, well actually let me rewind. I will easily argue that terradata has been the data warehouse platform for the last 30 years that everyone has tried to emulate. I'd even argue so much as that when Haduke came on the scene eight years ago, what they did was they changed the dynamics and what they're doing now is actually trying to emulate the terradata success through things like SQL on top of Haduke. What that has basically gotten us to is we're looking for a terradata replacement at Haduke like prices, that's what Green Plum has to offer in spades. Now, if you actually extend that just a little bit, I still recognize that not everybody's going to call us, there are still 200 other vendors out there that are selling a similar product or similar kinds of stories. What I would tell you in response to those folks is that Green Plum has been around in production for the last 10 plus years, we're a proven technology for solving problems, many of those are not. We work very well in this cooperative spirit of, Green Plum can be the end all be all, but I recognize it's not going to be the end all be all so this is why we have to work within the ecosystem. >> You have to, open source is dominating. At the Linux event, we just covered open source summit, 90% of software written will be open source libraries, 10% is where the value's being added. >> For sure, if you were to start up a new star up right now, would you go with a commercial product? >> No, just postgres database is good. All right final question to end the segment. This big data space that's now being called data, certainly Strata, Haduke is now Strata Data, just trying to keep that show going longer. But you got Microsoft Azure making a lot of waves going on right now with Microsoft Ignite, so cloud is into the play here, data's changed, so the question is how has this industry changed over the past eight years. You go back to 2010, I saw Green Plum coming prior to even getting bought out, but they were kicking ass, same product evolved. Where has the space gone? What's happened, how would you summarize it to someone who's walking in for the first year like hey back in the old days, we used to walk to school in the snow with no shoes on both ways. Now it's like get off my lawn you young developers. Seriously what is the evolution of that, how would you explain it? >> Again, I would start with terradata started the industry, by far and then folks like Netease and Green Plum came around to really give a lower cost alternative. Haduke came on the scene eight some years ago, and what I pride myself in being at Green Plum for this long and Green Plum implemented the map produced paradigm as Haduke was starting to build and as it continued to build, we focused on building our own distribution and SQL and Haduke, I think what we're getting down to is the brass tacks of the business is tired of technological science experiments and they just want to get stuff done. >> And a cost of ownership that's manageable. >> And sustainable. >> And sustainable and not in a spot where they're going to be locked into a single vendor, hence the open source. >> The ones that are winning today employed what strategy that ended up working out and what strategy didn't end up working out, if you go back and say, the people who took this path failed, people who took this approach won. What's the answer there? >> Clearly anybody who was an appliance that has long since drifted. I'd also say Green Plum's in this unique position where, >> An appliance too though. >> Well, pseudo appliance yes, I still have to respond to that, we were always software. >> You pivoted luckily. >> But putting that aside, the hardware vendors have gone away, all of the software competitors that we had have actually either been sunset, sold off and forgotten and so Green Plum, here we sit as the sole standard or person that's been around for the long haul. We are now seeing a spot where we have no competition other than the forgotten really legacy guys like terradata. People are longing to get off of legacy and onto something modern, the trick will be whether that modern is some of these new and upcoming players and technologies, or whether it really focuses on solving problems. >> What's the strategy with the winning strategy? Stick to your knitting, stick to what you know or was it more of, >> For us it was two fold, one it was continuing to service our customers and make them successful so that was how we built a profitable data platform business and then the other was to double down on the strategies that seemed to be interesting to organizations which were cloud, open source, and analytics and like you said, I talked to one of the folks over at the Air Force and he was mentioning how to him, data's actually more important than fuel, being able to understand where the airplanes are, where the fuel is, where the people are, where the missiles are etc., that's actually more important than the fuel itself. Data is the thing that powers everything. >> Data's currency of everything now, great Jacque thinks so much for coming on the Cube, Pivotal Data Platform, Data Suite, Green Plum now with all these other adds, that's great congratulations. Stay on the path helping customers, you can't lose. >> Exactly. >> The Cube here helping you figure out the big data noise, we're obviously in big data New York City event for our annual, the annual Cube Wikibon event, in conjunction with Strata Data across the street, more live coverage here for three days here in New York City I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris, we'll be back after this short break. (electronic music)