>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston,
connecting with top leaders all around the world,
this is theCUBE Conversation.
>> Hi everybody, I'm Dave Vellante,
and welcome to the Vertica Big Data Conference virtual.
This is our digital presentation, wall to wall coverage
actually, of the Vertica Big Data Conference.
And with me is Jeff Healy,
who directs product marketing at Vertica.
Jeff, good to see you.
>> Good to see you, Dave.
Thanks for the opportunity to chat.
>> You're very welcome
Now I'm excited about the products that you guys announced
and you're hardcore into product marketing,
but we're going to talk about the Vertica Big Data Conference.
It's been a while since you guys had this.
Obviously, new owner, new company, some changes,
but that new company Microfocus has
announced that it's investing, I think the number was
$70 million into two areas.
One was security and the other, of course, was Vertica.
So we're really excited to be back
at the virtual Big Data Conference.
And let's hear it from you, what are your thoughts?
>> Yeah, Dave, thanks.
And we love having theCUBE at all of these events.
We're thrilled to have the next Vertica Big Data Conference.
Actually it was a physical event, we're moving it online.
We know it's going to be a big hit
because we've been doing this for some time particularly
with two of the webcast series we have every month.
One is under the Hood Webcast Series,
which is led by our engineers and
the other is what we call a Data Disruptors Webcast Series,
which is led by all customers.
So we're really confident this is going to be a big hit
we've seen the registration spike.
We just hit 1,000 and we're planning on having
about 1,000 at the physical event.
It's growing and growing.
We're going to see those big numbers
and it's not going to be a one time thing.
We're going to keep the conversation going,
make sure there's plenty of best practices learning
throughout the year.
>> We've been at all the big BDCs
and the first one's were really in the heart
of the Big Data Movement, really exciting time
and the interesting thing about this event
is it was always sort of customers talking to customers.
There wasn't a lot of commercials, an intimate event.
Of course I loved it because it was in our hometown.
But I think you're trying to carry that theme
obviously into the digital sphere.
Maybe you can talk about that a little bit.
>> Yeah, Dave, absolutely right.
Of course, nothing replaces face to face,
but everything that you just mentioned
that makes it special about the Big Data Conference,
and you know, you guys have been there throughout
and shown great support in talking to so many customers
and leaders and what have you.
We're doing the same thing all right.
So we had about 40 plus sessions planned
for the physical event.
We're going to run half of those
and we're not going to lose anything though,
that's the key point.
So what makes the Vertica Big Data Conference really special
is that the only presenters that are allowed to present
are either engineers, Vertica engineers,
or best practices engineers and then customers.
Customers that actually use the product.
There's no sales or marketing pitches or anything like that.
And I'll tell you as far as the customer line up
that we have, we've got five or six already lined up
as part of those 20 sessions, customers like Uber,
customers like the Trade Desk,
customers like Phillips talking about
predictive maintenance, so list goes on and on.
You won't want to miss it if you're on the fence
or if you're trying to figure out if you want to
register for this event.
Best part about it, it's all free,
and if you can't attend it live,
it will be live Q&A chat
on every single one of those sessions,
we promise we'll answer every question
if we don't get it live, as we always do.
They'll all be available on demand.
So no reason not to register and attend or watch later.
>> Thinking about the content over the years,
in the early days of the Big Data Conference,
of course Vertica started
before the whole Big Data Conference meme really took off
and then as it took off, plugged right into it,
but back then the discussion was a lot of
what do I do with big data,
Gartner's three Vs and how do I wrangle it all,
and what's the best approach and this stuff is,
Hadoop is really complicated.
Of course Vertica was an alternative to RDBMS
that really couldn't scale or give that type of performance
for analytical databases so you had your foot in that door.
But now the conversation that's interesting your theme,
it's win big with data.
Of course, the physical event was at the Encore,
which is the new Casino in Boston.
But my point is, the conversation is no longer about,
how to wrangle all this data, you know how to lower the cost
of storing this data, how to make it go faster,
and actually make it work.
It's really about how to turn data into insights
and transform your organizations and quote and quote,
win with big data.
>> That's right.
Yeah, that's great point, Dave.
And that's why I mean, we chose the title really,
because it's about our customers
and what they're able to do with our platform.
And it's we know, it's not just one platform,
all of the ecosystem, all of our incredible partners.
Yeah it's funny when I started with the organization
about seven years ago, we're closing lots of deals,
and I was following up on case studies and it was like,
Okay, why did you choose Vertica?
Well, the queries went fast.
Okay, so what does that mean for your business?
We knew we're kind of in the early adopter stage.
And we were disrupting the data warehouse market.
Now we're talking to our customers that
their volumes are growing, growing and growing.
And they really have these analytical use cases again,
talk to the value at the entire organization
is gaining from it.
Like that's the difference between now and a few years ago,
just like you were saying,
when Vertica disrupted the database market,
but also the data warehouse market,
you can speak to our customers and they can tell you
exactly what's happening, how it's moving the needle
or really advancing the entire organization,
regardless of the analytical use case,
whether it's an internet of things
around predictive maintenance,
or customer behavior analytics,
they can speak confidently of it more than just,
hey, our queries went faster.
>> You know, I've mentioned before
the Micro Focus investment, I want to drill into that a bit
because the Vertica brand stands alone.
It's a Micro Focus company, but Vertica
has its own sort of brand awareness.
The reason I've mentioned that is because
if you go back to the early days of MPP Database,
there was a spate of companies, startups that formed.
And many if not all of those got acquired,
some lived on with the Codebase, going into the cloud,
but generally speaking, many of those brands
have gone away Vertica stays.
And so my point is that we've seen Vertica
have staying power throughout,
I think it's a function of the architecture
that Stonebraker originally envisioned,
you guys were early on the market
had a lot of good customer traction,
and you've been very responsive to a lot of the trends.
Colin Mahony will talk about how you adopted
and really embrace cloud, for example,
and different data formats.
And so you've really been able to participate
in a lot of the new emerging waves
that have come out to the market.
And I would imagine some of that's cultural.
I wonder if you could just address that
in the context of BDC.
>> Oh, yeah, absolutely.
You hit on all the key points here, Dave.
So a lot of changes in the industry.
We're in the hottest industry, the tech industry right now.
There's lots of competition.
But one of the things we'll say in terms of,
Hey, who do you compete with?
You compete with these players in the cloud,
open source alternatives,
traditional enterprise data warehouses.
That's true, right.
And one of the things we've stayed true within calling
is really kind of led the charge for the organization
is that we know who we are right.
So we're an analytical database platform.
And we're constantly just working on that
one sole Source Code base, to make sure that
we don't provide a bunch of different technologies
and databases, and different types of technologies
need to stitch together.
This platform just has unbelievable universal capabilities
from everything from running analytics at scale,
to in Database Machine Learning with the different approach
to all different types of deployment models
that are supported, right.
We don't go to our companies and we say,
yeah, we take care of all your problems but you have to
stitch together all these different types of technologies.
It's all based on that core Vertica engine,
and we've expanded it to meet all these market needs.
So Colin knows and what he believes and what he tells
the team what we lead with, is that it lead with
that one core platform that can address
all these analytical initiatives.
So we know who we are, we continue to improve on it,
regardless of the pivots and the drastic measures
that some of the other competitors have taken.
>> You know, I got to ask you,
so we're in the middle of this global pandemic
with Coronavirus and COVID-19,
and things change daily by the hour sometimes by the minute.
I mean, every day you get up to something new.
So you see a lot of forecasts,
you see a lot of probability models, best case worst case
likely case even though nobody really knows
what that likely case looks like,
So there's a lot of analytics going on
and a lot of data that people are crunching
new data sources come in every day.
Are you guys participating directly in that,
specifically your customers?
Are they using your technology?
You can't use a traditional data warehouse for this.
It's just you know, too slow to asynchronous,
the process is cumbersome.
What are you seeing in the customer base
as it relates to this crisis?
>> Sure, well, I mean naturally, we have a lot of customers
that are healthcare technology companies,
companies, like Cerner companies like Philips,
right, that are kind of leading the charge here.
And of course, our whole motto has always been,
don't throw away any the data, there's value in that data,
you don't have to with Vertica right.
So you got petabyte scale types of analytics
across many of our customers.
Again, just a few years ago,
we called the customers a petabyte club.
Now a majority of our large enterprise software companies
are approaching those petabyte volumes.
So it's important to be able to run those analytics
at that scale and that volume.
The other thing we've been seeing from some of our partners
is really putting that analytics to use with visualizations.
So one of the customers that's going to be presenting
as part of the Vertica Big Data conferences is Domo.
Domo has a really nice stout demo around
be able to track the Coronavirus the outbreak
and how we're getting care and things like that
in a visual manner you're seeing more of those.
Well, Domo embeds Vertica, right.
So that's another customer of ours.
So think of Vertica is that embedded analytical engine
to support those visualizations so that just anyone
in the world can track this.
And hopefully as we see over time,
cases go down we overcome this.
>> Talk a little bit more about that.
Because again, the BDC has always been engineers
presenting to audiences, you guys have a lot of
you just mentioned the demo by Domo,
you have a lot of brand names that we've interviewed
on theCUBE before, but maybe you could talk
a little bit more about some of the customers
that are going to be speaking at the virtual event,
and what people can expect.
>> Sure, yeah, absolutely.
So we've got Uber that's presenting
just a quick fact around Uber.
Really, the analytical data warehouse is all Vertica, right.
And it works very closely with Open Source or what have you.
Just to quick stat on on Uber, 14 million rides per day,
what Uber is able to do is connect the riders
with the drivers so that they can determine
the appropriate pricing.
So Uber is going to be a great session
that everyone will want to tune in on that.
Others like the Trade Desk, right
massive Ad Tech company 10 billion ad auctions daily,
it may even be per second or per minute,
the amount of scale and analytical volume
that they have, that they are running the queries across,
it can really only be accomplished with a few platforms
in the world and that's Vertica
that's another a hot one is with the Trade Desk.
Philips is going to be presenting
IoT analytical workloads we're seeing more and more of those
across not only telematics,
which you would expect within automotive,
but predictive maintenance that cuts across
all the original manufacturers
and Philips has got a long history of being able to handle
sensor data to be able to apply to those business cases
where you can improve customer satisfaction
and lower costs related to services.
So around their MRI machines
and predictive maintenance initiative,
again, Vertica is kind of that heartbeat,
that analytical platform that's driving those initiatives
So list goes on and on.
Again, the conversation is going to continue
with the Data Disruptors in the Under Hood webcast series.
Any customers that weren't able to present
and we had a few that just weren't able to do it,
they've already signed up for future months.
So we're already booked out six months out
more and more customer stories
you're going to hear from Vertica.com.
>> Awesome, and we're going to be sharing some of those
on theCUBE as well,
the BDC it's always been intimate event,
one of my favorites, a lot of substance
and I'm sure the online version, the virtual digital version
is going to be the same.
Jeff Healey, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE
and give us a little preview of what we can expect
at the Vertica BDC 2020.
>> You bet.
>> Thank you.
>> Yeah, Dave, thanks to you and the whole CUBE team.
Appreciate it
>> Alright, and thank you for watching everybody.
Keep it right here for all the coverage
of the virtual Big Data conference 2020.
You're watching theCUBE.
I'm Dave Vellante, we'll see you soon