Tableau: What’s the key to handling big data?
Chris Selland, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development: What's really going to make big data go mainstream is the ability to connect not just with data scientists and technologists but business people, and absolutely one of the keys to that is visualization, is being able to show people, not just tell people, not just show numbers or even show charts but to have those charts and graphs and visualizations come alive.
And it's really so, so, so important for big data really becoming not just a technical term but a business term, which is exactly where we're going now, and for organizations as we get into this future where analytics is going to be the key to competitiveness.
Tableau: How does Tableau help?
Selland: So, you know, Tableau is obviously very much at the forefront of that wave, and the fact that our technologies work together so well that the power of our platform really allows Tableau to really show its best performance and perform with the absolute highest performance and, you know, the products have really been well optimized.
When we demonstrate Vertica, we are very, very commonly demonstrating Vertica behind Tableau. We're showing Tableau. It's funny, because oftentimes people say to us, "Is that a Tableau demo?" We'll say, well, it's both, because, you know, the fact that Tableau is performing so well and going so quickly, that's really our product helping in the background. So but it's a great partnership, and as I said, the future is I believe even brighter than it's already been
So the ability that we have to kind of benefit from that, and like I said, not just show data in a static way but show data in a live, visual way where things move, where things flow, but yet even when you have these massive data volumes or ability to scale. So there's so much joint opportunity for us and visualization is so, so important to us.
Tableau: Who’s using Vertica?
Selland: These days, Vertica finds itself used by organizations across a wide variety of industries anywhere there's very large volumes of data. As I often say, double, triple digit terabytes, petabytes of data, that's really Vertica's sweet spot as an organization and as a technology.
Some of the industries that we serve, we have become very big in areas such as advertising technology, social networking. That's certainly a very big market for us, given the volume of data and some of the truly, you know, large social networking organizations. Companies like Facebook and Twitter are joint customers of ours.
Telecommunications is a huge industry for us, financial services is a huge industry for us. In all those industries we've shared a wide variety and a large number of customers with Tableau. We've had so many high profile customer wins over the past few years, and so many high profile customers that we work in common with Tableau. This is certainly a partnership which if a customer says to us, well, you know, I’m looking to use Vertica with Tableau, can you tell me who else is doing it, we - we have a large number of organizations we can show them. We've got a great, great breadth of joint customers and joint success that we've been able to bring to the market.
Tableau: Why do Tableau and Vertica work together so well?
Selland: I think the organizations' joint commitment to customer success as well is also what makes them successful in the long term.
Our customers, particularly our joint customers, really benefit from first of all just this sort of shared history of how long Vertica and Tableau have worked together, how well our products work together, how well the organizations I think mesh, both from a technology standpoint and culturally, and just our track record of success.
Tableau: Can you tell us about a particular success story?
Selland: Last December at HP Discover we had Tim Campos, who is the CIO of Facebook, come and talk to an audience, pan-EMEA, really a worldwide audience if you include everybody who was watching online, about the power of Vertica and how Vertica has really transformed analytics inside of Facebook.
That obviously is a customer that we're very, very proud of. We're very, very proud of our ability to help them sort of get to their goals, and it's also a customer that we share with Tableau. So we're really proud of that implementation. The video is actually live on HP.com where you can go see for yourself but that certainly is one that we count as a customer that we're really proud of, and a customer that we've worked with you with.