HPE’s Big Data Conference in Boston, Massachusetts, begins on August 29. Mercifully sparing attendees marketing fluff, it will be a use-case-focused conference from a company with a presence in Big Data that may surprise you. Since HPE acquired Vertica in 2011, it has built on its analytics capacities to offer data solutions that couple HPE’s core competencies with the latest innovations from open source — with support and oversight that open source alone lacks.

Senior Vice President and General Manager at HPE Big Data Colin Mahony told Dave Vellante (@dvellante), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, he believes in keeping the focus on real use cases and issues its customers face. He explained why this conference might be tagged “The people’s tech conference.”

Mahony is theCUBE’s Guest of the Week.

“We’d always heard from our customers that they wanted to learn from other customers. They knew there were use cases that they shared. They wanted to get together. And we set up a lot of these informal conversations between our customers. But we took a chance.

“Everybody told us actually that we were crazy to do this type of thing. But we took a chance a couple years ago, and we sold it out. We could have had twice as many people there. And it was so clear to us that the conversations that people were having, what they were learning about, really were impactful and important.”

Core competencies and then some

Mahony spoke about how HPE Vertica has found its place in the increasingly crowded Big Data market. He said that it offers advisory and support, a home base if you will, while pulling in the best innovations and delivering them in a digestible package. While they utilize open source, for instance, they don’t leave you on your own with the heavy lifting.

He also warned that the idea that you’re not “locked in” with open source is somewhat illusory; you’re going to develop on something and are in some sense locked into it, whether its open or not, he contended.

“It has been an incredible renaissance of innovation and technologies, and Hadoop being a huge part of that, obviously. I would say what we did was we always focused on what we were really good at. And we knew our strength was on the optimizer, the execution engine, running the best analytic database engine we could for Vertica in this market.

“And there were a lot of tendencies and pressures for us to branch out and try to be a massive Hadoop platform and a database engine and all these things. And instead we said we know what we’re good at, let’s focus on what we’re good at, but let’s integrate with this open ecosystem of all these open-source vendors, whether it’s Hadoop, whether it’s Kafka, Spark, you name it.”

Proprietary dinosaur

Mahoney noted a peculiar thing about the cloud phenomenon.

“As the world shifts to cloud, it looks like the world is moving toward another proprietary dinosaur — you know, getting locked into a single stack. And so something that is very unique to us in this space is that we offer an engine with a lot of choices. You can run it wherever you want. We have great hardware to run it on. You can run it on the cloud, many clouds; you can run it on Hadoop distributions.

“And I think that choice in the data democratization is going to become more and more important to enterprises — to be able to choose the right software but leverage all the innovations that are happening in the ecosystem.”

Show me the use case

Mahoney said that the conference will feature guests talking about nitty gritty of their use cases. DreamWorks Pictures will be one featured customer, as will the Spanish Ministry of Defence, which is using data to fight terrorism, and the New York Genome Institute, which now uses data to fight cancer.

He also mentioned that Uber Technologies Inc.’s data science manager, Cory Kendrick, will also be a guest.

Watch the complete video interview below.

Photo by SiliconANGLE