Robert YoungJohn, SVP & GM, Autonomy HP, discussed the HAVEn platform, Big Data trends and application development trends with theCUBE co-hosts Dave Vellante and John Furrier, live at HP Discover 2013.

“Big Data is in that phase right now where everybody talks about it,” but they each refer to different things, YoungJohn said. HP identified three categories of data – machine data, business information (data that comes from CRM, ERP, management systems), and human information – video, text, audio, what human beings create every day. While most start in the middle, with business information (warehousing level), HP’s approach is to start at the edges, with the human information. And that is what HP’s new platform for Big Data application development, HAVEn, is doing.

“We actually started with the concept of machine augmented human intelligence,” YoungJohn explained.  “With Vertica you can take a massive data set, run a query and get a response in a second, in a way you could never do with a traditional BI tools.” But there is still a need for individuals who can help you understand which data sets you have to use.

Asked what the conversation around Big Data is with HP customers, YoungJohn said it’s about “trying to understand the underlying business problem they are going to solve.”

As far as offering improvements for developers are concerned, YoungJohn mentioned that with Autonomy and Vertica, HP “will expose all the core functionalities through APIs and web services. We want to be clear on documentation,” to create an effective developer toolkit.

“We have a lot more work to do to energize the developer community,” he said, commenting on HP’s strategy to market HAVEn and Autonomy to developers. “There’s already functionality, there are people writing HAVEn-based applications,” he added.

Asked how HAVEn can be consumed, YoungJohn said: “my ambition for the Autonomy component is that all the services are exposed as cloud services.” Security concerns might lead certain customers to want to take it on premise,  but the strategy is to enable customers to consume it every way they like.

Old vs. New

The traditional approach to product development, YoungJohn explained, is to go out and talk to customer, listen to what they want, go into a dark room and build it. “But the IT world has never been like that,” as people don’t know what a tool does until they see a demo. That is why the focus now is to show people what Big Data can do.

Asked what the most amazing thing in Autonomy and Big Data was, YoungJohn said it was “our ability to build archives at an incredible scale.”

Compliance, risk and data management are primary concerns for CIOs, and HP addressed them by focusing on offering a “consistent central policy management for IT.” If you create a Facebook post within the internal firewall, that is sent from one employee to another, that might be a message you need to have archived, YoungJohn explained. Therefor you need a tool that determines if it needs to be stored or deleted.

Autonomy’s and HP’s milestones are focused on innovation in the software business. “In software, standing still is not a competitive strategy,” YoungJohn said. “I challenge my team, I want to generate 20 percent of the innovation.”

Watch the full interview here.