Broadcasting live from HP Discover 2013 in Las Vegas last week, theCUBE hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante welcomed Chris Selland, VP of Marketing for HP Vertica, who leads the global marketing strategy for the HP Vertica Analytics platform.

Selland is extremely happy with Vertica’s position in the market, and with its current growth. As he said, “the market it crazy, chaotic and competitive, but Vertica is winning more than a fair share of the business.”

Selland used to do market trends analysis for a living, and in a way he still does for Vertica, so he is more than able to talk about the state of the market, the trends and the confusion. He advises looking at the big picture in this industry, as every 7 to 12 years or so, something happens that changes everything. That something is now Big Data. Selland admits having a love/hate relationship with the term itself, because, despite being catchy with the general public, Big Data is not just IT.

Big Data truly represents business, not IT

Big Data represents big business; all the CMOs, CFOs, CIOs, COOs, they are all interested in this topic. And it’s not just the volume itself. It’s the three Vs: volume, variety, velocity. Twitter feedback from viewers coming in during the show also highlighted the three S’s: scale, speed and security.

HP Vertica manages to provide real-time loading and querying. Business owners need access to their data on the spot, not three days from now, as the information is already different by then, being generated continuously around the world. The new kid on the block is now HP HAVEn, a big data analytics platform, which leverages HP’s analytics software, hardware and services to create the next generation of big data-ready analytics applications and solutions.

The integration happens in context, says Selland. HP announced several solutions that are based on HP HAVEn, which are demonstrating their use for specific market niches (i.e. dentist offices, various vertical industries, and so forth). This is a huge oportunity for HP’s partners too. HAVEn is a platform that brings in HP services and HP converged infrastructure, allowing partners to build on the solution for broader offerings.

“Any challenges within your own group?” Furrier asks.  Selland answers by pointing out education. Nowadays, not only the CIOs are interested in new solutions, but also various departments. The people in Finance want to know how this business opportunity going to help them and their workload directly. Customers do not want to hear what Vertica can do, they want to know what they can do with this product. People want everything now, they do not want to wait anymore.

Vellante thinks that Big Data is a waging war that’s going to be won by whomever manages to provide the platform that simplifies application development. That is exactly what HAVEn is intended to do. HAVEn is about taking the combined capabilities of different technologies and different products in HP’s portfolio and generating a product that helps solving real business problems, explained Selland. In this case HAVEn is not a solution, but a platform, and that implies plenty of flexibility.