Colin Mahony, Vice President and General Manager, HP Vertica, discussed the tectonic shift Big Data brings to the technology world with theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante, live at the HP Vertica Big Data Conference.

“The amount and volume of information that are out there are growing at faster and faster pace every day,” Mahony said, “and we’re realizing how to make use of it.” Big Data represents a tectonic shift in the IT world, as “there’s a perfect storm of what’s happening right now – cloud, mobility, security, Big Data.”

Everything is generating enormous amounts of information, now being acted on at a faster pace. New applications, new products, new services are being developed to take advantage of information,  and that is “the new refresh in Big Data” which affects software, hardware, and services.

The tech world has reached a point, with the current processing and computing power, where “it is fairly inexpensive to make use of big data,” said Mahony. As an example, a person making a phone call today generates ten times more data for the carrier than in the previous generation. Right now, that amount of data can be collected, analyzed, and acted upon.

The other major component of the Big Data shift, Mahony explained, is “the social element to data where everyone wants to compare” to themselves, to others, and share.

Software developed with its own evolution in mind

Asked to comment on current software architecture changes, Mahony said the “most intriguing things in how software is being developed” is that new applications being developed “have all these hooks that pull out information” that can subsequently be used to create better software.  The prior model of releasing new version every one or two years is no longer feasible, you “have to have a method where you come out constantly with new releases.”

Explaining Vertica’s philosophy, Mahony said that, in the first place, HP strives to make it easy for people to get the information and get it very quickly. “Until the information gets into any platform, you can’t do anything with it.” Then, interactive analytics allow users to do anything they want with that information, such as asking different kinds of questions when analyzing data. Thirdly, the ability to deploy it anywhere comes into place. Mahony used GPS systems as an example: people want them to tell them where to go, “you don’t know that analytics are happening.” There is a need to be close to the users – deploy it in the cloud, have appliances, etc.

Removing the friction for adoption

“With any technology, any product or service, you’ve got to remove the friction to adoption,” Mahony stated. HP took all the great things about the ecosystem around traditional data bases, embracing it, but also taking “the things that people don’t like about databases, and solv[ing] them.” Maintaining SQL capabilities, they fixed the issues that traditional databases have. “People want to keep doing the things they are doing, but solve the root problems,” Mahony explained.

“To really take advantage of information, you need IT to be intimately involved with the technology, you need the data science, and the business buy-in as well,” Mahony said. What it takes to win with analytics and data within the organization is not tech, business, data, “you have to bring all these things together.”

“For businesses right now, everything technology related is about the return on investment,” Mahony said. People need to know the specs and speed of the products they’re getting, and how much it costs.

Big Data is sustainable — what has to be done is “constant reiteration, constantly discovering new models,” Mahony said. What will be sustainable will be taking in 100 percent of the information, and using it to try things that one never thought would be related to a line of  business. Bringing in more, new data faster, discovering new models, will allow people to try new things in real-time.

What’s in store for HP’s Big Data ecosystem?

Asked what the direction of HP and it’s ecosystem was, Mahony said that HP had been around for 75 years and was built on partnerships. For many channel partners there was “so much pent up demand around Big Data,” and the company embraced this direction. Vertica, however, was a “pure play analytics platform, we’re open-standards based. In a time where there’s been massive consolidation and vertical implementation in organizations, what customers say they want is choice,” and HP is committed to offering that, said Mahony.

From a client perspective, “what everybody wants right now, especially in the Big Data space, they want use cases, they want to know what problems you are solving.” HP and their partners take use cases and present them to clients, showing them what problems can be solved and how. “Partnerships are not something you set up and then walk away from,” Mahony added. They need continuous effort put into developing them.

Talking about the HP Vertica Big Data Conference, Mahony said that the main purpose was to “get our customers and partners to talk to each other,” to learn about the success stories, see what people have managed to do with Big Data so far.