Updated with full video – see below.

Broadcasting live from Boston, from HP Vertica Big Data Conference, theCUBE hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante sat down with Chris Selland, HP Vertica’s VP of Marketing, to talk about this week’s event, which turns out to be his brainchild.  The trio also discussed HP’s strategy for the future.

This Conference is not just HP Vertica’s show, but also their partners’ and customers’ show. It wasn’t even intended to be a show; it started as a user group meeting, powered by the need to establish a community. They basically wanted to feature what their customers and partners were doing with their technology. What interests Vertica about their customers is how they really gain business value. During the event they heard an interesting story of Vertica being used to win an election.

“As a marketing guy, this has been a dream place,” brags Selland. He joined the company about a year ago and he immediately started talking to customers, getting their feedback and generally maintaining the vibe of a start-up while leveraging the scale of HP. “It’s interesting because those are two different types of environments, but we did a great job blending them.”

“The work that we’ve done to leverage the scale of HP really helped in the higher end of the market, the big enterprise deals, the big names customers, that made significant previous investments in HP, and who love the idea that HP is not forcing them into the HP stack. HP is for an open ecosystem.”

Pushing the envelope on Business Intelligence (BI), Furrier stated that the ecosystems also hold a lot of false promises and asked Selland to elaborate on HP’s strategy. Chris Selland said that they broke the ecosystem in multiple pieces.

The 3 Types of Partners for HP

“I’ve always said that you have about three types of partners: the partners that you sell to, the partners that you sell through (the reseller channel) and the partners that you sell with (the technology partners). Ultimately, it is not about the relationship with the partner, it’s about the joint relationship that the partners and HP have with the customer.”

Just like with HAVEn, when people asked how was it integrating, the answer always was “depends upon the solution we’re trying to build for the customer.”

HP is investing very heavily in enablement training – Big Data is not necessarily an easy sale.

• How customers are responding to data-driven pressure to innovate

More and more customers are becoming interested in unstructured data. They want to be able to interpret and transform it. So in a lot of cases it’s not just about analyzing data but creating common repositories.

“Big Data has created this imperative to become a Data-driven organization. How are HP’s customers dealing with this imperative?” asked Vellante.

Technology has become a more mainstream thing. A lot of the early HP customers were technology visionaries, and there was a more IT-centric early buyer. What changed now is the level of comfort around technology. Technology is no longer scary and intimidating for a non-technical user.