TheCUBE booth in Fira GranVia Barcelona was graced for a couple of minutes with the presence of Colin Mahony, VP & GM of HP Vertica. Attending the HP Discover 2013, John Furrier and Dave Vellante, theCUBE co-hosts, took the opportunity to interview the who’s who in the tech world, unveiling the latest trends and finding out as much as possible about the business models, challenges and the near future plans of top IT companies.

“There’s just so much innovation happening here,” exclaimed Mahony, living up to the label “kid in the candy store” applied humorously by Furrier in the beginning of the interview. “As you guys know, from the days we were a start-up, we always had a hard time getting hardware, getting services or resources, or getting reach into the global markets – and that’s not a challenge for us anymore; whether it’s HP IT, using Vertica internally, us learning from them, whether it’s us working with the enterprise group, it’s just so fun.”

Despite generally having a pro-HP attitude, Furrier admitted sometimes giving in to a more critical stance. “The HP mojo right now, with the people working in the company, is very entrepreneurial,” he observed. “You can see the hussle. Hussle is part of the entrepreneurial spirit. What are you guys knocking down in the market place?”

Switching on to the business updates mode, Mahoney declared: “We shipped Vertica 7 yesterday, which is a massive release for us, and we introduced something called Flex Zone, which is basically a drop zone for the data. Our methodology is store, explore, and serve. Vertica 7 has some really tight Hadoop integration, improved security, Java SDK, and it represents a critical part of the HAVEn Big Data platform at HP. We do some phenomenal work with autonomy, enterprise security and services, building out some of the end applications; we already have about 10 applications by HP Software, powered by the HAVEn infrastructure.”

• The HAVEn vision and Hadoop

“We always say that the H in HAVEn is for Hadoop, as we strongly believe in it,” admitted Mahony. We have lots of customers that are leveraging in Hadoop and Vertica, we invest a lot in that cross-link and we support all of our partners there, whether it is Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR, the Apache distribution or Intel. We have been open about how we wanted to interact with those vendors. Hadoop continues to evolve, as it should. HP has always prided itself being best-in-class, but still sporting an open standards approach. Our customers want it all.”

“The only challenge of Big Data with the cloud is uploading it to the cloud if you have a lot of data. HP has public and private cloud, striving to leverage all the organizations in, offering choice to the customers. We are investing in our platform to make their experience better,” declared Mahony. He also implied that the second user conference that HP is planning for next year will be highly focused on developers.

• Big Trends

“In-memory is getting a lot of attention,” noted Furrier. “Yes, we’ve always been working with the memory side; we’re leaders from a hardware’s perspective,” Mahony replied. “People ask me what do I think about our road map. For me it’s 1) make it easier to get the data in – Flex Zone and Vertica 7 do that; 2) do a lot more with the data once it’s in there – store, explore, analyze it; 3) deploy it anywhere – that’s the cloud,” explained Mahony.

• App store

“What’s the value proposition for the developers?” asked Furrier. “Developers need a couple of things,” Mahony started. “First of all, one of the things they like the most is the community – both to contribute and to gain back from. If you look at our market, that community experience is very rich. Secondly, you have to give them an area to display what they’re doing.

“A lot of our partners already said they’ve developed all these SDKs to plug into the Vertica platform and they’d love to share them with the world and let people know about it. Thirdly, it’s about learning something that you don’t know (training through the community).”

Wrapping up the interview, Furrier wanted to find out what surprised Mahony the most during the last six months.”I’ve been amazed by the challenge to find great people in this space, people who understand the business, data and analytics.” As Furrier added, and Mahoney agreed, the solution is to “grow your own data scientists.”