The Big Data revolution is creating exciting new opportunities for business leaders. SiliconANGLE’s theCube crew interviewed a few of them at the recently concluded HP Vertica Big Data Conference to bring you the executive angle on data-driven innovation.

It’s all about the customers, according to Vertica vice president of marketing Chris Selland. He told theCUBE hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante that the event enables his firm to keep track of the latest customer use cases, which provide unique insights into the different ways users leverage Vertica technology to drive business value. He added that HP incorporates client feedback into its decision making process to ensure that company resources are invested in the right places. This approach has generated handsome returns.

“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.”

Brian Weiss, the vice president of marketing for Autonomy, highlighted that Hewlett Packard’s increasingly integrated Big Data lineup is also attracting enterprise clients . He discussed how Autonomy married its technology with Vertica’s to provide organizations with real time insights into consumer trends, and noted that the combined platform delivers much more context than spreadsheet based analytics solutions.

Vinnie Mirchandani, an industry analyst, book author and innovation historian, praised HP for being “one of the few vendors who can say it doesn’t matter whether the data is structured or unstructured.” The company is on the right track as far as its innovation roadmap is concerned, he said, but the technology needs to be made more relevant for decision makers.