Andre Boisvert, Actian Board Member, and long-time leader in Business Intelligence, joins John Furrier and Dave Vellante in theCUBE. The discussants explore Boisvert’s take on the future and significance of Big Data. Furrier and Vellante also glean insight from Boisvert’s 25 years of executive experience with enterprise leaders like Oracle, Cognos and IBM and his current service on eight different boards.

Given Boisvert’s leadership experience, Furrier and Vellante ask: “What does it take to be a good leader?” In particular, Furrier references Joseph Tucci, current Chairman of the Board of Directors, President and Chief Executive Officer of EMC. Boisvert suggests Tucci made brilliant moves including the launch of spin-off companies that were more nimble than a large public corporation. For example, Tucci launched an auxiliary company that was able to do a joint venture with General Electric. Boisvert finds that Cisco is not as aggressive, but still an excellent corporation.

Vellante asks how open source fits in Boisvert’s investment strategy. Boisvert says it’s always been important to discern when open source is practical to implement and acquire to lower the cost. Boisvert has been involved in various open source acquisitions. He also notes an important difference between open source and proprietary operating systems. Boisvert suggests, “while you’re sleeping there’s always an engineer who wants to show they’re smarter than your engineer.” As a result, developers are constantly exploring open source code.

When it comes to his other business decisions, Boisvert notes that IPO is not something to rush into. Even with Actian’s noteworthy success and trajectory, the company is still not ready to go public according to Boisvert. He suggests: “When you’re private you can do things that you don’t have to worry about when you’re public.”

See the entire segment below.