SiliconANGLE’s theCube hosted dozens of business and IT leaders during the recently concluded HP Vertica Big Data Conference. Among the guests were executives from HP Vertica and prominent partners such as Cloudera, which joined forces with the database maker to deliver plug and play solutions for data-driven enterprises.

Tom Pinckney, the director of global partner sales for the Hadoop distributor, told us that Hewlett Packard plays a central role in his company’s strategy of “bring[ing] forward certified partners, to have an ecosystem that provides solutions and solves business problems.” The firms’ relationship is mutually beneficial – it helps Cloudera reach new markets while enabling HP to round out its Big Data portfolio with the former’s software.

Vertica vice president of marketing Chris Selland has a very clear perspective on his firm’s channel strategy. In an interview with John Furrier and Dave Vellante he divided the channel into three categories: “the partners that you sell to, the partners that you sell through and the partners that you sell with.” He also highlighted that Hewlett Packard’s open approach to the ecosystem empowers enterprise customers to enhance their deployments with complementary solutions from third party providers.

Check out the full interview below.

Andrew MacBean, the vice president of ecosystems at Vertica, elaborated on this point. As he put it, “a lot of our partners are looking to go with us as we get better and many of them are looking at us to open the market for their business too. They see us as a vehicle that enables their market share growth.” According to HP general manager Colin Mahony, this growth is driving the democratization of data.

Mahony believes that cloud, analytics, mobility and security are on a collision course, a trend that HP is hoping to exploit with open web standards that make it easier for customers to aggregate and analyze data.

To hear more of Mahony’s perspective on Big Data, click on the video below.