Customer lock-in has been a part of the technology industry since it began, but today’s enterprise customers want choice. Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE) is now enabling that choice by taking its Vertica database analytics engine to different clouds in different ways.

As the VP of Big Data Platform Solutions at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE), Jeff Veis heads up the HPE Big Data Conference each year, and he spoke to Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, about the conference, HPE customers and how HPE is responding to market demands.

Conference connections

“It’s not a marketing conference. It’s about substance. It’s about getting real information. It’s about making it authentic,” said Veis in response to Vellante asking what it’s like to put the conference together. He continued to say that customers have the opportunity to learn and talk directly to HPE engineers in order to get real answers.

He also said it is a great opportunity for customers to talk with each other about their experiences. “The connection with the community is just as important as what goes up on the main stage,” he added.

The customer wants …

According to Veis, the customer wants scale and speed. The big concerns are how to quickly move large amounts of data and start applying that capability immediately. He said the pivot in the industry is the growing customer expectations of having increasingly fast analytics and being able to connect and work in your ecosystem.

“People want to have access to the data, they want to be able to utilize it, and any solution that says you have to put all of your data with me, I think, is a nonstarter,” he revealed.

Haven OnDemand for Azure

HPE reps spoke this week about its partnership with Microsoft to deliver HPE Haven OnDemand cloud services platform as a service on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform. Veis explained that is part of a bigger strategy the company calls “any cloud.”

As companies move to the cloud, they want flexibility. “Part of that is making sure we can support, in a best-in-class way, any cloud,” he said.

The Hadoop trifecta

When it comes to Hadoop, HPE offers what Veis called two flavors. Flavor one allows the customer to bring data into Vertica from a data lake and run analytics. Flavor two offers the option of running Vertica directly on a Hadoop node, bringing the analytics to the data at Hadoop economics.

“The trifecta is that we have just added support for Hadoop analysis in place,” he stated. This third option allows a traditional Vertica deployment to connect and analyze data without moving it at all by supplying data into a query model. Any flavor will allow Hadoop users to analyze as effectively as possible.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the HPE Big Data Conference.

Photo by SiliconANGLE