Thursday, January 22, 2015

adMarketplace Solves Search Intent Challenge with HP Vertica Big Data Warehouse Solution

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how an consumer intent search company is able to handle massive amounts of data and analyze it quickly with HP Vertica.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunesDownload the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Podcast Series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing sponsored discussion on IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.

Gardner
Once again, we're focusing on how companies are adapting to the new style of IT to improve IT performance and deliver better user experiences, as well as better business results.

This time, we're coming to you directly from the recent HP Discover 2014 Conference in Las Vegas. We're here to learn directly from IT and business leaders alike how big datacloud, and converged infrastructure implementations are supporting their goals.

Our next innovation case study interview explores how New York-based adMarketplace, a search syndication advertising network, has met its daunting data-warehouse requirements.
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FREE HP Vertica Community Edition
We'll learn how adMarketplace captures and analyzes massive data to allow for efficient real-time bidding for traffic sources for online advertising. And we'll hear how the data-analysis infrastructure also delivers rapid cost-per-click insights to advertisers.

To learn more about how adMarketplace manages its big-data challenges, please join me in welcoming Michael Yudin, the Chief Technology Officer at adMarketplace.

Michael Yudin: Hello. Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: Tell us first about what adMarketplace does. It sounds very interesting, but I'm not sure I fully understand it.

Yudin: Well, adMarketplace is the leading marketplace for search intent advertising, and let me explain what that means. Search advertising is the best form of advertising ever invented. For the first time, a consumer actually tells a computer what they're interested in. That’s why Google became so successful as a search engine.

Yudin
Some things are changing in the marketplace these days. Consumer search intent is fracturing. You probably wonder what this means. It’s very simple. What this means is Google is no longer the only place you go to search for stuff.

I'll give you an example. Last night, I was looking for a Brazilian steakhouse here in Las Vegas. I didn't go on google.com. I opened my iPhone and I fired up a yellow pages (YP) app and I entered "Brazilian steakhouse" in the search box.

There are a variety of apps in my phone like that for travel, sports, news, and various other things I'm interested in. Anytime I search there, I don’t go to google.com. Consumer search has really fractured and adMarketplace has solved the monetization problem for that.

Providing value

Gardner: So when people are searching in areas other than say Google or Yahoo, how does your organization intercept with that and how does that provide value to both the consumer that’s searching and advertisers that want to provide them information?

Yudin: It benefits both the consumer and the advertiser. In the search world, an ad is really nothing more than a search result in response to user’s query. That’s why it’s so great.

Our clients are the Internet's largest marketers and brands. They use adMarketplace to acquire additional customers in addition to the other marketing channels like Google, where they are pretty much already maxed out.

http://bit.ly/1En8DHKThere are only so many searches that happen in Google and they're declining. So advertisers are looking for new ways to capture consumer intent and to convert this into sales and measurable return on investment (ROI), and that's what we do for them.

Gardner: Of course, a really important thing here is to match properly, and that requires data and analysis -- and it requires speed. Tell us a little about the requirements. How do you do this technically?

Yudin: You just nailed it. This is a very, very big data problem and it has to be solved at scale and fast. And it’s also a 24x7 problem. We can never take our system down. We have a global business, and anytime you go and you search for something as a consumer, you expect to see the result right away.
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FREE HP Vertica Community Edition
Our network handles about half a billion search queries per day and this results in about two terabytes of data per hour constantly generated by our platform, across multiple data centers. We needed a very scalable and robust analytical data warehouse solution that could handle this. Two years ago, we evaluated a number of vendors and settled on HP Vertica, which was best able to satisfy our tough requirements.

Gardner: And are these requirements primarily about the scale and volume, or are we talking also about a need for rapid query, or all the above? Give us a bit more insight into the actual requirements for your network?

Yudin: That's a great question, and I think this is what makes Vertica unique. There are products out there that can store a lot of data, but you can't get this data out of these solutions quickly and at high concurrency. We require a system that can ingest large amounts of data constantly. I am talking about terabytes and terabytes of data. This data has to be queryable right away, with very low latency requirements.

Some of our queries for Advertiser 3D and analytical dashboard are preplanned queries obviously, but they are very big data queries and the service-level agreement (SLA) on these queries is two seconds. Very few products can do that. Some queries are obviously more complex, but we're still talking about seconds and not hours.

Concurrency requirement

On top of this, there's a concurrency requirement and that’s a very big weak spot of a lot of products. Vertica is actually able to provide sufficient concurrency, and it’s never enough.

I do know that there's an upcoming release of Vertica 7, where this is going to be improved even further, but it’s quite acceptable right now. And it has to be fault tolerant, which means that it should be able to sustain a hardware failure on any of its nodes -- and it can do that.

Gardner: Tell us a bit about where you've built Vertica in terms of data centers. Are they your own? Do you have managed service providers? How are you managing your infrastructure that supports Vertica and then therefore your data processes?

Yudin: We own our own infrastructure. So these are not managed services. We actually once used managed services, but we've outgrown them. And Vertica runs on dedicated hardware.
This was driven by business requirements. We didn’t just decide that we needed this

We also have several other Vertica clusters that run on virtualized hardware, and even though it’s dedicated infrastructure, it’s really dedicated at the cloud level now. So call it private cloud. It's a buzzword. It's a mix of dedicated and virtualized. It's elastic scaling.

Gardner: And the transition. You mentioned that two years ago, you were searching for a product. How were you able to bring this on board and what sort of growth have you had as a result -- in terms of data volume, but also in your business, in terms of customers and overall business metrics of growth?

Yudin: This was driven by business requirements. We didn’t just decide that we needed this. So we started to undertake a very, very ambitious project -- Advertiser 3D. If you go to our website, www.admarketplace.com, you can read more about it.

This is a very elegant, simple, and yet powerful, system to match and price traffic across a multitude of traffic sources. To deliver this product, we didn’t have a choice. We had to have a powerful analytical back-end data warehouse. That's when we started to evaluate products and chose Vertica.

Gardner: And have there been any other benefits of going to Vertica in terms of being able to increase the number of features, or have you been able to leverage the technology in new business opportunities in terms of what you can offer your customers, not just to have met the requirements, but perhaps whole new types of benefits?
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Heavy lifting

Yudin: Definitely. Our customers don’t know and don’t even care that we use Vertica on the back end. That’s probably why we won an HP award, because we integrated it into our overall solution very elegantly and seamlessly, but it obviously does a lot of heavy lifting on the back end.

And the project was successful and transformed our business. Our growth rates have accelerated over 50 percent on our core revenue and performance. Data-savvy marketers, and our clients started to see significantly double-digit improvement in ROIs.

Gardner: As Chief Technology Officer there, you've gone through a fairly significant change in your infrastructure and adoption, as you've just described. Looking back, are there any lessons learned that you could offer to others who are also running into a wall with their data infrastructure or looking for alternatives? Any thoughts on how you would advise them to make the transition?
Our growth rates have accelerated over 50 percent on our core revenue and performance.

Yudin: Definitely. The number one advice I would give anybody is don’t believe anything until you do two things: Try it yourself and get references from people who actually use this and whom you trust. That's very important.

Gardner: Well, great. We've been talking about how adMarketplace captures and analyzes massive data to allow for efficient real-time bidding for traffic sources for online advertising.

I would like to thank our guest, Michael Yudin, the Chief Technology Officer at adMarketplace. Thanks so much.

Yudin: Thank you, Dana. My pleasure.

Gardner: And I also want to thank our audience as well for joining us for this special new style of IT discussion coming to you directly from the recent HP Discover 2014 Conference.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HP-sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunesDownload the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how an consumer intent search company is able to handle massive amounts of data and analyze it quickly with HP Vertica. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.

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Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Creative Solutions in Healthcare Improves Client Services and Saves Money Using VMware vCloud Air

Transcript of a Briefings Direct podcast on how a major healthcare provider is improving internal operations and patient care with a hybrid cloud model.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: VMware.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you directly from the recent VMworld 2014 Conference. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of BriefingsDirect IT Strategy Discussions.

Gardner
We’re here to explore the latest developments in hybrid cloud computing, end-user computing, software-defined data center, and virtualization infrastructure management.

Our next innovative case study interview focuses on Creative Solutions in Healthcare in Fort Worth, Texas. We're going to hear how they've adopted cloud, and why cloud is benefiting them as a healthcare organization.

To learn more about Creative Solutions in Healthcare, we're joined by their CIO, Shawn Wiora. Welcome.

Shawn Wiora: Good morning, Dana.

Gardner: Tell us a bit about your organization? It sounds like you've got a big, sprawling healthcare facility group?

Wiora: Yes. Creative Solutions in HealthCare is the largest independent owner and operator of skilled nursing facilities (SNFs), which are nursing homes, in the State of Texas. We also operate assisted-living facilities and we provide long-term care solutions, primarily in Texas.

Gardner: How many people we are talking about, both in terms of your employees and then also patients?

Wiora
Wiora: We have about 6,000 employees. Many of them are nurses, and many of them are capturing data about our patients and our residents. Our residents are in the thousands and, as a private company, we're able to deliver solutions in the marketplace that are really geared toward lifestyle, care, nutrition, activities, and programs. That's why the company has been so successful -- we have this passionate care about our residents.

Gardner: Of course, healthcare is really gearing up and changing in terms of how it's using IT and leveraging IT, and I suppose you're no different?

Wiora: That's exactly right. HealthCare has been ramping up in terms of IT, not only catching up with the industry, but in some cases, leading the forefront, especially when it comes to patient care and delivering innovative diagnosis and treatment programs over telemedicine and other types of electronic media.

Gardner:  Shawn, tell us a bit about why cloud computing has been appealing to you with your requirements? What challenges were you trying to solve when you looked at the cloud model?

Going virtual

Wiora: It's an interesting story. About two years ago, the company was 100 percent physical in terms of its server infrastructure. Similar to many other long-term care facilities, we have to deliver new forms of compliance as it relates to HIPAA, the HITECH Act, and the NIST framework.

So if you take all those, in addition to the new apps that are being required of the organization, new types of health exchanges that we are involved with, the requirements were just escalating dramatically. So we started with a physical infrastructure and we looked at going virtual.

Gardner: Did you begin cloud in a particular part of your organization, perhaps in development, and then expanded out, or was this wholesale change ramp–up? How did you approach it?

Wiora: You're right. It was a wholesale change ramp-up. We took a big challenge by embarking on an initiative that allowed the company to go from physical to virtual, and at the same time, we went from premise-based to the cloud. We did that together.

Fortunately, we already had some really good experience with virtualization, but by no means did we have a program that was deploying across the server infrastructure. So we issued an RFP and we selected a group of vendors at the top of the pyramid. At that top was Azure, AWS, and VMware’s vCloud. We chose Microsoft Azure.
The team at the VMware understood what we were doing in terms of our timeline, our projects, and our applications that we are looking to move to the cloud.

We started a pilot with Azure, and it was really interesting. We're a Microsoft house, and the team chose Azure based on the fact that not only we were Microsoft house, but we had a number of initiatives that we wanted to move to the cloud, including Microsoft Exchange.

So, we started moving Exchange into the cloud with our Azure program. Then, we asked Microsoft to issue a document that indicated that they would support Exchange, their own software, in Azure, their own cloud, and guess what happened.

We did not get acknowledgment. Ultimately, they would not indicate that they would support their own software in their own cloud. We were flabbergasted. We just couldn't believe it.

We ended up pulling the plug on that project, on that initiative. We went back to the marketplace and we chose VMware’s vCloud hybrid services, now known as vCloud Air, and we quickly ramped up. That's the reason why this project has been so successful -- the ramp-up.

The team at the VMware understood what we were doing in terms of our timeline, our projects, and our applications that we are looking to move to the cloud. That's really where they differentiated, not only between Azure and AWS in terms of their on-boarding, because we did pilots on all those cloud infrastructures. VMware’s vCloud Air team, the on-boarding team, had the best on-boarding process for any kind of IT project that I've been involved with in the past 20 years.

Had our back

It just really made the IT team at Creative Solutions in Healthcare, the company, just feel like those guys really had our back. They really cared about what was happening. They knew that we were under the gun, because we had done this Azure kind of cluster, and it was not even feasible for us to go down the path with our own infrastructure. It ended up being a great partnership.

Gardner: Shawn, tell me to what degree you're hybrid? Do you have an on-premises cloud virtualized set of applications? Do you have another set of applications? You've have opted to go into the public cloud, the vCloud Air. Is this something that you're still sorting out in terms of what goes where? How about the data? Is that also on-prem, and how you are factoring the hybrid approach?

Wiora: We're very deliberate with our cloud strategy. We started with a pilot of some core applications, got our feet wet in the cloud, and then we took that success that we had. Again, the on-boarding that we received in that process was really second to none.

That made the team feel very comfortable with moving other infrastructures. Now, we've moved our entire back-office infrastructure, our accounting, a number of custom apps, provisioning, and supply chain into the cloud with the vCloud Air.
That's what IT should be focused on: how do we ultimately deliver solutions that the other business units, and ultimately our patients, can appreciate.

We're are also in a hybrid environment, as you've indicated. We have servers throughout our facilities and servers at headquarters. We have other software-as-a-service (SaaS) models that we're interacting with. We're moving data from other providers back into our on-premise environment and then we're moving that into vCloud Air. There's a lot of hybrid going on right now.

Gardner: So that integration, management, and orchestration, being able to automate that, seems very important to you. You want to be able to set this up, have it run, and then devote your energy to all these new projects?

Wiora: Yes. That's really where the return is to the company, the shareholders, the board, and the management team. That's what IT should be focused on: how do we ultimately deliver solutions that the other business units, and ultimately our patients, can appreciate.

Dana, we're in the long-term care industry and we've been very successful in growing the company based on the passionate, caring model. The IT organization aligns its passion and care towards the patients.

Instead of being wrapped up with servers, virtualization, and all of the other things that VMware is the best at doing, we're outward focused on the business units and the patients.

New product appeal

Gardner: Shawn, we are here at VMworld, and there is been some news and announcements, some new things happening with vCloud Air, particularly the Object Storage beta program and Virtual Private Cloud on Demand.

Are you interested in being a beta customer? Do these added new functions for public and hybrid cloud model appeal to you?

Wiora: Absolutely. We talked about total cost of ownership (TCO), and when you look at ramping up on an on-demand scenario that has been announced, we're absolutely interested. We've indicated our interest. We're going to be moving forward and looking at that.

Who has more data than healthcare? There are some organizations that have a lot of data, but we track what our patients eat, what time they go to sleep, what they do during the day in terms of activity. We're talking each and every day across each and every facility, thousands of patients.
It is been game changing for the company. It is been game changing for our patients.

So Object Based storage, yes, this is something that is in our future. We talked earlier about desktop virtualization and the Air launch announcement recently that was also something that we were keenly interested in.

Gardner: So, one last area for adoption. You have talked about the on-boarding process, but there's also the end-user absorption of new approaches from IT. How this has gone in terms of your end users?

Have they noticed a change in the type of applications? Has it been something that they didn't notice? What's been that result at that end-user inception point when you made this transition to cloud?

Wiora: It is been game changing for the company. It is been game changing for our patients. Instead of being fearful about approaching IT, the business units are coming to IT, and they know that we can ramp up applications very quickly.

We just ramped up our maintenance application in a couple of days. In the past, that would have taken months of planning. The business unit laughed. They just looked at IT and said, "You have to be kidding. This is up and running already?"

Advice for others

Gardner: That's a strong testament. How about advice for other organizations that are beginning that RFP process, that are thinking about cloud, looking at the different approaches, the different providers? Any words of wisdom in hindsight that you could offer now that you have been through that process?

Wiora: Absolutely. Who wants to reinvent the wheel? If I'm looking at going to the cloud for the first time or if I am looking at enhancing my hybrid cloud environment, I would suggest you look at TCO.

Look at what your labor costs are. Look at who the A-Team is in the industry for virtualizing. Look at what the roadmaps are and look at which vendors really don't care what you put in your cloud infrastructure. There are vendors. as we talked about earlier, that really have the ability to approve or disapprove what you put in there.
You have to look at TCO and look at partnering with an organization that can help you easily ramp up.

I'd look at that, but you have to look at TCO and look at partnering with an organization that can help you easily ramp up. Then, I think you look at how you want to run your IT organization. If those things make sense to you, then I would suggest you look at the vCloud.

Gardner: Well great. I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. We've been hearing about how Creative Solutions in Healthcare in Fort Worth Texas has embarked on a cloud journey and have leveraged hybrid cloud quite successfully. So a big thank you to our guest, Shawn Wiora, the CIO at Creative Solutions in Healthcare. Thank you.

Wiora: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And also thank you to our audience for joining this special podcast series coming to you directly from the 2014 VMworld Conference in San Francisco.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of VMware sponsored BriefingsDirect IT discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: VMware.

Transcript of a Briefings Direct podcast on how a major healthcare provider is improving internal operations and patient care with a hybrid cloud model. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2014. All rights reserved.

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Wednesday, December 03, 2014

HP Launches Haven OnDemand to Deliver Big Data Services Suite in the Cloud

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on new offerings, announced this week at HP Discover in Barcelona, that provide on-demand, pay-as-you-go data analysis servcies.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Podcast Series. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing sponsored discussion on IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.

Gardner
Once again, we're focusing on how companies are adapting to the new style of IT to improve IT performance and deliver better user experiences, as well as better business results.

This time, we’re coming to you directly from the HP Discover 2014 Conference in Barcelona.

We’re here the week of December 1 to learn directly from IT and business leaders alike how big data changes everything … for IT, for businesses and governments, as well as for you and me.
Learn about big data analytics in the cloud
HP Vertica OnDemand
Request a 30-day free trial
Our next panel discussion explores some very big news made here at Discover, the announcement of HP Haven OnDemand, a new set of big data in the cloud services.

Stay with us now as we unpack the details and implications of this debut of the cloud-based HP Vertica OnDemand and HP IDOL OnDemand components within the HP Haven OnDemand suite.

And we also welcome to our panel two early users of HP Haven OnDemand, and we will learn how they developed new sales force value and knowledge-intense mobile services from these new HP cloud offerings.

With that, I'd like to welcome our guests, Fernando Lucini, Chief Technology Officer for HP Big Data. Welcome, Fernando.

Fernando Lucini: Hi, Dana.

Gardner: We're here also with Howard Brown, Founder and CEO of RingDNA, based in Los Angeles. Welcome, Howard.

Howard Brown: Hello. Thanks for having me.

Gardner: And we're here with Neal Holley, Operations Director at GateWest New Media Ltd., based in Bristol, UK. Welcome, Neal.

Neal Holley: Hi, there.

Big picture

Gardner: Fernando, let's go first to you. We've heard quite a bit the last few days at Discover, and HP Software General Manager Robert Youngjohns has delivered the news Tuesday about HP OnDemand. Let's look at this from the big picture first. Why are data and analytics, combined with the cloud-hosting model and delivery model, such a good fit? Why is this an important milestone for the cloud?

Lucini: Thanks Dana. It's exciting in a number of ways, but let me take a quick step back. If you think about what we've launched, we recognized early that our customers, our partners, and developers out there were going to consume technologies in a new way. This is something that the industry all agreed on. We were just early birds in this and we recognized that it's all going to be about on-demand consumption, self-service, speed, elasticity, and all those nice things.

Lucini
So in some respects, the industry wants to consume things in this fashion. We recognize it, and then the next step for us is to think about the people and what they're going to do with these kinds of services.

You can think about it in two different ways. You have the people out there in the real world who are creating applications on top of very rich information, and that's the mobile apps that we all use. It's the applications to look at both human information, as well as business information, or very structured information, creating applications that do that. We have that persona and we really wanted to make sure that that developer had all the right tools in that model on-demand, self-service.

The other part of the equation is the world of the data warehouse, where we have very large amounts of information. We're traditionally applying analysis, but in this new generation, we need the tools that can do this at a bigger scale, can do it quicker, and can be more flexible. This is our Vertica technology and the same kind of on-demand, self-service needs are out there. So the second part of our answer to the question for industry is that we'll provide you an on-demand way to serve that particular purpose.

Brown
Today’s announcement comes from a number of good reasons. It provides the market with an answer to both of these peoples' needs. It does so in an incredibly elastic fashion and it does it with incredible richness. It has quite a unique degree of depth and variety.

If you look at the IDOL OnDemand functionality, there are new APIs that you can explore and use with the freemium model.

If you look at the Vertica OnDemand space, it allows you to manage whatever size warehouse you need in an incredibly elastic and transparent way, but still on-demand.

I hope that answers the question. There’s so much to tell. It’s such an exciting time for the industry, and being in HP, leading the charge, is pretty, pretty impressive and important.

Great importance

Gardner: Clearly, this isn't news just for one part of an IT organization. This seems to have a great importance for data scientists, IT operators, developers, even line of business users of business intelligence (BI).

Holley
So let's look at this a little bit from the perspective of the IT operator. This is something that's a cost issue in many respects and broadens the use of something like IDOL and Vertica to a much larger market. With it being in the cloud, you don't need to set up your data center and you don’t need to have those capital expenditures.

Let’s start at the top, where we're talking about this as a cloud model. Why does this broaden the market for data and analytics?

Lucini: Go back to this IT operator. This guy or gal has always wanted to provide their business with the tools. There was an element there where these guys want to provide the analysis capabilities, they want to have the ingestion and the features, but it’s a tough thing, as you very well put it. There is capital expenditure, maintenance, and training.

As the differentiator here, the move is that the acceleration is going to be immediate. Let’s use simple examples, I want to be able to take video and do face recognition, extract license plates, extract behaviors, or listen to voice and do something, I want to do that and I don’t want the burden of all the science that goes behind doing these things.
IT operators are going to be incredibly happy that they can provide the business with what the business needs at a lower cost and get outcomes quicker.

This IT operator is going to say, "No problem. Here’s the link. You pay this as you go. Enjoy." And that's as complex as it gets. So the acceleration is going to be immediate, which translates almost immediately to create more and more applications and doing more and more analysis, which is what we all want, at a lower cost point in shorter times.

IT operators are going to be incredibly happy that they can provide the business with what the business needs at a lower cost and get outcomes quicker.

Gardner: This should be of interest to large enterprises that might want to augment their current warehouse approach and strategy. It also sounds like for those organizations that may have been too small or didn’t have the budget to set up their own on-premises data warehouse, they now have an opportunity to walk right into a deep, powerful analytics capability.

Lucini: It democratizes the whole idea of analytics. You want to make it as democratic as possible. Size isn't necessarily important with regards to intelligence, interest, having something to say, or having something to analyze. It’s all about making it democratic, and the cloud really helps in that.

It's also about giving functionality that wasn't accessible to some of these guys. We're talking about very advanced analysis -- technologies for video, voice, or text analysis, let alone warehousing. It’s now available to everybody. They can go in there, test it out, play with it, see how valuable it is to them, and stop dreaming about the value, but make the value. Then, if that’s what they need, they can just start paying as they go and getting on with their lives.

General availability

Gardner: Let’s dig into a little of the details. HP announced Haven OnDemand on December 2, with general availability coming in Q1 2015, so pretty rapidly. Vertica, that’s the one that's coming up first and then IDOL OnDemand is currently available as a freemium model, as you mentioned, on an early access basis, but will be generally available in a few months later into 2015.

What else should we know about the pricing here? Why is this compelling not only as an OPEX versus a CAPEX, but with pricing that is very compelling and attractive.

Lucini: Indeed. In some respects, because you're removing the necessity to open the hardware and to scale it up, we're also providing economies of scale in what we're doing. In HP Cloud Services, we have an amazing cloud that we can go to elastically, and everybody gets advantage of this.

If you think about it, ultimately in one of these models, you get a lot of people come in, have a look, play, investigate, understand, and learn. Then, you get a smaller percentage that actually commit, do the greater applications, and run their warehouses.
You should be in a position where you understand exactly what you're using and what you are paying for it, and it should allow you to toggle back and forth on that need. It’s pretty cool.

It balances out and it allows us to have a lower price point. It also allows us to charge as we go. It allows us a pay-as-you-go model. It all works out. Over time, we'll understand more and more what people want. This is being done in a very collaborative fashion, listening to the market for on-demand.

In the very beginning, we have been very Net Promoter Score focused. I challenge anybody to get yourself a login, and you'll see the Net Promoter kick in.

All the analysis is very much linked to what you want to do, what’s important for you, what’s being used most, and what gives us the most economies. That drives us to be more competitive.

It’s very transparent. It’s very clean. You should be in a position where you understand exactly what you're using and what you are paying for it, and it should allow you to toggle back and forth on that need. It’s pretty cool.

Gardner: As for the actual cloud that this is running on, is there a choice with that or is this starting out on HP Helion Cloud, the HP public cloud. What's the roadmap for the public-cloud infrastructure that this operates on? 

Lucini: At the moment, this is running in HP Cloud Services, which is Helion based of course. It is all designed on top of Helion. So the roadmap for it in the next few courses will be that it will be deployed in any Helion implementation. As long as you have Helion, you can deploy the services underneath.

Of course, Helion is a flavor of OpenStack. So you have the ability to use this in other flavors of OpenStack, but we're principally focused on Helion. We're principally focused on the Public HP Cloud Services and the private Helion implementations with our colleagues from Enterprise Services.

No difference

In some respect in the next year it should be a choice for you to go public cloud for what you need to do. If you're a developer and you just want to create your own app, the private-versus-public doesn’t make a difference to you.

Corporate may want to use this inside a firewall. As you know, in HP we have some of the largest corporates out there. If you're one of these guys and have the need to have that privacy you can install Helion and run these services of top of Helion. Following the HP philosophy, it’s a matter of what the client requires and we'll achieve that.

Gardner: It sounds as if this has been made of, by, and for a hybrid model over time.

Lucini: Correct. Most of our big customers are hybrid, and we're delighted to serve them.

In the meantime, as they o go into a mode of using this stuff on Helion inside of the firewall, they'll still get all the elasticity that Helion provides them. They'll still get all the simplicity that REST and Web Services OnDemand provides them, and the flexibility that Vertica OnDemand provides them for scalability In some respects, there is no downside. There is absolutely no downside to anything that’s happening here. It’s just a matter of choice.
In terms of pricing, I think we're competitive. The features and functions are worth the spend.

Gardner: We'll get to our use cases and the examples of how this is being used shortly, but I just want to look at the competitive landscape. A big player out there, of course, in the public cloud is Amazon Web Services, and Amazon has what’s called http://aws.amazon.com/redshift/. It's their data warehouse in the cloud. How does what HP has announced compare and contrast to Redshift? Why is it a worthy competitor and is this price comparable?

Lucini: Of course, guys out there and everybody listening might know Vertica is a leading product in the analytics space and in the warehousing space. So we're coming  at this already as a leader proven inside the firewall.

You get all of the economies, flexibility, and features that Vertica provides; the Flex Zones, all of the optimizations, and the incredible scaling growth factors; and you get it in an on-demand package.

Just because we now have an on-demand version, these things don’t go away. It's quite the opposite. They're immediately available. In that respect, I think we have a strong proposal against Redshift, because you have all the features and functions, not only just the database itself. 

In terms of pricing, I think we're competitive. The features and functions are worth the spend. Our customer base, our history, and our legacy certainly prove that to be the case. Little by little, more and more of the features will seep in, and more customers will start to get comfortable with using it. We already have a few out there in beta land.

We're going to compete. Because of the features, the Flex Zones and other things, we'll carve our own space as well.

What is the differentiator?

Gardner: One of the things that seems unique to me, Fernando, is the IDOL OnDemand being so broad in terms of the types of media, content, information, and data that can now be brought into what’s essentially the type of analytics engine you would only think of for structured information. So it's the best of the structured analytics and high-performance environment, with that breadth and depth of the various types of content. Is that a differentiator in your opinion?

Lucini: Absolutely. I call it everything on-demand. As you notice, I tend not to differentiate between BOD and IOD. The whole philosophy was that we deal with unstructured, structured, and semi-structured information every day to build what we need for our businesses. So why should we see this differently?

If I happen to have an image, it's an image. If I happen to have a file, it's a file. If I happen to have an Excel sheet, it's an Excel sheet. All of these things are materially important. So let’s give our application developer and our data analyst a way to consume all this.

We have the connectors in the cloud, ways for you to suck information into the platform. We have the ability for you to index them and analyze them. We have some protected APIs for you to have a play around with.
It's as broad in analytics as possible. At the same time, it's still market leading in every single one of those APIs.

We have text-mining APIs. Obviously, this is a platform for us. So even though we're using the word Vertica and IDOL, underneath IDOL OnDemand, we have Vertica powering some of our features for user management. All our billing and other APIs are coming up.

It's all about giving the application developer all the tools. What the data is, isn't necessarily important. What's important is that they can process it, use it, extract as much value from it as possible, and make their business successful.

So you are absolutely right. It's as broad data-wise as possible. It's as broad in analytics as possible. At the same time, it's still market leading in every single one of those APIs, which is pretty cool stuff.   
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Gardner: Now, when you're able to bring all sorts of information and media together, when you're able to tap web services, social media, when you're able to create a sentiment engine and a search engine capability, you're really starting to develop intelligence in new ways.

It seems to me, you can gain insight into markets, prospects, competition, customer inclinations, and directions. It's really about bringing more of a data-driven aspect to a business in ways that had really been sort of an art before, something that was not always by experience, but was by gut instinct.

Before we go to our use cases, how are we really changing a business environment here? Are we talking about a data-driven approach? Are we giving the type of tools that will move a marketing organization, for example, from guesswork into a scientific approach to how they make decisions?

Testing instincts

Lucini: You put it very nicely. We're moving into a world where we're allowing instincts to be tested, and tested quickly. In the past, we had a lot of clever professionals in the marketing world making educated guesses about what’s going on, what I like and don’t like, what you like and don’t like, or what’s popular and what’s not.

We're opening the door for businesses to take data, take a sample of it or take it all, it's their choice, whatever that may be, and in whatever varieties they come, to test out their theories, to see if this theory is correct.

I used to call it the CIO conundrum, where the CIO thinks they've got something and it becomes very difficult for them to prove if they do or don’t, and then they question the results when they get them.

We want them to be able to test this out. If they have an opportunity with their voice data and they think there's massive value in the voice data and they want to cross-correlate it to the social presence, do it, and let the data speak for itself.
It's very exciting stuff, because there is a real change in the industry, and we all have to adapt to it.

It's now no longer difficult. Just go into the platform, put the voice in there, put the text in there, use the analytics tools, give us our enterprise resource planning (ERP) warehouse. We'll do the queries and we'll create what we call combinations -- which is everything coming together as one -- and test the value.

Now, it no longer matters that this is not a very large project with very large budget. It will prove out the case. We have a next generation of proving things out and being capable of proving things out.

That might lead you to a very interesting onsite project with our tools, where you're inside a firewall, but you have proven it out. Or it might take you to a very interesting on-demand implementation. Either way you perform the testing or the proving or the thinking in a much more practical way.

It's very exciting stuff, because there is a real change in the industry, and we all have to adapt to it.

Gardner: It is very exciting. Let's learn how some people have been using this already to change their business. Let's go first to RingDNA. Howard Brown, tell us a little bit about your company, what you do, and then how you've been using Haven OnDemand from HP?

Brown: Thank you. RingDNA is a comprehensive sales acceleration platform that allows companies to create high-performance sales teams by combining powerful communications tools with prospect or customer DNA. That's a combination of marketing data, social data, customer relationship management (CRM) data, and account history, and pulling that all together to allow a sales rep to perform sales faster.

Data for inside sales

Gardner: It’s almost as if you're putting the tools of a data scientist in the hands of a salesperson without them having to be a scientist, to get all sorts of information to make the best call on a call in real-time on an inside sales basis.

Brown: You've got it. It's applying a scientific approach to sales. It's taking all of the data that exists out there which can be truly overwhelming, prioritizing it, and making it contextual to make sales much more effective.

Gardner: And this cuts across communications, as well as data, applications, and web services. Is that correct?

Brown: Absolutely. We apply both a theory-testing model and set of communication tools. When a RingDNA customer walks in in the morning, they know exactly who they should be calling, who they should be emailing or texting, and prioritizing the messages so that they know exactly who to call, how to reach out to them,  and what to say.
What HP IDOL OnDemand has provided us is the ability to test all kinds of theories, because every business we work with tends to have a different theory of what a hot prospect may be.

What’s so exciting is that you can start to understand buyer intent from marketing data from past interactions with your customers. We can look at voice transcripts and sentiment analysis and have a whole new way of determining who the right prospect is, how we should be contacting them, and with what messages.

Gardner: So it's up to your organization to take the best of technology, data, and analytics and empower those inside salespeople. It sounds like it's been up to HP to take the best of its technology in the cloud model and analysis to empower you. How, in fact, has HP empowered RingDNA with your early access use of HP Haven OnDemand?

Brown:  It's been truly game-changing. You nailed it when you talked abut taking business information and human information and combining those two. What HP IDOL OnDemand has provided us is the ability to test all kinds of theories, because every business we work with tends to have a different theory of what a hot prospect may be.

They can simply and easily test those theories using RingDNA and HP IDOL OnDemand. If there are buying signals, like someone visiting a website and downloading a whitepaper in combination with other factors, such as that person viewing web pages or maybe tweeting about their product or service, we can look at that buyer’s sentiment through HP IDOL OnDemand.

We're taking a bunch of this data, processing it through IDOL, and making our reps that much more productive and that much more powerful.

Gardner: One of the things you're doing is you are joining and bringing together very disparate data and information and tidbits of analysis. Is HP IDOL OnDemand doing that for you? Are you doing that? How do you make those joins that bring all that information together? Is the cloud the key to doing that?

Cloud is key

Brown: The cloud certainly is the key. We couldn’t deliver the type of product and service we do today without the cloud. RingDNA is all about accelerating a sales team’s ability to close deals. The last thing you want is to negatively impact those teams.

The cloud model means we can quickly implement a RingDNA process within an organization, bring in all that contextual data, bring in all that metadata, and make that rep that much more productive without negatively impacting their workflow.That’s critical to any business today.

It’s one thing to be able to deliver information. It’s another thing to be able to deliver information and insight without negatively impacting the business. Let's face it, in this  day and age, we can’t afford to slow down. With tools like IDOL OnDemand and RingDNA, you’re not slowing down teams. You're actually accelerating them beyond what you ever thought was possible.

Gardner: Fernando, as you're listening to Howard, is there anything about the way that RingDNA is using Haven OnDemand that you think highlights some specific benefits or values here. Are they a poster child for a certain type of way in which you can use Haven OnDemand?
With IDOL OnDemand coming on stream, we’ve found that we had a whole world of options opened up to us.

Lucini: Certainly they understand that they need to use tools to solve their problems and they go ahead and do it. In that respect, it’s great to see. There are a bunch of things we could learn as an industry from them in terms of seeing the opportunity of mixing two pieces of data, how these things collide, and how we get them to customers. I would challenge anybody to check them out because ultimately the end result is key, and I think everybody would be impressed.

Gardner: Let’s go to our next example. We're also joined by GateWest and Neal Holley. Neal, tell us a little bit about GateWest, what you do, and how you’ve been using HP Haven OnDemand?

Holley: We're HP Autonomy partners and have been since about 2002. During that time, we have deployed and maintained many IDOL-based systems. We provide a lot of support services to our clients on an annual basis. We also provide user interfaces to the core engine, our internal development team.

As well as enterprise search, we also specialize in knowledge management (KM). We have a couple of products addressing the management of knowledge, particularly within law firms, and recently we launched an application for the iTunes App Store providing mobile access to IDOL OnDemand, and we see this part of our strategy of what we’ve termed Mobile KM.

Gardner: Tell me a bit more about the iTunes App Store app. What is it called, and how did you use IDOL OnDemand to build it?

Holley: The app is called KnowGate and it was developed in direct response to the offering of IDOL OnDemand. Over the years, we’ve found that IDOL on-premise had a large cost of entry. Obviously, with IDOL OnDemand coming on stream, we’ve found that we had a whole world of options opened up to us. We were very surprised how straightforward it was to take the standard tools for producing the iPhone apps and iPad apps and interface them with IDOL OnDemand.

Great performer

It’s given us that opportunity to bring the technology that we've worked with for so many years and found to be such a great performer and hold the audience that we’ve always wanted to bring it to. The offering has allowed us to do that through its low cost of entry. As Fernando said, it’s democratizing the tools of the very large corporates that we've traditionally worked for.

Gardner: Help me to better understand this. There is no easier way to adopt a technology than to download it for a few dollars from the app store and instantly fire it up on your mobile device. If I were to download that app today, what would I be able to do with it? Who is the typical user? What is the function that that they would gather from it?

Holley: The typical user is predominantly a business user. The first instance is that you would be able to access your KM, your valuable documents or your key information that you need whether in a law firm, or whether it's engineering specifications or your latest contracts.

That’s the first element of it. The second element is being able to actually capture knowledge while on the move and being able to take information from an email or take a photograph of a document, OCR it, and then be able to ingest that into IDOL OnDemand and share it with the rest of your organization.
So it really opens up that kind of ability, and of course, once it’s shared it becomes valuable.

So it really opens up that kind of ability, and of course, once it’s shared it becomes valuable.

Gardner: Very interesting. Fernando, we're seeing with GateWest, this joining of the cloud model with the mobile model. How is that accelerating the use of analytics? That is to say, an application that can gather data and information and extend it to the cloud and then the cloud can create an analytics value and then send it back to that mobile device? How are you seeing that as a powerful new way of broadening the use and value of analytics in general?

Lucini: If you think about it, mobility is everywhere. We all create mobility and mobility apps for everything you have. I'm sure you guys walk around with a mobile device.

We have to be very clear that all of our consumers, even if it's enterprise-consumers versus consumer-consumers, all become little data analysts. We're all much better versed on information than we ever were.

Now you see 18 year-old kids or 20 year-old kids coming out of university and their ability to manage information in their devices, in their environment, is incredible. You no longer have a situation where you can associate analytics from mobile.

Mobile apps are mostly about analytics with some description, certainly about adding value to the data that a user asks you to create it. When I say "create it," I mean create it indirectly, create it by the motion on your wrist, versus you directly writing something down. So you get these two sources of data.

But it's certainly now such a rich space. Let me give you an example. You can take what's coming out of the back of a device, which is probably machine-driven, all the stuff that really the machine produces. You can put that in Vertica OnDemand and that will be your warehouse for doing the analysis on that: What am I doing, when, how, for how long, all that kind of jazz.

Creating context

At the same time, I'm producing the information directly from my mind. I'm creating context, I'm writing, I'm speaking, or I'm recording, whatever the case may be. Now, IDOL OnDemand can deal with that.

Anybody creating a mobile app is not going to want to have a hard server-based infrastructure, because the whole point of mobility is that it is distributed. It is a distributed computing model.

Those are kind of solutions that are on demand, in the cloud, elastic, pay-as-you-go kind of things. They're perfect for this generation, whether it's enterprise or not. The kind of partners we have are guys who understand that their intelligence and the value they add is not necessarily that they know a tool, but that they are the experts in their space and they know how to balance Vertica OnDemand.

I have my machine or business information and I need to do something important with that. I have my human information and anything in between, and it's the understanding of how this information adds values to people’s lives and how they execute them that’s he key.
The beauty of our OnDemand infrastructure is that it was created for everyone. It was created for our customers and it was created for ourselves.

So it's a really important moment. Mobile is the linchpin of much of what's going on around this that makes sense. If you look at any company today, there's no chance that they won't have a mobile intent.

At the same time, we have a lot of hackathons in OnDemand. I can tell you that 90 percent of the products that are created as a result of hackathons are mobile. It kind of speaks for itself.

Gardner: I know. The combination of the cloud-delivery model, analysis on demand, or as a service and the mobile device is just creating entirely new opportunities to add value as a consumer and as a company. It's really flipping many businesses around.

Let’s look at a particular business when we think about the impact of this new series of models and how they interact. I'm thinking about the IT organization in a company, in an enterprise.

With HP Software having a very broad portfolio of applications, many of which are designed and geared towards those IT organizations and developer organizations in companies, how can Haven OnDemand with that analysis-as-a-service capability be brought to bear on other HP software applications focused on IT organizations?

Lucini: The beauty of our OnDemand infrastructure is that it was created for everyone. It was created for our customers and it was created for ourselves. Not to unveil too many wonderful things, but there will be a number of announcements of our own tools, which will be powered by OnDemand. And we made a distinction of what is on demand versus what we call core. It’s our language to speak about our internal use versus our external use.

Organizational tools

These are tools that help the IT organizations.We have tools for backup, where the on-demand model will add great flexibility to what the IT operators can do with the information and how they can serve the legal compliance and partner infrastructures.

We have uses of OnDemand for a wider HP software family where they provide analytics, both for security as well as operational systems, and things like that. So it's a very democratic tool. We recognize that the world of information pivots on two things, and that’s why we created a platform.

It pivots on our ability to incredibly scale up and analyze structured information and semi-structured information. That’s why we have a Vertica core engine. We recognize that human beings create information and so we have our IDOL infrastructure.

And it's these two things together that every single one of our internal partners, IT, our own software product that tender to IT as well as external customers only to leverage this product. And then in some cases it goes very heavily one way, or very heavily another, you have a very, very strong warehouse.
All of our internal partners look at us and say that they're coming at it either from very human or from very machine, or actually in most cases, both.

You always have that road-map of possibility to get you to the other side, either more heavily toward IDOL or Vertica. You can really start, for example, with a Vertica OnDemand warehousing cloud, make it super-flexible, and put information in Flex Zones, really massage that data, don’t be upset by schemas,  and then work as you go, and scale up.

At the same time, think of what if you need some enrichment, what if you need to take some information that’s coming in and asking to say take in your social feed. So I need to take a voice feed and text information, classify it, and put it into my Flex Zones. That is available, and in the opposite direction, it’s exactly the same.

All of our internal partners look at us and say that they're coming at it either from very human or from very machine, or actually in most cases, both. This is the roadmap to get them to take advantage of both in the same platform. So you can see, it's very, very compelling for our internal partners to use, and we are delighted to serve them.

Gardner: I'm seeing a great deal of flexibility on the applicability of this. We've seen from RingDNA how this can help an inside sales organization do things they just could never have done before.

We have seen from GateWest how this is essential to bringing knowledge management and document management to a whole new level by combining the best of cloud and mobile devices.

Then, as you're now saying, we're only scratching the surface about how IT organizations can use the cloud and the analytics as a service for improving their application lifecycle management, their business service management, or their application development test. So it's really an exciting time.

I'm afraid we are about out of time for today’s discussion, but there's a lot more that people can learn at hp.com in terms of Haven OnDemand. Let’s just end with one more peek into the future. Fernando, what might we expect next? Where do you think Haven OnDemand will go in the near future in terms of a new type of business value?

Disrupting markets

Lucini: Let me just say that we're going to disrupt a bunch of markets. We're going to be looking to take over some markets out there that have been very traditionally on premise and we're going to try to democratize it. You can guess that we're going to take the world of video and voice and we are going to make that very democratic.

There are going to be lots of interesting things coming out where we're going to allow our customers to create their own APIs and extend the platform themselves. So there is a lot of that to look forward to.
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We'll also be extending our Vertica OnDemand presence, getting more-and-more customers in there and getting more modes, using more of our Vertica technology to add functionality in a REST kind of way, in a web-service kind of way to the on-demand picture, and adding more and more APIs just to reflect the richness of a platform. So it's clear to everyone that this is only the beginning of an amazing story. So there are quite a lot of APIs, but there are many, many more to come. So there is quite a lot to look forward to.
There are going to be lots of interesting things coming out where we're going to allow our customers to create their own APIs and extend the platform themselves.

Gardner: Well, very good. I'm afraid we will have to leave it there. We've been talking about some very big news made here at HP Discover in Barcelona, the announcement of HP Haven OnDemand, a new set of big data in the cloud services.

We've learned a lot about the details and implications of this debut of the cloud-based HP Vertica OnDemand and HP IDOL OnDemand components within HP Haven. And we've delved also into two early users of HP Haven OnDemand and how they created new inside sales force value and a new knowledge management mobile service.

So please join me in thanking our guests, Fernando Lucini, Chief Technology Officer for HP Big Data; Howard Brown, the Founder and CEO for RingDNA, and Neal Holley, Operations Director at GateWest. And thanks our audience as well for joining us for this special New Style of IT discussion, coming to you directly from the HP Discover 2014 Conference in Barcelona.

We’ve explored solid evidence from early enterprise adopters of how big data changes everything … for IT, for businesses and governments, as well as for you and me.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HP-sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on new offerings, announced this week at HP Discover in Barcelona, that provide on-demand, pay-as-you-go data analysis servcies. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2014. All rights reserved.

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