We have been talking about geomaterial characterization and today I will be discussing about the electrical characterization. You will find it very interesting to note that during our 10 plus 2 physics when we were studying the electrical properties of materials, we never realized that where these concepts can be utilized particularly in the realm of civil engineering, geotechnical engineering and now in the realm of environmental geomechanics. The basics are same and these basics have been extended to solve very complicated looking problems which environmental geotechnologies faces in today's world. And this is what you are going to find out from today's discussion. So under the realm of electrical characterization, I will be talking about the importance then what are the electrical properties, electrical resistivity and electric constant of the material followed by influence of various parameters on the electrical properties of geomaterials. This will be followed by the method of measurement of electrical properties, the generalized relationships which we have developed and we have proposed and which are published in the literature which are helping people to obtain the electrical properties which can be utilized for understanding various micro mechanisms in particular which are happening in the geomaterials. Now this will be followed by the relationship between the thermal and electrical resistivities. This is an interesting concept where we can show that how thermal regime migration in the geomaterials can be related with the electrical regime or the potential regime which develops in the system. Now this will be followed by the laboratory and field investigations which have been conducted state of the art on different types of measurement techniques, then a little bit on what is the omiconduction in geomaterials and then I will be introducing the concept of electrical impedance. And this will be followed by again the determination of the properties of geomaterials by using the impedance which is a very state of the art and contemporary subject which some of my students have used as I discussed earlier also to exhibit how the unsaturated soils can be characterized, contaminant transport in unsaturated soils can be established. And nowadays we are utilizing the concept of electrical properties in defining the multi-phase of the geomaterials particularly gas hydrates. So gas hydrates is a subject where we are realizing that the electrical properties can be utilized as a signature of the material to demonstrate how the mechanism occurs. And I will also cover a bit on how the AC migrates in the geomaterials that is alternating current and the basic models which were developed by my students to understand the flow of current which is you know identical to the flow of water, the flow of thermal flux and the flow of you know electromagnetic flux also. So this concept becomes very, very interesting. And the last topic which I will be discussing during the next lecture would be the magnetic characterization of geomaterials. So to begin with what are the importance of electrical properties of geomaterials in contemporary geotechnical engineering this becoming essential for predicting and determining the most fundamental parameter related to the geomaterial which is the water content and saturation. See gone are the days when people used to take out samples from the field and they used to test them and then they used to analyze the results. Because first of all all of us are aware of the limitations associated with the sampling from the field and bringing these samples to the laboratory where we disturb the samples particularly its moisture state. So in most of the problems nowadays people are interested in measuring the in-situ water content and in-situ saturation all right because as I have discussed in the previous lectures most of the mechanisms depend upon the in-situ water content which is the volumetric water content and the saturation of the geomaterial. A good example of this would be whenever we talk about the coupled phenomena where we talk about let us say moisture migration out of the sample because of thermal gradients so this becomes a coupled phenomena. I would be very eager to understand how the saturation is changing within the sample of the geomaterial over a period of time and this is how we determine the unsaturated hydraulic conductivity of the soils. Another good example is that how the contaminant front is migrating in the geomaterials which is a function of saturation and in-situ volumetric moisture content of the geomaterials. Degree of compaction, so nowadays this is the age of electronics and people would like to measure or establish what is the degree of compaction of the soil mass, core cutter technique and sand replacement method and balloon method and you know all those methods have really been shelved off now and looking at the speed and the pace of infrastructure development it becomes very difficult to adopt the old techniques or the conventional techniques of finding out degree of compaction. So people are interested in finding out the in-situ densities so that the degree of compaction can be established by using sensors. So one more thing I think you will be realizing from this discussion is that in today's electronics era when the electronics is at its peak you know everybody would like to sense the parameters associated with the geomaterials by using sensors and this is where again the electrical properties of geomaterials become very very important. So most of the sensing techniques which I will be talking about would require electrical properties of geomaterials. The third one is porosity from the discussion which we had until now I hope you have realized that the porosity is the parameter which requires a very very dedicated efforts very intricate parameter to obtain and I will be discussing about this separately also how to determine the porosity of the geomaterials by giving you complete details of how the porous structure modeling is done in the subsequent lectures. So one of the techniques of finding out the porosity was to resort to molecular diffusion. So when we were talking about the contaminant transport through diffusion if you remember there I had introduced the concept of you know the equation where the diffusion coefficient is a function of porosity and free diffusion coefficient can be known and hence the porosity can be obtained. This concept is being utilized in most of the projects particularly which are of strategic importance or where you know the porosities are absolutely tending to 0 but you still want to establish that. A good example would be design of nuclear domes. What type of material should be utilized at what compaction states of the concrete they should be placed or compacted so that nothing diffuses out through the domes of the atomic reactors. Similarly, in case of soils also you must have noticed that I can cut short the advection phenomena but diffusion predominates. Now unless we understand the porous structure and how the pores are interconnected it becomes very difficult to do the modeling of the geomaterials. So porosity is a parameter which requires a very special treatment and I will try to do that. The next one is hydraulic conductivity conventional test for determining hydraulic conductivity have several limitations all of you are aware of it. So the question is if I really want to find out the in situ hydraulic conductivity of geomaterials what type of systems I should be utilizing. What type of mechanisms which I would like to study and how whether electrical properties can be utilized or not this is what is becoming quite useful in contemporary discussion. There are some efforts which have been made to obtain the liquefaction potential of the soil mass also. That means people have tried to determine the in situ density and the pore-water pressures which build up in the soil mass by using electrical sensors. Detecting and locating geomembrane failures the basal liners for the landfills when they get punctured because of their placement and the compaction the biggest issue is that there is no way to obtain whether or to establish whether the geomembranes have failed or they have got punctured while placing them in the form of the GCLs or CCLs. This is where the electrical properties could be utilized where the electrical sensors can be placed beneath the landfills and the compacted clay liners or geodextile clay liners. So when the contaminants migrate through the geomaterials the resistivity drops and this can be measured by using the electrical signals and analyzing them. To estimate corrosive effects of the soil on the buried steel structure. This is also a very contemporary subject. Most industries want experts who can establish the state of the structure which is buried inside the soil mass and lot of money is being spent by the industries to establish such type of you know state of the buried structures including the piles. So those of you who might become an expert tomorrow in the retrofitting of structures buried structures you will be using a lot electrical properties of geomaterials. To investigate the effects of soil freezing on buried structure freezing and thawing phenomena can also be captured by using the electrical properties and of course if you want to find out the salinity of the agricultural soils for agricultural activities the electrical properties would be very useful. There are sensors which can we call them as resistivity sensors or soil salinity sensors. They can be embedded into the ground and you can data along the entire network of the sensors to see whether the soils are more saline less saline whether they are losing the nutrition and how to replenish the nutrition by doing you know fertilizing. Another set of importance is that these are the concepts which have been used in understanding the electrical properties of the geomaterials. The basic hypothesis is that for any material the dielectric constant or the dielectric permittivity defines its properties. In other words for every material there will be a unique dielectric constant. The reason is that most of the geomaterials are made up of oxides of silica, alumina, iron, sodium, potassium, calcium and so on. So if you have done the chemical analysis of the material you can always link it with the dielectric constant of the geomaterial and the beauty is that this dielectric constant could be either for the dry soil partially dry soil or fully saturated soil. So if I know the water and dielectric constant of the water when the water goes and sits into the voids of the geomaterials this becomes a water geomaterial system and I can measure the dielectric constant of water geomaterial system and I can show that how the dielectric properties are changing over a period of time. Many sensing techniques are developed nowadays which use this concept of measurement of dielectric property or dielectric permittivity and depending upon the dielectric permittivity you can express the dielectric permittivity as a function of volumetric moisture content. So once these two are known I can manipulate the other properties of the geomaterials. Good examples of you know these type of techniques are capacitance probes and frequency domain probes, FD probes we call them or FD sensors we call them. There is another set of sensors which is known as TDR probes time domain refractometry probe. So both these probes are being utilized both in the laboratory as well as in the field to measure the electrical properties like dielectric permittivity of the material which is linked with the volumetric moisture content and volumetric moisture content is linked with the saturation and the density of the material. These are the techniques which are non-invasive and non-destructive alright. So that is the most advantage of resorting to electrical measurements that you are not changing the structure of the soil at all, you are not destroying the sample, you are not invading it and that is the biggest advantage of resorting to electrical properties of geomaterials for characterization. Any questions? Sir, how accurate are the results with respect to that oven drying from this? If I am applying voltage across two electrodes, what is the inaccuracy which I am going to impose to the system? So you must be realizing now see the whole society is graduating from conventional to electronic devices. The real answer to your question is these measurements are quite precise. So this is one of the concepts is that water happens to be a very you know dielectric material. So its dielectric permittivity is 81 and for air it is 1. So what it indicates is when you are dealing with the dry soils, the permittivity is going to be extremely less. But when you are dealing with the wet or saturated soils, the permittivity are going to be extremely high because of the presence of water okay. Now you can do the entire manipulation within a scale of 1 to 81 and then you can see how the whole system is behaving. So the electrical properties are electrical resistivity in 10 plus 2 physics I am sure all of you have studied and the dielectric constant k. So there are two broad methods of determination of electrical properties. One is we call as low frequency residue methods where the frequency of current is less than 100 hertz. However, there is a second category which is known as high frequency electric methods where the frequencies are up to the order of mega to gigahertz. So suppose if I ask you a question what is the advantage of pushing in let us say AC at a very high frequency into a material, what will happen? Why do you require very high frequencies of the current to be pumped into the sample? What have we high frequencies would do? We cancer would be when the AC frequency is more the passage of current becomes easy as compared to the current which is of low frequency. So this concept has been utilized to analyze the results of the electrical signatures of the materials. Now the advantages of these techniques over other methods is that these are non-destructive and these are fast and easy. And most of the time these techniques can be utilized under in situ conditions. So I will just insert a probe or a sensor and then I can get the properties. As far as the accuracy of the results is concerned, you have to rely on the measurements or the best way would be you repeat the experiments and see how reliable the results are. Another interesting thing is when we talk about the electrical properties of the geomaterials, the microstructure of the soil or the geomaterial gets. So one of my PhD scholars did his PhD thesis Dr. Sochandumaste who has tried to quantify the degree of you know anisotropy in the system in the soil mass by quantifying what is the degree of localization and what is the degree of dispersion of the clays. So I hope you can realize that when you can go up to this minutest details of the fabric of the geomaterials, your measurements are going to be quite precise. Now there are two more things which you should remember that electrical properties of the geomaterials are their response to the applied electric field. And I am sure you must have come across this function in your 10 plus 2 physics that dielectric constant is the ratio of epsilon s, epsilon s is the permittivity of soil divided by epsilon nod, epsilon nod is the permittivity of the free space. So we utilize these concepts to decode the geomaterial, I will show you how. Now comes the parameters which are influencing the electrical properties of geomaterials, porosity and the pore structure is number one and because the passage of current through the geomaterial is because of its inherent porosity and its pore structure. So I am sure you have come across these concepts of why permeability is more in the flocculated state of the geomaterial or the soils as compared to a dispersed state. That means the pore structure has to play a very important role, the orientation of the grains have to play a very important role. Water content, the salinity level, the cation exchange capacity of the soil, why? The more the cation exchange capacity of the geomaterial, the cations are going to adhere on the surface and they act as the conductor of current alright. So as compared to sands, the fine-grained materials which have negatively charged grains would be better conductor of current. Of course the temperature plays an important role. In the previous lecture I was talking about when you pass current through the cables, heat gets generated and if soils are not able to dissipate the temperature quickly, the heat within the soil mass increases which indirectly increases the temperature of the conductor or the cables. Now once the temperature of the cables increases, their resistance is going to increase and once the resistance of the cable increases, the opacity drops or the amount of heat which is getting emitted into the soil mass also increases alright. So temperature is a phenomena which can be considered as a coupled phenomena. It could be because of heating of the geomaterial or the temperature of the conductor is changing or if I pass current through the conductor, because of this conduction, how the temperature gets generated in the system. And as discussed sometime back, the electrical properties would get influenced by the type of current which is used. I am sure from your 10 plus to physics you must have learnt that which current is non-heating type, which one is a heating current, yeah you are right. So DC is a heating current and AC is a non-heating current, why? So you know the answer. So suppose if you are using a DC current, the chances are that the soil properties in terms of its moisture content would get altered because of the heating of the sample. And that is the reason most of the time high frequency AC is used for these measurements and the resistance offered by the material when you use AC of high frequencies is known as impedance. So impedance is the resistance which is dependent upon the frequency of the current. In this context, because we are geotechnical engineers, I thought it will be a good idea to draw a balance between the parameters which influence the liquefaction potential of the soils and how the electrical properties can be utilized to map them. So grain shape and size can easily be mapped by using electrical properties of geomaterials. And we know that liquefaction is associated with the coarse-grained materials which are very regular in shapes or spherical in shape. So we tried studying the grain shape and size effect by using the impedance and we were successful. The studies are still ongoing. Porosities and relative densities which again are related to the liquefaction potential can be easily captured by electrical properties and variation in water table. So water table is variation in nothing but saturation as a function of depth including the capillary zone, alright? So if you derive a relationship where saturation is a function of dielectric constant of the material which is a function of depth, you can map the water table also. External forces like shearing effects. So some of my PhD scholars are now working in this area of what really happens when shearing takes place and whether we can capture the shearing response by using the electrical signatures of the material or not. So the philosophy is like this, resistivity is a function of void ratio and void ratios are a function of density. So if I can map these three parameters by conducting good electrical properties experiments I can even find out the liquefaction potential of soils. So on net if you search you will find that there are some efforts which have been made by researchers in this context. And please remember all this is being done in situ. So those of you who are aware of disadvantages of finding out liquefaction potential of soils by conventional SPT would appreciate that this technique would give you the liquefaction potential under in situ state and you can monitor when the systems are going to liquefy. This can also be extended to the fact that delta resistivity that is the change in the resistivity is going to be a function of change in the void ratio and change in the density of the geomaterials. Efforts can be made to find out the e-critical value. If you remember the critical void ratio when you shear the sample and when you plot the dilatancy versus compressibility of the soils and then you define a band of 10 to 15 percent of the void ratio which falls under the category of e-critical void ratio where the shear strength becomes constant that can be used as the reference electrical signal for establishing the liquefaction potential of the soils.


I ask Tom to come to the podium and to make his talk about optimal systemic therapy in setting of hepatic and renal dysfunctio. Thank you very much for advising me. The optimal systemic therapy in hepatic renal dysfunction, which is an appropriation view of what I was doing last night. I've pressed the wrong slide already. I'm going to start with renal dysfunction if I may and then move across to hepatic dysfunction. I think the hepatic issue is more complicated. I don't think we know enough about either to be honest. I think the reason we don't know so much about renal dysfunction is actually the problem isn't as big a problem as perhaps we make it out to be. The issue with hepatic dysfunction is I think actually we lack a little bit of an understanding about exactly what we're dealing with. I think as a group including myself we're just a little bit confused about what a transaminitis is and what hepatic failure is. This is the, obviously, compars and this is looking at increased creatinine associated with pisoponib and snisnib and as you can say it's vanishingly rare. These drugs are not associated with dramatic problems in terms of renal function. This is a patient. I've got a couple of patients which I'm going to talk about who we saw just recently. 67-year-old female nephrectomy in 2010, non-insubprenent diabetes, grade 3 clear cell renal cancer in the remaining kidney. Relaxed, contralaterally, creatinine 240, creatinine clearance less than 20, as you can see a big mass. We have a long debate I'm sure you all do in the room about whether you remove this mass. The problem with this individual was actually that they had widespread metastatic disease with liver and lung disease. The issue is what we do here, do we give them systemic therapy and I can see from the graphs of the questions that we've answered already that people are keen to treat these patients. Certainly the options go along nephrectomy and systemic therapy. We wouldn't do that because obviously you would render them dialysis dependent by doing that nephrectomy. The second option is systemic therapy which is attractive, observation alone and Brian talks a bit about observation. This individual had immediate risk disease and we tend to start targeted therapy in these individuals and then nephrectomy alone which I don't think is a particularly attractive option. We went for option 2, systemic therapy. Which therapy do we give and at which dose? I think the second question probably is more important than the first question because there is a little bit of data out there suggesting to us that actually we may be playing around a little bit with these drugs. The data that is available, this is a creatinine clearance of less than 60. Actually this is relatively common, lots of patients have a creatinine clearance less than 60. This is not an uncommon situation and in fact I, looking at a creatinine clearance of less than 60, I am actually not too concerned about this sort of level and I wouldn't bat an eye about giving full dose and going straight in and I probably wouldn't get over excited about it either. You can see from here and I accept the numbers are very small and this is about the best data we've got. But you can see from here that there's nothing standing out on this page to suggest that synitinib is not safe in this population. I guess the same applies for mTOR inhibitors. Again very small numbers but effectively in this population with moderately impaired renal function both drugs look very safe. The key question I guess is in this population with moderate renal impairment, do the drugs actually work? Very few of these patients require a dose reduction and you can see with a progression free survival of 10 months with response rates in the 20%. There's no suggestion in this moderately impaired population that number one we should be playing around with the dose. Number two is we can give any of the drugs and we should be comfortable with all of them, pysothinib, synitinib and mTOR inhibitors. And number three is we shouldn't expect necessarily patients to do badly although I accept completely the numbers are small. And you can see here from the tolerability slide that actually the drugs are relatively well tolerated. Again nothing stands out from the page suggesting that we should be doing anything different in this population. This is a slightly more complicated issue and Simon Chowdery led this study from another retrospective analysis looking at more severe renal dysfunction. So these people have a crack in the influence of less than 25 or they're on hemodialysis. And two things for me. Number one is I expected a lot more toxicity. I expected a lot less, this is supposed to be an F not a D, I apologize. I didn't expect a progression free of 10.5 months. I was expecting a mismatch of patients. The one thing that did stand out though is over 50% of patients started at less than suboptual doses. So that's most patients starting synitinib 37.5 or pysothinib 400, lots of people those escalating without problems. I think that to me demonstrates a nervousness and that nervousness is being generated by a lack of data. So I think what we have is in moderate renal impairment we have no concerns in more severe renal impairment. We have a nervous community but actually when you give the drugs the toxicity profile and the outcome actually looks pretty good. So perhaps we should be confident or slightly more confident in this population. Remember the drugs aren't metabolized by the kidney. So we shouldn't get too focused on that. There are some PK results and I'm just now on the final part of the renal. I'm going to talk about hemodialysis patients. I'm nervous about hemodialysis patients and I've created half a dozen perhaps. There has been some quite nice PK work done both here and in a couple of slides I'm going to show in a minute. The key to this PK data is twofold. Number one is when you give synitinib both that decreased dose and at higher doses. You can see from this curve here, it's this bar, it's the bar here, the solid buff is the dose that one would like. You can see from here that we can achieve doses that are equivalent to those done in the phase one PK studies on hemodialysis. So give the drugs seems to be the message from these results. Number two is the synitinib concentration seems to be independent of the timing of the dialysis. So we shouldn't get too fixated on giving the drug two hours before or two hours after dialysis. So remember the half-life of these drugs are relatively long. So that's a question which I'm often asked is if you're on hemodialysis when should we be giving the drugs? It doesn't seem to matter that much. Should we be giving 37.5 or 50, 400 of pysopinib or 800? Again, I don't think we know the answer to that question. I would suggest close monitoring of these individuals because of the lack of data that we have. But I think caution is wise but I don't think that this is a hopeless situation and we should treat these patients where we can appropriately. This is more pharmacokinetic data supporting the previous slide but not actually adding very much to it. Beyond the PK suggests that the dosing on hemodialysis falls with the PK data falls within what we would acknowledge as standard type PK results. So just to summarize the first part of this and I think it's the easier part. I think the data is not great and I just think maybe why is the data not great and I don't think it's because we don't have the opportunity to publish because I'm sure that any of us in the room could gather a group of friends together and get two or three hundred patients within a year. I think it's actually because we're not as excited about this area as we could be because the preliminary data that's come out suggests that there isn't a problem and it's very rare for me to speak to people about patients with problems in this area. So I don't think we should get too focused on this issue. I think we should work towards standard dosing and I think this applies for particularly those individuals with moderate and more severe renal impairment because it doesn't appear that these patients are compromised and it does appear that we can get good efficacy results. And I wouldn't get too fixated on the hemodialysis issue either. It doesn't necessarily make things more complicated. I would encourage close monitoring but I don't think again it's a hopeless situation. I'm now going to move across if I made the second part of the talk which is totally unrelated to the first part of the talk but follows a similar line and that is actually hepatic impairment. And liver toxicity is graded by a child-pew score. These are the parameters. It's like the Heng criteria. You get points and then you go from A to C and with this you can predict treatment algorithms and outcome. And this is what the liver doctors do at all of our institutions day in, day out. What they don't do is they don't focus on CTC criteria of a transaminitis. They don't actually look at the transaminitis as I'm sure we all know when an individual goes in with liver failure after a paracetamol overdose they're not talking about grade 3 or grade 4. They're interested in albumin, they're interested in INRs, they're interested in encephalopathy. But what we're doing with all of the VGFTKIs is we're giving drugs and we're identifying transient transaminitis. And I think at times we're calling this liver toxicity and I'm not sure those two fit particularly well with one another. And again, CTC criteria and I've banged on about this many times and I will again today, they weren't designed for VGFTKI therapy. They were designed to assess chemotherapy toxicity. And it's very important that we remember that these figures here of grade 1, grade 2, grade 3 and grade 4 are very much plucked from the air. And don't really mean if you have grade 3 toxicity, there's been work to suggest that's worse than having grade 2 toxicity. And that's a really important message that I'm going to try and get out today if I can because it's again a question that I'm asked a lot. So actually there is a real dearth of data in this area about what it actually means if you get a transaminitis, whether or not you need to stop the drugs and whether or not you can reach out and I'm going to try and address some of those issues today if I can. So I'll do this with a patient, so this individual, a transaminitis, 62-year-old male, starts with an ALT at baseline, perzopinib 800mg, standard doses. On cocodamol, there's this paracetamol issue which people sometimes talk to me about. And after five weeks we've got a grade 3 transaminitis. I'm not going to ask the room what they would do but we kept going and we actually kept going. So a week 7, they'll move from a grade 3 transaminitis, sorry, it'll move from a grade 1 to a grade 2 transaminitis. ALT, the upper limit of normal and continuing on perzopinib. I hope by the end of the talk on the next five minutes I'm going to have given you some clarity about what we should be doing on this individual. So what's the data that we know? So this is synisotib, again, this is the COMPARS trial. So as you can see, it's raised ALT, both drugs causing 60%. Grade 3 or 4 toxicity, that's a transaminitis, so remember that's going to be the raised level. And you can see perzopinib higher than synisotib here. So a transient transaminitis being caused by both drugs but perzopinib more of the grade 3 toxicity and the same applies for raised ALT. So the question that I'm often asked is when does this occur? And this is some work, some retrospective work that we did in a series of 125 patients, a number of people in the room involved both from London and the United States. And the issue here is you can see that actually the occurrence is occurring particularly in the first 12 weeks of therapy. So 90% of these events on perzopinib occurring in the first 12 weeks. And in fact the more severe the grade 3 and 4 transaminitis, all of it occurring within the first 10 weeks of therapy. The current guidelines for LFT monitoring are this 3-weekly process. So you can see from this, looking at these blood test measurements, you can see that we're measuring them regularly and we are going to identify most of the transaminitis during this period of time here. As time goes by when you look at these patients here, some of these patients of course they've developed transaminitis, some of those are associated with things like progression of disease. So after this period it appears to be very rare. And the second important question is okay so we've developed the transaminitis, how long does it take for the LFTs to normalise and when can we expect to restart the patient back on therapy? And you can see from here the median time is approximately 4 weeks to get back to a grade 1, a less than grade 1 transaminitis. The issue about grade 1, as I said before, is that's never been validated at the time to restart. And many people in this room and many people I'm speaking to are restarting drugs with patients who still have a raised ALT or AST. And so therefore most people are starting, are restarting between 3 and 5 weeks in this series in which we looked at. So the next question which is can we give the same drugs safely for a second time? Can you re-challenge with Pozopnib or if it occurred with Stunisnib or Seraphnib, can you re-challenge with those drugs too? So 32 of our patients were re-challenged and many of them were re-challenged back at the original dose. And actually the recurrence of the toxicity only occurred in 7 of these 32 patients. And so one of two things is happening, either there's a tolerance is occurring, this is a transient period which is self-resolving or the dose reduction is effective. I'm just going to point out this one patient, so one patient for whatever reason actually didn't stop. He developed a grade 2 toxicity and didn't stop Pozopnib, just kept going straight through. And actually it was a self-resolving problem. So this may actually be a self-resolving issue. Yes, I do think we need to address it and particularly for those patients who develop an extreme transaminitis, but I don't think it's again a hopeless situation. I think we need to be very prudent, we need to wait for normalisation, but I think we can re-challenge. Whether or not you re-challenge with the same drug or switch to a different drug is very much up to you as I see it. Just the last couple of slides and the numbers are very small and I don't want to be too provocative. But for those patients who developed a grade 0 or a grade 2 to 4 toxicity, you can see there may be a small difference between those and the individuals who developed this grade 1 toxicity. So the issue out there is like the hyper tension. Is there a correlation between development of toxicity and outcome? This data does not suggest that. More data is required, but I think it's an interesting area. And I just thought I would just give this slide and this is the recommendations on posopenly related liver toxicity. And I think this is a useful slide. Again, look at the reassurance. So transaminitis levels of less than eight times the upper limit of normal continue on drug. I'm not sure how many in people in the room are not interrupting after five. Certainly historically that's what we've been doing. This suggests that yes, we should be monitoring regularly, but we should also have confidence that we are able to do this safely. If it occurs in concurrence with a raised bilirubin, the situation is somewhat different. And obviously if it goes above eight times the upper limit of normal, interrupt. If it is going to occur, it will happen in the first 12 weeks. Interrupt, restart, and you can restart safely either posopenib or an alternative agent like sunitonib. So this is the patient who I was treating. And actually I, at five times the upper limit, I don't interrupt this patient. This was treated some time ago. I think the message is keep calm and carry on to a point. But obviously close observation is very important. I'm not stopping the paracetamol at this point is wise. I personally did it. I'm not sure there's any evidence it helps. So what I'd like to just conclude if I may is to say that specifically for this hepatic part of the talk, let's be really clear this is not liver failure or liver toxicity. It's a transaminitis. It's very different from the child-pew score. It's a transient event which is occurring in the treatment course that requires monitoring, re-challange is possible and safe and it's usually okay. CTC criteria again unfortunately here I think being counterproductive in my opinion. And we probably should work together to work out a better way of doing this. And yes we need a lot more data in this area because I think it will be helpful for the community. Thank you very much indeed.


I hope I'm audible. Looks like I am. I have the India staff for being here before lunch, when everything is just about feeling the growling in the stomach and about to head for a quick lunch. But the morning sessions were extremely exhilarating. I was part of them. I mean, the impassioned speech of Rajdeep. And then the knowledge for the journey of Aditya, I think both were very, very inspiring. And sitting there, I was one of those few, it was very hard to see all the conversations happening on this one. From my perspective, there's not much that I can really add value to. There's nothing that you guys probably already don't know. And since I'm not a practitioner, necessarily, from the PRC, there are those many limitations that I might have in whatever I'm going to talk about. So please do keep all those in mind when I'm here talking about a function, which is seen all around us, especially as a person who looks after a large news organization. And PR and news goes literally hand in hand in many ways, more ways than one. So just keep that in mind as we talk about this. And as I read somewhere, that we talked about some of my earlier colleagues talked about the content traveling. And what does it mean now that how do we make content travel? And there was a conversation about making things, the headlines are clickbait. And the effective usage of the headlines are clickbait to get more and more people to choose to see your content. So I thought maybe I should do one of those and try and put that as one of the topics for this conversation. So the topic actually came down to PR 2.0, the road ahead 2020. It was aimed to be a clickbait material for people to pick up and figure out maybe their own mediums or wisdom which might be in there. But that's for all of you to judge. It's not going to be too much, it's a long session. I'm just going to walk you some of the things that from an outside perspective, when I see the business of PR, and this is primarily later the business of PR, not the editorial side of it which Raji is the perfect master at, but it's more the business side of PR and what can we do to make sure that the entire function literally redesigns itself and comes to the fore of the marketing communication which even the panel before referred to me as sometimes now which is completely homogeneous in nature. Very difficult to separate marketing from PR. And this is an attempt at that. So see it in that prism and let me walk you through what this is. So in the decades that we have seen in the group of India at one point of time it was just enough for a client to have a marketing project. Because the role was that here's the RX product, it needs to be sold X many times and hence there was a marketing manager and a brand manager whose job was to work with sales and make sure the KRA's were in terms of how much category, how much product sales happened for this particular product. This was an era when there weren't too many competitors around you and there was enough virgin territory in the market for you to go and conquer. And the KRA's were fairly simple. You need 10% of the product share or the volume share or the market share of the particular category. You get it down to 15, 20 and hence in some ways the marketing objectives or the sales objectives kind of merged together in some sense. Cut to a scenario where now in every product category you have at least 20 to 30 competitors. You also have the advent of social media. You have the advent of digital platforms where the lines are blurring between what marketing does and what TR does and all of those kinds of things. Seen from a CEO's wisdom, there are a lot more communication challenges than just brand marketing challenges. It is not just about how many products do you sell. A CEO today is also talking to prospective employees. He's also talking to hip board directors. He's also talking to the financiers who have lent him the money. He's also talking to all the ancillary industries that feed in his particular industry. He's also talking to the regulators who inform and influence his industry. So the role and the definition of what marketing used to be to just about sell more product has radically altered into constituting all of these things. Somewhere it was under the preview of HR that noted the job of the HR to talk to prospective employees or to current employees. Somewhere it was left to, for example, the investor self to deal with the investor's queries and things like that. Somewhere it was left to the personal skills of the CEO or the promoter in that sense to interface with media houses to make sure that there is a positive persona created about them. So it was all in different, different, different functions and different, different individuals talking about these things. I think today we all realize that all of them finally boil down together that it is no longer sufficient just to have something which is known as brand marketing but it is effectively the overall corporate marketing which is today the center of all the challenges. So when there is a challenge on magazine it's not just a challenge on magazine it's also a challenge on Nestle. It's a challenge on the entire organization. It is a challenge on every statement that the CEO makes for everything that the prospective employees might make. So the spectrum is cast far wide and this is something that PR has always been doing doing a lot of those things but I think it needs to come out more into the mix and what do I mean by more in the mix? Given that PR is a communication specialist today the role is not as probably widely taken in as the marketer's role is. The marketer still controls the largest lion's share of the budget. It's the lion's share of all the communication that happens there whereas sometimes including when I look at our own organization the PR communication is as a result of the CEO telling what needs to be done and essentially dealing with the external world and very little with anything else which means that today the person who closes perhaps to the corporate communication side is the PR, the comp head rather than just the marketing head because the marketing head is dealing with the market scenario. What this guy is dealing with is actually the corporate scenario which in many ways is more vital at times than just the brand metrics that will be used to. So that's what I'm talking about that in 2020 and beyond is there a significant shift that can happen from the PR champions to take more and more center stage role in the communication piece altogether. What does that mean? There are new frontiers that have emerged. There was the original erstwhile PR which all of you guys are champions of. There are new frontiers of digital there's a new frontiers of social who's going to control those frontiers? Who has the ability to understand the nuance of everything that the corporate stands for and hence reply back to the conversation that happened in the market place. We've seen instances when internet shutdowns happen we've seen instances like what this guy referred to where the CEO himself is intervening on social media and giving a message out. Now whom can you entrust with that responsibility? Is it a marketer's job? Is it a corporate communication person's job? Or is it a collective job of the entire organization to make sure that all these effective constituents are effectively dealt with? Recognizing these frontiers is the first step towards reorganizing your ecosystem to make sure that your corporate communication team also become a center stage in your entire marketing portfolio because they know probably far more about the organization than what the marketing person might know because he's a product specific role and he has an organizational specific role that a cop come guy manages. So it's effectively knowing that and knowing that the new frontiers may have new controllers or new custodians within the ecosystem and that needs to be appreciated. So if you were to look at it there was the core role of PR is effectively disseminate information, generate awareness. Now this has always been there the role. You know also edit rate the place in the brand on platforms that are credible so that the rub off to the brand does happen and it seems like yes your brand has really has a fraction in these particular outlets and hence it seems to do there. Marketing a job is to join the audience. The corporate communication job is to hold the audience build on them and manage your reputation in your daily interactions with those brands. Where marketing ends in some sense is where corporate communication starts. You have already got a fan call and you've already on a lot of people who are following you. How do you deal with them through the cycle when they are already engaged with you as opposed to first just drawing them in. So this is distinction in some sense between the role definitions that need to evolve as a mechanism and automatically get a line shift as a budget or a budget needs to be divided in that sense so that there is more traction behind all these communication challenges. Which then leads to the rise of content marketing. Now what is content marketing all about? What we've been used to think is very frequently commercial. What we've been used to think is static outdoors and static print communication. All with a view to getting people to buy more cars and all of those kinds of things. Now what it does now needs to happen which currently happens in the form of some articles that might be pushed through from the PR ecosystem or might happen somewhere else is content. And now for content to take center stage and build a narrative about it there is a bland way of doing content which is making it press release, shooting it out and hoping that somebody picks it up, throw 10 things in the sky and go one thing six and then put out a deck around that this is the cumulative PR value that I bought for the table and that's good enough for some sense. But I think there's a larger opportunity here because the understanding of content is far more sharper in the PR comes to you than only the marketing in many ways and ones because in brand marketing there's a certain carrier that you have which needs to sell more product. Now by showcasing many, many things in content marketing it's a slow burn process. It's not going to immediately go into the people that are going to the showroom and time 20 cars just because you did something about it. Content marketing is little more long term, is little more involved with the editorial product of what you're trying to communicate. It is also involving all the communication sects that you want to cover. Right from talking to your prospective employees to talking to your shareholders to talking to your board of directors to talking to your regulatory authority who manages from the government of India. All of these are something that the communication talks and all of these are something that can be together woven in into a content marketing plan. And guess what today? The creative agencies are focused on the 32nd ad. The media agencies are specialized in buying those 32nd ads. This is the white space available for content marketing and it is waiting for the content specialist to come to the front and take center stage in this new era of content marketing. And that I think is the journey that PR 2.4 can definitely have. Obviously, it will have to happen in conjunction with the marketing team with a certain amount of marketing investments behind it. But I think there's a lot of things there that one can pick up and make sure that it becomes a part of the marketing arsenal than just being relegated to relationships and then driving some articles here and there. Small examples of some of the things that have happened. You've seen, you know, things, the rights to green campaign, the water scarcity campaign. That's what's immunized India. As a small example, I will not dwell much on it because I don't necessarily am inclined to use this platform for the use of networking. But some of the examples that's what we did in water scarcity is Mission Pane. Mission Pane is a record, it's a hardback. Now, it's not, it's definitely perhaps not going to sell more of our things. But it's aimed at a thought leadership stance within the entire record, within the entire ecosystem and it is very, very closely editorially delivered by the entire length and breadth of networking which houses 20 channels which is out of 70 crore individuals every year and in 15 different languages. Which also is another challenge for PR, which is that if in case you've only been using Indian English, the audience is far wider than that. The nuances of a translated press and needs can go dramatically off if you do not look at in the content of every single language that your consumers are available in.  And that's what I think the role needs to be which is effectively that of storytellers. It's not just a hard push, it's a storytelling. How do you make yourself engage it? It's not about clickbait. You have a story, Nestle had a story. How do you engage with that? How do you build upon that? That what role does a Maggie play in the entire source of what India is all about? The grassroots entrepreneurship that you see in India is people operating those Maggie stalls outside of, you know, pill stations or in tourist destinations with nothing investment than just a star in the middle of the night. Now that's the story that people don't know about what that brand is about. Now have these stories come into the fore? The answer is these stories don't necessarily come to the fore. The kind of conversations that have happened over what was symbolically known as Shai Tej Chastra could effectively become Maggie Tej Chastra. Has it been done like that? Because it is a melting pot for people from different communities coming together in those places, having conversations. Now those are brands at point. Now those are also corporate communications at point. It only depends on how you look at that person, how you lift that, convert it to a story in a format, work very closely with the editorial teams of the platforms that you choose to work with in the language that you choose to work with and make sure that finds itself in its way in the content mix in an editorial environment, whether it is television news, whether it is print, whether it is digital, whether it is social, the same narrative. And do not expect quick returns perhaps in one month. It takes time. Storytelling doesn't just happen overnight and you cannot expect magic to happen overnight. That's the part about storytelling. It's beyond product launches. It's beyond press conference. It's beyond media releases and events. It's what the organization stands for. It's a multi-year commitment. It is in some sense, where I say, a lifelong commitment towards building the values of the organization and making sure that you use effective storytelling tools in an editorial environment over a period of time to keep blending in the message very, very subtly that this is what we stand for. And over a period of time, you will get that for the show. There is no way that you will not get that for the show. And once you get that context, and this is all whatever I'm talking about is actually context marketing and content marketing. Context marketing is vitally important because at a time of a crisis, when there's a crisis that happens and all the PR comes rough together to solve those things, with these kinds of backdrops, it becomes far easier to manage because you'll be known to be more about the context and not purely about certain examples that may have gone off, it might have got the attention and suddenly spun out of control. So that is the journey that I'm all talking about. Now, all of this will not happen in isolation. It needs to happen in actual consultation with the client and keep pushing the bounds and keep pushing the envelope and trying to become more and more center stage and getting more and more relevant in the marketing mix as an industry. And I think it's high time that that happens, right? What does it entail? It also does entail that you think like a consumer, that I'm a consumer. What was such my, really my goal? There are some commercials that go far viral than some other commercials. It's just because of the emotive content material that touches your heart somewhere because you think that the consumer, oh yeah, this commercial was made because there's a grandmom in that commercial which resonates with my grandma. She's bringing a tip into my hospital. She's working in XYG. Those are heartwarming moments or in some instances, you've seen British Airways done that, you know, getting the kid to the home to eat that food, right? Those are very emotive moments. Now that is thinking like a consumer and there is no reason why a car from communication professional does not think or shouldn't think more like a consumer and then understand as a consumer what story would I like to listen? And hence, if I am a storyteller, if I'm gonna give stories to the consumer, then how do I become a content creator? Now, I may not be the best at content creation but can I then work with partners who can help create those stories and say it in a better format than what I might be able to do? And that's a very big opportunity which basically then is part of the main marketing story of the brand which includes hyper-local content in every language so that you feel that it's not something which is happening far away, it's happening to me in my community and if it happens in my language and it happens in my district or my town or my village, then you identify more with it. So when you are thinking content creation think through all of those touch points. First thing about the last touch point and then think about the corporate headquarters. If you do like this, then you would have made a state change in your communication strategy and then your choice of the vehicle that you choose will effectively start from hyper-local, going to local, going to national and then going to international. And in many cases I have actually seen it actually go the river from international to national, to local and perhaps if there is some resident last denominator left then it goes to hyper-local your brands are actually getting consumed in the river fashion and that's what communication says we need to realize that it's actually the river pyramid which works here than the normal pyramid. And that's the journey that I thought in a quick format because I know that I'm coming in between lunch. This is really my two cents to the entire function of PR is to take up these challenges because nobody understands these challenges better than you. Nobody has seen these heated moments of crisis or the kind of communication that happens in corporate headquarters. You are more privy to it than anybody else. What you choose to do with that is all up to this entire function. If you were to look it up in a progressive fashion and make sure that you hold center stage, I don't see a day that far off when this becomes a very vital and major part of the marketing budget actually being devoted towards creating of these marketing storytelling platforms which even there I say changes the remunerative model of the industry that you worked in thus far. From a retainer, it's something which is far more than retainership because it is creating of content and it is working with different content creating partners and definitely with much more media investments behind it. And that falls from my perspective because just I thought that you know the pertinent time to be looking forward and what I could contribute to this. Thank you so much for your patience.


at Big Data SV 2014 is brought to you by headline sponsors WAN Disco. We make Hadoop Invincible and Actian, accelerating Big Data 2.0. Okay, welcome back everyone. This is Big Data Silicon Valley. Hashtag Big Data SV is a continuation of our in-depth coverage of the Big Data landscape. We were just in Big Data NYC just a few months ago. Now we're in Silicon Valley. We're all the innovations happening and this is theCUBE crowd-source innovation, streaming the data live. This is what we do, expect a signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angle. I'm joined by my co-host, Dave Vellante, co-founder of wikibon.org. We have a very special guest in the house here in theCUBE, CUBE alumni, Kaz from WAN Disco. Welcome back again. Always a pleasure to have you. One, it's a dynamic conversation, great personality, and you know what you're talking about. And you don't hold back, so we love it. So welcome back. It's a lot to carry on. Thank you, John. You are a tech athlete and you're not afraid to throw a few punches and which is, we love the controversy, but let's get down to it. So what's changed since New York City, obviously New York City, very financial services oriented, very much business, a lot of tech being discussed, Silicon Valley, growth is happening, valuations are high, a lot of things happening in the marketplace. What is your view of Silicon Valley, Big Data, the Stratoconference? What is happening here? What is the core story? I think what is going on is that the Big Data is being caught on more and more, rather, I would say, of the big companies, right, so big enterprises.  And among these companies that actually bring the real deal on table are companies that stand behind the open source movement, essentially the Hadoop and HBase technologies. And of course, real-time processing, such as, you know, or close to real-time processing, such as Spark and Shark. And we see the huge momentum gain, essentially, in these companies. As you know, Databricks actually got the funding recently, so it shows that the investment community has a belief that this segment of the market will go up and will keep growing. And Clouder has actually took Spark under their wing, so there's officially supported platform for them as well. But what's interesting is that all these analytical, new analytical tool sets, tool kits, they still, I believe, struggle to reach the level of real-time responsiveness of HBase, for instance, which has been around for a while. And the building community that works actually behind of it made it the real kind of, it's pretty much the part or moving cog of any data warehouse for anyone who needs a fast access to data, right? So HBase is there, HBase is growing at the fast pace, and we see actually quite a bit of the momentum, again, from the customers and the like, who are asking about HBase solutions. And again, we'd be in the company that did the non-stop Hadoop last year, actually, interestingly, about a year ago. That time, we announced non-stop HDFS, and now we brought to the table the next offer, which is non-stop HBase, because we see actually quite a bit of the momentum gain. So how's the non-stop working right now? I mean, how's the non-stop, and you continue to roll out more and more features HBase? Is it well received by customers from a technical standpoint? Are there specific proof points you can now point to and say, hey, these are the use cases that we're exploding in a big way, and here are some new things around the corner that we're attacking? Actually, as you know, the original non-stop HDFS comes into different flavors, right? It comes for a data center, such called LEM edition, and for a cross-data center application, which is called VEN edition. And what we see mostly in terms of interest from the companies is that VEN edition is significantly higher demanded. So people actually need to have a way to solve the disaster and recovery problem between the data centers, considering especially the fact that traditional ways of doing this is actually very costly and have limited capabilities, both in the range and the data volumes. So non-stop VEN is actually being received very well. So we're going into the number of the hyperfile POCs and it's actually catching up pretty good. So H-Base is interesting. I mean, obviously it's got a lot of momentum in the marketplace. It's kind of the de facto standard in the dupe, but there's a lot of complaints about H-Base. It's hard, so there's a lot of heavy lifting involved and it's not non-stop. So you're addressing the latter of those two complaints. So you're concerned about, first of all, do you think that's valid?  Is that a concern of yours? And is the market addressing that? And so I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. Yeah, so as apparently many of the listeners might know already. So H-Base has redundant failover capabilities built in. So basically H-Base contains two main parts where the administrative piece of the H-Base called master manages the information about the essentially the regional servers that tracks the metadata about data placements and table spreads and what was not. So the redundant failover capability in, sorry redundant, I shouldn't say redundant, a certain failover capabilities of H-Base, I actually focused on the regional servers. So there's a way to failover the regional server if the active regional server failed. But the problem as usual in any distributed systems is that you can, if you're lucky, so failover could happen very quickly. If you're not so lucky, the failover can take actually a few hours. And that means service interruption essentially. Another part of the problem essentially is that H-Base client is not HE capable unlike HDFS client. So in HDFS too, for instance, client can failover quickly because there is a notion of proxy provider that helps you essentially bounce from one node to the standby node. And we took advantage of that in our implementation back in HDFS. So H-Base doesn't have such capability so client is actually not aware about the possible multiplicity of the region servers. So essentially the problem here is that you have a bunch of clients writing at high speed the data into the region servers, okay? Region servers, essentially the H-Base tables. And a couple of things could happen. So if region server goes down, the HE capability, the failover capability that H-Base actually has right now can help you to essentially re-register the region server on a different server, on a different host. And hopefully everything will go okay after that. But the clients will fail essentially the transmission because they have no way of switching over quickly, right? So what we're trying to solve in the offering that has been announced yesterday is essentially this part, right? So we're trying to solve the failover or make multiple active region servers available similarly to what we've done for HDFS. So you say the problem is that the recovery is very variable and unpredictable for clients today, the pre-wet discoverers. Operational complexity is well there, right? I mean, if you called our organization from last year, we mentioned that the operational manual for QGM with ZooKeeper is whatever, 40 pages, 24 pages. I don't remember the number, but it's sort of like complex and huge. So H-Base, as I said, is even more hardcore and even more sophisticated. So operational headache is actually bigger. Yeah, so the big chunk of that operational headache that I was referring to in my question relates to recovery and the whole failover procedures. And so you're dealing with that sort of out of the box, is that right? Yeah, we essentially give the clients an ability to run multiple region servers, right? And the all active, they can serve clients actually at the same time without any essentially overhead, pretty much without any overhead. I mean, there's some overhead on rides because we need to reach the consensus and all that stuff, but it is actually would benefit from the multiple regions or architecture because natural load balance will help actually to bring up the speed. So Kaz, what kind of apps, use cases, examples, do you see your solution being most popular in? What do you see expected uptake to be? It's sort of an interesting question. I'd say, again, my guess is as good as any, right? So because we're probably better than most, anyway. Better than John and James. We're both, if I'm not wrong. But I think what's going on essentially is most of the real time or close to real time oriented applications would benefit tremendously from this because for these guys, even at 10, 20, 30 seconds of downtime might mean huge loss of data. So that would be my guess. Apparently for anybody who is using HBase in production, for instance, a good example would be eBay Search.  So imagine HBase goes down in eBay. And I know for a fact that eBay, for instance, has a pretty sophisticated harness around their HBase setup in order to provide that failure or capability as quickly as possible. So I'd say guys like this would be actually very efficient. So you mentioned Search. And that's sort of an e-commerce play. I would think ad-serving, maybe. Is that right? Maybe fraud detection? I'm not an ad guy at all. But you would think HBase is being used. I would think in certain situations, they would be, yeah, maybe, maybe not. I mean, you see some other new databases emerging, but still. True. Yeah, every single day, there is a new technology coming around. And this year, Ostrata, I found actually probably another 20% of the companies I never heard about. 20% more compared to the last year. I mean, they might be here for the whole next year, or might be not. They might develop something that will catch up in the market. So we don't know. But what I'm saying is that there's always competition. We heard that yesterday from the CEO, John Schroeder at MapR. He's like, I walked through the hall. I saw companies I've never heard of before. And half of them won't even be around. So I was my comment. It's like, look to your left, look to your right. They may not be there. It's kind of like that when you go to school. But I got to ask you more importantly. We heard some great quotes. I remember the first HBase con, we covered the queue with Cloudera, and they launched that. The quote that I liked there was, HBase is like a fine tailored suit. Suit it up. It's perfect. So if you want to try to put it on somebody else, it's really difficult, which just kind of points to the use case of what HBase did at the time. The quote we just heard from the CEO, ex-Microsoft guy we just know was, it's like a big bodybuilder, big built up muscles and thin legs, professional services, and you have skinny legs on Hadoop or HBase in this case. So what's your take on that? Because you're seeing HBase is a very viable product. It's growing fast. Is it expanding its use case? What are people doing with it? What are some of the trends around HBase that you can share with the folks both technically and just from a relevant standpoint? Is it evolving faster than you expected? Slower than you expected? Is the ecosystem and the contributors growing? What's your take on HBase? Give the update. I think HBase, and again, I'm not a commuter to HBase or whatever, so I cannot tell for the community. But what I observe from the outside is essentially, I see community being very focused on bringing the stable API-complete version of HBase into the game. So for instance, right now, there is a very active work on the 0.96 line of the release of HBase, which they call the single-edit release, which would be the last incompatible sort of release. I mean, it's a huge jump. Everything's going to break. Everything's going to be incompatible. But after that, they promise to be stable and sit actually at the same spot forever. So community is actually very busy working with that. And it's great to see that there is no stagnance. There is no slowdowns.  And with the stability release in place, I think this fast move forward would be actually oriented on better performance, on better usability, on better operational procedures, and that kind of stuff. But as with any open source product, essentially, there is always this last mile between the open source release and the customer. So somebody needs to actually cover this gap. So system integrators actually need to step in and make it actually usable for everybody out of the boxes, essentially. Because as we referred a couple of times before, operational complexity is what killing a lot of these software offerings, in my opinion. So I want to ask you, Kaz. We were talking before about 20% of the companies at the show floor hadn't heard of and presumably their new startups that you hadn't heard of. You have been in the inner technical circle of Hadoop since the beginning. And some of the other companies that you see on the strata floor are ones that maybe weren't here at the beginning either. You see EMC, a lot of the big whales coming in to the community. And so you see them trying to co-op the big data theme and doing a great job of marketing. My specific question is, what's their contribution to the core of the technical community? Are there certain companies that are stepping up and bringing their capabilities to open source? Is it mostly pure marketing? What do you see there? And what's the community's response to these big companies coming in? It was positive in one hand. Are they delivering the kind of contributions that you guys would like to see? Well, I want to compare, and I'm not the first one actually to do this, but I want to compare open source development with a sort of evolution process. I mean, nobody drives it to a particular goal. So we're sort of trying to approach thousands of different ways and see what works better and what sticks. So it's like throw something in the wall and see if it falls out. And with big companies coming in, they apparently have a certain agenda that they want to achieve certain results performance-wise, feature-wise, and that stuff. And I think open source community is actually a thrill to see this, because more people will contribute to the product, the better product, the better use cases user base will get out of it. Marketing-wise, as you said, yeah, there's quite a bit of hype here and there. So some companies just want to sort of ride this wave and just, OK, so we are big data guys, because we said so. In terms of contributions, the original, I would say, core teams that were actually focused on Hadoop and HBase and what so on, they're still around, they're still very actively working. And they, I'd say, sit in probably in three, four, five, mostly companies around the Silicon Valley, right? So people, I believe what happens is that the companies where the most of the open source contributors are with, they manage to create this climate of the engineering creativity, cultural kind of paradise, if you will, right? So where people can actually contribute most effectively. I don't know if the big companies can do this. And again, I've been working for big companies in my life, such as Sun Microsystems, for instance, Rest in Peace. But I think that Silicon Valley startup spirit should be there, right?  You need to actually bounce the ideas with your colleagues and with your peers and with people in other companies and all this stuff. And I think, actually, at Wengie Sky, the one of the reasons, again, self-plugged, but the one of the reasons I like the company is that we always bounce in the ideas with each other. We always sort of trying to help. Remember the cloud era back in the day when you guys were sitting on the floor there? Yeah. Something similar. So I don't know if that spirit was in the cloud era. Remember the old days, the cloud era? Well, the early days we were there. How many like that? Less than 30 people. Yeah, it was the first small company. But Sun's a good example. I mean, Sun always had an open culture, open source culture. And I mean, even though Linux became Sun's snake oil anyway. But are there large companies, in particular, that stand out? I mean, for example, John and I always talk about IBM's open source mojo. And I want to put you on the spot, but is that illusory? Is that real? Are the big companies sort of all together in this? Or are there some that really stand out? I think, again, each company has an agenda in there, right? So for instance, if you take a look at Intel, right? So I know that Intel is very active in Spark Community, for instance, right? So if you look at Pivotal, Pivotal seems to be very active, actually, in Groovy, Spring Source, that sort of the community. So now they ramping up their contribution into Big Top and Hadoop and whatnot, right? I don't think you actually can paint them all in one brush, if I understand the question correctly. Yeah, yeah. So you're saying it's their line with their agenda? Right. So for instance, Microsoft is very interested in bringing the Microsoft bits and pieces into the Hadoop, right? And I'm not sure if they do this in a good faith or not. Again, not my call. You kind of got to trust that they do and hope that they do, right? Right. I would ask them. I'll fill in the ones. Yeah, right, exactly. So anyway, but yeah, the modern media, anyway. Yeah, we'll leave it. We'll leave that. Because great to have you on theCUBE, great to hear from you. Give us the final word on what's happening here this year at Strata Conference and Big Data SV. What's the big revelation from your standpoint? I think what they really thrilled to see is, as we just discussed, a lot of big companies are there on the floor. And they actually, literally, they trying to start providing the services around big data. It might be Cassandra. It might be in a SQL, Mongo, HDFS, Hadoop, wherever. But they actually getting on that bandwagon, which means that customers would have more choices. Customers would have more to pick from. More competition, more fierce competition actually will find the best solutions on the market.  I like the speed with which the market is actually moving forward. And there could be different explanations for that. But still, I believe we all, essentially, at the end of the day, we will gain from that highly high speed craze, if I can put it this way, where you get, actually, everybody's on board every day. Every day, new names popping up. And the marketing dollars, too. The big companies want to do market development for the little guys all for it. And then the little guys have to compete on the capabilities that they bring in the differentiation and solving problems that the big guys don't. OK, this is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest here. Live in Silicon Valley, this is Big Data SV. The hashtag is hashtag BigDataSV. Go to crowdchat.net slash BigDataSV and join the conversation. We're posting photos there. You can post videos. You can post photos, post commentary. And it automatically loads the hashtag. So join us and ask us anything. We'll be happy to answer your questions. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back after this short break.


The purpose of our Police Week celebration was to celebrate our officers, to commemorate our fallen officers and to remember those who have fallen and who have given the ultimate sacrifice in their police duties and line of duty. We also wanted to show appreciation for officers because sometimes it can be a really thankless job, especially here on the base. They always run the domestic operations trailer which has all of our ride gear and everything like that. Obviously for domestic operations, whether it's any sort of rides or anything like that. Honestly, my favorite thing about this entire Police Week, even though it's my first one, is how kind of everybody around base you kind of tend to get trapped in your own squadron and it kind of branches out. You get to meet new people around base that maybe you've seen a thousand times checking IDs down at the gate, but you get to know them a little bit more in a personal level. You get to kind of figure out what they do and they kind of figure out what you're doing in security forces. It's the first time we've done something as far as I would know in our squadron to celebrate Police Week.