Thanks for checking out this movie review. This is for the 2001 Japanese film Ichi the Killer by Takashi Mike I know some people say it differently Takashi Mike or Miike. I don't know. I say Mike Ben a fan of Takashi Mike for a while actually, but this is the first of his films I'm covering this film, you know, is it necessarily horror. I don't know I wouldn't really call it straight up horror But I think it gets kind of lumped into the horror category because of the brutality of it all the kills in it The SMM aspect to it all that type of stuff a lot of people don't know where to throw it genre-wise I mean it is crime and it is a bit thriller But it gets thrown in horror all the time and that's why it's on shutter right now when I am doing this review And that's where I watched it even though I have a DVD version of it back in here somewhere Actually own a bunch of Mike films. I'm a fan Anyway, like I said directed by Takashi Mike which I don't think he's ever written any of his material He's a very prolific director at one point I think he was pumping out directing like seven films a year for a while, which is insane That is totally insane. So anyway, some of the films he's done a ton a ton a ton of films So I'm just gonna name some of the films that I've seen that I would recommend seeing Dead or alive, I mean all three of them, but it's diminishing returns Fudo Shinjuku Triad Society Lay Lines the Great Yokai War Iso deadly outlaw Wrecker Sukiyaki Western Django 13 assassins imprint Audition and gozu a lot of its films are really out there real crazy real wacky That's Mike Screenplay about was by Sakeichi Sato who also wrote screenplays for Ichi the killer episode zero and won the Ichi Gozu which Mike directed Tokyo zombie, which I've heard good things about a chain of cursed murders This one is interesting zero man versus half the half virgin and Meatball machine Kadoku which I have the first meatball machine. I need to see more of them That's fun, and it's based on a manga by Hideo Yamamoto Who also did who also has film credits for mangas for films based off of mangas He's done Including stop the bitch campaign stop the bitch campaign again Ichi the killer episode zero and won Ichi It stars Ted nobu Osano, which by the way, he's my favorite Foreign actor probably I was gonna say my favorite Japanese actor, and then I thought a little bit I'm like, I think he's my favorite foreign actor period and he's definitely up there as far as like overall favorite actors He's he's great. He's kind of considered when I was reading one time I was reading that he's kind of considered like the Johnny Depp of Japan I don't know if that's the same now, but this was you know a while ago He's been in some films like electric dragon eight eighty thousand volts bright future Last life in the universe, which is an amazing film. It is not horror at all. It's not action It's a slow film, but it is an amazing film Make sure you see that last life in the universe the blind swordsman Zatichi Tokyo zombie Mongol the rise of Genghis Khan a Lot of people will know him from Thor and Thor Ragnarok. He's been in the Thor films He's not a huge role, but he's in there and then this is an interesting one I saw it on his IMDb credits Apparently for the 2021 Mortal Kombat he's gonna be Raiden. I Like that. I love that actually so a little bit of information on You know little tidbits about the film It's been banned in several countries because of the brutality in the gore Not a big surprise there because there are films that are less intense and less brutal and less gory that have been banned from countries The semen in the beginning of this film that that is kind of like a puddle of semen outside of the the apartment Where each was masturbating while he was watching a woman get beat up and raped This it when it forms the title of the film that is actual semen. I think it was one of the the crew members provided it Interesting and that that's directly from Mika in one of the director's commentaries Mika wanted Yamamoto the guy who wrote the manga for it to write the script But he claimed that he really wasn't able to because he had some severe writer's block So that's why he didn't do it himself Otherwise, he would have which would have been interesting to see what he would have done because I know that There were some differences. I'm not really gonna go over all the differences, but I know there were some differences Kakihara's ringtone Asano's character Kakihara in the film who's probably the most iconic character from the film other than Ichi and Actually, it's probably just the most iconic because he's a stronger character. He's a more interesting character. He's certainly the most flashy The way he dresses is awesome. I love his outfits outfits in the film But anyway, his ringtone in the film is the theme song for the film So just a little tidbit In the manga actually the character of Kakihara is not good-looking at all and he's not like a thin dude He's like kind of a little bit bigger and he's ugly. He's like a disgusting person Yamamoto says the story is actually a love story because This is what it said due to Kakihara and Ichi being the opposite on the opposite ends of the spectrum of SNM Which is Seido masochism Sadism and masochism so obviously you see it and Ichi is obviously the sadist and Kakihara is obviously the masochist because he likes having violence and and You know painful things done to him So if you watch the film knowing that that Yamamoto the creator says it's ultimately a love story about these two coming together You really see it in the film not like every step of the way But you do see it and I will kind of talk about a little bit of stuff like that because in the end I mean, there is a lot of kind of like in anticipation especially on Kakihara's part of finally meeting Ichi because since Anjo his his boss wasn't around anymore. He's very depressed. He's very sullen and that's because Anjo used to beat him and The way he did he liked that was the part part of his masochism So since then no one's been able to come close and he feels like he's been let down a lot by that so he In the end obviously finds Ichi and it's kind of the ultimate experience for him from a masochistic standpoint and you feel the anticipation and see the anticipation from Kakihara throughout the film of Working up and being like oh, he's getting closer. He's coming for me and then even towards the end He's saying, you know, I feel scared, but when he's saying that he's scared. He's like giddy It's kind of like he's like excited for a first date with someone he's meeting So watch the film and think about that stuff. It's very interesting The crazy disorienting visuals in the very beginning of this film are crazy and disorienting I don't really like that aspect of it, but you know, that's kind of a thing that Mika will do in films Yeah Ichi Ichi was beating off on the balcony in the beginning because of the mix of the sex and the violence going on Obviously you you end up learning a lot more about Ichi in his background Obviously initially you think that his background and where all that comes from is because he witnessed a girl being raped by bullies But then you later find out that Gigi. I think his name is Gigi Had hypnotized him and made all of that up and then and that really what had happened is his kid murdered his parents So he goes through this kind of struggle throughout the film that you really end up seeing quite a bit Not really knowing who he is being very confused about what he's feeling because he's told by Gigi and the hypnosis The ideas that have been implanted in him through hypnosis He thinks that he's driven by revenge against bullies He's trying to rid the world of world of bullies because that's what his boss is telling him But in actuality and what he ends up kind of finding out at the end is that he truly is a sadist And that's in his true past of murdering his parents and just being a violent person by nature So you kind of see him Have that journey as well Throughout the film.  I say that because we're watching the very beginning where all those guys are kind of complaining about how they have to go In and clean up after Ichi which every time he kills he believes a Incredible mess especially because of that all that a arterial spray that ends up going on which It happens in Japanese films quite a decent amount and it always makes me laugh Like I feel like it's an over-the-top thing that actually makes the violence not as intense or scary It makes it more wacky and funny and I think one of the things is one of the reasons that I don't have such a terrible like visceral reaction to a film like Ichi the Killer is because Between the music the that things like the arterial spray and the way that Miki shoots the film with like a lot of weird Kind of off-kilter angles and getting in like oddly close to characters and almost doing a little bit of like an evil dead type angle thing at times I think those things keep it feeling just weird and odd and wacky Instead of intense and scary and disgusting So it's weird. It's it's this weird kind of dichotomy of like this terrible intense gory stuff going on right here, but the feel of it is very different It's way lighter, which is super odd Which actually When you think about it would make sense because someone who's into SNM would kind of view it that way as not being at as you know Scary or intense they would view it as being more you know kind of light and You know interesting The first look at cocky heart is interesting I assume that the scars that he has on himself are probably self-inflicted maybe done by someone else I say probably self-inflicted just because of what happens later with this whole tongue-cutting situation Which I'll talk about that a little bit As an audience member you feel like you need to play catch-up somehow because you're just plopped in the middle of Yakuza dealings with basically no context But then again, you know, this is something that Mikae does a decent amount with his films Especially when they're Yakuza related films, which he's done a decent amount of Yakuza related films It's just something he likes to go for And it's interesting because it literally is like you're just dropped in the middle of stuff going on because literally you're dropped in the middle of drama between a bunch of kind of Yakuza clans basically in this film and then it takes you a little bit to catch up and You're just like, okay now I understand what's going on here The first torture scene of the guy suspended and the use of the shrimp tempura hot oil On the back is certainly a way to kind of set the tone as far as the brutality and violence I think it's probably the most intense and messed up of all the scenes in my opinion or at least for me personally Especially when you end up seeing how much joy it's bringing cocky horror in the film Like you see in that in that scene how much inflicting pain really makes him happy, but then later on in the film you see how it's Having pain inflicted on him makes him even more happy so Ichi seeing the girl at the club is the next step of seeing who he is as a person It's kind of these layers that keep getting pulled back of Ichi throughout the film He needs to relive seeing her being beaten and that's the woman He goes to see at the club after he had been outside of her balcony watching her being beaten and raped and then he shows up And he he likes seeing the aftermath and remembering what he was seeing and then having her talk about it That's his fetish, you know that gets him off It then goes to the scene of cocky horror cutting his tongue So after the scene of of Ichi reaching you know going and seeing this woman It's this intense thing of pleasure for him at that point That's kind of like his height of pleasure at the moment And then it goes right after that to the scene of cocky horror cutting his tongue off Which is a parallel of Ichi's scene with the girl basically of cocky horror's height of Pleasure at that point as he cuts his own tongue off and then you can sense it you can tell it So I thought it was cool that they kind of did that Mika has a bunch of odd and eccentric characters in his films That's another thing that happens a lot Prime example the guys with the clear masks and like all that like gotcha pawn those little you know like figures all over there You know beanies Also, you know the whole thing with the the brothers later on that you know The one puts like the little animal ears on and says he's gonna be like this the special You know animal detectives weird But that you know, that's Mika. That's what he does with these films He has these weird corky characters and that's part of what keeps films like this less tense less scary. Let's gory Well, I mean they're still gory, but just you feel it less The cut in half scene is crazy, but kind of looks funny Now because the CGI is bad and that's one of the things with this film I say all the time. I hate when Films have used CGI especially when they age because it never looks good over time So that's one of the things I don't like about each either killer watching it now Is that the CGI a lot of times doesn't look so hot you can tell it's not actually there. It's kind of like Paste it on and then the cut in half scene even though it is kind of cool and impressive Just isn't looking so solid anymore Already talked about the arterial spray can't tell you how much fun. I think that is in film It's funny how afraid everyone is of Kakihara all the time, especially in those moments where he acts very docile I love that.  He's a big name He's everyone's afraid of him Especially because he doesn't mind taking punishment from others like he actually kind of welcomes it So, you know, how are you not gonna be afraid of a person who loves to dole out pain and punishment and doesn't care about having it? You know inactive back to him Ichi does seem confused. Yes. Okay, so we already talked about that I'll skip that. That's about him being confused initially but figuring out who he is eventually Kakihara is convinced that Ichi is coming for him, but he has no clue what an unfocused mess Ichi actually is That's one of the interesting things about Kakihara's perception of Ichi throughout this entire film is that he think thinks he's like this Sadistic mastermind who's got everything planned and he's just slowly coming after Kakihara and Kakihara almost kind of views it as It's like this intentional build-up that he's getting that like he's trying to make him scared He's trying to build it up for them But he's not, you know, it's just that Ichi can't figure out who he is It's this giant mess and he's just being told by Gigi, you know Where he has to go on what he has to do and he's just kind of fumbling through things So to see those two sides of it are interesting The scene of Kakihara catching the guy's fist in his mouth and then stripping all the skin off as he pulls it out is a pretty crazy one and It looks nuts. I think it's cool. It is relatively intense. I do like that scene quite a bit The woman pretending to be the girl who was raped becomes the catalyst for Ichi finally figuring out who he actually is and What he actually wants to be doing Although he does seem to kind of fall apart in the end once again But at least for a little bit he's he's hyper focused. He's like I know what to do and I know what I need to be doing here But I can't really my thought and I might be wrong. I don't know tell me in the comments I think maybe she was doing that as kind of like a Favor to her boss to kind of awaken Ichi because he had been saying that he was having you know focusing issues He couldn't you know, I think he was saying he could get hard, but he couldn't come basically So I think she was trying to like get him going and get him like back on track as far as like You know being ready to go for the boss to go, you know make the kills But other than that I couldn't figure out why she got in that situation because obviously it was very dangerous And ended up being deadly for her. It was nuts When Kakihara is talking about being scar scared of to meet Ichi he's giddy like he's nervous for the first date I know I already said this but it's very important at that part of the film because it feels very mismatched for what's coming and for And for what Kakihara should be feeling unless you're viewing it from the standpoint of what I was talking about about this kind of love You know love story of the relationship coming together. I Dig the way they did the slow motion for the chase scene on the rooftop That actually may be my favorite sequence of of the film visually because it looks so cool Like you can see especially in the expressions of Kakihara as he's kind of like you know maneuvering like he's gonna do his best to stay alive and To fight because that's part of the sport, but he's he's like scared and excited at the same time and I think the The slow-motion aspect of that rooftop scene really captures things really well. I love it The X cop walking towards his son while he's bleeding after he's had his throat cut It's kind of a ridiculous scene because he's like still moving even though he's lost Who knows how much blood, but it also just becomes funny because it drags on that long and it's all that like crazy arterial spray Although it's not going out. It's like going down, but it's just ridiculous Let's be honest the film is too long and it is actually pretty slow at times, but that's another thing It's kind of like this cultural thing a lot of Japanese films are on the slower side. They take their time actually a lot of Non-American films are kind of that way So so it becomes this issue where I know there are people who Won't watch Horne and I was gonna say I was gonna say horror. It's not just horror won't watch foreign films in general Not just because of subtitles, but because the films are slower We over the past bunch of decades have gotten to a point where they try and keep things You know shorter and more tight film-wise really moving action-packed and a lot of other You know countries aren't really doing that because they're trying to leisurely tell a story kind of take everything in look around You know soak in the environment and each of the killer is like that Although I would argue it probably needs to be cut down a little bit because it's a bit over two hours And I don't think there's really two hours worth of content there in my opinion All right Mika Mika is big on free-roaming camera work for this film It's always moving and it has lots of shots going down the streets Sometimes in like normal times sometimes kind of sped up But then also like doing these long scenes of following people places like through Hallways in the rooms up the stairs and stuff like that I like it because it feels almost a little bit like you're actually there like almost a little found footage Esk, but not quite crossing that boundary. So I like the way that plays it makes things feel a little more real Mika uses a lot of odd angles and has goofy characters with comedic moments These things help soften the mood of the brutality. I knew I already said this, but they definitely bears repeating That is a very important thing about why a lot of people can watch this film and not really have a big problem with it And I remember the first time I watch it, which I'll tell you in a minute For each he this is a pretty extreme example of doing what you love for a living Think about that because truly it is what he loves and he was getting paid I assume he was getting paid. I mean, there were jobs who's getting these envelopes of people he needed to kill Or maybe he was just surely doing it for the revenge that he thought he was getting when he wasn't actually getting any So good ending to this film good film overall The first time I ever saw this I'll tell you I had a friend who would watch all sorts of crazy stuff He gave the DVD to me and was like look. I want you to watch this film. It's insane. It's definitely worth seeing Don't watch it when anyone's around watch it at night before you go to bed because if somebody walks in when you're watching this film They're gonna judge you And I'm glad I took that advice I watched it late at night before I went to bed and I was just like wow. Yeah, I'm glad I did this on my own And then I felt like if I can watch this film I can watch any violent film pretty much I can see anything in a film because especially back when I saw it, which was probably around. I don't know 2005 ish I was like, oh my gosh, you know That's very intense that my senses were just like Overwhelmed. I had not experienced gore and brutality like that in a film before obviously seen a lot worse sense But yeah, I mean it was crazy at the time and some people would still say it is So anyway out of five stars with half stars Possible, I would give each of the killer a pretty solid three and a half star rating I'm not willing to go to a quite like a four star level. I think it is a good film. I don't think it's a great film For reasons that I kind of laid out I was between three and a half and four, but I think three and a half is kind of where it should be It is I recommend it if you haven't seen it, but no, it's extremely brutal But anyway, put your comments down here. I'd love to hear what you think about it Do you love it? Do you hate it? Have you do you not want to ever watch it because you know, it's too much for you I don't know but do me a quick favor and hit that subscribe button if you haven't already That's your way to repay me if you like any video I've ever done including this one because I'm not getting paid or anything and it literally takes you a second It is totally painless for you to go ahead and do that for me I would really appreciate it also hit the notification bell when you do that If you've already done it hit the notification or if you're already subscribed hit the notification bell now if you're gonna subscribe Also hit the notification bell now that way, you know when I'm putting up, you know Movie reviews or unboxings or doing live streams or any of that great stuff, but regardless I really do appreciate you taking this time to check out this video and until next time keep it brutal


Live from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. And welcome back here on theCUBE, the flagship broadcast channel for SiliconANGLE TV as we continue our coverage here at VMworld at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. I'm John Walls along with John Floyer. John, good to see you today, sir. Nice to be here. We're with Brad Tompkins who's the CEO of Vmug who's, of course, a VMware user group. And Brad, good to see you, sir. Thanks for having me, glad to be here. Big week for you, right? Big week. Obviously the show in itself is a roaring success, but Vmug's presence here is quite noticeable. Yeah, well, thank you very much. We obviously have a large presence here. It is one of the signature events that we partake in and we kicked it off with a fantastic party at the House of Blues. It was a member party and a lot of people had a good time, 80s theme. So that was nice for everybody. But we also have some business that we do here. We've got a leader lunch tomorrow. We're really fueled by the community and the leaders and their volunteers what really makes Vmug Vmug and that's the magic. So we try to take care of our leaders while they're here. So we have got some special events for them as well. So John, did you get your invitation to the party? I don't think that mine, hey, must've been lost in the mail. Yeah, certainly got lost in the mail. I know people, though. I'll check on that. Maybe for tonight, we can work on that. For those who are watching, maybe not too familiar with Vmug and the full range of services and offerings that you have, take us through a little bit about the webinars, education, training, all that you do and how big your membership is. Absolutely, we got to. So our membership, first of all, is free and we encourage everybody to engage and get involved in the community. The community is 120,000 members globally and those are active members. So that means that they're participating in some way, either logging into the website or going to a user con. So it's a great community to get tied into. And just for clarification, our members are individuals. So it's not companies, it's individuals. So what we do for that, our goal is education and we do that many different ways. I mentioned that the user cons earlier, so user cons are our full day events. We'll have keynote speakers, breakout sessions, trade show floor, those kind of things. We also have virtual events. We do about 40 of the user cons, so that doesn't, and that's across the globe, but there's some people that can't make it for whatever reason. So the virtual event is the same thing, it's just done virtually. And it is an eight hour show and we do have people that stay logged on the entire eight hours. Our average is about three hours for that, which is really amazing. So we have a tight partnership with VMware. We're an independent organization, but we are tightly aligned. And some of the examples of that is when we do have events, we'll have some pretty good keynote speakers for the likes of Paul Strong, Guido Appenzeller, Scott Lowe, those type people. So it's really great that they support the independent user group as much as they do. It's very tightly aligned. What I also like about the relationship with VMware and the speakers is not only the keynote speakers, is VMware also ships out the very same people that are speaking at a show like here, like VMworld, the very technical, principle architects, office of the CTO. So if people really want to get a technical deep dive into what's going on at VMware and what's going on this year here at VMworld, go to a VMug because the same guys are there and speaking. So, but Brad, I talked to a lot of companies and they come to me and ask, wow, VMug is a very special organization and how do we replicate something like that? I say, well, start in 1999 and completely change the face of the technology industry. Stick around for a long time. And then something like that can develop. But what do you think is responsible for the success of VMug? Why is it such a thing? Why has it grown like it has? And what makes VMug VMug? Well, we joke about it, but a lot of it is the software. And back when ESX came on board, obviously it did revolutionize what was going on in the industry. But I think beyond that, it's just making sure you're connected to the community and to those local volunteers and the leaders. That's where the magic is. That's where those folks are out and they're energized in their local area. And so they bring together, our local meetings are generally 30 to maybe 100 people. And then that kind of builds and everybody sees what's going on. They see the sharing that's going on. They see the peer-to-peer networking. And those kind of things are really attract more people into the group. So then it kind of feeds on itself. And we do a lot of things to try to encourage people to give back to that community by presenting or by running a local chapter, opening up a new one, those kind of things. And it really helps the leaders get out of their comfort zone and add some soft skills to their resume, if you will. It also raises their visibility in their local area and increases their network. And then they can utilize that for their benefit. And sometimes that might be, we have this often where a leader will go off and become an employee, a VMware or a partner, or they will utilize that platform and say, how can I attract the best talent for my company to assemble a good team here? So for me, it's all about the community and all about how do we, on a local level, make sure those connections are happening? Because when they happen at a local level, naturally it's gonna bubble up into larger things like a user con and participation here at VMworld. So who are the members? I mean, we talked about 120,000 various touchpoints with VMware. But for again, for people who are watching to say, is this something in which I can participate is something I want to be involved in? Does your company have to be a VMware client or user service? I mean, what's that membership comprised of? So our membership, we want to include everybody in the community. So obviously that's in users. That's people that are using the product. And it doesn't matter if they're just using Fusion all the way up to full SDDC, full suite of products. It doesn't matter anywhere in between. The other part of that, and this is key is the partners. So the partners play a big role in this as well because it's all an ecosystem. You think about that community, it's a big ecosystem. And then of course, VMware. VMware employees are part of the community and they can be part of V-Monk as well. So any of those three categories, you can be a member, all three categories are free. And so we do encourage everybody to go sign up and get plugged in and learn about how you can, again, feed that community and be a part of it and get what you need out of it. And it's like anything in the world. The more you put in, the more you're gonna get out. I do love the community spirit and how everybody does help each other. You really become better at your job when you're part of the community. And I've seen it happen over and over again. People's careers just take a right turn for the better often when they get involved in the community. But it's important to keep this community grounded, right? And so how are you working? It's a very, you have a central organization, but then each V-Monk is independent too. So what's the balance to keep an individual city V-Monk centered and technical and make that connectivity? And I'm kind of asking, because I do talk to other vendors and they have trouble with, well, either the central headquarters says, you have to talk about this or a channel partner, the salespeople get a little excited. Do you have to go out and tell people to calm down sometimes? Sure, well, that does happen from time to time. And it is, you've got to strike that balance between letting the user group naturally do what it needs to do and be hands-off and just let it be what it is. Now there's times that we get involved for a couple of reasons. One might be that local leader reaches out to us. Hey, I might need help with logistics on whatever it is. And this is just back office stuff that we can help out with. Or sometimes it might be a situation where we hear a lot of feedback that the pitches I'm getting are too salesy. Our members are technical. They're engineers. They're system admins. They want technical, technical content. So in that scenario, we then go and talk to the vendor and say, hey, here's a better way where you can be engaged to community better. And so we do have programs that they can go and look at and learn how, okay, this is what our leaders and our members want to hear. And we've actually got some YouTube videos out there that just speaks directly to partners on how they can be a better community member when it comes to presenting to the local BMUGs. Thank you very much. That training is needed across the board and everybody could use a refresher, right? That's right. Too much marketing, too heavy-handed in that kind of context. People will walk out and then they will walk out. Everybody's wasting everybody's time. That's right. I'm going to a breakfast actually this week and we're going to talk about a little feedback on community and user envy in my organization. I think part of the conversation will be around the V-Mug user cons, which I love and we've seen each other on a couple of them. I've keynoteed a few user cons, all-day conferences, multi-track. Frankly, some of the same speakers here at VMworld, they're super deep. I really love them. It's an innovation in a user group. How, what do you see as the future of user cons and how do you keep them user-centered? Because VMWare also has the V-Forms, slightly different beast. How do you keep user V-Mug's user groups? Yeah, that's a great question and that is something that the board spends a lot of time on and trying to understand and see how we can evolve our user cons. At the center, it always has to be the end users. We do want that technical content and so we, as I mentioned, we work with partners on that, but we also have a different program that we work with our members to really encourage them to present and encourage them to be that person that's gonna stand up and talk about whatever project is that they're doing. I mean, that right there is user group gold, if you will. So we really try to encourage that and we have different programs that do that. You're familiar probably with the VMug Advantage and part of that, you get a license key for HomeLab. So we give a lot of those away at user cons and part of the stipulation is, if you win this, you've got to go and build that HomeLab and then come back and talk to us about what you did and how you ran it and it doesn't matter if it's vSphere or vSan or NSX and whatever, just come back and talk to the community and share what you have. Do you have an example that you can point to of anecdotally within your sphere of maybe a small conversation or one of these experiments that turned into something much broader, much bigger and much more helpful for the whole community or just something you like to point to as being useful as an example of just how this community can encourage growth, whether it's professional within one person or within a company. Sure, I think that the best example is really when Vima got started and it's a long, long story on how it got there but if you just back up say five or six years, that's when we really started exploding in membership and it was just allowing the folks to just kind of let it happen and be there enough to kind of guide it where it needs to go but have a really wide road and then you can kind of collect that up and say, all right, now we're in a situation where we can do things like larger user con and it has more formalness around it but let the user groups and the local groups really be grassroots, people that are standing up and talking about what they're doing. Some of the things that we're doing now that seem to be more successful is panels. Have a panel, have a group of people up there, sprinkle in a little VMware, sprinkle in a little partner and then a few people that are actually doing it where our members really, really love that. Another thing we're thinking about is a lot of our conferences, it might be a 45 minute session or a 60 minute session, let's reduce that down and get more content out there and more those snackable type content because people are gonna need to go take a deep dive on that later and that's the purpose of a follow-up meeting and those kind of things. So those are some of the things that we're seeing that is really starting to resonate with our members. Over the 11 years or so, I've been involved with the VMware community and I don't wanna name names, I don't wanna embarrass anybody. I have seen multiple examples of somebody, they're just an admin, they're just doing their thing, they get involved with a V-Mug, all of a sudden they start to speak or they start to like blog or they start to go to events. Pretty soon they're invited to events, pretty soon I've snuck some people, the people I snuck in here in 2006 or seven just with free passes are now principal architects, they're speaking, all of a sudden they switch roles and they're working for a vendor and crazy amazing things happen when you get involved in V-Mug, very good things. Absolutely and that's something we do see a lot of, I'm glad you brought that up, John, of people just taking it, taking V-Mug and that really accelerates their success and that's something that we really, we like seeing that. It does propose a problem of we've got it now, a local leader that we need to backfill that position but you know what? That's a good problem to have. That is a good problem to have. Another thing that we do is not all technical is, and you've been a part of this, John, is we call it a career corner, we've done some of these at our user cons and getting people one-on-one time with some industry experts like John and say, this is their situation at their particular career, how can they increase to the next level?  They'll email you a nice headshot and everything and we're like, you know, we're making LinkedIn prettier one picture at a time. This is your soup to nuts. You're taking care of all of it. It's soup to nuts because to be successful, it's more than just the technical side of things and our members do a good job of telling us, hey, this is what we want. This is what we want from partners. This is what we want from vendors and then we try to return that favor and say, okay, this is what you need to know about that's coming down the road. It's not up to BMUG to tell you what software to deploy or this and that. Just be aware of it and have the answer and then you can make that decision for your company, for your company's best interest. It's all about building community and you're certainly doing a great job of that. Continuous success, good job with that. Thank you very much. Thanks, Brad. Back with more coverage here from VMworld in Las Vegas and just a bit here on theCUBE.


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Live from the San Jose Convention Center, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering Hadoop Summit 2015. Brought to you by headline sponsor Hortonworks, and by EMC, Pivotal, IBM, Pentaho, Teradata, Syncsort, and by Atunity. Now your hosts, John Furrier and George Gilbert. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in Silicon Valley in San Jose Convention Center for Hadoop World, Hadoop Summit 2015. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANG. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and then extract the signal from the noise. Our next guest is Lauren Schwartz, CMO of Atunity. Welcome back to theCUBE. You've been on every CUBE we've had. I kind of slipped as a Hadoop World 2015, but it's Hadoop Summit. It's the same ecosystem. Yeah, you've been seeing it evolve over the years. It's been interesting to be on here, kind of talk about the growth from each one as over time, but yeah, it's a pleasure to be back. So I want to get your perspective. We've had many chats over, many CUBEs over the many five, six, this is our sixth year at theCUBE. Right, right. What's your take? I mean, you're having a historic perspective. We've been in the front lines for the entire present and creation of the Dubico system. So what's your take? Are we high-fiving each other too early? We cross the chasm, as people said. I mean, George and I are like, hey, the industry, we're high-fiving each other. Self-congratulatory, but customers aren't like high-fiving us. Or are they? Yeah, well, I think you've seen a lot of articles recently. You've had Gardner talking about being at the peak, right? And just kind of crossing over that. So I think there's been a lot of hype. The nice thing is over the past few years, we've kind of seen the promise, right? Then you've kind of seen some adoption of people trying projects. And what's been exciting for us, and we work a lot of customers who have traditional data stores and on-premise, and then they're trying to figure out how to do it, is we're actually starting to see the return on value. Now it's still a definitely large gap, right? The number of deployed systems for Hadoop, the numbers in the thousands, versus they've got still billions of dollars going into data warehouses. So it's an active and noisy area, but we're actually starting to see some real values with customers. Yeah, George and I were talking, and Dave and I were talking at the last event, and also we had Informatica, where we went to. It's a whole master data thing. We're just talking about talent about this. There's no doubt that there's going to be some shake up, but this never going to go away. The data warehousing business intelligence stuff is classic.  It's just, if you can do it at a lower cost. So everyone wants to move portions of it off of the data warehouse into cloud or whatever environment. So that's where I see the check writing going on. Do you see the same thing? And what are you guys doing there? Yeah, and that's the place that we've been playing in. So as a company over the past few years, even before you saw a lot of growth in the Hadoop market and the cloud market, was how do you move between all the different existing data stores in an environment, whether it was Oracle or DB2 or a SQL server. And that has kind of transcended first into the cloud. So that's actually what we started to grow as a company, supporting Amazon, being a close partner on AWS, so people could figure out what portion, what type of analytics they might want to go from Oracle to Redshift with. And then as Hadoop started to grow, it was the same question of how do I go in an operational environment and take advantage of Hadoop? Because there's plenty of open source tools or things like Scoop. People can go started and get trials going. But then when you want to keep it up, consistency, real time, all this other sort of information, you have to take another step that has to go that way. So we've been helping focus on the movement of data. And then what's been exciting for us is, in just recently in the last quarter, we expanded our portfolio, announced the acquisition of a company called App Fluent. And they help with that first part of the question is, not just how do I move the data, but what data do I actually want to consider moving? I can look into the data warehouse now, there's plenty of legacy systems, they're not going to go away. And how do I figure out what's the value of the data in there? Do I have data that really needs that high performance and other lineage information or whatnot that I really want to keep in there? And what information can I move to Hadoop and do kind of the longer tail analytics? So that's been an exciting area because now not only is it a question of how do you move, but how do you figure out what to move? And that enables them to kind of cross that gap and take advantage of the power. You guys have had great success. You were recently named top big data company and database trends and applications. So congratulations. Thank you. But I got to ask you, there's a lot of tools out there. Yeah, yeah, sure.  Right, right. So there's a lot of noise. How does customers figure out what to do? You guys advise also technology. That's a huge issue. And is that the pretext to replatforming? So this is a conversation we were having earlier. So just noise. How do you get a signal from the noise on the tools? Yeah. And then, you know, just replatforming trend. Yeah, it's, it's interesting. You know, when you look at, you know, we kind of went from being in data integration space, kind of focusing that area. And then we talked to customers. It's a broader story about data management, right? So you got to step back and say, forget about, you know, what you're moving to and what the platform is, but what do you want to do with the life cycle of your data, right? Because it's going to have some value up at the front. You know, as time goes on, it might have less value. You got to figure out what to move it. How do you optimize on different platforms? And that's the conversation that they want to have, right before you get into the conversation of, oh, am I going to use a dupe? Am I going to use my existing stores? Am I going to use the cloud? So, you know, we've been able to architect the platform. That cuts across all those different areas, right? So now you're having those broader conversations of, let us figure out, you know, what to move. You know, help you, help figure that out, then move it and then kind of manage that and get it ready for analytics. That sounds like the type of conversation that sort of a trusted advisor would have. Exactly, yes. And so who are you talking to in terms of roles? And, you know, just in thinking in terms of numbers, we were hearing previously, just at the CapEx cost, we were hearing data warehousing cost about 35,000 a terabyte and Hadoop at around 1700. But actually we've heard it was worse that it's like 100,000 a terabyte with operational costs sort of capitalized and Hadoop down to a thousand a terabyte, which sounds a bit of a stretch. Yeah, yeah. So you've got tools now and a relationship where you can advise. Right. So help us, tell us some of the scenarios. Exactly. You know, where you say, is it just the ETL offload stuff or what else? Yeah, no, it's a great question. I think for us as we've expanded out of our portfolio, we're having conversations that, you know, often we have conversations across the spectrum. So when you think about their overall data management products, now you're having, you know, CIO level discussions. And they start thinking about all the factors and I'll give you an example of, you know, how they come to us and how they think about it, right? Again, it tends often not to be a technology play. It's, you've got the first and foremost thing about cost, right? So we've got the top people at an online travel agency, one of the biggest in the world who came to us and said, look, I've got six petabytes plus growing on my traditional data warehouses. Six petabytes. What are they spending on that? Yeah, well, that's the thing.  It's unbelievable. Yeah, I mean, and this is one of the largest online travel. It's a good business. It's a very profitable business. So the question is- Not good for the customer. Yeah, they're not going to all move everything to Hadoop tomorrow, right? But they're trying to figure out what makes sense. How do I modernize the architecture and where can I slot it in to do the longer-term analytics? And the first thing you have to do is go in there and figure out what's being used, how often, where is it consuming resources. And we go in there. That's a profiling app, isn't it? It is. So what App Fluent did as an independent company, it's now under the umbrella of attunity under visibility, is it can sit there and look at the logs and you'll have to let it run for a while or if a customer has a lot of information, you can kind of pull that and they can use that. And then, yeah, it's telling you based on the queries and other things, what's being used. And I like to think of, we're going out there and trying to hunt down the zombie data and kind of the vampire data, right? We've got all this zombie data, which is all this data that's sitting there, it's not really being used. It's taking up a lot of space, right? Very costly to be in a data warehouse. And at the same time, you're talking about ETL processes, you might have a smaller subset of data that's just taking up a lot of ETL. It's being updated all the time, right?  It's kind of like a zombie sucking that out. It could be very active, it's just not strategic. Exactly. So you don't want to use your data warehouse for data that's just taking up space and taking up a lot of resources at the end of the day. So you can have profile and figure out very quickly with an assessment of where do I want to move this, right? And for this company, they were able to save right off the bat by putting in the solution with community visibility, $6 million, right? It's a nice step, right? And then they can, at the same time, think about how do you curb the growth, right? We have other companies we work with where they might have terabytes. They may have scores of terabytes, but they know it's growing and they want to cap that. So we work with them to figure out, okay, how do we cap the level that you have and say DB2 and then figure out what's offload into modernized architecture? So Merv Adrian was on theCUBE yesterday and he had released his survey. And talking about that, class is half empty, half full, it was the debate. And the survey wasn't painting a rosy picture of adoption. What's your take on that? I mean, I think Merv's right, but again, the sample size is a little bit too small. Is that the representation of the broader global market? I mean, I think he's actually right on the survey. Results, as you've crafted the results of how he sample-sized it, but so sample side aside, he might be right, but is that enough sample? I mean, what is the representation of today's market? What's your take on that? Yeah, well, we have, we're about one company, right? But we have thousands of customers worldwide using some form of a tuning product. And then we have conversations about data management and data integration, what companies want to do.  You can kind of say, half of those conversations now involve something around what they're trying to do and figure out what they're trying to move with the do. So it is that prevalence is there. Again, you're starting with smaller numbers. There's a vast amount of legacy data systems out there in data warehouses. But, you know, it's, you can say, you know, at least half or more are having those conversations. So- They're still good numbers. It's fantastic numbers, right? Because, you know, the other half for people who just have, you know, typical management issues or it might be a part of the system, they don't need to move, they have other issues to work with. So those are great numbers. And compared to, you know, even two years ago when as a company, we were at the cusp of it and looking at it. And we were just having people kind of inquiries and were like, should we even go into this phase? Right? And now here we are half the conversations. That's a pretty amazing advancement. Let me ask one thing. Sometimes the data management vendor or data warehouse vendor, they want to have a tiered storage, you know, high performance, medium performance, sort of semi-archive. And in doing that, they're doing the profiling internally. And since they have visibility into, you know, how they're constructing the SQL queries, they have a certain level of fidelity in trying to come up with that mix. Right, right.  Right. But how do you position yourselves against that? Yeah. You know, what's the message to the C-level audience? Yeah, so there are existing tools on a lot of platforms which are very good. And for a lot of them are geared towards, you know, just A, that particular platform, right? And then the other thing is they're geared more towards operational statistics on the database and how to manage it or the data warehouse, rather. And that's, again, if you're the DVA administrator, that's one thing. But we also provide visibility out to the business level, right? So if you have, let's say you're the internal IT department, you're trying to service operations, you're trying to service marketing, you're trying to service finance. The product can actually look at the data and do cuts of that based on the different businesses coming in so you can see which users from different departments are coming in. So now when you have somebody from finance saying, hey, I need another 30 terabytes and it's got to be the highest performance you have because I'm running these types of reports. Or you can associate a cost with the SLA. Exactly. What we can do, we can do show back, we can do charge back, right? Yeah. And then basically you can say, hey, if you're asking for this type of service, let's actually look at how you're using this service. You may think that you are using this and that you need this level of SLA, but in reality, you're not. Or maybe it's the opposite. It's you've asked for this little, but boy, you're consuming half of my resources. Let's have a conversation. So it's sort of like the delta between what they want and what they actually use. What the reality is, yeah. And this is, it's funny when you talk about storage. I mean, I came, I'd been at some of the big storage companies earlier in my career. And tiered storage is another thing that storage vendors try to think of is how you tier it. In some ways it's a similar fashion of, I mean, I think EMC's got a good message right now. EMC saying, you know, store it in EMC. Everyone say, don't store your data in someone else's platform. They're saying, we're open, store it in our platform. So that's kind of, even Merv made a comment about Teradata. No one should put all their data in one platform. But that's what Teradata wants, right? So it's like, everyone's saying the same thing. Don't store it in someone else's platform. And, but store it in ours. Yeah, well, I think that the challenge is for a large enterprise, especially these really big companies, right? Fortune 500 companies, they have a little bit of everything, right? They're going to have, you know, some Teradata, some EMC, they're going to have a DB2. They always have some sort of mix, different departments, different areas. And so we work closely with all those partners and in some of those areas that make sense, keeping it in one system. And then other times it's, you know, you need to have that heterogeneous view and we can help with that as well. So here's the question I want to have for you. I'm a customer and I say, hey guys, here's my concern. I'm going to invest in a Hadoop project. We've done some POCs, my guys like it. Yeah, yeah. You know, pick a van to say Hortonworks. Sure. Or whatever. And I'm really worried about foreclosing future opportunities. Yeah. So I want to have a data architecture where I can store my data. Yeah. And I want to have the ability to say, hey, I want to move to the cloud and on-prem. And I want to have multiple players. I might want to have Clouder, Impala. I'll use Hortonworks here. But I don't want to have the ability to go horizontally at a platform based on whatever my app needs are. Sure. So if I'm successful, if I'm not successful, I get fired. Right. So I don't want to get fired. It's probably the other two. If I'm successful, I want to actually have growth. I don't want to have to pay more money in headaches to replicate that data. What do you say to that? Yeah, well, part of it is it's not a single- Store it and just storage and have like a commodity storage layer? No, no, I would say it's not, it tends to be a dynamic environment, a dynamic decision, right? It's not that you will kind of move the data over. And a lot of companies do this or have the need that you take historical information and move it over a lower tier and then you'll be done with it, right? But it's also, I've heard it's a dynamic supply chain of data, right? You know, sometimes it's going here, sometimes it's going over there. And you've got to have the flexibility to move it around, right? You've got to have the flexibility to offload it. So for example, you talk about the cloud, right? We work with some of the major healthcare providers like Phillips, which is also a close partner of Amazon, a close customer of Amazon. Focus at them to reinvent show. And they try to figure out, you know, with Redshift and with Atunity, how do you go ahead and take advantage of the capabilities to do analytics on demand, right? For some of their applications. They might need that some of the time. They might need to do some of their analytics on their on-premise systems. So I don't think they give up that flexibility, but they want to have the ability to kind of choose as needed in those different areas. All right, so outlook for the industry as we wrap up here. What's your take looking back four years? What do you think? Looking ahead four years? No, looking back four years and then to look ahead. Yeah, yeah. Where we've come, is the tide coming out for the big next wave being cloud or whatnot? Yeah, I think the, it's an irreversible trend in some ways, right? Even look at, you know, where people are developing their systems. Just from a technology standpoint, Hadoop is becoming like a data operating system, right? So more and more people are building solutions around that. So the trend is going in that direction. But also towards what John said. Do you think that if we move more and more to the cloud, with Redshift as one, you know, part of an example on AWS, will that data operating system be the data operating system for Azure, Google, and Amazon? Or will we see more heterogeneity? Yeah, that's a good question.  I think it's EMR, right? You know, in terms of just to share growth. So don't have an answer to that one. It's a good one. But, you know, there's that general growth and trend of, I call it the democratization of getting to data, right? Which is, I've got to, you know, I want to take advantage of Hadoop, it lowers the cost, makes it easier to do things. It makes it more, you know, it can run more things, create a bigger lake. I can go into the cloud very easily, right? You know, I can set things up, I take advantage of that, do quick analytics. We just announced a solution for Mongo, right? If you're a developer, now you can get into it much more quickly without having the DBA background and be a SQL expert, right? So I think the bigger trend is, you know, the democratization of how to get, you know, all these people in all these different departments have much greater access, lower costs, lower entry points, easier to spin up than they ever did before. And that's what I think the excitement is. All right, Lawrence, we're running out of time. Got a wrap. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate you seeing you. Attunity doing great. You guys are awesome. Big day to congratulations on your recent awards. Sure, thank you. Thousands of customers. So, yeah, business is good. And it's a healthy ecosystem. I'm really excited. So, half the people want to do it. So, it's not bad. That's right. It's a pleasure to talk to you guys. All right. It's theCUBE. We'll be right back after this short break. Thanks.