The recent changes at Hortonworks, which saw Eric Baldeschwieler move from CEO to CTO and Rob Bearden become CEO, were routine and do not indicate any change in the company’s dedication to developing open source Hadoop into a full, enterprise-ready tool, Baldeschwieler says.

I really always have been the CTO,” he said in a live webcast from theCube, hosted by SiliconAngle at Strata 2012. “Last year our focus was on getting the technology together, so it made sense for me to b CEO as well. Now, as we plan to go to market, we have to change, and it made sense for Rob to become CEO and take over doing things that have been keeping me from the technical job.”

While he says that Hortonworks “may create other products with other licensing models” at some time in the future, it definitely is not planning to create a commercial layer on top of Hadoop. “We remain totally dedicated to a fully free, open-source Hadoop and to making open-source Hadoop enterprise ready.”

It’s business model still focuses on selling training, education, and other services around Hadoop. “Red Hat is a closer model for us than a managed services company,” he says. “We don’t build someone’s applications.

Unstructured data is growing much faster than structured data, so enterprises need a new solution. We see an opportunity for Hadoop to become the next-generation database solution for the enterprise. A lot of things can be done with the Hadoop stack, and the emerging reference architectures around Hadoop and HBase are exciting.”

However, he does not envision Hadoop growing to encompass the entire stack, and one of the areas where Baldeschwieler wants to make progress is in opening the Hadoop and HBase APIs to allow more vendors to integrate with it. For instance, he said, he was talking with a banker who was complaining that he has 23 monitoring tools in house. The last thing he wants is another one for Hadoop databases. Instead, Bladeschwieler hopes that the existing software management players will extend their platforms to provide Hadoop management to their customers.

New versions of Hadoop and specifically of MapReduce are in the works, and he says gradually information will be made public about those. And he is mentoring a new crop of Hadoop committers at Yahoo. And the entire Hadoop ecosystem is expanding rapidly making “room for everybody.”