If you haven’t seen it, a great interview from #theCube at Strata-Hadoop World 2012 last week featured Steve Watt, Hadoop Chief Technologist for Hewlett-Packard and Amr Awadallah, Cloudera – CTO.  Among the topics discussed were the partnership between their companies, customer perspectives on Big Data and Hadoop, Impala -Cloudera’s latest update, and the next phases in adoption across the board.

When HP looks at Hadoop, they see two key areas they want to address:

1. Platform complexity – customers having trouble understanding how to acquire and maintain hardware or is having problems with those issues.
2. The other is application complexity – In other words, how to apply Hadoop once they have acquired it and then using it to solve business problems.

HP is focusing on both those areas. Watt’s group specifically focuses on platform complexities, and has reference architecture for Hadoop on its radar as well as a full-blown Hadoop appliance. With a widespread toolset, they could be looking at a use-case for Autonomy when the level is largely unstructured data, or they could be looking at a scenario for Vertica, where the requirements are working with structured data, and real-time access, and finally Hadoop which can be applied along a sliding scale of requirements. Watt’s group takes a consultative approach to see what approach suits their customers best.

Adwallah recently transitioned from Cloudera VP of engineering to a new role as the company’s CTO. On that transition, he shares the critical importance of guiding the technical future of the company and the need to be accurate on the direction he takes. With Big Data still nascent, Adwallah sees this as the beginning of the movement still and some time before full maturity and “mainstream” adoption, particularly when compared to hallmark conventions such as VMWorld and OracleWorld. Cloudera’s alignment with HP is a logical strategy, given HP’s roots as the quintessential Silicon Valley startup story. Challenge lies in integrating with HP’s many moving parts, making for a complex proposition.

HP focuses on making the Hadoop conversation simple for customers, as they see a learning curve in the datacenter that needs to be overcome. Making the technology simple is the first step, giving them a platform, then letting real use cases give them the business value they are looking for. As in the term “e-business” of a generation ago – it’s just business, so realizing the intrinsic value of the Big Data and Hadoop proposition is a part of business, and solutions drive it.

As Cloudera rolls out its newest update – Impala – they have to navigate a number of things as with any successful launch. Partnerships are an important part of those milestones and Cloudera is paying attention to utilizing partnership based on solutions and true delivery. HP’s strategic partnership with Cloudera started organically, with sales forces meeting up in the marketplace, and discovering they had common customer needs. That means tailoring the message, leading the way, and also striking down notions about technology that are incorrect. For example, the notion that commodity equals cheap. This is a misnomer that really should do a better job of saying price performance is made better by scaling out and not up. Hadoop and scale-out architecture go hand-in-hand, and offers the ability to implement solutions in a low-cost way. Tech giants like HP and IBM wouldn’t encounter such a market until a clear customer signals were seen saying they were ready for these new technologies.
Watt predicted that a year from now, with the availability of HP’s moonshot platform, there will be a revolution in this space.

HP’s Moonshot is a project that is developing extreme low-energy architecture for datacenters for emerging web, cloud and hyper-scale environments. Built on SOC architecture, HP will be providing reference architecture this time next year and will enable revolutionary advantages, including the partitioning of computation. Along Cloudera’s data management abilities in the stack, they plan to revolutionize the datacenter. SiliconANGLE has done extensive video coverage on Moonshot with loads of videos on the official YouTube channel – http://www.youtube.com/user/siliconangle/videos?query=moonshot

Cloudera will go forward with their big theme for 2013 around low latency, further pushing the envelope and increasing functions across the board. In five years’ time it is projected that HadoopWorld could rival those marquee events such as VMWorld in size and importance.