Vice President of Converged Application Systems with HP Paul Miller sat down with John Furrier and Dave Vellante on theCube at HP Discover 2012. From the outset Paul Miller states that he feels he gets the best of both worlds being where software is married to hardware.

With the growth in popularity of big data, John Furrier asks about computing and applications in relation to it. Miller feels the next trend is going to be around the variety of big data and what unique applications can customers build on top of their foundation. He compares Hadoop to a “data lake that you pour all your data into”. He says the next generation will be taking Hadoop, wrapping management tools around it to help query, and then building vertical applications on top of it to allow the business decision makers to interface with the data in a way they had not before.

Due to the high demand from customers for a working product in relation to big data and Hadoop, it was asked what products are being developed to fill that demand. Miller brings out the point that one major concern with Hadoop is that it is new and there are not a lot of tools developed around it. The new appliance that HP announced is a dashboard they call the App Manager for Hadoop. It gives you a view of the entire cluster set and environment. Setup of the database and management of it is made easy with this dashboard.

With the newly acquired Autonomy, HP announced an eDiscovery appliance. Miller explains that this package is usually purchased by a legal or compliancy department within a company and not IT. It is a modular package that can be deployed easy. It would plug into a database and “provide almost instantaneous value to the end customer”. They also plan on taking Autonomy to the cloud. There it would help in the deploying of apps in the cloud.

When Dave Vellante asks about bringing real-time to big data by bring SQL and NoSQL together, Miller mentions Vertica. He states that with Vertica (traditional SQL), Autonomy (NoSQL), and combining them with rich services and management across both, HP will be able to migrate and probe on 100% of a customer’s data. He sees that as being the future of the SQL/NoSQL data mix.

Miller goes on to discuss how HP is embracing open source and how it is seen in their OpenStack. He says that when they are able to rollout their OpenStack strategy integrated with Hadoop, it will be a great offer to their customers. That means big data and cloud on-premise in addition to the public cloud. OpenStack is not quite ready for “primetime” yet, but it will be soon.

The discussion goes on to the subject of “information optimization”. Miller explains that he sees that as a superset of big data. It is the optimization of all data, big data and traditional data. He feels that in the future unstructured data and structured data will converge.

In relation to big data, HP seeks to offer an easier and smoother deployment. Combining management tools, as well as security and compliance in the deployment is very important. The strategies of HP show that big data is going to be native in their products and services going forward.

See the entire interview below, and check out our YouTube channel for more great interviews from HP Discover.