Tim Moreton, the chief technology officer of Acunu Analytics, hopped into theCube yesterday afternoon at this year’s first Strata event to talk about his startup, and explain the value of real-time analytics for the enterprise (full video below).

Acunu created a real-time data crunching engine for Cassandra, an increasingly popular distributed database available under the Apache license. The offering, which will be announced next week, offers advanced data structuring and querying capabilities that client organizations can’t develop on their own.

Moreton claims that the market for this solution is huge:  most Fortune 500 companies have deployed Cassandra in their production environments, he says, “they’re just not talking about it.”

The CTO goes on to explain his company’s business model. He says that Acunu offers a freely downloadable distribution of the database, and makes money from selling its analytics engine as a separate, proprietary solution. The offering is compatible with both Acunu’s version of Cassandra and the official Apache distribution.

Why is Cassandra such a big deal?

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Moreton points out that it has several advantages over Hadoop, not the least of which is speed.

“Real-time insights is number one,” the executive says. “Doing what you have traditionally have done in a transactional relational data or perhaps on a Hadoop system and actually moving that into a real-time framework where we talking about data coming in and being available…in seconds rather than in minutes or in hours.”

Acunu leverages this capability to embed insights in business processes, rather than to discover trends that may or may not be worth the effort put into identifying them. The startup’s product comes with a set of customizable dashboards that display relevant data in a specific context.

Moreton concludes the interview with a prediction: the collision of traditional enterprise warehousing with Hadoop and the database layer is inventible, and there’s no telling how it will affect customers.  See his full video below, and check out our YouTube channel for the complete line up of exclusive clips from Strata Santa Clara, 2013.