Josh Klahr, VP of Product Management, discussed the recent EMC Greenplum announcement on Pivotal HD inside theCube, live at Strata 2013. While it is true that Greenplum delayed the Pivotal HD announcement which consisted of bringing SQL to Hadoop, Klahr explained that the new release is based a year-and-a-half of technology development to bring parallel database technology to Hadoop.

“It takes a long time to build scalable query processing,” Klahr said, this being an area where Greenplum excelled and turned it into a differentiator.

Commenting on the aggressive stance against industry rivals like Cloudera’s Impala, and Hive, the Greenplum VB stated that “the intent was not to be aggressive, it was to really look at where SQL query is on Hadoop today.” Through Pivotal HD, Greenplum does not intend to replace Hive, which can be a good solution to solve some problems, rather to compensate for its failure to perform when it comes to interactive analysis.

Asked if Hadapt was not a player to consider when it comes to interactive analysis, Josh Klahr stated that Hadapt’s architecture is probably the closest in the market to Greenplum’s approach. “I just think we are further down the line in solving problems when you have to move data back and fourth,” he explained, as the Greenplum database is more mature.

As far as Greenplum’s approach to Big Data, Klahr said the company’s aim is to solve business problems that have not been solved yet. The target for what their newly launched product are those struggling with data access on Hadoop and and helping them solve their issues.

BI vendors recognize the rapid adoption to Hadoop, yet they still struggle because BI is by nature interactive, that means interactive queries need to be brought into the Hadooop offering, said Khlar.

Greenplum’s strategy to get a bigger chunk of the market is to expand the number of use cases that can be done on top of Hadoop through Pivotal HD. Big Hadoop clusters are currently 10-20% utilized. The ability to bring computational services on top of Hadoop was missing, thus making it a focus point for Greenplum.

“Our approach is to try and solve customers problems, we listen to what they say and we try to bring software” into client infrastructures that helps solve them. Greenplum focuses on offering full packages to our customers, and intends to expand SQL and Hadoop offering.

Asked which software development approach will win in the future, Klahr explained proprietary or open source is not a good or bad thing for the customer. Yet everybody in the tech space that is profit oriented tries to create a proprietary software.

See Klahr’s full segment below: