Big money players are entering the Big Data Hadoop marketplace. Todd Papaioannou, CEO of Continuuity, was all smiles when he stated, “it’s good for us.” A long-time friend to theCube, he stopped in to discuss with hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante the roadblocks he sees from developers around Hadoop, and what Continuuity is doing to serve those needs.

Yesterday Continuuity announced the public beta for the company’s developer suite and application sandbox enabling PaaS Big Data. As we covered on DevopsANGLE, there are two highlights of yesterday’s release: the release of Continuuity’s runtime (called AppFabric) along with the development framework to use it, and the release of a developer sandbox that permits same-as-production testing of Big Data applications on the AppFabric.

“With the combination of our Developer Suite and AppFabric editions, we accelerate time to business value, slash provisioning times, and make building Big Data apps easy and fast for any developer, ” said Papaioannou.

Distribution is the biggest roadblock with Hadoop. Developers and Businesses alike want to drive business insight much more quickly. Get to production, or as Papaioannou coined, “Productionize the application.” Build apps and deploy. Hadoop is only in its second year as far as an ecosystem, but Continuuity sees the execution slowly but surely taking place to explode the technology and Big Data.

A quick side note: Papaioannou said that the flavor of the conference has been “I have SQL for Hadoop.”

There is one big takeaway for Strata from his interview on The Cube: the big move is to slash time to business value and business insight. Big Data is truly transformational when you can expedite both of those business processes. “In the Hadoop ecosystem specifically, we bave a lot of infrastructure, but are missing those apps to take off and really build out the platform.” Clearly there was a mad dash to get in the race, but Papaioannou and Continuuity are seeing the tracks start to fall into place for Hadoop.