Tim Vincent, an IBM Fellow and CTO of Information Management for the company, provided his unique take on Big Data in a Monday interview hosted by Wikibon’s Jeff Kelly.

In the first part of the discussion, Vincent focuses on the Big Data solutions that his company officially launched earlier this month. He starts with PureData, a plug and play Hadoop appliance that can be deployed in a matter of hours.

The executive says that PureData’s edge over homegrown Hadoop clusters is that it empowers organizations to invest man-hours in the development of technology that drives business value. IT departments that choose the DIY route can take weeks to setup the environment, and they often overlook certain long-term considerations such as the need for a simple means to roll out software upgrades. These risks are all eliminated by IBM’s solution.

Kelly points out that while commodity-based, scale-out deployments may be difficult to implement, they are highly scalable. This is a definite advantage, but Vincent highlights that PureData is beefy enough to address the needs of most organizations. He then brings up a new topic: the question of how Hadoop fits into the user’s existing IT environment.

Vincent says that from IBM’s point of view, Hadoop is meant to augment traditional infrastructure rather than replace it. He explains:

“The question is, how you can use Hadoop to do more. Hadoop becomes what we’re thinking of as a landing zone or an exploratory zone; you can think of it almost as something that sits in front of those systems. What we’re trying to use this model for is allowing people to actually expand what they have in the warehouse: you can actually start doing things like putting some of that warehouse data into Hadoop.”

The model that Vincent outlines gives organizations the ability to get data to the people who need it. “So you’re bringing all these different forms of data into this landing or exploratory zone and then you’re letting the business users actually start doing more than exploratory type of work…looking across the superset of data you’ve not really been able to explore before,” he summarizes.

Making data available for a broad spectrum of users requires an information supply chain, and Hadoop is but one link. Vincent lists data visualization, abstraction tools such as IBM’s BigSQL interface and monitoring as some of the other components needed to make Big Data accessible, which is first step towards evolving it and gaining valuable business insights.

For the full insights from  Tim Vincent, check out the video below. Make sure to tune to IBM’s Big Data at the Speed of Business event on April 30th for more insights from Big Blue executives, including Cube alumna Inhi Cho Suh and Bob Picciano, the general manager of the vendor’s Information Management business.