K Young, CEO, Mortar Data, discussed the importance of data science, current data processing challenges and approaching business types with Big Data solutions with theCUBE co-hosts Dave Vellante and Jeff Kelly, live at the recently concluded MongoDB Days conference.

“Mortar is a platform and also an open source framework that is used by engineers and data scientists that process large volumes of data.” Young explained, built on top of Hadoop. Currently the company focuses on developing its recommended systems, aiming to build ten different types of such systems targeted at companies in different sectors which would allow them to make recommendations to their customers. “Mortar itself is still a platform with very general purpose,” he said.

Cloud perks

Mortar offers Hadoop as a service, making it easier for people to consume it. It is run exclusively on top of Amazon’s AWS, “We use their infrastructure.” Explaining the difference between AWS and their own service, Young said that AWS was raw infrastructure, “It will run Hadoop jobs for you if you have them.” while Mortar was a full solution.

Asked about their hiring and interest in the data science space, Young said data science was very important, “We organize the New York data science meetup. The reason it’s so important to us, as one of the problems we solve is repeatable data science.” Mortar created a framework for data processing, for a full run of taking data from its raw form to a usable result. How to elaborate, repeat, are areas to focus on for data science. “Those in the community are excited about what we’re doing.” he added.

“Since we’re available exclusively on AWS, all our customers have data on it.” The company’s clients are “Mostly young companies. There has been no particular industry focus.”, Young said.

One of Hadoop’s benefits from the cloud is that “If you don’t need any process, you can turn it down. If you need these massive spikes, you can do that.” Will the costs might go up on the particular day of the spike, the overall costs are reduced.

MongoDB is “Primarily is a data store, you put data in, and take it out.” Young stated. There is huge interest in both the Hadoop and MongoDB communities to get these technologies to work well together.

Asked how he approached business types about Hadoop, Young explained said that when it comes to articulating business cases to them, “Unless you are speaking in the language of the CEO it won’t work. I dig into their business a little bit.”  with questions about what they do, what’s stopping then from selling more, and then advise them on what to keep track of, what data to pull and business use cases that can help their companies.

For the future, Mortar Data pans to improve its offering on the cloud front, having a release coming out over the next weeks which makes the framework very fast in getting feedback when developing on Hadooop, complete its recommend systems, and add people to their current team of 10.