Shaun Connolly, VP of Corporate Strategy for Hortonworks joins John Furrier and Dave Vellante in theCUBE’s ongoing coverage of Hadoop Summit 2013. The three discuss Hortonworks strategy, value and how conversations concerning the company’s value have changed.

Connolly believes Hadoop really has emerged as the system uniquely qualified to store massive amounts of data at a significantly large scale. Vellante notes that Hadoop began as an enterprise oriented vision. Connolly acknowledges that Hortonworks now deals with many more mainstream enterprise users.

Furrier asks Connolly, as a strategy expert, “What’s the biggest change in the Hadoop ecosystem since last year?” Connolly suggests some new factors include that YARN enables more workloads like interactive and streaming. He explains that enterprises want and need this type of solution and “that’s not a conversation we were having twelve months ago.”

Furrier notes that in early pioneering businesses, people often ask, “where’s the value?” Connolly says the value of Hortonworks is seen clearly across retail chains with both a web and brick and mortar presence. More specifically, he notes that “it gives them a ‘data lake’ where they can really see the customer that their reaching for true 360 degree analytics on that customer.” Connolly notes this insight is particularly helpful to companies with ways of engaging customers.

Vellante notes that other companies have failed to live up to the promise of bringing analytic and transaction data together. He asks Connolly if he agrees that a spectrum would include batch, interactive and analytic in the middle. Connolly agrees with this conception and adds that companies need a multiplatform approach and “bring context of transactions back into the mix.”

Connolly concludes by noting Hortonworks’ three word strategy: “We do hadoop.” He adds, “We’re focused on making this an enterprise viable data platform.”

Furrier suggests that what makes Hortonworks so successful is not just their business strategy, but the community they have created among developers and customers that like working in the OpenSource arena. As, Furrier puts it, “People are voting with their code and their apps.” He advises Connolly to not make Hortonworks too commercial oriented.

Watch the full interview below.