Charles Zedlewski, Vice President, Products, Cloudera, discussed the current state of Hadoop, the company’s contributions to the industry, and the concept of enterprise-grade Hadoop in the Big Data space with theCUBE co-hosts Dave Vellante and John Furrier, live at the 2013 Hadoop Summit in San Jose today.

Talking about the current state of Hadoop, Zedlewski said “it’s a market category, a new kind of platform, an incredible set of stories about how this technology is changing businesses” that you read about in the news, it’s an exciting time. People’s minds are starting to change about what it’s going to do, where it’s going to go, and Hadoop’s general potential.

An ongoing conversation of Hadoop for the enterprise

Asked to comment on the Hadoop business value conversation, Zedlewski said this had been the conversation for the past three years. “The reality is that traditional organizations have been using this in production for years now.” Moreover, every year the percentage of businesses who trust the platform and want to adopt it increases.

Talking about the companies that want to be Hadoop vendors, some are systems and technologies vendors, and sell it along with traditional infrastructure. Cloudera continued to thrive, along with independent companies in the space, because “we know that it’s actually delivering value in the enterprise today.”

• What does enterprise-ready Hadoop look like?

Asked to define enterprise grade for Hadoop, Zedlewski said that the main requirements are availability – people just need to have their systems running at all times, recoverability – be it from user mistakes, data center outages, or app errors, security, compliance – businesses have all kinds of corporate policies that Hadoop has to fit into. usability, and usability – the biggest hallmark from an enterprise customer is that they have to bring hundreds and thousands of different users to the platform and it has to be easy for them to use it.

Commenting on the areas of improvement for Hadoop, Zedlewski said “the availability is in pretty good shape, at least in Cloudera.” There will be some improvements coming for recoverability. The big gaps to fill are advances in the security of Hadoop, there are data base style security requirements, as not all user should have rights to all data sets, thus more fine-grained security is paramount. Usability is what has driven Cloudera’s investment in Impala and in search as the challenge is “how do we provide a BI experience to people comfortable with relational databases,” how to provide value to end users – doctors, clerks, etc. The goal is to attract new sets of applications and users to the data.

• What’s next for Cloudera Impala? Open source?

Asked to provide some updates relating to Impala, Zedlewski said there had been great adoption, the BI support was extended, performance was higher. In the future, Cloudera would add more SQL functinality, user defined queries, and planned for new releases every month.

Commenting on open source communites as the new standards bodies, Zedlewski said that “the way standards work in my mind right now with open source, part of it is an open source community adds features and it becomes a standard.” But the key is to have adoption, otherwise it cannot become a standard. “At the end of the day there is no substitute for good software. Adoption will decide what the standard is.”