VMware is hoping to secure its place at the intersection of cloud and Big Data with Project Serengeti, a set of open-source tools designed to speed up the deployment of Hadoop in virtualized environments. At this week’s Hadoop Summit in San Jose, the company announced that the initiative is entering the next phase of its life cycle.

Wikibon analyst Stu Miniman went over the news and shared his angle on the story in a recent Q&A with SiliconAngle NewsDesk host Kristin Feledy.

According to Miniman, most of the world’s data will be stored in Hadoop environments a few years from now. With this prediction in mind, it’s easy to see why VMware wants to get a piece of the pie. He reflects that when Project Serengeti debuted last year, the community doubted whether VMware’s licensing model is truly compatible with the low-cost, scale-out architecture used by large Hadoop clusters. In his view, this week’s announcement shows that VMware has made a lot of progress towards making its Big Data ambitions a reality.

Serengeti will be available with the company’s flagship hypervisor under the name vSphere Big Data Extensions. The solution is expected to enter general availability later this year. Miniman says that the upgraded platform will be targeted at enterprises that are deploying Hadoop in their production environments.

Feledy mentions that VMware shed its Big Data onto Pivotal, and asks Miniman about the impact of this move on its position in the ecosystem. He replies that the spin-off has the positive upshot of not limiting VMware to EMC’s Hadoop distribution, which means that the firm is free to partner with major distributors. Serengeti will have a big impact on the channel as well: the software will enable VMware’s hardware partners to stay competitive as their core markets become more commoditized.

Check out the full discussion in the video below.