Updated with full video – see below.

John Furrier and Dave Vellante are camping out in Boston for a couple of days, to cover the HP Vertica Big Data Conference, in full swing this week. One of the first people to be interviewed for theCUBE’s live broadcast was Lawrence Schwartz, VP of Marketing with Attunity.

The company has been around for a while, with a long history in edit/capture, and has worked with various data types and data systems, boasts Schwartz. Their current focus is on “getting real-time data innovation going”. Attunity’s information availability software solutions enable the access, sharing and distribution of data across heterogeneous enterprise platforms, organizations, and the cloud.

Based in Boston, Attunity joined the Conference for at least two reasons:

• to announce the partnership with Vertica
• to launch their new product. At the Attunity booth they are showing how to use Click-2-Load for HP Vertica solution combined with HP’s World Class Big Data Analytics.

Who owns the data strategy?

There are many types of data being generated as we speak. There is the structured and unstructured data, but there are also different types of content: social, HR or traditional data stores. Vertica proves a fantastic platform for that type of data analytics, says Schwartz.

“Who owns the data strategy?” asked Vellante. Obviously, the users of the data, or so thinks Schwartz. It’s the users who expressed the need to synthesize all data together, and their demand generated the growth of platforms, such as Vertica.

Talking about the emerging trends, Lawrence Schwartz pointed out that Hadoop gets to the fundamental problem of handling data. Many people do not know the questions they want to ask, so they are trying to get access to as much of the data as possible and formulate questions afterwards. Therefore, having a great analytical platform is key.

“When you have the power to move the data to where you need it to get, and you have a powerful analytical platform, you can ask the questions later. Those are different ways to think about it and they offer more flexibility than the traditional model. It allows people to deal with the questions as they think of them and sort through the data,” says Schwartz.

A symbiotic relationship

Speaking of their recent partnerships with HP Vertica, Lawrence Schwartz clarified: “It’s a symbiotic relationship. Vertica has a powerful analytical platform, while Attunity has the capability to move the data there.”

Attunity has just unveiled their Click-2-Load solution, which will accelerate data loading for HP Vertica Big Data analytics platform. The solution is designed to accelerate the process of loading data, enabling quick time-to-value and allowing customers to gain faster business value from Big Data Analytics initiatives.

Attunity works with partners in the finance sector, where the data consists of consumer’s credit data, and they pull it in from multiple data sources, performing the analysis in near real-time. That’s something you can’t do with an ETL process.

Data needs to be flexible, stresses Schwartz. Being able to analyze different types of data is very important, but exploring what you can do with the power you have in the platform is critical. One of the capabilities one has now is getting the data in as soon as possible, allowing users to perform the transformations later. Without data flexibility, all the brain power and the computation power it just ties your hands.

Asked about the core innovations Attunity has made recently, Schwartz listed two:

1. a simplified interface
2. speed and performance – using Attunity’s software solutions, the customers’ businesses benefit from enabling real-time access and availability of data where and when needed, across today’s IT environment.

The partnership with Vertica is justified by the need to work with the best in class-solutions out there, focusing on simplifying the process, not making it developer-centric.