Amr Awadallah, the CTO at Cloudera, discussed Big Data trends, the industry’s maturity level in this sector, and the company’s partnership with Splunk with theCUBE co-hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante, live at Splunk .conf 2013.

Commenting on the current state of the Big Data industry, Awadallah said “maturity and enterprise readiness are very important.” He explained customers often ask them to focus more on stability, reliability, all the things that enterprises need, and less on innovating and adding new features to the platform. He added that, over the next year, the company will focus of “the rigor of how we can be more reliable, more secure,” and become better at handling workloads.

“Everything we do innovation-wise, what we are working on — it’s enabling the future vision of having a single platform where you can store data of any time,”raw, machine, images, multiple data assets and multiple workloads, Awadallah said.

Comparing Big Data management tools

Asked whether Hadoop and other types of data such as that of Oracle databases were complimentary, Awadallah said that right now, they were very complimentary. “The system that Oracle has, it’s great at structural data.” Hadoop, on the other hand, is about bringing unstructured and structured data together. How they evolve in the future would be an interesting aspect to watch, he added.

Commenting on Accumulo and Hbase, Awadallah said the former offers role-level security for every cell in a table, each having its dedicated tags and security clearance. HBase is the same at a feature set level, but does not offer the same granular, cell level security, focusing on column level roles. It additionally offers features such as snapshots, replication across data centers, etc.”Accumulo very good and deep on the security front, but lack on others.” While Accumulo was perfect for government agencies, the enterprise does not require that level of security.

Asked about Cloudera’s relationship with Splunk, Awadallah said, “we have several integrations with Splunk,” the most exciting being recently announced Hunk. “What Splunk has, which is very special, is the UI,” which is very easy to use and learn. “Now they also have analytics capabilities as well. They are going for the larger BI space as well.”

“The holy grail of Big Data is putting data analytics in the hands of business users,” Vellante commented. Awadallah responded saying Cloudera aims at “building the iPhone of Big Data.” When you take a phone with the iPhone, it is good enough, he explains. You can take a better one with a DSLR camera, but it costs more, and that’s all the camera does. “We’re building a foundation that can take very good pictures, but does a lot of other things really well.”