A hopeful sign for large-scale adoption of Big Data technologies, this year’s #strataconf has attracted a number of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and executives, as well as the expected cadre of developers, interested in the new technologies that will facilitate Enterprise’s embrace of Big Data strategies.

Joining Dave Vellante and John Furrier on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE was Josh Rogers, President of Syncsort. Syncsort, established 46 years ago, was a key player in the early technology of mainframe development. It was with that long standing history in mind that Syncsort observed and embraced Hadoop. “Our having the best ‘sort’ technology enabled us to leverage [Hadoop].”

The business landscape for 2014 is significantly different than even last year. Many Enterprise customers were taking a wait-and-see approach throughout 2013. However, Rogers notes those same customers have provided for budget allocation around Big Data for 2014. “It will come with a set of expectations that requirements will need to be met on the business front.”

Big Data, big savings

The greatest benefit being realized by the Enterprise, as Vellante commented, is that they are seeing that they can do the same or considerably more for far less money. Rogers stated Syncsort is focusing on what they call ‘offload.’ Offload, he explains, is where Enterprise customers can continue to use their legacy equipment, transferring their workloads into Hadoop.

Addressing the future, as it pertains to the unbundling of software and the mainframe, Rogers stated the next step would be the production of industry-specific applications meant to drive the compute platform. “Those will be offered as SaaS models or on premise.” But Rogers doesn’t necessarily believe there will be commoditization across the entire application ecosystem.

“They are doing things that are hard and will stay consistently hard. When people move Hadoop into their Enterprise, they have to figure out how to plug it into their mainframe,” Rogers said. “We believe that is an area we can continually strengthen. We call it ‘Big Iron to Big Data.’”

With regard to data fusion, Furrier inquired if this is still an unclear concept that the Enterprise is still trying to get their arms around. “I think a lot of people are doing that,” stated Rogers. “They are still trying to understand all of their tools. At the end of the day, they want to view analytics. To do that, they have to look at unstructured or semi-structured data and derive some structure out of it. I think that is where there is a great opportunity for new tools to come out and help them do that.”

Syncsort, with strong relationships in the Enterprise, has created partnerships with many of the more innovative startups coming out of Silicon Valley. “These startups have found it’s good to have friends like us that have relationships with the Enterprise,” he commented. “We have helped them and they have been great about helping us to integrate with them. They’ve been terrific in embracing our strengths as well.”

You can watch live coverage of SiliconANGLE’s #BigDataSV at SiliconANGLE.tv