John Furrier, SiliconAngle Founder and CEO, was joined in theCUBE at #BigDataSV  by Colin Mahony (VP & GM of HP Vertica) and John Schroeder (CEO of MapR), to talk about their recent partnership, the state of the market and the challenges of the developers.

Already a regular of the show,  Mahony broke the ice: “We are really excited about our relationship with MapR; we’re combining two great solutions so that customers who want to take advantage of big data (or any data), can do it seamlessly. What Vertica brings to the table, is an incredible MPP SQL analytics platform, but when you think about the big data lake, it just makes sense that you can have a single environment where you can do anything you want against the data. Like with most great partnerships, it’s really customer-driven.”

Praising their business model,  Furrier asked the MapR CEO to elaborate on his company and what sets it apart.

“We’re more like Splunk than Red Hat; we build technology and bring it to market. Over the last year we’ve had a tremendous amount of activity around SQL and Hadoop,” said Schroeder.

Not long ago  Schroeder predicted that “SQL is going to be the most exciting and disappointing technology for 2014 because the state of technology was not in the state that the customers thought it would be.” He then contacted Mahony to discuss the SQL platform which was part of Vertica’s MPP platform, which seemed robust enough to run the way customer expected SQL to run with MapR Hadoop distribution.

Prompted by Furrier to explain what ‘enterprise grade’ meant,  Mahony entertained the viewers with a penguin analogy; not so long ago the Big Data companies were like the penguins sitting on the edge of the iceberg, nudging each-other off to see if there’s a shark swimming by.

“That’s what Big Data was like; people weren’t sure what it was, how to define it or if it made sense. We’re past that,” said Mahony. “The penguins are in the water, swimming, and CIOs know they can become heroes with the things they’re doing around information and data,” said Mahony.

He continued: “There’s an incredible high ROI with anything analytic-related when you can do it right.”

Gaining the trust of the customers

“In order to have systems that are operational, that businesses are depending on, you have to know that the data is secure, backed-up, that you have fail-overs if something happens to the hardware, and that you can continue running,” thinks Mahony.

“If you have a thousand node cluster, with 12 drives each, you’re going to have a stack of broken drives and a stack of broken servers on your desk at all times. The whole system is built to assume failure,” added Schroeder.

Wanting to know more about the inner workings of their partnership, Furrier pressed for details: “What’s the mechanics of the deal? What are you doing for each-other?” he asked.

The answers, however, were not very conclusive:

“Right now the teams are working together in the field, working with our partners to get customers and prospects up and running. Integration is very seamless, and there’s not a lot of work that needs to be done to get it going,” Colin replied evasively.

“We are selling support to our own products, but that might change in the future,”  said Schroeder

“Where is this going?” asked Furrier next.

“We wait and see where the customers take it. If you look at any MPP environments (Hadoop, Vertica etc), there’s a new deployment model going on around information, a pure scale-out model,” said Mahony.

Furrier asked his guests to comment on the state of Big Data industry.

“If you look specifically at Hadoop, it’s settling down to a couple of platform providers, and we’re the leader there, but I don’t think it’s ready to vertically integrate the stack,” replied Schroeder.

“It is a great time in the industry if you’re a buyer, because there is so much innovation,” pitched in Mahony. “But with that comes a lot of fragmentation, which makes the formation of the ecosystem more challenging for the buyer to figure out what works. That’s why we talk less about the speeds and feeds and more about the problems that you’re trying to solve.”

Furrier wanted to know if the mainstream markets are ready for this large deployments, building data lakes and data hubs.

“We’re already doing it,” boasted Schroeder, who mentioned working already with Telco, financial services, healthcare and the Federal Government. “It’s still lumpy, as they are not  all moving at the same rate. Telco’s been the most consistent adopter across the board. The most interesting part of the market right now it’s the lumpiness,” he added.

Commenting on the current state of the market, theCUBE guests gave their two cents:

“I think there’s going to be a lot more analytics, a lot less talk about Big Data,” forecasted Mahony. “It doesn’t mean it’s going away. Analytics should be embedded in everything you do and I think it’s going mainstream.”

“From a Hadoop perspective, we’re starting to see operational use-cases,” added Schroeder.

Advice for other entrepreneurs

“There’s always going to be white space for Entrepreneurs,” thinks Mahony. “Despite people telling you it will never happen, if you’re passionate, it will happen.”

He thinks there’s still room to grow because, despite all the demand on the market, it’s a shortage of expertise. So there’s a huge opportunity still.

“Perseverance is an underrated quality in an entrepreneur,” agreed Schroeder. “The biggest advice is ‘Follow the customers and follow markets’ as they will guide you in the right direction.”