The Hadoop world should focus on business outcomes, as cool visualizations and queries are nothing if the data does not generate value for the organization. Oliver Ratzesberger, the SVP of Software at Teradata, explained that the new conversation on Hadoop’s business outcome should indeed be the new focus of the industry in a live interview yesterday with theCUBE co-hosts Jeff Frick and John Furrier.

As conversations at the Hadoop Summit circle business outcome, Ratzesberger agreed “it’s very important to focus on business outcome. I spent years integrating Teradata, Hadoop, and others to create business outcome. If you just create core visualizations, if you just run cool queries, that does not mean anything.” Organizations need to adapt to the new market and new customers demands, he went on, saying “you can miss the ball very quickly on that,” without a way to get value out of data and analytics.

Agility is a spectrum

Asked how CIOs and infrastructures dealt with the pressure to move faster, Ratzesberger said that “moving fast means hours and days.” Weeks already mean you’re too slow. “You have to be careful about that though… because it quickly turns into Wild Wild West.”

“You have to start with an agile environment first, and introduce a Big Data platform on top of that,” he explained. “Designing an organization for agility is very hard work. Most organizations, they want to be agile, but they fall into this waterfall methodology.” To adopt agility, you need to train your people, to shape your organization, said Ratzesberger.

Commenting on Facebook’s decision to change its mantra to “move fast, safe infrastructure,” Ratzesberger said “when you are new in the market, you can break stuff. Later on, you can’t make mistakes. You need to realize that you don’t build a plane or power plant in agile, but you need it for new products. Agility is a spectrum, it’s not an on off switch.”

“The push for agility needs to come even higher than the CIO,”  Ratzesberger  explained. The CIO is an enabler, so is the CMO, but the drive has to come from the CEO level or even be a board level decision.

 

Reeling in the community

“DevOps needs to come much more into Big Data,” Ratzesberger stated. “Right now analytical applications are lacking the kind of DevOps that’s been developed around cloud solutions.”

“What we have done from within the analytics side, we pushed very hard for agility,” he went on, “but we pushed for purpose and methodology. We took the entire development community and got them through Scrum training, but also included business units into this.” Developers and those on the business side worked next to each other, without the traditional separation.

“What we’ve learned over the years, agility with data is paramount,” Ratzesberger added. “We need to design for making that happen.” The concept to achieve that is to train people on agile and add a self-service dimension. He used eBay as an example, the company having implemented the concept of virtual sandboxes which gave access to all the data a customer needed to see. “We made it very easy for people to try something out, right there, on the production data.”

The end user experience

Asked what the reality of the customer was, Ratzesberger said “it’s all about execution. To a CEO, to a CIO, it matters if you can produce tangible outcomes and results. What we do at Teradata, we’re driving a lot of that new thinking into Teradata, we are constantly thinking what is the next step we need to solve for our customers” and what are the new capabilities emerging from these communities that are not enterprise ready, and see how they can be brought into the enterprise.

“What we are seeing a lot is the integration between trade data and new types of data, where it is very powerful to have a processing platform like Hadoop,” noted Ratzesberger. Image data data processing is an example, with use cases around fraud, and better search. Another important use case is around sensor data, which one customer used to predict locomotive breakdowns.

Commenting on the relevance of Teradata in the context of the current perfect storm of innovation, Ratzesberger  said that Teradata had “experience of integrating data at various levels” and “is at the forefront, somebody that really makes it happen. We build and integrate the technologies, bring them into your company and really let them loose on solving your problems. We do that engineering for our customers, we bring a prepackaged solution,” but it’s an integrated ecosystem, there is no lock in.