Attunity’s Lawrence Schwartz

The burgeoning analytics ecosystem is at an important crossroads, not only in terms of the strategic shift towards the cloud among the top Hadoop distributors but also – and more importantly – in user adoption, according to Attunity Inc. marketing head Lawrence Schwartz. The executive from the respected enterprise data management vendor returned to theCUBE at SiliconANGLE’s recently concluded Big Data NYC summit to share his perspective on the market and his firm’s role in accelerating the user momentum driving the trend with hosts Jeff Kelly and Jeff Frick.

Like so many other of the disruptive technologies to emerge in recent years, Hadoop got its start with the web-scale crowd, which needed an answer to an issue no one else had yet encountered and was willing to spend the time and effort required to scale the challenge. Today, that segment is still very much leading the way, but more traditional organizations have also joined the fray in pursuit of a solution to what has become a shared problem: tame the explosive growth of unstructured data.

Within its customer base, Schwartz detailed, Attunity sees that latter category of adopters dividing into two primary camps. The first is made up of existing clients who have had a positive experience with the firm’s data migration software in moving workloads among their existing systems and seek to replicate that success for their Hadoop projects. The second group, he said, consists of new accounts typically coming from other vendors. But it’s the further subdivisions that are truly revealing.

Schwartz agreed with Wikibon’s observation that customers are leveraging Hadoop primarily as a means to quickly and cost-effectively ingest data that might have taken days to properly prepare in the past.

“That ‘getting there’ is the hard part, that data interrogation problem, and that’s where we can lower the barrier,”  Schwartz said. “That’s where we see our role in this: how we lower those barriers to adoption and make it more feasible for people to get going.” But Attunity isn’t stopping at the initial preparation stage.

A significant portion of the firm’s enterprise-scale users are taking their Hadoop projects to the next level and offloading processes they have traditionally run on traditional platforms such as Oracle database onto the batch processing platform. The goal is typically to cut costs, but Schwartz said that the savings to be had from the framework represent only the tip of the iceberg. The real value lies in the new use cases it enables.

Leveraging Attunity’s software to handle the traffic, a company called Grizzly Oil Sands ULC managed to realize a 1,500 percent return on its Hadoop investment – orders-of-magnitude more than the market average – as part of an initiative to analyze sensory transmissions from extraction equipment. This not only demonstrates the potential of Hadoop but also what Schwartz described as the widening adoption of the platform in vertical markets. That trend holds special significance from the vendor point of view and his firm’s in particular, he explained, since it has now to tailor its offering for each market.

“It’s very hard to quantify the value in healthcare or energy because it’s specific to that industry,” he detailed.” If a big retail place can transact a tenth of a second faster, that’s huge because people won’t abandon stuff in their carts, so it varies by industry. You have to understand these different industries. Once you show the value to one it then gives ideas to others in the industry.”

Attunity is riding the Hadoop wave to the fullest, most recently upgrading its Replicate platform with a more user-friendly interface as part an aggressive push towards simplifying data integration.“It’s an exciting point in time for us, where we can be a good consultant and offer guidance to our customers and help them figure out the problem because we can solve more pieces of the puzzle than we could even a year ago,” he concluded.

Watch the full interview (19:29)