As the potential for gathered data draws in more and more companies from virtually every industry, many are finding that their internal organization and legacy architectures aren’t quite up to snuff for the new data-focused world.

Jacque Istok, America’s Field CTO at Pivotal, Inc., joined John Furrier (@furrier) and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, at the Hadoop Summit US, to talk about Pivotal’s role in data management, enabling customer potential and its expectations for the future.

Joining the customers

Istok began by laying out a history of Pivotal’s goals: “When we formed Pivotal … agile DevOps was clearly going to be the mainstay, everybody was coming through, and nobody could do it better than Pivotal Labs. And then … we have Pivotal Cloud Foundry, which is based off of the open-source Cloud Foundry, and that allows us to have a Platform as a Service to deploy those apps in a Google-ish, Facebook scale, but for the enterprise.”

He continued: “And then what powers all those apps, bringing it all together, is that perfect trifecta of Big Data, or data in general. … Our portfolio, we have three main data products: Our Greenplum Database, our GemFire data-grid, and then our HDB database, which is based off the Apache HAWQ version. And that allows us actually to have every piece that enterprises are looking for today in order to modernize where they’ve been for the past 20 years.”

As Istok explained it, Pivotal opens many of its business relationships by introducing themselves to companies for the purpose of addressing apps that need to be overhauled and moved onto an open platform. Once these steps are made, he said, “When the business sees success, success begets success … and then it just blossoms.”

Breaking old barriers

“In an organization, there’s a lot of caution. And if you look at a developer, a DBA, or a system administrator, what they want to do is they want to see their fruits of their labor actually be used and draw value,” Istok noted. For Pivotal, finding ways of bringing those goals and the customer closer together is important, but so is improving the customers’ understanding of how they fit into the new paradigms.

“What organizations have been doing for the last five or six years as they’ve explored the Hadoop ecosystem is they’ve seen that, ‘Wow, I really do have a lot of data here. Let me see if I can make use of it,’” Istok said. “I think the progression’s in the technology, so Hadoop … has matured almost more rapidly than any other tech that I’ve seen in the last 15 years.”

He continued: “And so that ability to become enterprise-ready has really enabled more folks to actually leverage it,” he said. “But you extend that just a little bit further … and what we’ve found in the way Pivotal has changed and migrated in the last few years, where we bring the most value is enabling our customers to actually take advantage of that scale and advantage of that technology.”

Customer desires

Looking at the information drawn from dealings with customers in these situations, Istok said, “What I’m seeing is customers looking for a path to make that Amazonian experience enabled in not only their datacenter, but also within Amazon. And I think our products allow you to cross both sides. … I would say, in a way, we are seeing our customers push for and really need more data services within Cloud Foundry, and we’re very focused on the Pivotal data side in order to enable that and partner with many of the folks you see [at this conference].”

Istok predicted: “I think what you’ll see is more and more of a convergence of ease-of-use, ease-of-operations, again so that customers and businesses can just make use of that underlying technology. There exists a spot now, more than ever, where customers and organizations are amenable to leveraging the cloud for data storage.”

Watch the complete interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Hadoop Summit US.

Photo by SiliconANGLE