There is a chasm in the tech world. On one side stand the developers, those who create and explore technology. The other side is the home of business, where executives ponder what is right for their companies. For a product to be successful in the enterprise world, it must cross this chasm, going from a tool for developers and becoming a tool for business. Hadoop has made the leap. Is this Big Data technology ready for the mainstream?

To shed some light on the state of Hadoop in the business world, John Furrier (@furrier) and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, visited the Hadoop Summit US 2016 conference in San Jose, California. There, they spoke to Herb Cunitz, president of Hortonworks, Inc.

Taking what works in Big Data

The conversation started with the mention of the change in how people talk about Hadoop as a technology. Cunitz pointed out that people are discussing not so much what the platform does, but what it can do for their companies. He used the emergence of the Cloud as an example of how customers don’t care about the tech itself; they just want to consume it, and that desire is one thing that’s driving Hadoop’s adoption.

Cunitz spoke on how the early adopters were fine with assembling tools, but business just wants to take what works and go do it. It was repeatable use cases that allowed Hadoop to cross that chasm.

The platform for platforms

The topic soon shifted toward ETL (Extract, Transform, Load), a process at the core of preparing Big Data for use. Cunitz explained that better ETL allows companies to do more iterative machine learning on top of all their data. Machine learning is dynamic, and superior ETL will let a company constantly refresh their data to return dynamic insights.

“We’re starting to see the emergence of a series of data-focused applications than can run on the platform,” he said. He offered that these companies will run the next stage of machine learning. As for Hadoop, Cunitz considered the value will come from platforms and applications. He felt Hadoop would be the platform other developers built their platforms on.

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE