I recently met with Mike Hoskins, EVP & CTO of Pervasive Software, based in Austin, Texas. It’s an interesting company that combines a large legacy database management system with developing technologies for big data applications around the Hadoop database.

Here are some notes from our meeting:

– The Austin tech scene is doing well, there are a lot of startups. And there is a large Hadoop user group.

– We are 30 years old which is rare in the software business. We have had 41 quarters of profitability

– Our products help companies integrate their IT systems withy applications. Integration is a tough problem but it is also one that will be around for many years. If an application hasn’t been customized it is easy but most aren’t.

– Our integration platform is build it into many “cloud” platforms, such as ADP and Intuit’s.

– We recently opened a marketplace for adapters, where people can resell connectors for various systems.

– We have an innovation lab where we focus on new projects. One of these on Hadoop and how to improve performance.

– Hadoop is really taking off because it lets companies manage very large amounts of data. A key feature is that it’s scalable. But it’s a brute force scalability, you need to add more processors to scale. There is no more “free lunch” from faster processors because of multicore architectures.

– Modern processors are now multicore. We are looking at speeding up Hadoop performance by making it more efficient at taking advantage of multicore architectures.

– Parallel processing will speed up Hadoop applications but it is difficult to do. We are developing a Hadoop accelerator for big data applications.

– The database market is very interesting, there is massive disruption happening.

– Data is immortal. Applications are just a skin that sits on a database.

[Cross-posted at Silicon Valley Watcher]