James Markarian, executive vice president and general manger of Informatica’s Enterprise Integration unit, stopped by theCube at Hadoop World 2011 to give us a look at the ecosystem from his company’s perspective. Informatica has seen immense growth since Markarian joined the company, and it’s now expanding into the unstructured data world. One of the latest pushes was the development of HPraser, which the executive addressed during the interview.

Markarian started off by noting that HPraser is only the latest initiative by Informatica in the big data space, though nevertheless one of the more significant ones. He went on to explain that the solution solves issues with having to keep track of different components across various formats by brining those together for the analytics process.

At that point, the topic shifted more towards the general market and ecosystem. He expanded on the point that Hadoop is simply easier to use and more affordable when it comes to handling unstructured datasets, saying that companies are also discovering new data sources. These contribute to their insight into the button line, and subsequently further increase complexity.

Another thing Markarian raised is that customers still have a lot of questions concerning Hadoop, questions he expects to be naturally resolved as the platform gains in popularity (and thus increasing awareness of its full potential and further increasing its adoption.) He also elaborated a bit on how many companies are using Hadoop today to supplement their existing analytics infrastructure.

Furrier and Vellante raised the question of how long it could take for Hadoop adoption to trickle down to business users. Markarian’s response was that in order to achieve that what’s needs to be changes is the traditional business person’s perspective, a space where’s there’s arguably little room for more drastic near-term changes. He did however mention a few companies that are working on fleshing out this field from the Hadoop angle.


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