Christophe Bisciglia, the Google veteran and Silicon Valley entrepreneur best known for co-founding Apache Hadoop services firm Cloudera in 2010, joined SiliconAngle’s John Furrier in The Cube at last week’s HBase Con 2012 to talk about Wibidata, his current venture – and how personalization is the next real opportunity space for big data developers.

Apache Hadoop is a fantastic solution for storing and crunching big data sets, Bisciglia says. But in age where consumers face a “firehose” of data, across social networks and apps, the standout tools are going to be those that help customers manage the flood. And how do you do that? By leveraging tools like HBase to crunch vast quantities of data and create a more personalized experience.

That personalization can come in the form of tracking and making predictions based on a user’s previous behavior, across your own service or even other services. It’s the difference between Google’s original mission of downloading the entire Internet to index it, and its current approach of presenting results based on the very slight differences in search habits between users.

Where HBase comes in is that, like Google BigTable before it, by providing the mechanism for    quickly processing and running MapReduce on this data, you can get “living, breathing” apps that create new, better, constantly-evolving experiences for the customer in real-time. It’s a real, fundamental shift, Bisciglia says.

And while HBase is a standalone application, developers are taking the entire rest of the Apache Hadoop ecosystem along for the ride. Unlike other large-scale databases, Bisciglia explains, HBase gives a way to take MapReduce, GFS, Hive, and the rest of the Hadoop lineup  and apply it to your data warehouses, all in one go. It’s that tight integration that really sets it apart.

The real-time personalization is the real wave of the future for HBase in particular and big data in general, as per Bisciglia’s talk, but other topics touched on during his time in The Cube include the necessity of DevOps expertise to a successful Hadoop deployment, the maturity of HBase itself, and how Wibidata is meeting customer needs. Watch for yourself here: