theCube invited Scott Howser, VP Marketing Hadapt, to discuss the startup’s progress thus far and their opinion on the big “Hadoop War” conversation going on right now, started by Greenplum’s aggressive announcement on Pivotal HD.

In a live interview at Strata 2013, Howser stated that Hadapt believes “the worlds of SQL and Hadoop will converge” sometime into the future. Therefore, Hadapt’s efforts to bringing SQL to Hadoop have presented the company a privileged position in the market.

Scott Howser, VP of Marketing, Hadapt

Asked to comment on Greenplum’s statements that it has a more mature database, developed over the past 11 years, while Hadapt is the new kid on the block, Howser pointed out that Hadapt has “a lot of experience in relational database technology.” The company’s differentiator is that SQL runs inside of Hadoop, while Greenplum uses a connector based methodology. This approach can lead to operational challenges, performance availability and performance and availability constraints. All other platforms currently available have the same “two platform approach,” two separate platforms that need to be unified through some connector technology.

As Hadapt pioneered SQL in the Hadoop market,  Scott Howser commented on Greenplum’s strategy and approach to the Big Data market. “They want to provide the entire stack,” he said. Greenplum is trying to create a market where they have a sole opportunity for clients that want to do Big Data. However, “there is beauty in the community” and what happens in the Hadoop open source community, as it can produce new tools faster than one company or another. Greenplum’s approach is restrictive and their clients will not be able to use these open source tools and integrate them into their ecosystems.

Hadapt is not proprietary, he explained, “we support any distribution that’s out there.” The company offers the SQL interface, but can integrate any other tools and products and offer them on top of its solution.

Talking about Hadapt evolution and client adoption, Howser mentioned that they are currently shipping products and have paying customers. There is a lot of uptake in financial services and customer behavior analysis. In the latter field, the Hadapt platform helps them analyze behavior in customers, bringing all data into one platform and getting the insights needed to influence customer behavior.

All Hadapt competitors favor a two platform approach thus fur. This means a lack of interactivity, that Hadapt is working on offering through unifying SQL and Hadoop.

See Howser’s complete interview below: