John Furrier and Dave Vellante, theCUBE co-hosts, broadcasting live from Day 2 of Hadoop Summit 2013 in San Jose today, discuss the changes in the industry and in the business model with Herb Cunitz, President of Hortonworks.

Cunitz has an extensive experience in growing and managing sales and customer operations for emerging software companies, so naturally he was interested in the customers’ opinions at this event. He noticed two important topics regarding what Hadoop does for them: 1. it gives them this platform that can run all this different workloads on; 2. it’s wonderful in terms of security and authentication. One of the customers even talked about replacing a lot of the mainframe workloads with Hadoop, which was unheard of. Hadoop is truly becoming that Next Generation Data Platform.

Asked about the vision of coexistence with the other platforms and solutions out there, Cunitz explained that “Hadoop doesn’t just become the platform to rule them all, but a component of the Next Gen Data Architecture.”

Next-Gen Hortonworks

Furrier and Vellante pressed Cunitz to disclose the growth strategy for Hortonworks. “The financing is fantastic and we’re blessed to have investors to come in and do that, but in another way, it’s just business as usual.” It’s almost a non-event, it’s just money that allows us to continue to grow the business, said Cunitz.

Talking about changes, particularly changes in the marketplace, Herb Cunitz remarked that:

1. Open source has emerged and matured, being accepted  in the Enterprise and not feared as dangerous
2. the Open Source community continues to grow and scale

“Because of the economics, and because of the capabilities you have in terms of what you can do, Hadoop is going to be an inflection point in changing the industry and in the market. It doesn’t mean the old market goes away, but it opens up a whole new world. All these types of data that were thrown on the floor can now be leveraged to make smarter, more predictive decisions,” believes Cunitz. The trend is moving from reactive analytics to predictive decisions.

“What has to happen to enable that tsunami of applications that’s yet to come?” asked Furrier, inquiring about Hortonworks’ vision of the future. Cunitz replied that “Hadoop can enable a whole new set of applications to emerge.” When they launched their business, they predicted that half of the world data is going to be on Hadoop. They stand by that statement, acknowledging that is was a bold prediction back then, but also noting that the entire ecosystem is actually evolving faster than anyone thought initially.

• Changes in the business model

“Ultimately, the market is choosing what the standard is, based on adoption, and based on where the value is. That democratization is really what the Open Source is driving, and it is overall better for everybody, because it’s coming up with the better results.”