Scott Howser, Vice President of Marketing, discussed the uniqueness of Hadapt in the Hadoop space where their approach to data and SQL queries is concerned, with theCUBE co-hosts Dave Vellante and John Furrier, live at the 2013 Hadoop Summit.

One of the key differentiators for Hadapt is its “focus on building a real relational engine,” Howser explained, with indexing and all the benefits of SQL, along with search capabilities, which the company has been offering for over a year.

Searching Hadoop is a specialty

Asked what was special about search in Hadoop, Howser said that “one of the most unique things of search is leveraging the unstructured, free-flow text and context,” the ability to use search as a filter in a SQL query is a very powerful thing. Hadapt brings a lot of the SQL capabilities to Hadoop, such as user defined queries, the platfrom enables users to write their own analytics functions, making the data accessible directly to business analysts.

• Unification

“We talk about unification and bringing all these tools and technologies into one platform,” Howser said, and making them available to business analysts via SQL, a well known and understood language to them.

In most cases, companies use dual platform approach, an analytical database and Hadoop. “We advocate merging those worlds.” With Hadapt you don’t need a two-platform approach. which complicates the management of features such availability, scale, performance, disaster recovery. If the analysts want to manage and access all the data, the only way to do that is by giving access to all data. If business analyts have to figure how to move data around and where to store what data, there won’t be mass adoption in the marketplace, Howser warned.

• Addressing complexities in managing Hadoop ecosystem

There is a big challenge in managing the operation of two different platforms, as it requires bigger teams, and different skill sets. “There’s this feedback loop that occurs between IT and business types,” Howser said. Analysts, in order to get to the data, have to write an ETL job, based on it some data has been called into Hadoop, they put it in the analytical database,  but if they discover some insight, in order to actually gain access to the data set, they need to go back to IT and request it. With Hadapt, “all the data lives in the ecosystem in Hadoop,” it’s available to the analysts, “they can dig into the raw detail of the information” without having to go through IT.

Replacing traditional data warehouses with Hadoop

Asked if Hadoop will replace traditional data warehouses, Howser said that “long term, that’s our vision.” Hadoop is the operating system for Big Data and over time it will continue to eat away at traditional data infrastructures, and change the way people look at data analysis. The Hadapt approach is to make data accessible to people who can change business outcome based on it.

• Uncovering missed revenue opportunities

Asked about the changing economics, as traditional data warehousing implies large investment in infrastructure, maintaining it, and making it faster, Howser said that with Hadoop, the reduction in infrastructure costs is not the only benefit. It’s about “revenue opportunities that you’re missing otherwise.” There is significant cost reduction on infrastructure, but the revenue curve changes for the customer by accessing and analysing data.

• Next for Hadapt

Asked about the future plans of Hadapt, Howser said that the most important goal to keep an eye on was “seeing the customers themselves speak about the things we are doing.” Once more mainstream use cases are in place and customers are able to talk about them, there will be “more in the public eye about the things we are disrupting.”