Tom Pinckney, Director Global Partner Sales, Cloudera, and Steve Tramack, Director of Big Data Systems Engineering, Converged Appliance Systems & Solutions, Converged System, HP, discussed the partnership between the two companies with theCUBE host Jeff Kelly, live at the HP Vertica Big Data Conference.

Explaining his role in HP, Tramack said it focused on converged systems and converged infrastructures, his team being responsible for building appliances around the HAVEn stack. Consequently, they have been working on building boxed solutions for Vertica and an appliance.

When someone deploys a complex infrastructure stack, typically an organization will try to build something custom-made and work with a partner to achieve the desired outcome, Tramack explained. “We have converged products that allow them to do that.” In such scenarios, the success rate depends on the skill set of the organization. Thus, HP  engineers focus on developing best practices, and balancing hardware and software, through reference architecture to support them.

With HP’s appliance system, “it takes the complexity out from building the infrastructure.” The company provides customers with specific optimized servers, storage, “it ships rack and stack, pre-installed, delivered to the customers site.” The goal is that in day one the environment goes live.

“We’re not experts in hardware, so it’s great collaborating with HP to understand server platforms.” Pinckney said. “It’s great to walk into an account and have both infrastructure and Cloudera/Hadoop expertise.” HP has tremendous trust, long-standing partnerships with major customers who are now adopting Cloudera.

“Customers want solutions,” Pinckney added. “They are not trying to deploy Hadoop, they are trying to solve business problems. As Cloudera, our ability to bring forward certified partners, to have an ecosystems that provides solutions and solves business problems is very powerful.”

HP has an open kind of strategy, centered around HAVEn. “It’s critical as we’re providing a foundation for ingesting and analyzing and garnering the value from multiple sources of data, that we work with the best of partners and provide a platform and a foundation” for the collaboration, Tramack explained. “We’re able to provide Cloudera as part of the solutions to our partners. We’re able to take some of the complexity and risk out.”

“We’re really seeing enterprises trying to understand how to adopt cloud and Hadoop,” Pinckney stated. The HAVEn announcement is very important in that regard. What customers are interested in is basic operations and use cases. Organizations are looking at data transformations, where Cloudera is an optimal platform to free up capacity.

Asked about future HP developments, Tramack mentioned advancements on the converged infrastructure, fron, particularly the SL 4500 platform, Moonshot gaining more interest as data continues to scale and “the amount of space and power necessary to store that is astronomical.” Additionally, there is effort put into the blending and moving of data from Hadoop into Vertica for the speed of analytics. “We’re seeing a maturation of the technology.”