In their ongoing coverage of SiliconANGLE’s own Big Data NYC conference, John Furrier and Dave Vellante spoke with Ankur Gupta, MetaScale Lead of Sales and Marketing, in theCUBE. The three discuss MetaScale’s origin and what distinguishes their enterprise position and current offerings, especially with Hadoop.

MetaScale was born out of Sears. At a challenging time in its corporate history, Sears dedicated significant time to identifying and developing a big data strategy to advance the company. Years later, having nearly perfected the art of using big data technologies in a large enterprise, Sears launched MetaScale as a legacy company to help other businesses develop big data strategies.

Vellante asks, “How are you helping others?” Gupta says what differentiates  MetaScale offerings is their enterprise experience. MetaScale aids with Hadoop implementation and identification of use-cases. Most importantly, Gupta says, “we’re vendor neutral – you are essentially talking to experts who have done it on their sides.” (Although MetaScale is a vendor, it is also a “heavy implementer” of its own solutions.)

Various enterprises are in different stages of using Hadoop. According to Gupta, they face challenges when, “They do not have proper talent, they do not implement it correctly, [and] most importantly, they don’t have use cases.” In such instances, MetaScale typically suggests companies take their time, to identify the use-cases that make the most sense for the brand. MetaScale helps companies in their initial stage build use-cases to see how Hadoop can sincerely help them, based on where they currently are; bringing together big data management and big data talent. Gupta adds, “We have a pretty detailed methodology that we take our customers through. And, as we learn about their ecosystem, we help build more and more on top of it.”

Gupta notes that MetaScale helps their clients’ bottom line. He explains, “You are able to make business decisions quickly, so [the benefit] is a combination of immediate dollars and better customer relations.”

Vellante asks, “Is hadoop ready for the enterprise?” Gupta replies, “Hadoop is an ecosystem of technology, you can’t just download it and hope it will work.” Furrier notes that some will say Hadoop is not ready because of fail-overs and other limitations. Still, Gupta maintains, “Cloudera’s distribution of Hadoop is enterprise ready. We use and promote the open source version. The companies like Cloudera and Hortonworks have already done the packaging for you.”

Furrier concludes asking Gupta to offer advice to companies about use-cases? Gupta quips, “There is one solution: hire MetaScale.” Otherwise, he suggests it is important to unite professionals from the business side and technology side to brainstorm. In essence, Gupta says its simply a matter of “Really thinking about how Hadoop will fit into your whole ecosystem.”