Jack Norris, MapR CMO joins John Furrier and Dave Vellante in theCUBE. In their ongoing coverage of the 2014 Strata Conference in Santa Clara, California, the three discuss new MapR goals and strategies in addition to market innovations, in general.

Norris says MapR maintains “a truly focused business model,” providing innovations and advantages that benefit customers’ bottom line. He notes that Cisco has focused on how they can best leverage the data and are now dramatically expanding their use cases and how to derive value from data. Norris suggests, “sometimes its leveraging new data sources, sometimes its leveraging the data sources that they have available.”

This makes sense given that users are asking questions like: How do I expand my exposure? How do they develop new insurance projects? How do you drive efficiency? Or, is it straight cost? Norris says Hadoop has been a disruptive force, offering solutions at  1/20th or even 1/50th the typical cost depending on the platform being used.

Vellante inquires about how the traditional data warehouse is changing. Norris, doesn’t think organizations believe that now that they have a technology that can replace a data warehouse that they will replace the data warehouse. As he puts it: “Just because I’ve got a data warehouse here and my data’s growing by 40 percent, does that mean I need to invest 40 percent more?” Users can deploy Hadoop and offload some of that data growth, “it’s not a necessarily a rip and replace.”

For the most part, Norris has observed MapR being implemented horizontally. “What’s surprising to me is that its not just across industry, it’s across that company,” he adds. Yet, Vellante has observed a lack of innovation in the market and asks, “Can large companies innovate or do they need to partner with and acquire start-ups?” Norris responds, “This isn’t an architectural change, this is an architectural innovation. And, I think that’s why we’re seeing such a wide open fast acceleration of companies like MapR.”

Open source may imply a singular business model, which Norris says has caused some initial confusion. Still, he believes MapR’s hybrid model has proven it’s uniqueness and efficiency. Simply put, Norris notes: “It’s easier for folks to get to much faster — there’s been a pretty fast and broad acceptance of that with enterprise customers.”

See Norris’ entire segment below.