Day two of Strata Conf. 2014 kicked off with co-hosts John Furrier and Jeff Kelly who were joined in theCUBE by Bob Wilkinson, COO of InfiniDB, a man more than happy to talk about the recent changes his company went through and also debate and discuss some of the trends in the Big Data world.

The company updates include a funding and a name change. “In the last quarter of last year we announced a broader open source strategy and Hadoop big data integration,” said Wilkinson. “The name change and the funding is really taking that to the next level. We’ve consolidated our brand assets around the product name which became the company’s name as well.”

“What’s on your agenda for this year for growth?” asked Furrier.

“Our recent funding is for building our sales and marketing department,” explained Wilkinson. At the moment InfiniDB only has a headcount of 25. “We’ve been on the market since 2010, but we weren’t that widely known until now. We feel our product is ready to make some waves and have an impact, especially in the SQL on Hadoop space, and the funding is actually taking that marketing and sales to another level.”

“You have a good product and a good story,” agreed  Furrier, who prompted his guest to talk about the dynamics that his company is addressing.

“SQL is sexy again,” smiled Wilkinson, who added that one of the key trends they see in the market is a lot of momentum and noise around unstructured data. “We think it’s a big place for SQL. Legions of developers know how to use it and, at the end of the day, a lot of data that people want to do analytics on is structured, SQL is the right tool to do that. What we can do with a technology like ours is making it accessible, make every SQL developer a Big Data developer,” added  Wilkinson.

Performance matters

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Another trend Wilkinson sees, that is really important for InfiniDB, is the trend around performance. “The ability to get more of a real-time conversational access to data matters to businesses, because they use that to drive competitive advantages.”

There are critics out there who do not think SQL is ready for the spotlight, noted Furrier, asking Wilkinson to comment on the matter.

“The critics need to come back and take another look,” invited Wilkinson. “If you look at the early technologies that were on Hadoop (the open source ones) you can see why the people were reluctant to embrace it. Frankly, you can still see some of that… Cloudera was early with their Impala move, and that product has been moving along, and now you have products like ours coming into the space, that really take things to a new level,” bragged Wilkinson. “It’s a fourth or fifth generation product, it’s mature and now it’s being brought into the Hadoop ecosystem. Many of these newer open source solutions are much less robust,” he said.

Joining the conversation, Jeff Kelly, Principal Research Contributor with Wikibon, noted that “InfiniDB competes with the likes of Vertica and Greenplum” and wanted Wilkinson to comment on why they decided to move to open source. “Why would you made that decision and how do you think that plays in the larger big data landscape? Kelly asked.

Bob explained: “For us it was a 2-step move: 1) we felt like the market needed an open source technology in the column MPP space. There are a couple of solutions, but almost no open source options if you needed that kind of technology; 2) we saw this market momentum around Hadoop, and now around SQL and Hadoop, and we felt like in order to really participate in that market, in the way that market expects, we needed to have an open source strategy as well.”

“It’s been good for us. We’ve seen a lot of interest that we weren’t getting before. People were out there looking for these kinds of open source solutions and there weren’t that many to find in this space,” declared Wilkinson.

Gaining traction

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“From the perspective of the user,” said Kelly, “do they come to InfiniDB to tinker with the code, or because it’s free? What is the advantage of the open source nature of this MPP database?”

“It’s more about the business model,” explained Wilkinson. “People can wrap their heads around an open source business model; it’s a scaling model that they understand.”

Kelly prompted Wilkinson to talk more about the customer traction: “What do you see in terms of innovative use-cases, in terms of people actually making stuff work? A lot of the talk on theCUBE was initially around the tech. But what are people doing out there in the field that’s driving business value?” he asked.

“For products like ours, the best fit is someone who has time-series data, and this massive growth of the data. One good example is in the gaming space. More and more now, especially mobile games, are throwing off events’ streams. In a time-series data that’s logging everything the players are doing in a game, all those things are events streamed off these games. They have hundred of millions of events per day that they like to do analytics on. A traditional solution doesn’t really help. But with a product like ours they’ve been able to take that data in and analyze it focusing on player engagement,” said the InfiniDB COO.

“Mobile handsets seem to be like a megatrend,” noted Wilkinson. “In that space you have a multitude of data from the global network infrastructure and the term ‘customer experience management’ is heard more and more over there.”

Furrier then asked Wilkinson to elaborate a little on the competition in the marketplace, providing the viewers with a personal opinion regarding what it takes to be successful.

“In order to be successful, people need to make their solutions accessible and easy to use,” reckons Wilkinson.