This week’s #HadoopSummit is a coming out party, of sorts, for the platform. A theme that Hortonworks VP of Strategy, Shaun Connelly, really wanted to stress was ‘Enterprise Hadoop In Action’. In the few years since the first Hadoop Summit, the entire Hortonworks portfolio, replete with products whose names adhered to their animal theme, has seemingly congealed into an enterprise-ready offering.

Referring to the the advance of the platform experienced since he joined Hortonworks, Connelly noted, “Nothing held it together. Now we are focusing on enterprise services.” The intervening time has witnessed the market reaching a maturity that has the likes of IBM, Cisco and Sprint signing on to the open source platform.

“If you think about when it was invented, back in 2005 or 2006,” Connelly stated, “we are about eight years into the journey.” He continued, “New markets take a decade to flesh out. We have another three, five, maybe seven years ahead of us for this thing to stretch its legs.” Hadoop is well positioned to do just that thanks to their ability to run in almost any environment, be it in Linux, Windows, on prem, hybrid or cloud.

At the start of the week, Hortonworks hosted an analysts session to listen to their broad spectrum of customers and the experiences they have had on their journey. Interesting to Connelly in this session was how even long standing companies are seeing the embrace of Hadoop making the navigation of the disruption not only far less painful but adding to their bottomline.

Watch theCUBE interview in its entirety here:

“British Gas is a 250 year old company and yet they are adding smart meters to 1 million households. Their journey is more classic. TrueCar is more of a green field. They don’t have a lot of legacy and can go all in immediately,” he stated. “Each enterprise is different so they are going to get onboard with different drivers. The successful ones that we see are the ones that identify the applications that move the needle.”

Connelly sees those that approach Hadoop adoption solely from the perspective of cost savings and driving the cost out of the platform as underselling the platform if that is all that they are looking at. The true value of Hadoop will be in the utilization of it as a transformative driver for how the business conducts itself going forward. “The gentleman from British Gas described it as his company no longer being a traditional enterprise. He looks at British Gas now almost from a telco perspective.”

Another specific use case Connelly discussed was that of Sprint. “Their Hadoop journey started from the business and analyst side, not the technology side,” he said. “They were tasked with bringing a lot of data together and it was a research cluster. Figure out the art of the possible.” This process allowed them to identify several use cases. They presented a specific use case to the CIO showing not only the cost savings but the benefit to be derived from implementation.

“They still keep the rest of their research cluster for educating the rest of Sprint, onboarding interesting use cases that will prove themselves they are worthy to move into their cluster,” he explained. “It’s a great best practice. But it was very much line of business and analyst driven. IT came in as secondary.”

Referring to YARN as Hadoop’s architectural center, Connelly sees the updated MapReduce overhaul as being beneficial, not only to open source, but to SaaS offerings that can tie in and get as close to being native with Hadoop as possible. “This isn’t an open source only thing. It’s commercial. It’s ecosystem. And a broader set of tooling. It isn’t just open source.”

One criticism Hortonworks receives, notes Connelly, is that they are often accused of being less brazen than they ought to be when approaching the market. “If you are making a market,” he explains, “you have to be patient and have the internal fortitude to make the market.” Hortonworks is confident that not only will they make the market big enough to support both themselves and other players on the field. “When we get a slice of the pie, it will be sizeable. We will take a deserved slice of the pie without hogging the whole thing.”

The next 12 to 18 months are going to see a huge amount of acceleration, Connelly predicts. He cites the very real collision course he sees for PaaS and Hadoop. “We are living in a collision of events where disruption is happening across all sectors: data, cloud, compute, IoT. It’s really exciting.”