theCUBE Live at BigDataNYC with Cloudwick Inc CEO Mani Chhabra

Traditionally, organizations that want to implement new technology hire a small army of consultants to make up for the lack of in-house skills, but Cloudwick Inc. CEO Mani Chhabra believes that data analytics is reversing that pattern. He believes professional services are actually catalyzing the adoption of new solutions such as Hadoop.

The industry veteran returned to theCUBE at SiliconANGLE’s recently concluded BigDataNYC summit to share Cloudwick’s position with hosts Dave Vellante and Jeff Kelly. As Chhabra explained it, his company comes in once the Hadoop distributors are done setting up their software at the client site and the hard work of putting that investment to use at the organizational level begins.

“Scaling from 40 nodes to 400 nodes is not easy for the enterprise, and our focus is Fortune 1000, where they really, really need help from the DevOps side to the engineering side of the business,” Chhabra said. Large international companies typically suffer from proportionally more cultural and structural barriers than the smaller and nimbler web firms they have suddenly found themselves competing against.

“The people transformation, the process transformation – it’s extremely complex for them. They have been doing relational databases in a preset world, and now they have to change everything,” Chhabra said. Not only that, but they also have to do it fast or risk falling behind the rapid maturation curve of the Hadoop ecosystem.

The challenge of accelerating technology adoption in the traditional enterprise is typically discussed in terms of convincing business leaders to embrace the same new trends as the competition, but Chhabra noted that Cloudwick is witnessing a different story in the field. The business side, he said, is no longer the bottleneck.

“The lines-of-business guys now have an intuitive understanding of markets, because they see the pattern of their core business is being taken by upstarts emerging from Silicon Valley and these startups do business the data way,” Chhabra told Vellante and Kelly. Technology leaders often have a harder time adapting to the new reality of analytics, he continued, in large part due to the outsourcing craze that swept over the industry over the last few decades.

The trend – which most recently saw Lufthansa AG hand over responsibility over its infrastructure operations to IBM – has left many IT departments “hollowed out” and unable to take on a task as large as deploying Hadoop, according to Chhabra. Traditional organizations must undo those cutbacks in order to keep pace, which means investing more in training and their existing staff.

“The Fortune 500 have to do that, because [analytics] is an existential threat,” the CEO remarked. “They’re getting nimble because they see the line, and I think enterprises who look forward to embrace this thing will survive and those who don’t won’t.” He said he believes that the same is true for systems integrators for the simple reason that they’re the first to go when a problem is not solved.

So Cloudwick is positioning accordingly. “The change is constant, so what we have to do is take all the knowledge we learned from the industry, put together the use case perspective and apply that to the new technologies coming in,” Chhabra said.

Watch the complete interview (18:59).