A decade after its release, Hadoop has finally taken off. The top three distributors boast several hundred paying customers each, with more and more coming aboard every quarter. But Lawrence Schwartz of Attunity Ltd. believes that the path towards mass adoption is far from straight.

Speaking on theCUBE at the recent BigDataSV 2015 meet-up, the veteran executive highlighted that the organizations currently implementing the platform are still early adopters. That is reflected in the fact that a sizable portion are either bleeding-edge tech firms or comparably savvy global enterprises.

The reason for that is not that the rest of the world has yet to recognize the tremendous potential in unstructured data. The exact opposite has been shown to be true, most recently by a study of nearly 400 top decision-makers by Dell. Rather, Schwartz pointed a finger towards the sheer amount of resources needed to deploy and manage large-scale Hadoop clusters.

At the same time, there’s no denying that the platform has gotten much more usable since hitting the open-source ecosystem in 2005. As a matter of fact, that’s one of the main factors behind why adoption increased from a handful of web-scale companies at the beginning to thousands of organizations spanning multiple industries today.

“It’s hit that point, but there’s still a big learning gap, even for people who are very smart and savvy. It’s like a whole new language you have to learn,” Schwartz told theCUBE hosts John Furrier and Jeff Kelly, adding that taking Hadoop mainstream will require another major leap in simplicity.

He believes that the push is already underway.  Schwartz said that public cloud is one of the main drivers behind the shift, echoing the perspective of previous guests that the on-demand model lowers the entry barrier for everyday organizations lacking the resources to implement an on-premise cluster. The increased accessibility, he explained, enables more practitioners in the traditional enterprise to make themselves familiar with Hadoop.

Since the steep learning curve of the platform is the biggest barrier standing in the way of mainstream acceptance, that provides an invaluable boost for adoption. But the trend only addresses a symptom of the underlying problem, which is the inherent complexity of Hadoop . Vendors such as Attunity are seeing an opportunity to address the issue directly with value-added capabilities for automating the difficult operational chores that make large-scale analytics so unwieldy.

The data integration powerhouse is witnessing the results firsthand. “There’s a movement of doing more with Hadoop,” Schwartz detailed. “We see it in our customers as well, they start with some basic loadings for cost savings but they move on to applications that look at realizing the data lake, pull in different data feeds and get a real-time view of their business.”