A big question at Hadoop Summit 2015 is still whether Hadoop has “crossed the chasm” to the mainstream. Ashley Stirrup, CMO of Talend, Inc., thinks it’s close, but not quite there.

“If you look at Hadoop, it provides tremendous value in terms of performance and cost savings, and yet it’s still pretty hard to work with,” he said. “There’s a lot of growing up it’s still got to do. And that’s where tools like Talend come in, in terms of providing a visual interface, allowing you to do drag and drop data integration instead of having to hand-code MapReduce, for example.”

Implementing real-time analytics and responses

With the explosion of Big Data, Stirrup believes the next step is implementing real-time analytics and responses to all that data funneling into company systems. For example, Stirrup said that one of the largest e-commerce sites in the world noticed that 50-70% of their shopping carts get abandoned.

“And they’ve realized that if they can predict who’s going to abandon a cart and then pop an offer in real-time, you know free shipping or a coupon something like that, they can have a dramatic impact on their business … several hundred million more in sales by influencing that one event,” he said.

Stirrup said that according to that company’s CTO, “If you can’t act on it in real time, all you can do is measure how much money you’re losing.”

Using real-time data to spot fraud

Another example of how data integration can affect real-time business actions comes from one of Talend’s financial services customers. “They want to take Twitter data and then combine it with their traditional customer data,” Stirrup said, “so that if they see somebody tweeting in Florida and supposedly buying a flatscreen in Chicago, they know that maybe they’ve got a fraud incident there.”

Hopefully, all this data will one day lend itself to personalized solutions for customers and a better company-consumer relationship. “The first thing is just, how do you bring together all this siloed data? What did they buy in the store? What did they buy online? What customer service calls have you had? And how can you just pull all that together to give insight to the person on the phone?”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Hadoop Summit 2015.