“I wanted to spend my money on engineers instead of licenses,” according to Kevin Goode, director of Platform Engineering for intelligent commerce company Inmar, Inc. Goode is a huge fan of open source.

Describing Inmar as the “financial transaction middleman between retailers and manufacturers across three different lines of business,” he tells theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s Media production team, how Inmar made the transformation from a traditional company to a data-driven enterprise. With an investment of only $50K in Hadoop, plus a similar amount in services from Hortonworks, Inc., Inmar now leverages Big Data to build insight and has products in production coming out of its Hadoop cluster. Goode tells theCUBE during the HP Big Data Conference, “A lot of people talk about PoCs but never really get to say, ‘Hey, we’re making money doing it.’”

Goode is attending the HP Big Data Conference to speak on how Inmar uses HP Security Voltage for reversible encryption of protected healthcare data, but he is also using the opportunity to discuss real use cases with existing Vertica customers, as Inmar is reviewing Vertica as a tool to load healthcare data.

Weeding through the marketing hype

Goode’s goal is for Inmar to stream data from digital coupon redemption in real time: “We know that paper coupons will eventually fade away and that digital is the future in that space. We want to do real-time streaming.” Working toward that goal, he is considering Spark, Storm, and Kafka for Inmar’s digital platform, but finds that the research process can be frustrating: “Kind of the crazy thing is that if I talk to Cloudera then Spark is the thing and Storm is terrible; if I talk to Hortonworks then Storm is the way to go,” says Goode. “We have to weed through the marketing material to find out what really makes the most sense.”

Although he uses open source whenever possible, Goode has no problem paying vendors, just as long as they are actively engaged with Inmar: “I want to make sure that whatever vendor I choose, if they are going to maintain some of it as closed-source, is a partner, and is going to work closely with me, and is going to provide more value than just, ‘Here’s some code that’s closed-source that you can’t use unless you pay me.’”

Goode is always watching the bottomline and decided against doing Hadoop in the Cloud for Inmar due to the cost: “I ran the numbers and it was costing me about $2,000 a month on-prem, and to do the equivalent cluster out in Azure it was about $11,000 a month and AWS was about $9,000 a month. When you get right down to it, I would prefer to spend that difference in money on good engineers so we can build good stuff.“

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the HP Big Data Conference 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE