The large purchasers and money spenders are out and about at this year’s BigDataNYC 2015 event. What does this tell us about the industry trends and the future of Hadoop, Spark, and Big Data?

John Furrier and George Gilbert, co-hosts theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, spoke to Founder and CEO David Richards of WANdisco plc in a compelling segment where he explained his take on the future of Big Data and where he sees the market trending.

From the lab to production

Interestingly, Richards pointed out that the startups and companies in the Big Data space today – many independent Hadoop vendors – are essentially functioning laboratories where the intellectual knowledge is being generated and tested. This is a place where orders are small, “30k” purchases with implementation. Not the scale necessary for the enterprise.

One of the indicators of things getting real, Richards noted, was the order size increasing to “half-million-dollar” implementations.

Getting real

According to Richards, this year’s BigDataNYC 2015 event is for the “whales” — those whales being top vendors in the Big Data space like IBM, Oracle, Google, Microsoft, etc. He suggested that these vendors will come to dominate the industry on the backs of innovative startups that can’t ultimately compete with the scale and production capabilities of the giants. He said, instead, the way to stand out in the Big Data space will be to have a unique and highly specialized piece of intellectual property with which to provide a high value service to the enterprise consumer base.

WANdisco, he noted, has been granted three important patents in the space and has seven pending, an indication that he also leads his company with the future in mind.

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE