Among the efforts to introduce Hadoop’s functionality and capabilities to new audiences at this year’s Hadoop Summit in Dublin, those who have already adopted it are looking for ways to expand and upgrade their existing data platform options.

Scott Gnau, CTO of Hortonworks, Inc., met with John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about some of the ways in which Hortonworks is refining and widening its Hadoop operability, how it’s bringing customers in to use it and ways of keeping security tight.

Deploying the platform

One of the first topics approached by Gnau was Hortonworks’ focus on building a stable data platform for users to utilize for future upgrades, without the need to overhaul everything. As he laid it out, “In a rapidly-changing market … where there are new tools, new requirements, new applications every day, the key thing we think that makes it sustainable is the fact that there is a central platform that can go through this evolution and agility and remain basically the platform so that applications don’t have to be rewritten and rehosted every time there’s a new shining object.”

Having established this framework, Gnau continued to discuss what it meant for Hortonworks’ end-users: “Customers who are going down this path with us can futureproof the business by making sure they have a sustainable platform, into which new projects, new objects, new applications can be built, and they know because of our open-community model that we’ll support any of those things that come along.”

Connecting the pieces

As Gnau noted, for Hortonworks, “There’s a significant effort that goes into building interoperability and the platform,” but it is also trying to establish baseline pre-readiness by having each of the projects accomplish some of that interoperability on their own. As part of that snap-together future, Gnau felt that “one of the things that you’ll see us working on is ways to package that platform to make the simple on-boarding easier.”

Gnau expects that this will be a draw to customers looking to do more than just improve efficiency of existing practices, but that there will be a wide mark of improvement in that regard. “Customers who are building data lakes, one of the things they want to do is not only get new and emerging data into the lake, but they want to pull in some of the legacy data from their operational systems to get better analytics. … The DMX-h [a tool for initializing Hadoop ETL] is an ‘easy button’ for that.”

Platform security

With big announcements regarding a partnership with Pivotal Software, Inc., along with the ability to deploy Pivotal HAWQ for customers, Gnau felt confident that people could see that Hortonworks was “not building individual pieces, but in fact, we’re building a platform.”

Beyond this, he also addressed national and continental differences in data handling and privacy and security regulations as part of Hortonworks’ focus on security. He recognized that while security threats continue to evolve, the basic philosophy behind security practices remains the same, and though implementation of those practices was improving, companies should plan for the worst: “Plan on it happening, and build in that response.”

To that end, he noted that certain ways of handling internal organization of data storage can do a lot to lessen the impact when security is breached and improve understanding of what was accessed in such a case.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Hadoop Summit 2016 – Dublin. And make sure to join in during theCUBE’s live coverage at the event by joining in on CrowdChat

Photo by SiliconANGLE