The end game so many customers seek from the smorgasbord of technologies they’re buying lately is often big data analytics. Deriving intelligent insights from data requires a sometimes cumbersome amount of advanced infrastructure and software. A massively parallel processing (or MPP) data platform can provide some of the needed horsepower.

“Users are looking for an easier experience and easier access to data in general,” said Jacque Istok (pictured), head of data at Pivotal Software Inc.

Istok spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during theCUBE NYC event in New York. They discussed Pivotal’s work in open-source multicloud for easier data analytics. (* Disclosure below.)

Greenplum’s friends in open source and cloud

Over the past few years, Pivotal has poured tons of sweat and toil into analytics within its ecosystem. Its gained much from open sourcing all of the software it shepherds, including the Greenplum multicloud data platform built for data analytics, according to Istok. Pivotal Greenplum is the world’s first fully-featured, multicloud MPP data platform based on the open-source Greenplum Database. It forked off the PostgreSQL (or simply Postgres) open-source database (which some say is the most advanced open-source database in existence).

“A lot of time, we’ll refer to our MPP platform as a massively parallel Postgres platform, because that’s kind of what it is,” Istok said. Pivotal continues to improve Greenplum as new versions of Postgres come out. “That’s actually enabling us to more easily democratize data to kind of anybody,” he said.

One main trick to making data analytics gel is greater connectivity and interoperability among open-source technologies, Istok pointed out. Greenplum connects and interacts with Apache Spark analytics engine, Apache Kafka streaming platform, and others.

Greenplum can run in all the major public clouds also, which enables flexible experimentation with analytics.

“I think what the cloud has enabled us to do is put some very innovative features onto a very easy to use platform while still maintaining that core feature that customers are wanting, which is: I don’t really want to have to know how to install it; I don’t want to have to know how to run it; I just want to push a button and have it instantiated, and then I want to use it,” Istok concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of theCUBE NYC event. (* Disclosure: Pivotal Software Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Pivotal nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE