Paul Groom, the chief innovation officer for cloud analytics specialist Kognitio, shared his perspective on the divide between Hadoop and corporate America in a recent chat with SiliconAngle NewsDesk Head Writer Winston Edmondson.

Groom perceives the Hadoop community as a somewhat isolated group “on the sharp end of technology.” He believes the biggest hurdle to Big Data adoption among traditional business users is lack of awareness about the immense potential of analytics, and lists integration as another major challenge that the industry will have to overcome. He explains that enterprises require plug-and-play solutions that can exploit their existing IT investments, namely legacy databases and business intelligence solutions.

Kognitio is tackling these problems head on. Groom elaborates:

“What they’re looking for is trust and reliability. They want something that will perform, deliver and engage on a day-to-day basis and they don’t have to give it a second thought,” he tells Winston.” We can help bridge the gap between the rough and ready world of the Hadoop community and what it can deliver in terms of innovation and new capabilities with the established corporate and enterprise infrastructure.”

Winston asks Groom about barriers that can prevent small to medium businesses (SMBs) from jumping on the analytics bandwagon. The executive replies that the cost of entry is a challenge with “Oracle and Teradata-grade” systems, but since Hadoop and other many other Big Data solutions are open-source, this is no longer a factor. He notes that open solutions also offer users more flexibility than proprietary alternatives.

Groom admits that Hadoop requires specialized talent, but he highlights that the platform is becoming increasingly automated thanks to vendors such as Hortonworks and Cloudera.

Click the video below for the full interview.