Ten years ago when Pentaho Corp. was founded, Big Data was barely a gleam in the tech world’s eye. Chuck Yarbrough, director of Big Data, product marketing of Pentaho, joined Dave Vellante and George Gilbert, cohosts from theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about those early days.

As Big Data loomed on the horizon, several groups of users emerged, Yarbrough said. “The first group, the early adopters, those were the guys that knew early on that they needed to do something,” he explained. “They were sort of … pioneers. They weren’t the ones that invented it, but they saw it … they recognized there was an opportunity, and they made it work.”

But it took some out-of-the box thinking to make things work. “Those guys, they had a will. In fact … on our website, we have some videos where we actually went and interviewed some of these people,” Yarbrough stated. “We call them the mavericks of Big Data. And really they’re not talking about Pentaho. They’re talking about what they did, what they were thinking, like why they went through really a lot of pain, because it wasn’t easy. So pretty interesting insights.”

The challenge of managing Big Data

Where does Pentaho fit into the tech infrastructure now? Yarbrough explained how Big Data analysis is integrated into data management.

“You have a data warehouse. What happens to that data warehouse over time? It gets big. It gets bigger,” he said. “And then it gets even bigger. And that becomes a challenge. It gets unwieldy, hard to manage. It can also become extremely expensive. So what are your options? The design pattern that we have for data warehouse optimization is pretty simple.”

Yarbrough continued: “You have your existing data warehouse infrastructure … but what we’re suggesting is implementing a Big Data platform, something like Hadoop … take the data that you’re not necessarily using as often … push some of that cooler data out … into Hadoop, and then make it available through Hadoop. So what you’re doing is, those size constraints become easier to manage. You can bring that data warehouse down in size.”

Where Pentaho comes in, Yarbrough said, is that it helps manage data so that once it’s been pushed to Hadoop, it can be brought back for analysis when needed.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of PentahoWorld 2015. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting with theCUBE hosts.

Photo by SiliconANGLE