Oracle has a laser focus on delivering Big Data to enterprise customers of varying sizes. The company is building a Big Data platform that will provide ease of operation, manage security and provide value right away.

Neil Mendelson, VP of Big Data and advanced analytics for Oracle, sat down with John Furrier and George Gilbert, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during Oracle OpenWorld 2015 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, to discuss Oracle’s answer to Big Data for the enterprise and the company’s answer to the competition.

The ever-changing world of data

“The definition of data management has expanded beyond the database to include things like Hadoop and NoSQL, and we are embracing those things,” said Mendelson. He continued to explain how the  company is simultaneously building a Big Data platform so customers can digest data, visualize it and run algorithms on it in order to get value from it.

Mendelson said the key to providing ease of operation, on cloud and on premise, with Hadoop and other source platforms is to merge them together, putting security on top, managing building on top and placing products on top to provide real value to the customer.

The development process

As Oracle sees third-party companies build applications on Hadoop and a combination of open-source platforms in areas such as customer 360-degree views and cybersecurity, it knows that from an app perspective things are starting to move.

Mendelson said that developers are free to operate at the lowest level on open platforms, but Oracle is trying to up-level that by offering data virtualization layers to extract themselves from the direct technologies to getting much faster queries over the data.

Competition and zombies

When asked about the competition, Mendelson pointed out, “AWS has a great infrastructure from hardware point of view, but beyond that they are not doing a lot.” He added that Azure and AWS do not provide the visualization into the data that Oracle can. If customers want to make Big Data discoveries on those platforms, they will have to write code. Whereas, Oracle provides search and a faceted navigation approach that save business people time.

Mendelson contends that Oracle has a commanding lead in the data warehousing space over Amazon’s Aurora. He discussed the vendors he calls “zombies” and said that IBM does a good job of assembling and picking up customers from the zombies. He added that Oracle is also doing well in picking up customers from zombies, but he feels that migrating old data marts to the cloud is innovation.

What lies ahead?

In terms of the future of data warehousing, Mendelson considers the data warehouse, along with the data lake and NoSQL as essential parts of the Big Data platform. He maintained, “These are three environments collapsing to provide a spectrum of capabilities.”

Mendelson explained that today needs are driving customers to real time. The enterprise needs to get customer transaction or search information by the minute. He sees systems merging to provide this information, enabling the customer to act in real time.

The Oracle culture

The interview also covered Oracle’s position with IoT and Larry Ellison’s (Oracle’s executive chairman and chief technology officer) involvement in the company strategy and tactics. On the competition, Mendelson said, “There’s nothing new with companies going after Oracle. The more competitive the marketplace is the more it invigorates the culture at Oracle.”

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE