As open-source continues to expand, it’s interesting to see how proprietary companies capitalize on it to offer products and services to customers. These vendors are the bottled water of IT. Yeah, customers could trek through the woods to the spring, but it’s so much simpler to pay for the product packaged by someone else.

“We make a clear distinction between being open and being open-source,” said Tony Kavanagh, CMO of Actian Corp. He told John Furrier (@furrier) and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during Hadoop Summit about Actian’s Big Data service, Actian Analytics Platform — specifically its VectorH, which makes use of Hadoop open-source software.

“We are proprietary technology,” he said, adding that customers know Hadoop’s value and appreciate having it sliced, diced and packaged by people who know what they’re doing.

How do you keep your data lake from turning into a data swamp?

As companies seek to acquire more and more data from diverse sources, the sentiment seems to be that the more data you have, the more insights and value you can create from it. Well, it isn’t quite so simple. When, where and how you use the data you have has a big impact on whether it will be worth your while amassing it. Without the right tools to extract it, you could wind up with a data swamp on your hands.

Kavanagh cited an expert who said that by 2018, 90 percent of data lakes will be useless “because they have just become this murky amalgamation of data.” While that idea isn’t uncontested, it’s clear to most that extracting and using data while it’s “hot” is an area of concern.

Kavangh said that VectorH sits in the Hadoop ecosystem and allows for super fast retrieval of data using SQL. He said this is key because it isn’t just about quantity or even quality of data, but also “how do you get it out, and how do you get it out at speed?”

Watch the complete interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Hadoop Summit US.

Photo by SiliconANGLE