The open-source world is an endlessly interesting and exciting place for developers. The inventory of technologies is always growing, and bleeding-edge software platforms often debut in open source marketplaces. For these same reasons, however, enterprises can grow weary of open source, a seemingly endless tweaking and tinkering game to customize software for business purposes. Some say a proprietary solution that utilizes open source is preferable for businesses that need to make moves in real life.

Juan Loaiza, senior VP, Systems Technology, at Oracle, explained the situation this way: “There are some people that are hobbyists. There are people who want to build their own log cabin. They want to cut their own trees, kind of build their own planks, and build together their log cabin. That’s kind of how Hadoop started; it was kind of a hobbyist’s model,” he told John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during Oracle OpenWorld. “Now it’s people that want to get stuff done. It’s like, ‘I don’t want to chop trees … just give me a house!'”

Haute coutre vs. ready-to-wear

Loaiza contended that however fascinating open source may be, by itself, it’s not a practical solution for enterprises.

“So that’s where [Oracle’s] Big Data Appliance comes in, because it’s a complete solution. It’s close to the hardware, it’s pre-tuned, pre-optimized, it includes the Cloudera software, it includes all our connectors,” he explained. “And it includes support for the whole thing, because that’s the other part of it. When you put together your own house, who are you going to call when it leaks?”

The multi-tenant database future

Loaiza spoke enthusiastically about the work Oracle is doing in database multi-tenancy. He likened it to what VMware does with virtual machines — only here, it’s virtual databases. So users have a “small number of physical databases, lots of virtual databases — completely saves costs, it’s more agile, opex lower, capex lower — that’s the new world of multi-tenant cloud databases,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Oracle OpenWorld.

(* Disclosure: Oracle and other companies sponsor some OpenWorld segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Oracle nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE