Lawrence Schwartz, chief marketing officer at Attunity Ltd., told theCUBE at Hadoop Summit 2015 that even with all the hype, Hadoop is really starting to come into its own.

“The nice thing is over the past few years, we’ve kind of seen the promise,” he said. “You’ve kind of seen some adoption, people trying projects. And what’s been exciting for us, and we work a lot with customers with traditional data stores and on-premise, and then they’re trying to figure out Hadoop, is they’re actually starting to see the return on value.”

Seeing real value with customers

That’s not to say that Hadoop has quite crossed the chasm, however. “It’s still definitely a large gap,” Schwartz said. “The number of deployed systems for Hadoop number in the thousands, versus you’ve got still billions of dollars going into data warehouses, so it’s an active and noisy area, but we’re actually starting to see some real values with customers.”

As customers have gotten more interested in optimizing their overall data management, Attunity has moved from basic data integration to a more holistic approach, asking questions like, “What do you want to do with the life cycle of your data?”

“We’ve been able to architect a platform that cuts across all those different areas, so now you’re having those broader conversations of let us figure out what to move, help you help figure that out, then move it, and then kind of manage that and get it ready for analytics,” Schwartz said.

This requires understanding where data is being used — and where it’s just taking up space.

Eliminating data that’s just taking up space

As Schwartz put it, “We’re going out there and trying to hunt down the zombie data and kind of the vampire data …. You don’t want to use your data warehouse for data that’s just taking up space and taking up a lot of resources at the end of the day.”

This saves companies money — $6 million dollars in the case of one company — that can be put toward business outcomes rather than maintenance.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Hadoop Summit 2015.