Open source Big Data tools are undoubtedly seen as fresher, hotter and more capable than proprietary resources, but companies are growing tired of sifting through open source for the magic combination that will make their data profitable.

Some are starting to miss the stewardship of the “proprietary dinosaur,” yet they can’t afford to miss out on open-source innovation. One company is aiming to turn its awkward position in the middle into a value proposition to solve customer conundrums.

At today’s kickoff of the HPE Big Data Conference in Boston, Massachusetts, Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, spoke about HPE’s prospects. “We hear this complaint all the time about these new Apache projects — it’s an unmanageable mess out there, and companies like Cloudera and Hortonworks are trying to bring some order to it, but HPE is doing so in its own way,” Gillin said.

Gillin said the utility of HPE’s position as steward and integrator of the ecosystem is easy to see and its columnar (as opposed to row) data technology approach is also timely. “So Vertica [HPE’s high-performance SQL analytics engine] really is poised on the brink of being talked about in some very hot areas,” he said.

Report from the trenches

To gauge how HPE’s Big Data offering, Vertica, is fairing where it matters — in the hands of working IT professionals — this conference will focus on real-world use cases. Vellante said that his read from practitioners is: “You will find that they’re pretty passionate — if not passionate — they rely on Vertica.” He said the reason is: “It’s a solution; it’s not an open source sort of mess that’s thrown at you, and at the same time, it’s not a snake swallowing a basketball like your enterprise data warehouse.”

HPE just announced its Vertica 8 release, which will focus on performance, scale and inter-clouding.

Private equity question mark

“HPE’s big liability from the private equity standpoint, frankly, is the hardware business, which is seen as being a business that’s constantly under pressure, declining prices, not very attractive to investors seeking return,” said Gillin.

He went on to say that if HPE can find a viable avenue to sell off its hardware business, then that could make it more attractive to investors. Then we may see Vertica’s star start to rise.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the HPE Big Data Conference.

Photo by SiliconANGLE