Back in September 2016, SAP SE scooped up a company called Altiscale Inc. to add high-performance and scalability to its Big Data-as-a-Service solution. Altiscale brought a highly optimized cloud infrastructure that offers Hadoop as a Service and Spark. These services complement the SAP Cloud Platform, offering a more dynamic enterprise solution that allows companies to focus on operating the business, according to Raymie Stata (pictured), senior vice president of big data services at SAP.

“Once people understood just how much complexity that takes out of their lives and how that enables them to truly focus on using these technologies to get business value rather than operating them, there’s that aha moment in the sales cycle where people say, ‘Yeah, that’s what I want. I want Hadoop as a Service,'” said Stata.

Stata, who was previously the chief executive officer at Altiscale joined George Gilbert (@ggilbert41), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during the BigData SV event in San Jose, CA, to discuss his new role at SAP and what synergies the two companies are combining. (*Disclosure below.)

Making Hadoop enterprise-friendly

Hadoop is stirring up a significant amount of interest with European companies, as well as U.S. companies, with a presence in the area. SAP is now opening a datacenter in Europe to fill the demand. Strata reported that with new and larger customers that are more demanding, his team is invigorated by the new challenges.

At the core of the platform, the BDaaS includes Hadoop, Hive and Spark as a service. The company runs Hadoop HDFS and Yarn from Hadoop, and integrates Spark and Hive as a service.

“That has been our value proposition from the beginning, and even coming into SAP, that’s not changing one bit,” Stata said.

Opportunities the big data services team sees in its future include Internet of Things, especially in the manufacturing and healthcare industry that will likely focus on outcome-based models.

The SAP portfolio now presents businesses with transformation and innovation to garner those big data insights that wouldn’t have access otherwise. There is a big momentum to help companies drive change, Stata concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of BigData SV 2017. (*Disclosure: Some segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE are sponsored. Sponsors have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE