Tasso Argyros, vice president of marketing and product management for Aster Data talked with Dave Vellante and Jeff Kelly in Hadoop World 2011 about Hadoop, the market and in particular his company’s offering.

The discussion kicked off with a look back on Aster Data’s acquisition by Teradata, and the resources–i.e. deeper integration with the data warehousing giant’s portfolio–Aster has gained access to as a consequence. Further into the interview, Argyros laid out a very interesting outline of his company’s vision and the way they’re going after the big data market.

According to the VP, Aster Data is catering to the customers that are willing to trade-off Hadoop’s ability to scale to handle massive workloads for other things, namely economics and more flexibility. In order to deliver these advantages, the company is providing an integration of the MapReduce programming language and SQL, which solves a number of potential obstacles according to Argyros.

By removing some of the scale that involves a Hadoop deployment Aster promises to make analytics infrastructure more available to companies. That encompasses a reduction in the manpower required to set the whole thing up, as well as in the manpower required to run analytics jobs. Arygros described how Aster’s MapReduce implementation provides a SQL interface via which users who are not necessarily data scientists can also manage the deployment.

He continued by presenting his angle on this space. Undoubtedly, part of the reason  enterprise today are having troubles adopting Hadoop is due to a skill-gap – a lack of data scientists that can be put in charge of  analytics, programming and a number of other tasks. This is expected to change in the future, but Arygros thinks that it’s simply not sustainable on the long run for some companies; and this is where Aster hopes to make gains.

The interview concluded after Vellante asked about the services opportunity Aster have built up with its approach, which Arygros said his company is not pursuing directly but rather via partnerships and Teradata’s existing services portfolio.