SAP’s recent acquisition of Altiscale Inc., a company that offers a cloud-based version of the Hadoop open-source software for storing, processing and analyzing many different data styles, gives SAP one of the best-known providers in the category of Hadoop as a Service. This will be useful for SAP, as competitors, such as IBM and Microsoft, continue to put a higher priority on cloud.

Ken Tsai, VP of Data Management and Cloud Platform at SAP, joined Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Peter Burris (@plburris), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during BigDataNYC 2016, held at the Mercantile Annex in New York, NY. The discussion included news about SAP’s recent acquisition of Altiscale and thoughts around technology adaptions.

Simplifying Hadoop

The conversation began by clarifying exactly what the acquisition of Altiscale means for SAP.

“You saw a lot of different thinking in terms of how to operationalize Hadoop. … For SAP, we saw the need to really simplify Hadoop to the customer. … Cloud is the way to go,” said Tsai.

The promise of running this software in the cloud is that companies do not have to add new servers, storage and networking infrastructure to existing data centers, and they do not need to employ people who know the software; the solution is already baked-in, he said.

Adopting technology

Burris spoke about the process of adopting any technology: “You start with something, this is cool. … You find the limits and build tools [to provide] specialization. … The goal is not to learn the tools, but achieve the outcomes, [the] speed to outcome. As [SAP is] a company with an applications heritage … how do you want to present SAP to the data universe?” he asked.

“With any type of technical knowledge adopt cycle … it’s all value driven … but, ultimately, it’s beyond a set of software. Our point of view is, there are specific gaps that present organizations from adopting Big Data … these are very practical things that SAP has experience bringing together,” explained Tsai.

He went on to add, “As you … deliver up the value of the solution, you lower the adoption to the masses. Even in Strata there is a lot of focus on use cases; not just the technology itself, but also the outcomes. …How bespoke does it have to be? You’ll continue to see SAP making bold moves in this area.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of BigDataNYC 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE