Doug Cutting, the co-creator of Hadoop, has changed the way that companies think about, and utilize Big Data. The open source project that he started has made its way to the world’s leading enterprises such as Amazon, eBay, Facebook and IBM, not to mention the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.  Cutting is also Chief Architect at Cloudera, an early leader in Hadoop distribution.

Now, plenty’s been written about Hadoop’s technology, especially at last week’s Strata + Haddop World conference. In an interview with SiliconAngle founder John Furrier and Wikibon co-founder Dave Vellante, Cutting talked about the Hadoop latest developments, as well as its future.

First things first, Cutting explained Hadoop’s importance in big data. The Hadoop Distributed File System can handle multiple types of data in large quantities, and companies can take advantage of commodity hardware and software, as well as the availability of bulk storage in an integrated customizable platform.

Open source in particular seemed to offer the option for enterprises, as IT leaders don’t want to be locked-in to a single vendor. Hadoop’s technology enables people to collect and analyze more stuff, but it’s not actually providing the analysis or doing the collection. Hadoop is much like a kernel of a distributed operating system, with companies like Cloudera building a distribution model based that kernel, branching out to services and software around that distribution.

In response to the trend bubbling up around visualization at this point of big data’s story, Cutting says that, as the infrastructure layer continues to mature, vendor will turn their attention to the real value proposition of visualization.  And Cloudera isn’t the only big data vendor focusing on analytics; others have also jumped on the visualization front, a pattern that was quite evident during Strata + Hadoop World this year.

In fact, Cutting has been taken aback by the success of the event, now in its third year.  The Hadoop community anticipated that companies would recognize the importance of big data, and this expectation is certainly coming to fruition.

Watch Cutting’s entire interview below, and see more archived coverage from Strata + Hadoop World on our YouTube playlist.