theCUBE Live at the BigDataNYC event with Oracle Corp’s Dan McClary

With the evolution of Hadoop, the industry has shifted its attention from the technical details under the hood to ways in which the batch processing platform can help address tangible business problems. The vendor community is now adjusting by assembling technology components into solutions in a shift that Oracle Corp.’s Dan McClary sees as validation of his own firm’s product strategy.

“Everybody wants to position an end-to-end solution, and it makes good sense, because the Big Data ecosystem is complex enough that to be able to span it is very important,” said McClary, who is a senior product manager with the database market’s core analytics business, in a recent interview on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE. “Although from our perspective, end-to-end means something different: Our end-points are a bit further out.”

In addition to bundling its software solutions into suites, Oracle also sells those products with pre-integrated appliances that offer organizations a more convenient alternative to cobbling together their analytics environment from scratch – for a corresponding premium, of course. This approach takes much of the hassle out of deployment and ongoing management, but that simplicity comes at the expense of flexibility, making it difficult for the database maker to stay on top of the rapid pace of change in the Hadoop ecosystem.

According to McClary, Oracle is making an active effort to try and offset that disadvantage by tearing down organizational barriers where needed. “It’s been an interesting challenge to take what is a very well-established workflow for how you ship software in Oracle and meld it with the best pieces of Agile development that spurred a lot of the Hadoop ecosystem. It’s created an interesting mix,” he said.

Oracle quickly found that it couldn’t bend the difficult process of hardware development, according to McClary, nor was it willing to cut corners in the inherently time-consuming testing process of its integrated appliances. But what the database maker did do is rearrange the various pieces of the product management puzzle in such a way that helped greatly streamline the overall process.

Much of the change occurred on the software side of the equation, McClary detailed. To keep pace with the rapid-fire rate at which components in the Hadoop ecosystem are updated, Oracle now starts its quality assurance process at the beta stage of upcoming releases rather than upon launch. That means the value-added functionality it bolts on top now hits the market much faster than the year or two it once took.

The most recent example of that is Oracle Big Data SQL, a solution the vendor first unveiled in July and launched earlier this month that provides a way to query multiple systems – including Hadoop – simultaneously without shuffling terabytes of information around each time. According to McClary, the offering also reflects Oracle’s recognition that no matter how fast it pumps out new products, its portfolio will never be broad enough to address the full and ever-expanding scope of the Big Data challenge.

“If you look at the Hadoop ecosystem, it evolves far more rapidly than any single vendor can ever hope to tame, so what we can do is fill in the things our customers need,” he said. At the same time, however, Oracle is working to cover as much ground as it can with solutions like Big Data SQL.

“We’re looking forward to seeing what applications our customers end up building with some of these new technologies,” McClary said. “If we can help our customers operationalize these things and do them well, it will also drive our own inspiration for new products.