Instead of hobbling together open-source projects, why don’t failing enterprise big data teams just buy a proprietary product guaranteed to deliver the results they seek?

“In the big data space, it’s hard to avoid going down the open-source path,” said David Hsieh (pictured), chief marketing officer of Qubole Inc., a cloud-native big data platform.

Open-source projects have obvious advantages over prefab products from traditional vendors, Hsieh said during an interview at DataWorks Summit in San Jose, California.

The talented developers in open-source turn out cutting-edge, innovative software at a rapid cadence, and these tools are flexible and configurable with each other, he told Lisa Martin (@Luccazara) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

The large array of choices and the pace of change, however, are both a blessing and a curse to enterprises trying to lock down an effective big data strategy for the long haul, according to Hsieh.

“Unlike commercial software, there’s sort of no one-throat-to-choke. And there’s nobody who is going to guarantee the interoperability and the success of the piece of software that you’re tying to deploy,” he said.

Bid data cheat sheet

For enterprises spoilt for choice, it is useful to keep some metrics at hand to gauge whether the software they are using is pulling its weight and helping them become truly data-driven, Hsieh explained.

“I think time-to-value is one,” he said, adding that another is the number of people in the organization who are actually able to make decisions with data.

“If you can say 100 percent of my company has access to the data and analytics that they need to help their function run better, whatever it is, that’s a pretty awesome accomplishment,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of DataWorks Summit. (* Disclosure: Hortonworks Inc. sponsored this DataWorks Summit segment on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Hortonworks nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE