This space is a cooperative battleground between the commercial open source world of Hadoop and the enterprise vendors such as EMCGreenplum, Teradata Aster, HP Vertica, IBM Neteeza, and many others.
All of these vendors know that they will succeed more if they can make their products less complex and more agile, and some like EMCGreenplum through its Chorus product are attacking the issue head on.
Steven Hillion is vice president of analytics at EMCGreenplum, and has led engineering at firms such as Siebel, KANA and QRS. His educational background includes a major in number theory at the University of California, Berkeley, which got him thinking about moving software engineering closer toward mathematical applications.