"A lot of the enterprises... traditional customers of EMC, these sort of large Fortune 500 companies, really need their deployment of this technology to be enterprise-ready, to meet strict SLAs, to be always available," he says.

Some early adopters of open-technology developed the expertise to go it alone, but "the second wave" of companies, he says, is anxious to get up and running quickly and might not have the internal talent for a do-it-yourself approach.

Enter the data scientist

Big data talent is indeed in great demand these days, and companies are realizing that by running open-source platforms, they'll be the best position to attract the trained people. Open-source technologies, particularly R, are widely used in academia.