As day one of BigDataNYC 2015 came to a close, there was a sense of excitement from John Furrier, Dave Vellante and George Gilbert, hosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team. The day saw big announcements, big players in the industry stopping by to provide industry insight and startups launching.

Furrier, Vellante and Gilbert engaged in a roundtable discussion to decipher the day’s events and the direction of Big Data.

The landscape

Vellante’s take on the business landscape was that it is “crowded, over funded, profitless but with great potential.” He asserted that the practitioners are going to make the most money and that investors looking for the next big thing within the vendor ecosystem could be disappointed.

In response, Furrier said that the industry touted Cloudera, Inc. as the big break out, but he does not see it getting there. He said, “Cloudera is not going to be a sustainable multibillion company unless they go all in on analytics.”

Software pricing slow down

Gilbert said, “There is a slow motion collapse in infrastructure software pricing.” One of the causes is open source. He emphasized that it is hard for companies to sell infrastructure in this environment unless there is a serious value add.

However, as Vellante points out, big companies like IBM are growing their analytics business significantly. He stated, “IBM has seen more growth in one year, with $18 billion in total business, than most of the smaller players combined within the ecosystem.”

A new commodity

According to Furrier, “Hadoop is being commoditized and regulated to be invisible with spark under the hood.” He sees Hadoop as a storage layer and that Spark is driving the conversation. “The big play for someone to be a billion-dollar unicorn is to take Spark and move to the finish line.” Furrier thinks that Cloudera needs to be the unicorn.

Industry profitability

The group expounded on the profitability of the industry, but in the end, the consensus was that customers have to invest in the ability to improve over time. As Furrier said, “At some point the rocket science that goes into building these systems will be an advantage to companies.”

Watch the full segment below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of BigDataNYC 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE