It’s an old business adage that data is power. In the new world of digital business, sharing data is power. Information that is useless to one company might be critical to another; establishing a relationship with that other company is a powerful way to draw value from otherwise dead data. Likewise, not every company has all the tools and experience to make use of the data they collect. For them, a partnership can also help maximize the returns on their Big Data strategy.

To talk about this new world of data sharing, John Furrier of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, sat down with Tom Reilly and Ryan Peterson at the BigDataNYC 2015 conference. Reilly is the CEO of Cloudera, Inc., while Peterson is the chief solutions strategist at EMC.

From technical exercise to the real world

Big Data, and the technologies that support it, has been something of an evolving experiment. The concept is just a few years old, and yet in that time it has begun to redefine business. Only a few years ago, developers were talking about technical projects, Reilly said, but now they’re concerned with real-world use cases and finding immediate value.

This has spawned a creative revolution around working with data. The new technologies allow companies to do things that would have been impossible before, such as engaging with a customer in real time, at the point of interaction. This has opened up new use cases and business opportunities.

A future perspective

The phrase “living in the future, operating in the present” describes the nature of Big Data companies like EMC and Cloudera. At the crest of this wave of development, these companies play a vital role in raising the next generation of Big Data technology and businesses, Peterson said.

Customers are always asking for the next generation of technology, but it’s the building, testing, documenting and training that’s being done right now in the present that will allow those customers to take advantage of future technologies. It is the experience of the present, shared across an ecosystem of partners, that will refine and define the future of Big Data.

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE