Even as predictions of all the wonderful things BigData is going to do for businesses are flurrying heavier daily, a troubling yellow light looms ahead. A recent flattening of consumption of business intelligence — one of Big Data’s main use-cases — has caused some to question whether we’ve hit “peak B.I” (business intelligence).

Ian Andrews, VP of products at Pivotal Software, Inc., explained that the concept implies that everyone who will ever consume B.I. products already has, and now the industry is just shifting customers among vendors.

Andrews spoke to John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the BigDataSV 2016 event in San Jose, California, where theCUBE is celebrating #BigDataWeek, including news and events from the #StrataHadoop conference.

Andrews said that recent events underscore the concerns, such as QlikTech International AB possibly going up for sale and Tableau Software, Inc.‘s market cap halving in a day. He said some even question whether we may be hitting peak platform for data. Happily, in his view, this is not the case. “We’re just at the beginning from a platforms perspective, but the consumption of that data is really about how you deliver that information in context,” he said.

Applications to the rescue

Andrews said that to grow, companies have to extract the complexities for the end user and get good at building convenient applications and “information in context.” “That is the shift that is happening here, and that is the next wave of consumption of these Big Data platforms like Hadoop.”

Using Uber Technologies Inc. as an example, he said the company has many complex data algorithms going on behind the scenes, but the customers have no idea about them — and that’s why they love the service so much.

Andrews said that in the past, the mindset was, “Build it once and then never touch it, because when I touch things, they break.” But now rapid iteration and agility are key to staying relevant. Companies need to take their application, “put it in front of users like you and me, and observe what those users are doing, and use that to drive the next iteration cycle,” he said.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of BigDataSV 2016. And make sure to weigh in during theCUBE’s live coverage of the event by joining in on CrowdChat.

Photo by SiliconANGLE