The Cloud has changed many things in the tech business, and nowhere is this more true than the world of analytics. The needs and ways of the Cloud are foreign territory to traditional database services, while the possibilities of the Cloud reveal themselves to most businesses only over time. It’s a strange place. To work in the Cloud, business must change their data architecture to match this new world.

To shed some light on the ways of data in the Cloud, John Walls and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, visited the Apache Spark Maker Community Event in San Francisco. There, they spoke to Adam Kocoloski, CTO of Cloud Data Services at IBM Analytics.   

Building for the Cloud

The conversation opened up with a look at the needs of analytics in the Cloud.

“You have to architect for the Cloud,” Kocoloski said. He explained how when workloads reach a certain scale, it makes sense to optimize the hardware for them. But, a company only gets that scale when they bring lots of people and projects together. We’re seeing a gradual evolution where some of the tenets are being rethought, he said.

Guiding a journey to the Cloud

People are at different stages in their analytics journey, Kocoloski said. Some go from on-premise to the Cloud and want the same things they’ve always gotten. We have offerings that cater to that kind of model. Once people are in the Cloud, they discover the benefits of the Cloud’s elasticity and begin to experiment, he continued.

We’re going to see this convergence, Kocoloski said. We started with the like-for-like, moved to a discovery phase, and then driving workloads to the Cloud.

The discussion turned toward machine learning. Kocoloski explained how the sudden spike in interest for machine learning was driven by a huge amount of data and the power of modern compute. “We can demonstrate the value in machine learning,” he said.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Apache Spark Maker Community 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE