If the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, does that mean you should ignore your customers’ current activity and focus on past activity? If you have a vast store of data on your customers, you might wonder if you should focus on historical data sets or the real-time data. It’s a tough question, but there might be an answer in data integration tools.

Ashley Stirrup, CMO of Talend, Inc., said that continuous data integration brings the past and present together to give more accurate insights. He told John Walls and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, “We’re automating that intelligent data flow” to do things like feed recommendation engines past and real-time data on customers.

Power in numbers

Stirrup said the value of increased data sources is only as great as your ability to combine and synthesize them. He said that in fact when customers talk about IoT, “What they often mean is new data sources,” and these sources need to be combined to existing data sets in a holistic way.

“We’re allowing our customers to wire all these things together,” he said. “So you’ve got both the historical information and the new real time, and you’ve got one environment that you’re managing all that on.”

No time like the present

He said that however much stored data you have, real time always adds a crucial element of timeliness to your intelligence on customers. “The more you can do in real time, the more value you’re getting out of your data,” he said, because, “the value of data decays so quickly.”

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE