Connectivity is the theme of this interview, as Sumit Sarkar, chief data evangelist at Progress Software Corp., works to enable connectivity in any direction, making it open in what he calls a “democratization of data.”

Part of this digital transformation is giving the data maximum flexibility, and Apache Spark achieves that by helping users access the data wherever they are. This allows members of the same team to be able to sift through and share data with each other, optimizing their results.

Sarkar spoke to John Walls and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during Spark Summit 2016 in San Francisco.

So how do companies work with these data lakes that are formed? “It’s different for each organization,” Sarkar noted. Some organizations just dump all of the data in as they obtain in and then analyze all of it after the fact. Others figure out what exactly they want to know before collecting data, filtering it as they go. Companies have to decide what method works best for them and which method has the most benefits for their team as a whole.

Day one support

In order to help companies make the shift more easily, Sarkar has initiated what he terms Day One Support. This means that if any company shifting to a newer version has an issue, they will treat it as a bug going forward.

“We’ll support you no matter what version of the supported distribution or interface you’re using,” he said. That way if there is any issue, they can fix it right away and introduce solutions that make sense from a data connectivity perspective. Adopting those changes in the next release can then make for an even stronger system.

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