Data is like unprocessed ore; a company spends a lot of money to mine it, but then the ore itself just takes up space unless something is done to extract the value. In the data world, Hadoop is becoming a serious tool for extracting that value, enough so that it has become the center of an ecosystem of Hadoop-aware products and services.

To explore the potential of Hadoop, John Furrier (@furrier) and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, visited the Hadoop Summit US 2016 conference in San Jose, California. There, they talked with Scott Gnau, CTO of Hortonworks, Inc., and Dave Mariani, CEO of AtScale, Inc.

Hadoop as a platform enabler

The conversation opened up with the question: Is Hadoop a platform enabler? Mariani answered that when Hadoop started out, it was like an archive. Then, when you bring active query into a Hadoop environment, it opens up to many different workloads. Gnau expanded on this, saying that from his own data-centric perspective, Hadoop and the surrounding ecosystem were becoming the center of gravity for data.

Gnau explained that all this data and growth has to go somewhere, but that’s not the whole of the story.

“Just storing data is fun, but so what? How do you get something back out?” he asked. He continued, stating that being able to connect things without physically moving the data is a really important technology.

Hadoop as a solution

Mariani moved the subject to data itself. He mentioned that people have always focused on the scalability and flexibility of Hadoop, but his concern was using data to answer questions in “the now.” He felt the customer wanted only those answers, the solution, rather than the technological pieces themselves.

These days, a company can get those answers very quickly. Gnau explained how a business can now combine data at rest with information happening in real time. The value is in being able to do something with the data right now instead of poring over historical data when it’s too late. Gnau stressed that connected consumers want it now and they want it to be relevant.

Watch the entire video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Hadoop Summit US.

Photo by SiliconANGLE