Finding ways of innovating within an industry is always a challenge, even when technological advances and creative startups are practically bursting forth. To some established tech analysts and advisors, simply identifying which aspects of the business are being underserved can be a major step toward extending into fuller changes.

Robert Youngjohns, EVP and GM of Software at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE), sat down to speak with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the HPE Big Data Conference about the big changes ahead of the tech world, along with opening up entrenched business models and embracing internal code-sharing at HPE.

Finding the disruption points

Looking at how people’s approaches to data have been changing in recent history, Youngjohns picked out one aspect that was having an enormous influence on other sides of the developing situation. People are starting with the data now, he noted. And with that move away from waiting for applications to deliver it after various mid-points, “I think that’s a huge change and is accelerating right now,” he said.

Asked whether the disruption seen in the taxi industry with Uber Technologies, Inc. and similar startups was a lone instance, Youngjohns asserted that there was similar potential across the range of industries. “I don’t think [the taxi industry] is the exception at all,” he said, adding that almost every other industry has something that can be disrupted in the traditional business model.

And in approaching those disruptive doorways, apps and machine learning will be playing a large part, Youngjohns said. “I think machines can unleash human intelligence in a way that’s never been possible before,” he explained. “If you can have filters and pre-processing, essentially, it can allow you to perform better.”

Keeping ahead of problems

But as always, the delay between recognizing possibilities and bringing them to achievement is a sticking point. “The technology tends to jump ahead,” Youngjohns noted. “Just when you think you’ve got a problem solved, it’s for a five-year-old problem, not today’s problem.”

So for his division at HPE, looking to empower others in addition to pursuing their own developments is a way to reduce those lags. “We want to be the toolset that anyone who wants to expose the value in data can use. … What I want to be is the arms provider, the tool provider, to the intelligence industry. … It’s got to start with getting developer traction,” he said.

Inside HPE

And to get to that ubiquitous level, Youngjohns shared that “part of what we’re doing is using the analytics platform to turbocharge some of our more traditional applications.”

He also gave some forecasts for how the technology will shift, including an assessment that “some [machine learning] APIs are going to become very consumer-oriented, and at that point, their ability to compete is going to become limited.”

Youngjohns revealed that’s he’s pushing an initiative within HPE to try and encourage code-sharing between various HPE nodes, including an intra-company equivalent of GitHub. The mentality he’s trying to build with this approach was summed up as: “Every project we do is an open-source project, internally.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the HPE Big Data Conference.

Photo by SiliconANGLE