At the recent HPE Big Data conference in Boston, MA, the company unleashed the power of Vertica 8 advanced analytics and Haven OnDemand cloud services platform solutions on stage during the keynote addresses. One keynote speaker, considered a visionary by many in the industry, was Robert Youngjohns, EVP and GM of Software at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE). During the keynote, he shared HPE’s present status and its vision for the future. He even threw down the gauntlet to industry giant IBM and its Watson Analytics platform to prove HPE is one of the most powerful players in enterprise technology.

Youngjohns joined  Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the HPE Big Data Conference to provide some of his insights about where the industry is heading.

This week theCUBE features Robert Youngjohns as our Guest of the Week.

The data evolution accelerates

Vellante led the discussion by talking about Youngjohns’ view of how software is eating the world — and now analytics is eating software. Youngjohns responded by talking about data disruption.

“I think if you look at the evolution … the way we use to divide the applications as we go to study a business process, you know walk around with that clipboard [to see] who’s doing what. We’d then turn that into a process with a nice diagram. We’d then try to automate that process and then we decided what data we need to support it,” he said.

He went on to add: “And I think what’s happening today is the world’s almost turned upside-down. People are starting with the data. They’re using analytics on the data to expose patterns or potential new business processes. Then they are building new business processes on top of that, and they’re transforming and disrupting industries. I think that’s a huge change, and its accelerating right now.”

Demystifying technology

Vellante then commented: “It’s your premise that the data is the starting point and you’re going to move down … and ultimately design processes that fit the market and the data.” Youngjohns responded by talking about his premise that data is the starting point of the design process.

“Yeah, and can completely transform industries. And that’s because you are actually attacking known paradigms,” he said. “Because most other people in other industries worked on that ’80s and ’90s model, and you’re coming in and saying, ‘Maybe that doesn’t work anymore. Maybe the data is showing me there is a different process.’ You know the taxi driver loses to Uber is a great example of that, but that’s happened.”

Fear of machines

During his keynote, Youngjohns spoke about fear of machines. Vellante wanted to know why he was not concerned with machines replacing humans.

“Well I am concerned about it in the long-term, but I think right now if you think forward to the next 10-20 years actually it’s quite the reverse. I think machines can unleash human intelligence in a way that’s never been possible before, which is why I have talked a lot about this concept of ‘augmented human intelligence.’ It’s we as people who don’t have the capability to absorb the vast data sets being thrown at us, the amount of information that is available to us right now,’ he said. “But if you can have filters and preprocessing, essentially it can allow you to make better decisions, it can allow you to do what we do best, which is apply judgement and look at situations and go deep into what root causes are and analysis and so on.”

Haven OnDemand vs. Watson

Gillin asked Youngjohns about his positioning of Haven OnDemand against Watson. Youngjohns explained that he is ready to battle.

“We’ve taken the view that we need to expose it as a web service, make it freely available to any developer. We’ve done that since its origin. We have over 18,000 developers right now, signed up. I’ve said repeatedly, I’m willing to go head-to-head, API-to API with Watson because I think we can beat them in that area,” he explained.

Youngjohns continued: “It has to be easy to use, easy to consume and oriented toward the developer. As people move through … we’ll start to think about what the right business model is, how we get paid for it. We’re beginning to see some breakthroughs in that area too, but it’s got to start with getting developer traction.”

Open source: Advantage or disadvantage?

Gillin commented on how Facebook, Microsoft and Google all open source their machine learning libraries. “Is this a threat?” he asked Youngjohns.

“I think it’s an advantage, but I don’t think it’s specifically about open source. I do think that some APIs are going to become very consumer orientated, and at that point the ability to compete is actually going to be somewhat limited,” he stated.

As an example, Younjohns cited voice technology. “We’ve got some really good voice technology that when I look at the amount of resources that Apple or Microsoft is throwing at the voice problem … I have to take a pause and say that maybe those consumer technologies will eventually migrate into the enterprise world, and if that’s the case, good for them. We’ll use them. We are going to focus on stuff that’s really specific to deep enterprise business problems. Open source in itself doesn’t sort of concern me.”

This interview is packed with interesting topics, such as Youngjohns’ position on privacy and ethics, his predictions for the cloud and single orchestration tooling to deploy workloads, predictive analytics, and his perspective on the software industry in general.

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