As the methods for processing big data continue to improve, pushed on by competition between the many businesses making use of information, some long-standing fundamentals are beginning to lose their certainty, such as the need to wait for that data to be firmly in the databanks before analysis begins, according to Guy Churchward (pictured, right), president and chief executive officer of DataTorrent Inc.

“You can collect all the data from a business and process it before you land it,” he said of the current enterprise landscape.

Churchward and Phu Hoang (pictured, middle), co-founder and chief strategy officer of DataTorrent, met with John Furrier (@furrier), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, at SiliconANGLE’s Palo Alto, CA, studio to discuss DataTorrent’s involvement with telecom businesses, the acceleration of data-handling, the challenges of the near future and more.

While Churchward has, in his own words, “always been data-obsessed,” he clarified that it was never about “big data” for him, but rather for the smaller blocks that made up those storehouses, and understanding how they related to each other. His perspective was well complemented by Hoang, one of the earliest engineers behind Yahoo’s rise.

“[At Yahoo], we learned big data the hard way,” Hoang recalled. “We had to invent our own technology to deal with the kind of data-processing that we had. … The only thing we knew how to do was to have these rafts of cheap servers … and we turned to that as ‘This is what we’ll need to do to solve the data problem.’”

Those efforts led to Apache Hadoop, Yahoo’s open source framework for processing massive amounts of data, which led to other big developments, further educating Hoang about the nature of data all the while.

But now, “Companies are starting to obsess about the do-loop,” Churchward said, referring to the process of collecting, analyzing and organizing data, and then repeating it.

“You want to squeeze that down to sub-second,” he added. “If you can run your analytics at the speed of your business, you’re in good shape. If not, you’ll lose.”

The future of data

Looking to the near future and its coming developments, Hoang felt that the nature of data would find significant changes, not least of which would be in the distribution aspect of its handling.

“I think data will exist everywhere, on the fringe, in the middle, at the center. … The challenge will sort of be [location assignment],” he said.

The idea of how different brands of autonomous cars will handle communicating traffic and hazard data to each other was raised as one example of how speedy transmission and translation of data will soon be an issue of vital importance. But as Hoang noted, persistent high-quality and enterprise-grade data addressing “will be the tough nut to crack.”

Asked to provide advice to telcos at large, Hoang firmly stated that “[The Internet of Things] is going to happen,” adding that “Once you now talk about sensors … then the growth and volume is immense. I think there’s a huge opportunity, as a telco, in terms of the data that they have available and the insight that they could have about what’s going on.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Mobile World Congress 2017 Barcelona.

Photo: SiliconANGLE