A few years ago, Dave Vellante, co-host of theCUBE, made the suggestion that “data lakes” — the vast amount of data that companies store while not currently in use — are turning into “data swamps” because the technology used to manage them is not being leveraged properly.

And according to Tendü Yogurtçu, general manager of big data at Syncsort Inc., that is exactly what is happening.

Yogurtçu spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and George Gilbert (@ggilbert), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, at the BigData SV 2017 conference in San Jose, CA. (*Disclosure below.)

She discussed the importance and challenges of creating an environment where data storage, retrieval and use is independent of the location of the data, as well as Syncsort’s acquisition of other companies that complement its own data handling capabilities.

With the advent of the cloud and big data, many larger companies are finding that they must re-examine their data management solutions because it is becoming mission-critical for data management methods to operate seamlessly and effectively, regardless of whether the data is stored on legacy equipment or in the cloud, Yogurtçu explained.

Access to all data is critical to quality

One of Syncsort’s recent acquisitions was a company called Trillium Software Inc., which had been one of the industry leaders in enterprise data quality. Syncsort saw Trillium’s data quality capabilities as complementary to its own ability to enable customers to access enterprise data, not just the data from newer sources. The added data cleansing, matching and validation capabilities have given customers greater control over all their data, resulting in improved data quality, Yogurtçu explained.

“It is very complementary to our data integration and data management portfolios because we are giving our customers access to all of their enterprise data, not just the new emerging sources,” she said. “We’re also leveraging reference data, mainframe legacy systems and the legacy enterprise data warehouse.”

Adapting to change

Everyone knows how rapidly technology advances, and in the world of data storage and management, one of the most important issues driving success is how fast you can adapt to these changes and still integrate the data from almost any source, according to Yogurtçu.

Data integration is becoming more and more critical in a way that not only gives customers access to their data, but also in other areas, such as security and quality, and without time consuming re-writes of application code for the different environments. The closer data management to a “one-button” approach, the better, she said.

“In terms of the data integration, data integration has been always been very critical to any organization. It is becoming even more critical now that the data is shifting gravity and the amount of data organizations have,” said Yogurtçu. “You can deploy the same exact application without any recompilation without any changes on your standalone Windows laptop or in Hadoop, MapReduce or Spark in the cloud. So this design once and deploy anywhere is becoming more and more critical with data originating in many different places, and cloud is definitely one of them.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of BigData SV 2017. (*Disclosure: Some segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE are sponsored. Sponsors have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE