Anyone working on a software (or hardware) solution to help data trek to the edge and back in Internet of Things applications may be wasting their effort, said Scott Gnau (pictured), chief technical officer of Hortonworks Inc., during BigData SV 2017 in San Jose, CA.

“That is impossible in this new world order,” Gnau told John Furrier (@furrier) and Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio. (*Disclosure below.)

He said that the vast majority of businesses are now adopting hybrid environments; they can simply not afford to jet data around sprawled-out systems.

“It will be very important to be able to have applications that are deployable across a grid and have applications move to the data instead of data moving to the application,” Gnau explained.

IoT target practice in hybrid world

Complicating this, of course, are the live streams of data coming in from IoT devices at the edge.

“A lot of data in the future — IoT data, machine data — is going to be created and live its entire life cycle in the cloud,” Gnau said. Thus, analytics and applications will have to be agile enough to meet the data on its own shifting turf.

This IoT agility is the new scale, and those who can get a handle on it will have a market advantage.

“How do I have portable applications and portable applications that move further and further out to the edge is going to be the differentiation,” he said.

A platform open enough to straddle the sprawl but give a common look and feel to management is crucial, and Gnau said that Hortonworks is such a platform.

Despite their handshake with Microsoft Azure last summer, Hortonworks has been relatively quiet on its cloud strategy. Gnau said to stay tuned for relevant announcements at its DataWorks Summit in April.

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