Bill Schmarzo, chief technology officer at EMC, recently sat down with Jeff Frick at EMC World 2014. Known as the Dean of Big Data, Schmarzo works with businesses to try and take advantage of the massive amounts of data hidden within their organizations.

Most of the time these companies and organizations have no idea how much detail they have, according to Schmarzo. Such collections of information are known as Big Data because of its large and complex nature, making it hard to process using standard database management tools. Usually, Big Data requires specialized programs to help make sense of it all.

Schmarzo’s favorite project at the moment is one called Netflix for Teachers, where a school district in Texas is building a program that allows teachers to evaluate which students need the most help, allowing them to focus their efforts in those areas. The program delivers the recommendations on which lessons students who need help should go through. This, in turn, helps reduce the teacher’s administrative workload, allowing them to focus more on teaching. In the same way that such a program can help teachers identify problem areas, so can school principals identify teachers who need help, or are even teaching the wrong class.

The key, according to Schmarzo, lies in developing a data warehouse system that is easily updated with the data customer’s needs. This can help avoid the pitfall of the data no longer being valid because the wait to upload it took so long. As of now, though, IT groups have to continue doing the best they can with the technology they have.

When asked what companies will be talking about a year from now, Schmarzo stated, “We’re going to see company after company who have already jumped into the lake. The data lake is going to be a great enabler. It’s going through its overhyped status right now, but a year from now we’re going to see a lot of different organizations that have implemented the data lake and are running not only their analytics on top of that but, in some cases, have actually moved some of their data warehouse capabilities of that as well.”

When asked about how much it costs to store Big Data, Schmarzo responded, “What I think is the most interesting thing about Big Data is the economics of Big Data. The cost to store, manage, and analyze data is 20 to 50 times cheaper today than it was even two years ago.” In essence, data doesn’t become a cost companies try to avoid, but instead an asset that they can hoard and take advantage of when the time is right.