Rishi Yadav, CEO of InfoObjects and author of the Spark Cookbook, explained that Spark’s ability to bring latency “to sub-second level” has drawn clients to InfoObject’s doorstep. As a service company, InfoObjects has a unique perspective on what customers expect and hope for from Spark,Yadav told theCUBE’s John Furrier and Jeff Frick.

The mainstream market, Yadav said, is driven by the promise of Spark’s ability to run queries on their massive databases extremely quickly. Some companies are employing Spark “from the very start,” he said. Others have begun to move jobs away from MapReduce and over to Spark. Yadav added, however, that transition from legacy systems in the process of moving “data and use cases from the old systems” to new ones, still constitutes much of InfoObejcts’ business.

InfoObjects’ Focus on Customer Support

While solutions companies perform “great work in taking the technology forward,” said Yadav, they don’t offer the personal touch that smaller services companies do. He added that “they’re not companies that provide actual foot soldiers” who offer support on-site, off-shore, or through a hybrid model.

Yadav explained that many of InfoObjects clients see a lot of “capability in the beginner technologies,” at first, but need “actual people” to help them “navigate through all the complexities” of Spark. Explaining that his company offers a unique value proposition, Yadav said that InfoObjects does “everything a service company does…but we do it with technical expertise.”

At InfoObject, Constant Training to Stay Atop of Tech

The “biggest challenge” that InfoObjects faces, said Yadav, is being able to train enough Spark experts to meet the demand the company faces. With one year of focus “primarily on Spark,” Yadav said that the “traction [InfoObejcts has] been getting is amazing.” Even so, Yadav commented, InfoObject employees participate in frequent training sessions to ensure they’re always on top of the latest and greatest developments in technology. In fact, Yadav mentioned that training programs change on a monthly basis. “Bigger companies,” he said, cannot stay abreast of tech changes “in such a fast fashion.”

Watch the full interview with Rishi Yadav below, and check out the rest of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s wall-to-wall BigDataSV coverage here.