“The decade and maybe even the century is defined by the data and analytics. It’s why we call it the insight economy. Spark is the analytics operating system for that to just unlock that value,” Beth Smith, general manager of Analytics Platform at IBM, told theCUBE’s John Furrier and George Gilbert at IBM Spark Summit 2015.

Smith addressed the newly announced Spark program, stating that it “deals with some challenges in Hadoop and Openstack” and the goal is “universal access to data and get in intelligence into application.”

Accessing ‘universal data’

According to Smith, “Spark is a service available in beta on Bluemix so that developers can now pull that into applications that they are using.” But Smith foretold that Spark will be showing up in a number of places. One the advantages of Spark is having access to “universal data,” not just that from Hadoop, “access to data that it not related to batch.”

Smith hopes the future of the program will be developed through “technology, skill and the overall community.” IBM is “donating game-changing system technologies ML that will enable developers to build applications,” Smith reported.

In addition, IBM has “committed to train and help educate a million data scientists, data engineers around the world on Spark and surrounding concepts.” Smith told theCUBE that IBM has devoted “3,500 researchers and developers to bring the value of Spark into our analtyics platform, into our commerce platform, and to be leveraged as a part of our business solutions that we take to market.”

IBM committed to community and open source

Following the success of Apache (which IBM began sponsoring in 1999), IBM is “very much committed to community,” and “open source is a part of that.” Smith reminded theCUBE that “from the mid-to-late-90s, [IBM] was one of the first companies to really embrace what open source could be.” As advocates of open source, Smith emphasized the potential benefits for businesses using programs such as Apache.

When asked about the Analytics platform within the larger IT community, Smith replied, “The IT community is missioned, challenged to help to provide the systems and technologies to let business unlock value from their data. The IT community needs to be able to support developers and the applications that developers need to create.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Spark 2015.