Is Hadoop the past and Spark the now? Jim McHugh, VP of marketing at Cisco Systems, Inc., weighed in on the topic as he revealed his thoughts on the Big Data trends of past, present and future. McHugh joined John Furrier and Dave Vellante, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Medis team, during BigDataNYC 2015.

Where does the data go?

McHugh inferred strongly that the application is king. This has created two environments where popular, well-known applications are locked into large mainframes for support. New applications, he noted, are often placed on the cloud because the application needs may not be known. This creates essentially two separate systems or environments for some customers. McHugh stressed that business outcomes are critical to Cisco and its customers so integration is required and provided.

On the edge, such as the Internet of Things, a great deal of data is generated, and it’s necessary to make proactive decisions about whether or not the data should be stored at all. This is driving a movement of analyzing data in real time to make determinations. McHugh explained that Spark gets its edge from how simple it is to use and is an elegant solution to the problems that are common to Hadoop.

The future

Cisco is helping to drive the conversation and partnerships between companies to create an open space and commonality to solve industry problems. As McHugh said, you can’t have unprepared data for analytics and you can’t have analytics without data. The biggest issue to address is determining what data is important and should go to a data center and what’s trash. Then of the stored data, preparation of that data will be hugely important going forward, especially for those in the data analytics space.

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE