In San Francisco, CA, the Structure 2015 conference, hosted by Structure, LLC., is allowing its attendees to network with each other and explore ways of organizing data, cloud interfaces, and more.

Dave Duggal, cofounder and managing director of EnterpriseWeb, LLC, sat down with George Gilbert, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about some of the ways he sees data stacks and operations organization evolving, as well as old ways of thinking that may need to be challenged.

Reforming old structures

For Duggal, the adoption and expansion of cloud utilities has been a step toward the future, but he still sees problems with the way companies are choosing to implement their available options.

“It’s the 21st century… and we’re still building stacks,” he said. “We’re building all these stacks, and then we’re wondering why our data’s still siloed. We’re essentially rebuilding our silos in the cloud.”

From his perspective, modes of operation in the tech world could do with some shaking up to avoid being chained to old ways of handling things. Pointing to how switch-board operators eventually had to be jettisoned from communications systems in order to achieve modern connectivity, he acknowledged that for many, IT is an afterthought at best.

“The business doesn’t really love IT,”  he said. “IT is infrastructure, it’s a resource, it’s utility. It should be in the background.”

Bringing things forward

“When we formed the company in 2009 … I was looking at the technology; IT, instead of being a service to me, was becoming a rate-limiter business. I wanted technology to be more flexible from the business down,” Duggal said.

One example he put forth in identifying ways that companies could streamline their processes was the problem of pipeline middleware, physical boxes that support each step, creating indirection, systems complexity, latency and other hang-ups. Taking a more generalized approach from the base up, EnterpriseWeb has been able to go into old systems struggling to modernize and rethink their infrastructure.

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE