At the Spark Summit East 2016 event, all sorts of enterprises and solutions providers were represented thanks to the wide adoption of Spark as an engine for various tech services.

Among the attendees taking part in the event was Ken Tsai, VP of cloud platform and data management at SAP SE, who took time to speak with Jeff Frick and George Gilbert, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, about SAP’s goals and recent developments.

‘More than just accelerating analytics’

Spark serves as the “execution engine” for SAP HANA Vora, a Big-Data-focused offshoot of SAP’s HANA utility, which enables data collation on a massive scale. These are just a pair of SAP’s many Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tools, but Tsai praised the “maturation and adoption” of Spark, as seen at the Summit East event this year.

Addressing functionality desires from both SAP and the enterprises that make use of their tools, Tsai touched on utilities pertaining to data caching, simplification of data redundancy, materialized aggregates, information-parsing systems, and latency reduction, all of which are being further developed for efficiency and integration in SAP’s toolsets.

Tsai also outlined the interdependency between interactions and aggregation, as well as that of the computing and enterprise worlds in a modern perspective. “The reality of what the customer is facing today is that Big Data is everywhere; it’s not one centralized thing,” he said. “With the advance of IoT … where everything that a company can offer can be a service … Big Data is literally around everywhere.”

‘The age of real-time computing’

“I think one of the holy grails in this business … is simulations, asking what-ifs,” said Tsai, explaining how SAP is finding ways to integrate the many forms of data collection in ways that enrich the entire decision-making process and embed data into a business’ core processes.

By finding ways to “leverage the power of in-memory computing,” SAP is developing HANA Vora’s capabilities to make predictions from gathered data, which can then be deployed in innumerable ways.

Airline telemetry was one use-case example provided by Tsai, with early data from plane usage going to the Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) division to streamline those processes. Another example was more revenue-focused, aiming to answer the question of: “Based on real-time data, can I actually have multiple forecasts?”

The Golden Age of data

Commenting on the current state of affairs and tech’s penetration to countless aspects of day-to-day life, Tsai remarked, “Data is the currency of everything. This is definitely an exciting time, not just for SAP.”

Though he noted that SAP was still “in the process of defining a lot of these different use-cases,” Tsai was confident in looking forward to improvements of the company’s systems and the future of data.

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Spark Summit East 2016. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting with theCUBE hosts.

Photo by SiliconANGLE