The big story in Big Data is no longer about the technology, it’s about the problems that the technology needs to solve.

John Furrier (@furrier) sat down with his cohost analysts Peter Burris (@plburris) and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41) of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to take some time to review the information of the day at BigDataSV 2016, where theCUBE is celebrating #BigDataWeek, including news and events from the #StrataHadoop conference.

New worries

Furrier asked Burris about the key trends in the market, and Burris replied, “One of the key transformations we are witnessing in the Big Data Universe is a not-so-subtle shift from talking about the technology to talking about the problems. And I think that most of the folks who have been at the vanguard cutting their teeth, suffering the failures of these initial forays into Big Data, are now helping to articulate what that next class of use-case is going to be. As we think about applying the technology to the business problems, they are going to drive business change and improve customer engagement.”

Burris stated that this is the crucial junction point in any marketplace, especially the technology marketplace, when people pivot from worrying about the technology to worrying about the problems technology is trying to solve. He sees the leaders beginning to identify patterns that are enabling the industry to go after new classes of business problems.

The perfect storm

As Furrier sees it, the maturation of technology combined with the cloud and applications are creating the perfect storm. Burris spoke to the evolution of Hadoop and explained that Hadoop is going into the teenage years. He said that with teenagers, you have to think about how to allow them to go their own way but bring in control and discipline so they don’t hurt themselves. And so it goes with businesses using technology.

Gilbert spoke to another part of the transformation, engagement data. “We have a new class of apps that relate increasingly to external facing things,” he said. “So when we have a customer-facing application taking them through a multichannel engagement model, we don’t know how to codify how that should work. So we rely on data to tell us, not a definitive answer, but to anticipate what’s likely to happen and influence them.” According to Gilbert, the data accumulates and guides company engagements.

Link to path of digital value

“As the tools evolve, they have the intelligence to run these pipelines,” said Gilbert. Furrier and Burris agreed that the tools improve and enable the focus to be on the next problem that will add business value.

“Every single advancement in the tech industry has infrastructure or tools, but it was the developer community that grabbed it and ran with it to create new levels of value,” according to Burris. “So I think one of the interesting issues over the next few years are how developers are going to respond. Over the next few years, the crucial things will be the role developers play in creating new methods, new approaches and new tooling so we can get more people unlocking value.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of BigDataSV 2016. And make sure to weigh in during theCUBE’s live coverage at the event by joining in on CrowdChat.

Photo by SiliconANGLE