At any tech event of sufficient size, the presentations, panels and interviews covered over the course of the convention require some unpacking to get at the meat of the implications and connections each has with the rest. At BigDataSV 2016 in San Jose, California, where theCUBE is celebrating #BigDataWeek, including news and events from the #StrataHadoop conference, there’s enough material to demand examination on a day-by-day basis.

To that end, John Furrier, Jeff Frick, George Gilbert and Peter Burris, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, met at the end of the event’s first day to go through the interviews and other coverage each one had encountered, and network their respective thoughts and perspectives to piece out what it means for the tech business at large.

Big Data picking up steam

While prospects for Big Data were unclear in terms of adoption and development just three years ago, the pace of integration has picked up considerably, and as a number of company representatives theCUBE spoke to at BigDataSV emphasized, “The cloud is the engine of innovation.”

Frick followed up on this by noting how cloud-only applications are increasingly emerging as viable propositions, then passed off examination of the barriers for that sort of implementation to Burris. “I think that’s one of the biggest challenges … traditionally there’s been a presumed data model,” Burris said, exploring how fragmentary and unorganized dataflow, while offering significant resources, also presents new challenges in finding ways to effectively manage it all.

Speaking to what he was hearing from companies and how to handle that, Burris said, “That common theme is: ‘We have to make this easier … to actually use the tools and integrate them together,’” as well as enabling user accessibility. Gilbert picked up from there with discussion of how several enterprises were finding new ways to handle the broad channeling of data through Hadoop processing, as well as taking the datalake and turning it into more of a “production platform” for repeatable data transformation.

Value and app market changes

Furrier carried the conversation into addressing what the mobilization of successful apps in this new data environment would mean for companies looking to monetize them. Characterizing “the valuation of the data” as “the holy grail of marketing,” and emphasizing the need to identify “practice to business value,” he looked ahead in predicting, “I believe we’ll see an application renaissance … You’re going to see little boutique-like companies … and then you’ll see people who can really provide value and identify the use-case.”

Finding the value of the data, employing multiple sources and using the engine of cloud were key points picked out, and as Furrier said, “If you don’t have value, you don’t have customers, you don’t have revenue.”

Data organization a must

“There’s always been a need to be able to address problems that didn’t lend themselves immediately to a data-model-like structure,” Burris observed, continuing, “We’re talking about having the data be available and asking developers to find ways to make value out of that data, without necessarily having access to that data-model.”

Gilbert agreed, noting, “It’s harder to build apps now, because all we have is a mess of data.”

However, Gilbert anticipated that there would soon be changes: “We probably are going to see the first apps where we have a mini-domain [of specific use-cases] … It’s more like someone, a service-centric mini-app provider, will sell these [apps] that plug into an existing framework.”

The conversation covered a number of other points, such as changes to the online service business model to shift away from reliance on advertising and toward content and value generation, simplification across the board and an increase in services built from the start to work together, in contrast to Apache-built conglomerations and their visible seams.

Furrier provided an apt summation of the situation by describing the vibe as one in which, “We are living in an era of doing something in a new way.”

Watch the full video 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