In the tech industry, enterprise business lives under a curse. It’s their fate to work with older legacy systems that support millions, sometimes billions of dollars in revenue, but which aren’t suited to the new data-driven future. These systems need to be upgraded, but they also can’t be taken offline. In enterprise, new technology must work with the old.

To shed some light on the mix of new technology and legacy systems, John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE from the SiliconANGLE Media team, joined Gaurav Dhillon, chairman and CEO of SnapLogic, Inc., at the BigDataSV 2016 event in San Jose, California, where theCUBE is celebrating #BigDataWeek, including news and events from the #StrataHadoop conference.

Held hostage

Companies should not be held hostage to technology choices made before the current people came into the job, Dhillon said. The goal, he continued, is to make the old stuff work better. There are a lot of legacy systems in enterprise, and dealing with them is a fact of life. It’s possible to retrofit them, in the same way an old airplane might be fitted with new avionics. It’s adding new technology to extend the life of legacy systems, he said.

Dhillon then pointed out that one of the major things they do at SnapLogic is help businesses transition from legacy systems to new technologies.  

From infrastructure to provisioning

SnapLogic changes the service of data into a provisioning exercise, according to Dhillon. Companies don’t have to buy big boxes and the people to run them anymore; rather, a business can buy storage and compute as they need. SnapLogic also helps companies by separating the control plane from the data plane, making it easier to manage these systems.

People used to look at tech with a process-centric view. Now, they’re changing to a data-centric view, Dhillon said. This data allows businesses to think about predictions, to build predictive models on a self-service basis. Being able to leverage data to inform decisions and run predictive analysis is a whole new thing, he said. This will bring dramatic changes.

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