As the BigDataSV 2016 event began in San Jose, California, bringing us news and events from the #StrataHadoop conference, the women of Big Data joined theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team to celebrate #BigDataWeek, by providing insights into the current state of Big Data.

These women are leaders in the companies that are taking Big Data and bringing valuable insights to the enterprise. The interviews cover a wide variety of industry topics and trends from the perspective of women in tech.

Data in motion

Wei Wang, senior director of product marketing at Hortonworks, Inc., stopped by theCUBE to discuss the trend of analyzing data in motion.

“The data we use has actually doubled in the (past) century. With leading industry top analysts expecting the data is going to expand to 44 zettabytes. …We are truly breaking into the field of data in motion. Hortonworks has been known to offer Hadoop distribution, we offer our Hortonworks data platform for managing what we call data at rest — basically, historical insights. Now with new product offerings, we not only offer our data at rest, but we offer data in motion.

“So the data will grow exponentially to 44 zettabytes by the end of the decade, that’s the prediction. The traditional platforms that corporations are familiar with are just not capable to scale up to that power.

“The race is truly on. Right now all the corporations are thinking about what is the next platform they can deploy to get up and running to provide actionable intelligence that allows them to win the next generation of customers, to be able to provide the next generation of services and to be able to empower themselves for new efficiencies.”

Bringing insight to business people

Christina Noren, chief product officer at Interana, Inc., spoke to theCUBE about getting the data into the hands of the people who really need it.

“I think there have been different challenges at different times with classical data. And there’s been a very slow-building realization about all the value that’s in this data, and it spread very slowly through different organizations. So the workloads to answer questions that marketers might have, or the growth people might have, or product managers might have are inherently different workloads … for example, I am a product manager. I am more concerned about a user’s journey through my product … which is a very different analytic workload on the same data than what an IT person is doing or a security person looking at security threats wants to do.

“I tend to push back on people talking about technical or nontechnical; it’s just a pet peeve of mine. I think it’s just missing the point. The people who get the most value out of our system, know their businesses and business processes, and have a mentality where they can say, “OK, this is probably the digital trail that’s been left behind,” but they are not data scientists, they are not developers, they are not coders … they are people who can think in a structured way about their business …”

Born in the cloud

Marcy Campbell, SVP of sales and business development at Qubole, Inc., told theCUBE that there is a shift in Big Data, where the value proposition is about getting data into the customer’s hands.

“I think there’s been a couple of shifts in the market. The first one was when I first joined the company and we were out talking about the value of Big Data and the value of the cloud, and it became really apparent to me that we didn’t really need to talk about either of those because those were trends that were going to happen — and that people were going to move to the cloud and move Big data to the cloud. And I think that Amazon, Microsoft and Google have done a really good job of making the public cloud safe, and enterprises are starting to feel comfortable about putting their data in the cloud.

“So as that shift has happened, people are looking at what’s the value of being able to process structured and unstructured data and to get that data into their customers’ hands. So a company like MediaMath, which was a born in the cloud company, is taking our product and building out product into a product that they are developing for their customers to allow their customers access to their own data. We’re seeing other companies start to transform their environments by allowing and sharing data throughout the organization.”

Preparing mainframe data

Tendü Yoğurtçu, GM of Big Data at Syncsort, Inc., a CUBE Alum featured in last week’s #WomenInTech feature, stopped by theCUBE again yesterday to talk about cleansing mainframe data in a way that brings value to an organization.

“The mainframe data, it’s really how to access this mainframe data in a secure way and how you make that data preparation very easy for the data scientists. Data scientists are still spending close to 80 percent of their time in data preparation, and if you come to think of it when we talk about the computer frameworks like Spark, MapReduce, [Apache] Flink versus the technology stack, these should not be relevant to the data scientist. They should be worried about: How do I create my data pipeline? What are the new insights that I’m trying to get from this data?

“The simplification we bring in that data cleansing and data preparation is, one, we are bringing simple ways to access and integrate all of the enterprise data, not just the legacy mainframe and the relational data sources. And also the emerging data sources with streaming data sources, the messaging framework, the new data sources; we also make this in a cross-platform, secure way. We now make Hadoop and Spark understand data in its original format. You do not have to change the original format, which is very important for highly regulated industries like financial services, banking, and insurance and healthcare because you want to do the data sanitation and data cleansing, yet bring that mainframe data in its original format for audit and compliance reasons.”

Be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of BigDataSV 2016 this week. And make sure to weigh in during theCUBE’s live coverage at the event by joining in on CrowdChat.

Photos by SiliconANGLE