When it comes to providing data to thousands and thousands of factories, time is of the essence. This is something that Juan Asenjo, principle engineer at Rockwell Automation, knows all too well. The problem lies in providing specialized information — like explaining the interior workings of factory equipment — in a reliable time frame. The solution? Outsource the work to machines.

Crunching this amount of data wouldn’t be possible without Apache Spark, which provides the fundamental building block as the integral computing system for all of Rockwell’s data. “Spark is the ecosystem,” Asenjo explained to John Walls and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, at the Spark Summit event today in San Francisco.

Protecting customer information

A company with a focus in industrial machinery may seem an uncanny player in the Big Data game, but Asenjo said that data is essential to Rockwell’s work.

“Data can be a big liability with factories,” he said. “A single mistake can have you stop production or even hurt people.” Not only does Rockwell ensure safe interactions at its myriad factories, it’s especially careful not to expose sensitive customer information — a daily risk when leveraging data into the cloud.

The importance of connectivity

Rockwell has enlisted the help of InfoObjects, Inc., a consulting company that specializes in Big Data solutions. Sudhir Jangir, InfoObject’s India head and CTO, who also joined in on the interview, explained that his company has helped Rockwell manufacture intelligent controls on factory machine tools and other equipment.

Now, all of this machinery is connected through a standardized pipeline. “There’s a lot you can do now that you have connectivity that you couldn’t do before,” Jangir said.

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Spark Summit 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE