When news of Linkedin’s $26 billion sale to Microsoft hit, some in IT and business circles were at first a little stumped. What did this career networking site have that was so valuable to the software behemoth? If they’d done their homework on Big Data, however, they may not have been so surprised.

Discussing the value of LinkedIm’s data was John Furrier (@furrier) and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, wrapping up day one of the Hadoop Summit with guest analyst Abhi Mehta, CEO of Tresata, Inc. “Some would look at Linkedin and say, ‘Hey, that’s a Roladex; That’s a job board,'” Furrier said. He also noted that this sale really drives home the value of data.

Mehta agreed that LinkedIn’s data earned them the bulk of the billions and said we can expect plenty more from where that came from as businesses begin trading more and more in data.

“This era of data powered economic models is going to unleash a wave of business transformations — not just technology transformations,” he said. “The economic value at stake isn’t billions — it’s in the trillions.”

Hadoop’s legacy

Of course, transforming business with data will be a big (and lucrative) job for the company that brings the tools to the table. Furrier, Gilbert and Mehta speculated on who will win the lion’s share, with all agreeing that Spark is looking fitter than Hadoop.

However, Gilbert, said, “The principles that Hadoop stood for” are still relevant. He named “huge amounts of storage where you don’t have to decide up front exactly how you’re going to use it, and the ability to send the compute and the analytics to the storage” as Hadoop legacies that other companies continue to copycat.

Watch the entire video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Hadoop Summit US.

Photo by SiliconANGLE