

Data is like unprocessed ore; a company spends a lot of money to mine it, but then the ore itself just takes up space unless something is done to extract the value. In the data world, Hadoop is becoming a serious tool for extracting that value, enough so that it has become the center of an ecosystem of Hadoop-aware products and services.
To explore the potential of Hadoop, John Furrier (@furrier) and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, visited the Hadoop Summit US 2016 conference in San Jose, California. There, they talked with Scott Gnau, CTO of Hortonworks, Inc., and Dave Mariani, CEO of AtScale, Inc.
The conversation opened up with the question: Is Hadoop a platform enabler? Mariani answered that when Hadoop started out, it was like an archive. Then, when you bring active query into a Hadoop environment, it opens up to many different workloads. Gnau expanded on this, saying that from his own data-centric perspective, Hadoop and the surrounding ecosystem were becoming the center of gravity for data.
Gnau explained that all this data and growth has to go somewhere, but that’s not the whole of the story.
“Just storing data is fun, but so what? How do you get something back out?” he asked. He continued, stating that being able to connect things without physically moving the data is a really important technology.
Mariani moved the subject to data itself. He mentioned that people have always focused on the scalability and flexibility of Hadoop, but his concern was using data to answer questions in “the now.” He felt the customer wanted only those answers, the solution, rather than the technological pieces themselves.
These days, a company can get those answers very quickly. Gnau explained how a business can now combine data at rest with information happening in real time. The value is in being able to do something with the data right now instead of poring over historical data when it’s too late. Gnau stressed that connected consumers want it now and they want it to be relevant.
Watch the entire video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Hadoop Summit US.
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SiliconANGLE Media is a recognized leader in digital media innovation serving innovative audiences and brands, bringing together cutting-edge technology, influential content, strategic insights and real-time audience engagement. As the parent company of SiliconANGLE, theCUBE Network, theCUBE Research, CUBE365, theCUBE AI and theCUBE SuperStudios — such as those established in Silicon Valley and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) — SiliconANGLE Media operates at the intersection of media, technology, and AI. .
Founded by tech visionaries John Furrier and Dave Vellante, SiliconANGLE Media has built a powerful ecosystem of industry-leading digital media brands, with a reach of 15+ million elite tech professionals. The company’s new, proprietary theCUBE AI Video cloud is breaking ground in audience interaction, leveraging theCUBEai.com neural network to help technology companies make data-driven decisions and stay at the forefront of industry conversations.