How many times have you heard a VP or CTO of a technology company say they’re “business solutions” providers not product pushers? If that’s true, why are there so many different answers to the same question? If company X really has the best technology for a job, why does company Y insist that they do as well?

Rakesh Kant, head of Enterprise Data Management and Analytics Technology at U.S. Bank, doesn’t necessarily accuse vendors of dishonesty, but he does think the lack of standards is troubling. He told John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during Hadoop Summit 2016 that he’s hoping this situation will change in the near future.

Kant said in the data realm, for example, Apache Hadoop, Spark and Storm all seem capable of the same tasks — so which do you choose?

“Maybe all businesses need to come together and create a business consortium that everybody follows; maybe all analysts should get together and say, ‘Here’s what the standards should be,'” Kant said. “There’s a need for standards that can help businesses, but I don’t know where to look for it.”

Last mile’s the hardest mile

Kant said for the time being, his company trusts the big enterprise players like IBM to figure it out for them and abstract away the complexity. What he is missing most, he said, is a means to get through the “last mile of value delivery” quickly.

He said a template with a simple A/B test to gauge value before scaling out would be a godsend, but he hasn’t found one.

Silver lining

Kant said the constant experimentation in technology creates a “confusing landscape for users like us who have to deliver value at the end of the day, and we don’t want to spend more time kind of choosing between things — we want to deploy them.”

Burris concluded on an optimistic note, saying that the trend is toward an “application first” model in IT. The idea is that the application blueprint will actually suggest the tools needed so you don’t spend more time solving vendor problems than business problems.

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE