Is it a good time to be a digital-only company or what? Some recent studies from MIT show that some of these assetless companies derive up to 84 percent of their S&P value just from data, according to Brad Tewksbury, senior director of Global Business Development, Exadata and Big Data, at Oracle. It’s enough to inspire serious data envy in legacy companies who are saying, “Hey, we have data too — we just need to figure out how to monetize it.” Silicon Valley startups know if they can provide the answer, they could reap big rewards.

Tewksbury said the race is on to find the formula to turn data into dollars. He told John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during a special On-the-Ground segment at Oracle’s Redwood Shores Headquarters that companies don’t want another open-source mystery to unravel — they want applications that are ready for prime time.

“The reality is if you go talk to customers, they’re like, ‘Yeah, I’ve heard of Hadoop, but what do I do with it?'” he said.

The wisdom of the market

There is no shortage of comers working to give the people what they want, according to Tewksbury.

“What are the next set of apps? There’s a bunch of startups here in Silicon Valley that are thinking they have the answer to that, and we’re partnering with them, and we’re opening a cloud marketplace to bring them in, and we’ll let customers decide who is going to win this,” he said.

He mentioned that Rocana, Inc. is one company among these startups.

Watch the complete video interview with Brad Tewksbury below:

Photo by SiliconANGLE