As the methods for collecting, organizing and analyzing colossal amounts of business data continue to diversify, some of the former champions of the big data world have found their glory fading, while fresh challengers are quickly rising in prominence.

“I think the industry’s moved past this concept of ‘I’ve invested in Hadoop and I don’t need additional solutions,’” said Josh Rogers (pictured), chief executive officer of Syncsort Inc.

Rogers spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, at the BigData SV 2017 conference in San Jose, CA. They talked about Syncsort’s history, its new directions and plans for the future. (*Disclosure below.)

Rogers explained how Syncsort had already been involved in helping customers manage data, and how big data handling was a natural growth from that point. “Big data’s frankly been a terrific opportunity for us to … run that same gameplan,” he noted.

But as he pointed out, Syncsort was looking to move beyond adapting its old practices while also helping customers and their own practices grow along with them. One challenge he identified was the integration of legacy environments with next-generation environments.

“To do that you need to have expertise on both sides,” he said, leading into the topic of Syncsort’s acquisition of Trillium, which he characterized as “the independent leader in data quality. … When you look at large, global companies, they’re really the gold standard.”

Operations upgrades

Part of the impulse behind Syncsort’s acquisition was that it saw the established respect for Trillium, as well as the opportunity to apply its services to new environments.

Rogers also addressed the notion of metadata management, which he saw as “incredibly important,” along with speed-of-business incremental updates of data for analytics and other purposes.

As he explained it, Syncsort’s vision is to bring the engines driving those sorts of data purposing to new environments, something that could be done either by building from scratch to custom-fit the context or by taking existing, tested engines and integrating it deeply in these environments.

The latter approach was the one that Syncsort chose to follow, and as the goal of giving platforms the ability to update thousands of nodes without bringing down persistent, mission-critical workloads becomes closer to reality, the viability of its choice will soon show its tenability under real-world testing, Rogers said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of BigData SV 2017. (*Disclosure: Some segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE are sponsored. Sponsors have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE