Big data initiatives are rapidly becoming a top priority for businesses, with an increasing majority of industry leaders viewing the field as key to remaining competitive in today’s market. As a result of its quick rise to prominence, many enterprises are still struggling with developing processes and infrastructure tailored for their specific business needs.

“We’ve been looking very carefully at how customers purchase, what they want, and how they execute against technology, and it’s very different from what I expected. … Eighty percent of big data applications fail. This is one of the things that we really wanted to look at,” said Guy Churchward (pictured), president and chief executive officer of DataTorrent Inc. Just a year into his role at DataTorrent, Churchward is focused on streamlining big data initiatives that result in manageable, scalable processes for customers.

Churchward spoke with Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara) and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41), hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the BigData SV event in San Jose, California. They discussed the progress of big data in tech and how DataTorrent is helping enterprises make the most of their resources.

Streamlining the consumerization of enterprise applications

One of the greatest hindrances to effective big data processes in enterprise is the rapid pace at which the market moves. Applications have historically needed extended periods of development, leaving businesses unable to keep up with the rate of industry movement. “If you realize you need to do something, you’re probably already too late,” Churchward said.

DataTorrent is working to combat this obstacle by simplifying open-source components while retaining flexibility with its latest product release DataTorrent Apoxi, an opinionated stack that streamlines custom options for customers. “[There’s] a movement toward consumerization of enterprise applications. You want them all to scale into all industries … [with] just the best of breed. But you need to then put a sleeve around them so they all act as though they are a single application,” Churchward said.

Beyond reimagining application development, Churchward plans to implement new efficiencies throughout the data mining process with DataTorrent. “Companies assume that the first thing you do in big data analytics is collect all the data, create a data lake. … Then they poke the data lake posthumously. But the data in the data lake is, by default, already old,” he stated.

Instead of using this outdated method, DataTorrent’s architecture of choice ingests the information and uses high-performance storage and compute to normalize, enrich, analyze and act on it in motion to fully leverage it before sending it to a repository.

DataTorrent’s ultimate goal is to provide customers with an efficient platform that they can use to scale for years to come. “Our job is teach someone … and step away. What we don’t want to do is to put a professional services drip feed into them and just keep sucking the money out. Our job is to get them there,” Churchward concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the BigData SV event.

Photo: SiliconANGLE