For a company built on the premise of big-data management, the challenge for Hortonworks Inc. is to keep its eye on where enterprise information is going. As big-data applications move between on-premises and cloud platforms and customers increasingly demand workload flexibility, the information technology landscape has changed drastically since the company was founded just seven years ago.

That change has not necessarily involved a mass migration to the cloud. The Hadoop open-source big-data platform sits at the center of Hortonworks’ business, and two-thirds of the company’s revenue comes from on-premises installations.

What has changed is the breadth of data migration, across multiple architecture tiers involving on-prem, edge and cloud, driven by new models increasingly built around workload applications. And today’s enterprise customer wants as much flexibility as systems and the technology will allow.

“The information technology world has been horribly constrained from very highly configured, very procedurally-based applications,” said Rob Bearden (pictured), president and chief executive officer of Hortonworks. “Now businesses want to create high-velocity engagement between the enterprise, their product, their customer and their supply chain. What we’re seeing is a massive transformational shift of how the IT architecture is going to look for the next 20 years.”

Bearden spoke with John Furrier and Dave Vellante, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during theCUBE NYC event in New York. They discussed the role of containerization in Hortonworks’ strategy, the company’s edge-computing initiatives, and the value its DataPlane Service brings to hybrid architecture. (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE features Rob Bearden as its Guest of the Week.

Containerization will be key

The transformation taking place in information technology can be seen in the news released this month by Hortonworks that it would collaborate with IBM Corp. and Red Hat Inc. to create a common hybrid architecture. It’s a recognition by Hortonworks that, although much of its business remains on-prem, it must adapt to the hybrid world where cloud will play a vital role.

As part of this month’s announcement, Hortonworks will enhance its Data Platform for the adoption of cloud-native architecture in on-prem deployments. A key element of that will be containerization.

“We are containerizing all of our platforms with a Red Hat and Kubernetes distribution,” Bearden said. “The reason that’s so important is it gives us the modularity to move those applications and those workloads across whichever tier is most appropriate architecturally for it to run and be deployed.”

Getting to the edge

Another important element of hybrid architecture involves bringing compute to data wherever it resides, including the edge. Hortonworks saw this as an emerging trend, and in 2015 it acquired Onyara Inc., a company formed around Apache NiFi for secure and reliable data flow solutions.

Apache NiFi is the outgrowth of software initially created by the National Security Agency over a decade ago to deliver sensor data and track movement. As critical data generated by internet of things devices took on greater significance, technology for processing that information at the edge became equally valuable, to the point where Scott Gnau, Hortonworks’ chief technology officer, declared in a blog post that IoT “will be even bigger than the advent of big data.”

The Onyara acquisition gave Hortonworks the ability to help its customers exercise control at a key place in the data lifecycle. “The whole goal of that was being able to get to the edge,” Bearden explained. “What we wanted was the ability to operate on every sensor, on every device at the edge for the customer so that they could bring the data under management whenever that may be.”

DataPlane fosters data governance

The enhancements for HDP and a clearly defined edge strategy are two critical elements in Hortonworks’ hybrid data architecture. A third important piece is the DataPlane.

The company introduced its DataPlane Service one year ago as an offering designed to provide customers with data governance and security, whether it resides on-prem or in a public cloud. DPS users can also spin up clusters in either environment using a Web-based app store as part of Hortonworks’ overall data management structure.

This form of data governance sets the stage for Hortonworks customers to leverage context that can then be applied using artificial intelligence or machine learning tools. One example of this can be seen in the integration of IBM’s Data Science Experience solution with the Hortonworks platform.

“You have to understand the lineage of that entire data and the context of the data through its entire lifecycle,” Bearden explained. “That gives you the ability to take these very proscriptive actions that are driven through AI and machine learning insights.”

Three years ago, Bearden was listed No. 12 in a roster compiled by one industry publication of the 100 most prominent people in Silicon Valley, ahead of Tesla’s Elon Musk and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Hortonworks’ CEO has witnessed the evolution of a key part of the enterprise IT story from a front-row seat. And the final chapter is a long way from being finished.

“When we started Hortonworks, it was about changing the data architecture for the next 20 years and how data was going to be managed,” Bearden said. “We’re very excited about where we’re positioned as this massive transformation is happening. The data economy is here, and now and the enterprise understands it.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of theCUBE NYC event. (* Disclosure: Hortonworks Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Hortonworks nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE