According to Joel Horwitz, worldwide director of portfolio marketing, Big Data & Analytics for IBM, the energy in the office is infectious. After years of planning, IBM’s collaboration with Apache Spark has come to fruition.

“This is a new way of thinking about data,” said Horwitz during a visit to SiliconANGLE’s media hub, theCUBE, broadcasting live from IBM’s Spark event today. “We’re making data fun again. Spark is truly ‘sparking’ a new generation.”

Shortening the cycle time between insight and action

Horwitz said that efficiency is one reason Spark is the center of attention these days. “The more we can shorten that cycle time … between insight and action, the better off everyone will be,” he said.

The collaborative business model, as evidence by Hadoop and Spark, seems to work in today’s IT space. IBM shows that the “old guard” can adapt to this way of working. “Contribution matters,” said Horwitz. “With the announcement that we contributed System ML language to Spark, were showing that we’re committing some serious IP to this project. We’re serious about creating this community.”

Horwitz said that Hadoop “creates more of an appetite for Big Data,” and that some companies’ data lakes have become data marshes, because the data just sits. “Then in comes Spark, and they can do a dozen killer apps quickly and can continue to make those apps better.”

Training “a million-plus” data scientists

Moving forward, Horwitz said that IBM plans to train “a million-plus” data scientists and will work to convince the enterprise to adopt Spark.

“Who else but IBM can have this impact on the market?” he asked. “Everyone [at the company] is energized.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Spark 2015.