The one thing that can be said with any certainty about technology is that there is no certainty.

“I’ve been fond of telling clients that anybody who says they have their future state figured out, I throw out of my office. Whatever we think we know about the process today, in two years it is going to completely change with new options we haven’t thought of yet,” said John Akred, founder and CTO of Silicon Valley Data Science, LLC.

Change is imminent

Akred spoke to John Walls and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the Apache Spark Maker Community event in San Francisco about what his company is doing to help businesses keep up with the changing times.

The trio talked about how companies can augment so-called “legacy applications” without simply throwing them away. They also discussed how to take older framework and integrate it into newer systems.

Elevate the conversation

When asked how to elevate the conversation from simple day-to-day tasks to more long-term solutions, Akred said that it would ideally happen two ways. One way is the top-to-bottom approach, with upper management being aware of the useful applications of data science outside of the IT department. It’s important to be “speaking to the C-suite audience that is somewhat enlightened” in order to increase momentum, said Akred.

The second way is the opposite, a bottom-to-top approach, when someone like an IT associate notices changes that could be made and passes them on. Both approaches are needed to keep moving forward, Akred stated.

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Apache Spark Maker Community 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE