With cloud services and their applications causing fundamental disruption in a number of industries, the intelligent deployment of those tools to an enterprise’s data stores is steamrolling the volume of utilities offered by a provider to become the real point of determination in success.

At the AWS re:Invent 2016 event in Las Vegas, NV, Jonathan Gray, founder and CEO of Cask Data Inc., joined John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about big data, cloud transformations and the changes expected in the near-future. (*Disclosure below)

Smart data

Cask.co, as Gray described it, is an open-source big data company “really focused around big data applications.” And a big part of leveraging that focus, he said, was in intelligent analysis of the data, beyond the basic information deductions, and learning from what the major cloud players’ focuses are.

A key point in that move to more targeted usage of data was in “not just understanding what your customers are doing, but what Amazon on their commercial side does,” he said. “They kind of invented big data, in a certain way, from the whole collaborative filtering, machine-learning angle, and that’s basically where we’re focused.”

With “infrastructure platforms, clouds, [and] Hadoop distributions,” serving as bases on which to sell additional management and other services, Cask.co is “helping people to build these types of applications end-to-end,” Gray said.

Big data’s appeals

And one of the interesting things about big data for Gray is that “there’s so many opportunities, so much innovation, a lot of value being delivered; but at the same time, a lot of people are still at the starting gate,” he stated.

Spotting the ways in which cloud’s continued development will cause major disruption –, as with on-prem Hadoop datalakes and the resultant cost drops or the development of tools to turn “flat file storage into a data warehouse,” Gray said — is another area in which Cask.co is putting in effort to stay ahead of the game.

But not all of the anticipated changes can be immediately acted on, as he noted, when examining the path of data into clouds, though that foreknowledge does enable smart investments. “The data’s starting to be created into the cloud, and it’s starting to stay into the cloud, and that creates gravity,” he said. “And so, if half of the data is going to be created in the next two years, isn’t 80, 90 percent of that data going to be generated into the cloud? … The time-scale, and the acceleration and the growth of data … is going to create all the gravity into the cloud.”

He also felt that one of the interesting things about the cloud players is that they’ve built their cloud offerings based on their strengths as companies prior to the cloud revolution. For example, “Microsoft is clearly an enterprise software company,” he noted. “The other two major vendors, in Google and Amazon, are not traditional software enterprise companies. And so that’s perhaps a weak point for them; whereas if you go and talk to Microsoft people, there’s a massive field organization over there.”

In his eyes, these focuses appeal to businesses with the same foci, resulting in natural specialization, though there’s still room for adjustment and capability development by everyone as competition continues to rise.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (*Disclosure: AWS and other companies sponsor some AWS re:Invent segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE