Alibaba Group Holding Ltd’s annual shopping holiday — Singles Day — was held on November 11 and set records once again for sales, generating $25 billion. It is larger than America’s versions of Cyber Monday and Black Friday combined. During the day, Alibaba displayed the latest sales updates on it’s “real-time big screen,” a prime example of the power that real-time data analytics can provide.

But is real-time data streaming the real future? One information technology expert is not so sure.

“When I have to put on the data sheriff hat, I’m now having to ask executives and stakeholders, ‘Why streaming?,’” said Jeff Weidner, an information management professional. “It’s the new, shiny toy.”

Weidner stopped by theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with host Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick) at SiliconANGLE’s Palo Alto studio in California. They discussed the pros and cons of real-time data streaming, the future impact of new data protection regulation, and the bottom line impact that an analytics provider such as Datameer Inc. can have. (* Disclosure below.)

Cost can be a real-time factor

There are plenty of robust real-time streaming data analytics tools available today, such as Apache Kafka or Spark. But there is also concern that moving to a real-time data streaming platform requires changes in architecture that IT departments are often reluctant to make.

There is also the cost. “If you want streaming of real-time data, it’s going to cost you 3x,” Weidner said.

With new data governance and protection rules, such as Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation about to go into effect, enterprise IT organizations might be more interested in spending 2018 dollars to ensure compliance because penalties can be steep. “It can mean four percent of every company’s revenue, and that’s on every instance,” Weidner said. “That’s getting a lot of motivation for information governance today.”

Whether it involves real-time analytics or governance, the ultimate challenge in today’s IT world is to get real results and bottom line impact from data management. This was the goal when Weidner evaluated the capabilities of various options, such as those presented by Datameer, a big data analytics provider.

“Datameer allowed us to have a self-service interface that management and IT could agree upon to let us have our own lab environment and execute our work,” Weidner said. “Real-world results allowed us to get $10 million in uplift in our marketing activities across multiple channels.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CubeConversations. (* Disclosure: Datameer Inc. sponsored this segment on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Datameer nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE