Tuesday’s release of a new service from Hortonworks Inc. for the security and governance of data assets — Data Steward Studio — was a positive addition for the enterprise computing community as the clock ticks toward the deadline for General Data Protection Regulation implementation on May 25. The regulation requires any company with data on European citizens to meet standards for the protection and privacy of that information.

“It’s a powerful solution for a number of things that are at the core of GDPR compliance,” said James Kobielus (@jameskobielus, pictured), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. “It’s adding the teeth to enforce GDPR in an operational setting. I sensed a sigh of relief that it looks like a fairly good solution.”

Kobielus spoke during his kickoff analysis on the second day of the DataWorks Summit EU in Berlin, Germany. He discussed the features of the new data governance service, interest surrounding artificial intelligence and machine learning tools, and Hortonworks’ positioning in the industry.

New consent portal and data execution

The new Hortonworks studio provides for the discovery and inventory of personal data within a distributed data lake, offers a consent portal, and can execute on requests for the handling of information. “Data subjects can use this to review that data that’s kept on them to make fine-grained consents or withdraw consents for use in the profiling of the data that they own,” Kobielus explained.

In addition to the new DSS service, other major themes at the DataWorks Summit centered on developing uses for artificial intelligence and machine learning. “Everybody’s buzzing about getting up to speed on frameworks for building and deploying … machine learning models in operational environments,” Kobielus said. “[Enterprises] are building more and more AI and embedding that in conversational user interfaces and chatbots.”

This week’s new product announcement may reassure those in the user community who have been concerned about profitability and growth for Hortonworks. The fourth quarter of 2017 was the company’s first cash-flow positive reporting period.

“Hortonworks has definitely evolved into a far more diversified solution provider than people realize,” Kobielus said. “It has become a fairly blue-chip vendor, as they are continuing to grow their footprint of products and services and those of their partners, such as IBM.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the DataWorks Summit EU.

Photo: SiliconANGLE