Thought Leaders in Big Data: Jack Norris, CMO of MapR (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: For the last set of questions, I’d like you to put on an industry thought leader hat. What trends do you see in the market as it pertains to where you are operating? What’s coming out on the horizon? What are you anticipating? What are some open problems as it pertains to those trends? Where do you encourage new entrepreneurs to look for new business opportunities?

Jack Norris: First of all, you have to take a step back and look at the context in which these Hadoop innovations are happening. Let’s look at the data center today and how it’s changing. We’re in the middle of the biggest re-platforming of the enterprise. It’s really challenging a lot of the assumptions that dictate how data is organized and treated today. You have a separate storage network for computing, a separate production system, and separate analytic silos that separate, not only in terms of systems, but also in terms of time where it takes at least a day to get the data over into the analytics system.

Hadoop and MapR, in particular, is collapsing that so that you have this data together and data collection and creation time is highly compressed. We’re seeing a focus on data agility and how organizations can understand what’s happening and respond much quicker than the current cycles that are out there today.

That opens up a lot of potential for entrepreneurs as they look at that ecosystem and look at what that means in their respective approaches and solutions. If you’ve got that kind of a foundational change, it really opens up what’s possible. We’re seeing the use of data and the use of this collapsing of cycle redefining the competitive constraints of whole industries. You see a lot of changes and innovations that are driven by the better application of data.

One easy example to point out is Beats Music. They came out and innovated in an area that has been dominated by solutions such as iTunes and Spotify. They were picked up by Apple six months after launch for $3 billion. That was due to their ability to personalize the music and suggest things with the underlying MapR platform that made that possible. We’re seeing it in advertising and media. We’re seeing it in financial services. There’s just a world of opportunity out there as organizations look at how to better understand data and how data can be applied in new ways and really change the speed and the method with which companies compete.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Jack Norris, CMO of MapR
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