“Simplify” is a big word in IT today, and you could argue that the race to market dominance in any area belongs to the provider that can offer the easiest way to do something. But, ironically, customers are also demanding more advanced performance to power their Big Data applications. Providers now have to balance simplicity with performance to win with customers.

Ram Sriharsha, Apache Spark product manager at Databricks, Inc. and committer and PMC member, Apache Spark at The Apache Software Foundation, says that a big part of what has made Spark a data tool of choice has been simplicity. But, he told  John Walls and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, “It’s not enough to be simple; you have to perform.”

Sriharsha hopes that the release of Apache Spark 2.0 will meet both criteria. He said one of its main advantages is that it’s made streaming much simpler, so now building continuous applications will be easier.

Real time in the real world

Sriharsha said that real-time streaming can dramatically increase efficiency for businesses and institutions. He spoke about the case of fraud detection in banks and said the process could take up to two weeks in the past.” Now, he said, “I want to prevent fraud as its happening. So when someone sends me a fraudulent application, I don’t want to wait around for two weeks.”

He said that its preferable for businesses to detect problems like fraud in real time, and, “That’s when real-time, fairly advanced analytics come into play.”

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE