In much the way that different physical environments shape organisms, the environment where a new technology lives will shape platforms that utilize it. Specifically, the cycle of change and innovation can be difficult to keep up with for platform vendors utilizing the technology. With the breakneck pace of innovation in Big Data right now, it’s survival of the fittest for platforms trying to stay on the cutting edge.

Shaun Conolly, VP of Corporate Strategy at Hortonworks, Inc., a company that relies on Apache data software, spoke about the synergy. “The age of data is being driven mostly from the Apache Software Foundation, and each week or each month, there’s a new data-related technology,” he said.

Conolly told hosts John Furrier (@furrier) and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41) of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, platform vendors have to cover a lot of bases. “Yes, you need centralized operations, security and governance,” he said. “But you also need a platform that’s built for receiving innovation in a consistent way, in an agile way, and in a way where that innovation can run on cloud or on-prem.”

He sees no signs of Big Data’s charge slowing. “It’s an exponentially increasing curve of innovation now,” he said.

The new election cycle

Conolly explained that cloud allows customers to move on in a snap if you’re stuck in the mud, so it’s important to have the latest updates. He said we’ve transitioned from the subscription model where, “every year is an election year to every hour is an election hour in the cloud business.”

Vendors can take heart in the other side of the equation: Cloud is user friendly to them too. “On-prem, you’re able to run mixed workloads in a shared data lake. In the cloud, you actually can spin up very focused, targeted use cases,” he said.

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE