SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier and Wikibon’s Dave Vellante and Jeff Kelly converged in theCUBE on the second day of SiliconANGLE’s Big Data NYC 2013 summit to share their perspectives on the evolving Hadoop ecosystem.

Vellante observes that the commoditization of IT is shifting the industry focus from infrastructure and the lower layers of the analytics stack to data-driven applications. He views this as a positive trend that will “enable a lot of innovation to occur,” potentially solving many of the challenges faced by enterprises today. Vellante sees a bright future for vendors with service-oriented business models like Hortonworks and niche application providers such as Tresata. Citing the success of mobile apps, he says that the latter segment is set to “grow from a position of strength.” Kelly shares a similar view.

“While it’s critical to give business users the ability to investigate data, to come up with some insights to do their jobs better, to me the real killer application when it comes to analytics is simply analytics-informed applications that actually execute some type of function,” he explains. “It’s not necessarily a user looking at a dashboard, it’s an application automating a decision and actually executing that decision. It might be a recommendation engine that’s building on analytics in the background to help a call center worker make the best decision in real time.”

Kelly expects data-driven applications to emerge as a catalyst for analytics, driving widespread adoption beyond the Fortune 100. Furrier further predicts that Big Data and the software-defined data center will converge thanks to the efforts of companies like WANdisco, which provides a unique continuous availability solution that enables customers to reliably run Hadoop at scale.

Click the video below to watch the full interview.