Some say that 2016 will be the moment of truth for Big Data. Hype has steadily gathered around data for the past few years, and it seems now to have reached fever pitch. At the conferences, in the boardrooms and on IT teams, the question on everyone’s minds now is, “Where are the applications?”

According to Matt Morgan, VP of Product and Alliance Marketing at Hortonworks, Inc., the industry is coming to a realization. He said the idea that one large converged data lake is the way to go is being challenged by the reality of how the latest data applications actually function.

Morgan and Wei Wang, senior director of Product Marketing at Hortonworks, spoke to John Furrier (@furrier) of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during Hadoop Summit 2016. Morgan said that customers actually practicing data application development are becoming disenchanted with the converged model.

“If you look at all of these case studies, they have a very common thread. They are now deploying what we call these connected data platforms — the idea that data must be local to where it’s generated, and the analytics of why it matters is also local to where it’s generated,” he explained.

Data plane vs. data lake

“Think of it as a data plane vs. a data lake,” Morgan said, adding that this “plane” could span a number of different data lakes. “It’s for data in motion, data at rest, data on the wire, all of it, and everything in between.”

He explained that machine learning and IoT data apps, like those needed for connected cars, quite simply demand connected over converged for performance at the edge. “If we wait for that data to make its way through the cloud, across your VPN, into your data lake before we analyze it, we’ve already missed the value,” he said.

A starring role for Hadoop

Wang said that folks are getting down to the nitty gritty with data apps. She noted something about the people she’s speaking to at the conference: “It’s not those traditional IT developers anymore — they are actually application developers.”

Wang added: “People will talk to me about specific use cases — ‘I want to do this kind of thing; can you tell me how to do it?’ — rather than, ‘I have to go to my IT department and try to build something on top of it.'” Wang also said that Hadoop is playing a major role in these new application development endeavors with customers.

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE