 Live from Cambridge, Massachusetts, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering the MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium. Hi everybody, welcome to Cambridge, Massachusetts. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Wikibon's coverage of MIT IQ, the MIT Chief Data Officer Conference. This is our third year at the conference and we are here actually, thanks to Paul Gillan, who is my co-host today. Paul, great to see you back in Boston. Always a pleasure to be here and to be with you. So the story of the MIT Chief Data Officer Conferences, I got a call from you one day, you were asked to sort of be the sort of media partner and catalyze media coverage for this conference three years ago and you said, hey, do you want to attend? Maybe write it up, I said better, let's bring theCUBE and we brought theCUBE and we've had some fantastic guests over the last two years, as I say, our third year here. The narrative in year one was how prominent is the Chief Data Officer? Will that role emerge? Will it gain traction? Where should it report into the organization? And then year two was kind of, look this Chief Data Officer very clearly entrenched within financial services, healthcare and government, will it extend into other areas? And it feels like Paul, the Chief Data Officer has gone mainstream and now we're talking about more practical issues of sort of how to get things done, how to protect data, how to actually exploit data for productivity advantage within organizations. So it seems like this is taking hold, it's really evolving, there are a lot of subtexts around what does this mean for the CIO, but really a fascinating topic. Well, Dave, I think what we're seeing in the agenda this year is the maturation of the CDO role. And if you remember last year, there were some guests who actually suggested that the CDO may replace the CIO at some point. And with cloud moving as fast as it is, with companies looking at outsourcing essentially all of their future infrastructure, in some cases even their legacy infrastructure, you really have to wonder what the CIO role becomes when everything is in the cloud. And really it becomes then all about data. Data is the asset that is most valuable to most organizations. We're going to have some great guests here. We've got the CDO of Walmart, which has hired more than 2,000 developers in Silicon Valley to do big data analytics, completely revamping its approach to e-commerce. We are seeing the CDO concept and the idea of data as a competitive asset go from theory to demonstration now. Yes, we actually had John Holomka, the CIO of Beth Israel Hospital on this show last year, but call it's a question, the role of the CIO. I will say this in my observation, and I had some questions, will that CIO role divert into either a technical role or a business role? I actually think the CIO role, you're right, there's this data layer emerging. It's increasingly becoming, which infrastructure do I use to support that data layer? Do I outsource to the cloud? What do I keep on premise? And that seems to be the role of the CIO, part cloud broker, part keeping the lights on for the existing infrastructure. In my observation over the past 12 months, I think that CIO role has been solidified somewhat. I don't, at one point I was like, you know, maybe it is going to sort of vaporize over the next 10 years. I think it's going to be solidified, but it's going to transform quite dramatically. A big injection from the business side, I think it's going to be less of a technical role and much more of a infrastructure steward and process role. Absolutely, I think CIOs have got a big transitional task, a hurdle ahead of them. CIO is basically an evolution of what used to be the data processing director and then the MIS director, but it's always been about infrastructure. The core job of the CIO has always been about keeping the lights on, keeping the machines running. And when you think now, we are beyond the stage that it makes sense anymore to wheel in crates of computers and unbox them and put them on a raised floor. We're getting past that now to where information technology is truly becoming utility. And that means that the core job of the CIO, I think is going to be called into question as companies move large amounts of infrastructure into the cloud. And so they have to transition to a more strategic role. And that means they have to become data, they have to become experts at managing data. That has been traditionally just a minority part of the CIO's role. It's now going to become the job itself. So I think CIOs who will succeed in the future or the next generation of CIOs will be those who can get past the idea that their job is to keep the lights on and keep five nines up time. That's all going to be taken care of by somebody else. They really have to finally execute on this vision that we've heard for 20 years about the CIO as being a strategic part of the organization as contributing strategic value. It's time now to execute on that vision. I think we're also seeing a major impact in the financials of large corporations as a result of things that were born by the web giants, Google, Amazon, Facebook, cloud, mobile, social, big data, seeping into the enterprise now and having a major impact. I think a good example of that is Hadoop. While Hadoop is still relatively small, the ROI on Hadoop, as one colleague of ours, Abby Mehta has said, has really been around reduction on investment. And what people have done is they've sort of attacked that spend on the traditional data warehouse, moved a lot of data into Hadoop infrastructures. And now you're seeing that Hadoop batch model becoming more real time with things like Spark, moving into the mainstream of the enterprise. SQL is like the killer app for Hadoop. So you're seeing a lot more mainstream programming being done in that type of model, that distributed model. And it's driving costs down. And that seems to be permeating along with cloud throughout the industry. And you're seeing it in the financials as we were talking off camera, of all the major players. You've got this trillion or $2 trillion IT business, which is essentially flat. And then you've got pieces and pockets that are growing like crazy. We're now seeing Amazon's financial results, let's say they do five to six billion, they're operating profits, are the same as EMC's, a very profitable company. So everybody talks about this race to zero. Well, Amazon's figured out that they're driving infrastructure costs and provisioning down towards software economics. And it's starting to really take hold in the financials of these organizations that are very large, multi-billion, tens of billions, 40, 50 billion dollar companies, or larger like IBM and HP. And you're seeing things like HP now splitting up. You're seeing companies go private like Dell. And what these large companies are doing, and I'd love to get your take on this, Paul, is they're mobilizing and reorganizing and trying to get the new stuff in line that's growing, trying to get that big enough and growing so that it cannot offset the declines. But there really aren't a lot of, or any good examples of a large company being able to do that just yet. So they're relying on cash flow and balance sheet and share buybacks to stay relevant. Well, I've never seen a more disruptive time in the IT industry in my 30 plus years in this industry. Everything is changing. And the big players are being impacted across the board. You mentioned centralization of infrastructure. What's happening now is that infrastructure, which has historically been very distributed, each company had its own IT infrastructure. That is now all being centralized, economies of scale being applied, and companies like Amazon really learning how to drive the costs out of IT to a degree that has never been seen before. Open source is a huge factor. And really, this has been, the last year has really been the year of open source. This is when we have seen a transformation of the infrastructure that is driving. Companies like Amazon, like Google Cloud Platform, even Microsoft, moving toward open source. And the economics of that, of course, are compelling. But I think even more important is the innovation that comes about. The great advance that open source has introduced is we no longer reinvent the wheel. When an open source technology is developed, it's put out there for everyone to build upon. And so we don't have companies here, there, and everywhere building the same thing over and over again and selling it as a proprietary platform. So we're seeing this explosion of innovation in software development, new functionality, and of course, web scale, is a hugely disruptive factor. You know, prior to the release of some of these tools, like Kubernetes and like Hadoop, the biggest problems that companies ever solved were how to support maybe a couple of hundred thousand concurrent users. But Google and Amazon and Facebook have had to figure out how to support a quarter of a billion concurrent users with sub-second response time. Huge technical problems that those companies have solved and are now being made available for free in the mainstream as platforms for people to develop on. So it's an enormously exciting time. It's an enormously disruptive time, as you say, for the IBMs and the HPs and the EMCs of the world that have traditionally had very high margin proprietary products. They are seeing the margins being sucked out of those businesses by open source and by white box technology. And it's going to be a very difficult transition for them to make. The good news is that according to research I've seen, companies that buy software and infrastructure as a service over a five year period actually pay about 50% more for those services than they would if they bought them as a captive on premise platform. So the good news is that if they make this transition, the businesses will be more sustainable, more predictable, and ultimately more profitable. Yeah, so we're going to cover this and other topics. Sandy Pentland's coming on next. He's the head of MIT's Media Lab. Later on today, we've got a number of other great guests coming on from Michael Stonebreaker, who's going to be fantastic. I'm sad that we won't be able to see his keynote because we'll be on theCUBE. And of course, Bob Picciano, who heads IBM's $17, $18 billion analytics business will come on so we can cover some of these themes with him as well. So two days of coverage. This is theCUBE, we're live at MIT IQ. Check out hashtag MIT IQ. This is theCUBE, go to siliconangle.com for all the news, wikibon.com for all the research. We'll be back, Paul Gilland and myself to cover MIT IQ right after this word.