 Live from San Jose, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering Hadoop Summit 2016, brought to you by Hortonworks. Here's your host, John Furrier. Okay, welcome back, everyone. We are here live in Silicon Valley for Hadoop Summit 2016. This is Silicon Angle. This media is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Peter Burris, our next guest is Rakesh Khan, Head of Enterprise Data Management and Analytics and Technology at US Bank. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, John. So, love having the people who actually are out in the field, front lines, putting this stuff to use. Absolutely. Welcome and thanks for coming on and sharing some insights. So, the first question is really, what's your take on the ecosystem here as a customer of all these suppliers who want to sell you something? You have to put it to work. Where's the signal? Where's the noise? I'm not finding any signal right now. So, I must confess, coming to these conferences is confusing me more than helping me out, to be very honest and blunt. I think there's a lack of standards where a particular technology, we have got five choices. And I'll give you an example in the underlying distribution. We have a choice between important words, Cloudera, MapR. One is open platform, the other two are not. So, I'm scratching my head. Where should I go? I have no guidance. Look at the stack as you go up. You have a sequel. I've got a hype choice, I have a hawk choice, I have some of the Kyvo, Druid. So many choices out there. Which one should I use? For what? I have no guidance. When you're talking to different people, they give different answers. Yesterday there was a talk, I think the founder of, one of the co-founders of Work and Work was talking about Hive, and I asked him a question. If Hive is working so fast, should I also use, when should I use the product that you also have in your suite of products? Hock, can you tell me some guidance? Which one do you use when? I mean, the answer was not very clear. So, what I'm finding is, the industry is evolving more and more, I would say, experiments, which is confusing the landscape for users like us who want to deliver, who have to deliver value at the end of the day, and we don't want to spend more time kind of choosing between things. We want to deploy them. So a big part of that then suggests, Rakesh, that there's this enormous opportunity to apply these technologies to solve very complex business problems. The challenge is, you're starting to spend more time actually trying to parse and figure out how to knit things together and not spending time solving the business problems, which is where you want to be. So are you looking, is there a need for different governance model or concrete guidance, or what will help you get back to spending more of your time solving business problems and less time solving vendor problems? I definitely think that there is a need, there has been a reason that standards have been put in place if you're going to remember SQL, NC SQL. So you know when you hear it's NC SQL compliant, there are certain semantics that gets confirmed when you hear that standard. When you look at the Linux world, the operating system, they comply to certain standards. When you hear that, but in this world, other than OpenHDP, which is still not very clear what to use when a standard is required. I don't know who and how we can get there. Maybe business needs to, all business needs to come together and create a business consortium that sets that standard and then everybody follows. Maybe all analysts get together and they say, here's what the standard should be. There's a need for a standard that can help businesses, but I don't know where to look for. Where is it going to come from? I can't see that coming yet. But one of the things we've had a number of conversations with other users like yourselves and one of the statements that we're getting, and I know you've been part of these conversations too, John, is that we need an approach to conceiving of data value. That at the end of the day, what everybody's doing here is creating data assets that can be applied to business problems, but it's not clear how we continue to invest and sustain those assets and that having a concrete statement about data value can then lead to some approaches to thinking about how things come together to better maintain and create the assets that digital business needs. What do you think about that? It means because there's a lack of that, so we are adopting our own on-the-fly thought process. So we either gravitate towards the big enterprise players and expect them to figure all this out and deliver things to us. So Informatica of the world or IBMs of the world that figure it out for us, we are your customers, have been your customers, so we'll work with you if you abstract that complexity for us. The second is if the big enterprise players are not working out, then we go to one of the other large players and expect them to kind of figure out the complexity. So we are actively looking for partners and we are gravitating to whoever has the weight today to go get that guidance. Again, I don't have an answer for you, Peter. How can we get there? There has to be some collaboration. The community, venture capitalists, analysts, business, technology companies need to come together in some platform of understanding. Needs leadership. We'll talk to you some about that. Has the ODPI helped you at all? I mean, that's one standard approach that seems to be not in the conversation at this show, but they did make announcements about some standardization around at least deployments of a dupe or distributions. Is that the kind of thing you're looking for is, again, standardization on things like distribution or other components within the stack? Other components, like, for example, we've got Storm, Flink, and Spark, right? They almost can do similar things, but in different use cases, right? So if I am going to go deploy a messaging use case, what is the best, what is the standard? And it could be that three things fit into the standard. As long as, I'll take SQL as the best example because it can kind of relate to people. When you write select star from a table, you expect the behavior that it's consistent across different RDBMS. So when I'm trying to do a call for different types of calls, those call APIs are standardized. And then I can switch between Storm today and Spark tomorrow and whatever works, whatever dies. I'm not at risk of redeploying and recoding all of that. So that's the problem that's been identified. Thanks for pointing that out. And we agree, by the way, that that's standard is important. Can you quantify some of the consequences and the impact to your business of not having this solved? Can you share and put some color around some of the impacts? One of the use cases that we've been actively trying to work out is this value delivery last mile and the value delivery, where business is very interested in thinking about, I have this idea, great insight, but I don't know if it's gonna work or not. If there was a platform available where I can deploy my insight in an AB fashion, then I could get immediate feedback and I can say, okay, this works, let's scale it. This doesn't work, let's shut it down. We don't have that framework. It takes some amount of time to be able to go pull all the click stream, pull all the impression data, pull all the feedback data and then put it together and by the time it's kind of late, right? So if there was a, yesterday there was a talk by Alibaba that they are trying to do that, but they had to develop all in-house. So if there was a semantic available that you can go put together quickly. A template. Exactly, then you can go and apply that. It's a very, very real problem for us to solve. Additionally, we were talking before with another entrepreneur on the floor here and I asked him about the show and he echoed some of the sentiment that you have around, I won't say it, he didn't say it's a mess, but the ecosystem is seeing value and the value is on the analytics and the business value. Yet, there's still the conversation about technology. So there seems to be a conflict between technology speeds and feeds and standards and the pressure for business value. Do you agree? Oh, absolutely. I'm stuck in the middle right now and I would like to focus my time on delivering that value, having conversation with my business partners and I've heard at least five of them as recent as last week, telling me this is what I want, this is what I'm struggling with and then when I think about how to go help them, then I have to spend tremendous amount of time to figure out out of this bag of tools which one should I pick and combine and apply it to that problem. And by the way, worry about whether it is gonna be there two years from now. It's kind of like we were talking about that with Rob Ho for our editor-in-chief at SiliconANGLE was saying, you know, look, where's the problem? And, you know, like a good trial lawyer, someone's gotta be blamed for this. What's, who's at fault? Is it the ecosystem collectively? Is it the vendors just holding their lines? Is it just lack of evolution, maturity? I don't want you to name names, but I mean, where's the, who's at fault here? Is it a collective thing? I would kind of answer it differently. I don't think it's a fault. I think it's a creative, I would say, every human being, I mean, a lot of people want to create new things. They're interested in creating new things, but there's no process. So community itself, right? If there was a process in the community that says, new thing is coming up. How is similar, or dissimilar, with things that already exist in the tool bag, if rather than creating a brand new again, how can I put the same thing into the existing so that we can kind of develop the existing? There's no process for that. Today I come up with a new idea of kind of- So if someone cracks that code, they're gonna be a huge opportunity for them. Well, in many respects, John, going back to what we were saying, there's gotta be a statement of, where does the value come from? We gotta move away from being tool-focused to becoming more application-focused, where the application suggests a set of tools or a template for how those tools will come together so that we can get developers engaged and that's when we get the explosion. So from our perspective, we think great tools, stretching. Everybody's saying they're doing the same thing. Time to focus on the templates. It'll lead to applications that generate value and it's just a virtuous cycle at that point. Absolutely, and you're coming spot on. If you start with the value and you see value one, value two, value three and you break it down into parts and pieces, you'll see that ecosystem and then you standardize on, okay? If three use cases are using these two things, okay, this is the standard. That's how we traditionally, in the data world, we break that down. And in the technology world. Yeah, we should. Rakesh, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. We're sharing your insights really from the front line. Someone who actually writes the checks, deploys the technology, serves the business value. Thanks for sharing your perspective on the ecosystem. You're watching theCUBE here live in Silicon Valley. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. We'll be right back with more live coverage here on theCUBE after this short break.