The Importance of Focusing on the Business

Bill Schmarzo is CTO of IoT and Analytics at Hitachi Vantara and Executive Fellow at the San Francisco School of Management. Our discussion covered Bill’s origins in data warehousing and business intelligence, how and why he had to “unlearn” traditional approaches to embrace Big Data techniques. The conversation explores some of the differences in approach between business intelligence, big data and IoT analytics, along with how Hadoop fundamentally changed the economics of data. He shares some of the vision Hitachi Vantara and the application-first approach along with the benefits that come with having Hitachi’s other businesses as a customer. Companies he’s most interested in are those that are automating machine learning to bring it to the masses including Big Squid.