In this episode of the O'Reilly Data Show, I spoke with Christopher Nguyen, CEO and co-founder of Arimo. Nguyen and Arimo were among the first adopters and proponents of Apache Spark, Alluxio, and other open source technologies. Most recently, Arimo's suite of analytic products has relied on deep learning to address a range of business problems. When we started Arimo (our company name then was Adatao), the vision was about big data and machine learning. At the time, the industry had just refactored itself into what I call the'big data layer'--big data in the sense of the layer at the bottom, the storage layer.

When quantity reaches a certain level, it makes a qualitative difference. "When you have enough memory and compute, a funny thing happens. Nguyen, former engineering director for Google Apps, was referring to a slice of the technology behind his startup, Adatao, which just received $13 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz. Adatao's value proposition comes in two parts: pInsights, a document-based visualization layer that provides end-users with simple, real-time querying of vast data sets; and pAnalytics, a monster data processing engine built on Hadoop and Apache Spark. All of this, including the ANN (artificial neural network) component, is made possible by the huge memory and processing power that, today, has become a commodity. It depends on who you ask.