Every guest on the Drill to Detail podcast has been a pleasure to interview, from Stewart Bryson on the inaugural episode through Dan McClary, Mike Percy, Kent Graziano, Andrew Bond and later this week Cloudera and Apache Spark’s Mark Grover, but one recording I was particularly looking forward to was last week’s guest Paul Sonderegger, ex-Endeca and currently Oracle’s Big Data Strategist talking to their customers about a concept he’s termed “Data Capital” … and what this new form of capital means for competitive strategy and company valuations.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flVaIBRQ1eY[/embed]

If you (like me, secretly) thought Oracle’s previous “Digitisation and Datification” slidedeck was a bit … handwavy and corporate marketing b*llocks, well this is where it all comes together and makes sense. If you work in consulting or are looking for some sort of economic rationale and underpinning for all this investment in big data technology, and sometimes wonder why Netflix and Google are valued higher than CBS and your local newspaper, here’s your answer. A great episode exploring the business value of big data, not just the technical benefits.

And coming soon on another future episode … MapR. Watch this space.