In this Future of Data Platforms Summit interview, Frederic Van Haren, CTO and founder of HighFens, joins theCUBE’s Rob Strechay to discuss how enterprises are evolving their data platforms to meet the demands of AI-driven applications. Van Haren shares his perspective on shifting from compute-centric to data-centric strategies, highlighting the role HighFens plays in guiding organizations across consulting, services and full AI solutions. The conversation explores how enterprises are balancing infrastructure decisions between CPUs, GPUs and storage systems while confronting challenges such as data gravity, silos and lifecycle management. Van Haren explains why simply storing data is not enough and how companies must extract business-ready insights through scalable architectures, metadata-rich governance and automation. He also examines the growing importance of Apache Iceberg, the role of agentic AI in workflow automation and the realities of managing hybrid and federated data environments across industries like healthcare, pharmaceuticals and automotive. The discussion underscores how organizations are addressing the dynamic nature of AI training and inference cycles, reducing inefficiencies by aligning infrastructure with business value, navigating vendor lock-in through open standards and building transition strategies that keep pace with rapid innovation in data platforms.