Organizations have a lot of valuable data laying around, most of it locked away in aging silos that are difficult to manage and even harder to get to. This lack of accessibility poses a fundamental stumbling block for CIOs undertaking Big Data initiatives, especially in large enterprises and highly regulated companies that are subject to strict requirements in managing their information.

Atigeo, a nine-year-old cloud software provider headquartered in Seattle, is tearing down legacy barriers to analytics with a cloud-based platform that acts as an abstraction layer for heterogeneous IT infrastructure, enabling consistent management across disparate systems. Appearing on theCUBE at BigDataSV, Atigeo CEO Michael Sandoval said that the solution allows customers to treat their information as a strategic asset and rapidly build data-driven applications without having to worry about the lower layers of the stack.

According to Sandoval, his firm’s offering makes it possible to perform different types of advanced analytical, including machine learning, natural language processing and inferencing, in a single environment that can be used to power mission-critical and industry-specific processes. Healthcare in particular is a big focus area for Atigeo, as is the financial services space and the public sector. Big Data is disrupting all three, he tells theCUBE hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante, and automation is becoming increasingly important in driving insights.

“You’re trying to connect all the data, you don’t want to have to use a bunch of professional services people in order to figure out which hypotheses and what questions you’re gonna ask first, then ETL the data, and then you have this new data and a month later go through the whole process yet again. You want to do that in real-time, you want to be able to (when you look at predictive measures) do forecasting but also realize what’s going at the given moment,” Sandoval explains. Today, the bulk of Big Data spending goes to consultancy services, but he expects that to change over the next decade as more and more companies embrace what he calls a 21st century approach to Big Data.

Cloud computing is one of the driving forces behind this trend, freeing up time and resources to generate tangible business value. “Is it really in your best interest to try to build a large IT staff and use them to govern and help you through the hypothesis process to discover what’s in your data and how your business operates?” Sandoval remarks. “I’d like to see those resources shift to the business side of the equation, and maybe shift all that IT [spend] out to the cloud for something that can be actionable here and now.” Decision makers are becoming data owners as part of the transition, he continues, with a large number of organizations delegating responsibility over analytics to business executives rather than the CIO.

Sandoval says that about 10 percent of Atigeo customers have done so already, a percentage that is likely to grow as companies come under increased pressure to put the power of Big Data in the hands of users.

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