With the massive amounts of data that organizations must find, process, analyze and act on, new technologies continue to evolve to assist in this process. Alation, Inc.’s enterprise data accessibility platform is one such solution, which allows businesses to use the right data for better, faster business decisions.

Stephanie McReynolds, VP of marketing at Alation, talked with John Furrier and Dave Vellante of theCUBE, a SiliconANGLE Media production, at the HP Big Data Conference 2015.

Companies using Alation include eBay, MarketShare and Square, among others. “The value that analytics teams are getting out of this product is really being able to access their data in human context,” McReynolds said. “So we do machine learning to look at how individuals are using data in an organization and take that machine learning and also gather some of the human insights about how that data is being used by experts.”

Understanding the behaviors around the data

McReynolds also discussed how Alation integrated the Vertica engine into its stack to support what it calls “data forensics,” which is the ability for IT to understand the behaviors around the data and the types of analysis being conducted.

“When we were developing the tool, the goal was to combine certain features from Vertica and Square tools to create a hybrid,” McReynolds said. Doing this produced a powerful analytics tool that targets a particular data type. Because Alation can be set up for auto documentation-type tasks, the analysts can concentrate on only what they select. The power of the platform now allows for something that would take six months to process in the past to now be processed in a matter of weeks utilizing the appropriate tools.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the HP Big Data Conference 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE

Commentary during the live interview from the Crowd via CrowdChat App