Back when Ingo Mierswa, founder and chief technology officer of RapidMiner (Rapid-I, Inc.), was a data scientist consulting with telco companies, he was tasked with solving data science problems around churn. While delivering his results, he had difficulties communicating his findings to business people who did not get value out of  lines of code. Mierswa knew that it was incumbent upon him to visualize the outcomes for his clients. He founded RapidMiner centered around this principal.

Mierswa sat down with Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media media team, at RapidMiner Wisdom 2016 in New York City to talk about why his company is successful in the analytics space.

Confusing data

When Mierswa addressed event attendees this morning, he tried to explain the distance between the data and what the actual conclusions mean. “It is so easy to make all kinds of mistakes around data science,” he said. He explained how data can be confusing, using as an example the increase in the number of UFO sightings on July 4^th. He asked, “Is this because aliens are looking at fireworks? No. It’s  probably because people are looking at the fireworks thinking, ‘Is that unusual?’ And then they report this.”

Based on this analogy, Mierswa concluded that you need to look at more than the data. RapidMiner takes the results and communicates them in an easy-to-understand format, reuses data to become more efficient and is building a platform to take insights that will trigger an action or business process based on the data.

A value proposition

Making a point and proving value is what Mierswa believes organizations are seeking from data analytics. His vision is to make it extremely easy and leverage more knowledge into a platform to help companies make decisions established by the data and gut instinct.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of RapidMiner Wisdom 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE