While corporations may be the ones driving the development of data-management and its standards, there comes a time at which the results have to be handed, at least in part, over to the users. For the more engaged data companies, finding ways to approach this with benefits to both sides can provide further innovations.

Pete Schlampp, VP of products at Platfora, Inc., joined John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, at BigDataSV 2016, where theCUBE is celebrating #BigDataWeek, including news and events from the #StrataHadoop conference. Their discussion covered topics of new trends in data-management and visualization, citizen users, and breaking down the workflow.

Making Big Data accessible

An early key point, as phrased by Schlampp, was “democratization of Big Data, getting it out into the hands of business people.” This recognized need to bring together the tools of data management with those who will put them to use in developing revenue has served as a motivator behind several decisions for Platfora, from development to market targeting.

“One of the things that we’ve noticed is that over the years we’ve built a great product that allows you to go from raw data to answering business questions, but those questions are being answered by someone called a ‘citizen data scientist,’” Schlampp commented, going on to examine how these users affect the discourse involving the data.

On another front, there’s the common business analysts who still use utilities such as Excel or Tableau. “What we want to be able to do with this [new] release [of Platfora’s Lens-Accelerated SQL powered by Apache Spark] is extend the data into those people’s hands,” Schlampp stated, noting that while Tableau was still a useful piece of software, new functionality could be blended with its features without putting off its users.

Discovering data uses

Schlampp also indicated that “data discovery,” which would allow users to “slice and dice, drag and drop” various kinds of data through multiple arrays, was something that would be a major point of focus in the near future. “Data discovery is, I think, the new Excel,” he said.

He also addressed some of the issues confronting companies that are looking to update to these modern standards. “One of the things that we’ve learned … is that companies, when they try to do Big Data, they’d better have a use-case, and that use-case had better be about getting better value than using a basic BI.”

In particular, while new infrastructure is more expensive, many people are being fooled by the flash and hype, and then finding themselves with budgeting issues. There’s also the deep technical problem of the workflow, with a main question posed by Schlampp: “How do you go from raw data and files to a petabyte workflow? … How do you put that all into a workflow that a single user can do?”

Business value

The automation of old tasks and added value through better understanding of causality and usability, along with Platfora’s announcement of Lens-Accelerated Sequel to enhance their existing utilities, are some of the company’s current top priorities. Asked about Platfora’s customer and user bases, Schlampp said, “We tend to focus on large organizations [such as banking, the healthcare industry, retail, gaming], on and on. … [They] tend to be companies with a lot of event data.” He continued, “In terms of users, we tend to focus on the citizen data scientists.”

Wrapping up the conversation, Schlampp was asked to provide his perspective on what companies competing in the Big Data arena should be wary about, and he responded: “There’s two things that stand out to me. One is business value, [the second] is the cloud, and literally not just cloud in general, but the big three players … and how is their vision for Hadoop or the technologies behind Hadoop … going to change the industry?”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of BigDataSV 2016. And make sure to weigh in during theCUBE’s live coverage at the event by joining in on CrowdChat.

Photo by SiliconANGLE