As the applications of Big Data bring new energy to virtually all corners of the tech world, some long-established business utilities are finding their own lease on life extended through the integration of new functionality.

Darren Harris, CEO at High-Tech Innovation Labs Ltd. (HTI Labs), and Jonathan Glass, CTO at HTI Labs, sat down with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about their turbo-charging of Microsoft Excel and the importance of avoiding too many assumptions when designing a data app. 

Schematiq’s functions

“We’re here to demonstrate kind of the extension to a product we’ve made,” Harris stated. “Our product’s called Schematiq, and we’ve extended it to access the HPE Haven OnDemand function IT, the APIs it exposed, the applied machine-learning APIs.”

HTI Labs took the Haven OnDemand APIs — which enables developers to apply the power of machine learning to build next-generation applications — one step further and simplified it for users to access. “And it basically [means] any user of Excel can access those APIs, experiment with them [and] run unstructured analytics against the Haven OnDemand back-ends,” Harris said.

“Our product … keeps the core Excel experience that users love, but it allows them to work with bigger datasets; it allows them to offload processing to things like [HPE] Vertica, and now Haven,” Glass added.

Set apart

“The core IP … of what makes [us] different is that we have, in [an Excel] cell, what we call a datalink, and that datalink is a pointer to unstructured data that kind of sits outside of the core experience of mapping everything down to rows and columns when you work with it. So when you look at Excel, what you see is a viewer … that allows us to visualize these datalinks and work with them,” Harris explained.

“The minimum barrier is one installation on one desktop machine, and, immediately, all the data sources that you have access to, anything that we support, you can get hold of,” Glass said.

Glass also shared HTI Labs’ thoughts on how applications could be overdesigned and why keeping functions from getting locked-in was important to them: “As IT developers, internal dev teams should be providing units of useful functionality to their users and leaving the users to creatively combine them. And I think when applications that people use start to presuppose the way that those units of functionality can be combined, you actually lose power; you lose capability.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the HPE Big Data Conference.

Photo by SiliconANGLE