The idea of power drawn from diversity has become a core feature for many businesses in the modern tech world, but for the majority, putting focus on finding ways of drawing data value from the specifics of that diversity has not yet become policy.

At this year’s HPE Big Data Conference, Mark Lockwood, director of Product Marketing at Logi Analytics, Inc., spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, about the “continuum” of users, approaches to analytics and the importance of embedding capabilities.

Logi’s wares

“Logi Analytics is a platform for application owners and developers to build custom operational analytic applications,” Lockwood outlined, going on to explain his company’s deep connections to HPE.

“We’ve partnered with HPE for a while now,” he said. “We’re actually, I believe, the only vendor who has a native connection to both [HPE] Vertica and [HPE] IDOL, so we’re able to basically blend structured data from Vertica and unstructured data from IDOL together. It’s a rather kind of unique and impactful dashboard.”

Vertica is HPE’s SQL analytics engine, and HPE IDOL provides text and rich media analytics powered by machine learning.

Targeting data

Lockwood also gave his assessment of how these analytics tools are finding distribution: “There’s kind of two types of approaches to the analytic market. A lot of the data discovery merchants out there are looking at an out-of-the-box experience for a rather contained use-case. … We focus on really scalable information distribution operational use-cases.”

He shared an example use-case of Service King, an automobile maintenance chain, being able to use Logi Analytics’ services to engage in real-time monitoring and analysis of its employees’ performance across various physical centers, along with enabling center-to-center communications to find the best ways of doing specific jobs.

“There’s a lot of [data] tools out there … that focus on the analyst, [and] you have traditional BI [business intelligence] tools that are focused more on the kind of consumers who are passively looking at information,” Lockwood stated. “We really see that that gap between supply and demand as a problem [of] taking a one-size-fits-all approach and not tailoring applications to end-user experience.”

The continuum

A key point of the interview centered on Lockwood’s description of Logi Analytics’ concept of the continuum within businesses: “There’s the consumer … this is actually probably the majority of most organizations, and at this point, it’s really about reading information … it’s not about interacting with the underlying data. As you … become a more advanced information worker, you move into what we call ‘the creators,’ and these are more of the people who … want to supplement those dashboards and reports that they’re given with their own metrics and measures, and that’s also a fairly large portion of most enterprise deployments.”

Lockwood continued: “And then you have the analysts, which are kind of the guys who want that blank canvas where they can pull in [various data] and mash it all together into new insights.”

Logi Analytics finds out the grouping percentages for employees along this continuum for its studied companies “and then build analytic capabilities tailored to their needs. We also focus … on embedability, and the reason that we focus on that is because we want to make sure that that information is delivered in the context of where people are actually working.”

Describing Logi Analytics’ “direct-connect” model, which allows the company to access foundational databases without moving the contents, Lockwood identified the core idea behind the company’s value to its users. “Basically, what we provide is a really kind of custom presentation tier, our front-end, to what they do really well on the back-end, which allows us to basically translate the value of their back-end systems into solutions and business use-cases.”

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