Take a startup company driven by raw data and add in the power of HP Vertica, and what do you get? HP Big Data Hack Day winners. Looker Data Sciences, Inc., an innovative business intelligence provider, teamed up with HP for Hack Day @ the HP Big Data Conference and won based on insights they gained looking into the raw data from the New York City taxicab system.

Colin Zima, chief analytics officer and VP of product at Looker, and Joseph Yen, senior manager, business development Big Data Group, HP Software, sat down with John Furrier on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s Media production team, at the HP Big Data Conference 2015 to talk about their success and to discuss moving Big Data closer to the end user.

The hack

As part of the “hack,” the company received raw data from HP and developed queries, allowing them to explore and uncover valuable information. “We looked at the data set of New York City taxicab rides and determined that the tips for drivers peak at 5 a.m.,” said Zima. Upon drilling down on that information, they discovered the reason was this was also the peak time for airport drop-offs.

Data exploration

Looker, a relatively new company, is trying to innovate how people view the data. Zima described the company’s product as an exploration tool, explaining, “Companies want to get at the raw data and attack it. They want to start answering questions on the fly without moving the database.”

The idea is to bring the data closer to the end user, and HP Vertica plays a significant role in helping Looker achieve that goal. “Vertica’s history as a platform plays successfully with the ecosystems of a variety different of solutions,” said Yen. “HP Vertica works with Looker to take advantage of the performance and analysis capabilities within our database and is able to surface it closer to business user.”

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