A business may have the tools to access its data and even analyze that data, but making that information available and accessible to non-data scientists remains the challenge. Looker Data Sciences, Inc. aims to solve this dilemma with a data platform that lets data analysts have their way with data, and then easily exposes this data so that his or her team, partners and customers can ask and answer their own questions.

Founded in 2012 by Lloyd Tabb and Ben Porterfield, the company has raised a whopping $98 million in funding and has grown from 100 employees and 250 customers in 2015 to about 250 employees and more than 700 customers in 2016.

Looker Data Sciences certainly knows what it’s doing around data. Keenan Rice, VP of Strategic Alliances at Looker Data Sciences, sat down with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the HPE Big Data Conference to talk about how the company has successfully ridden the Big Data wave.

Providing data access to everyone

“We built the company to be cloud native, 100 percent in-database, and to leverage the growth and innovation that’s happening in the data storage layer,” Rice said. “We’re that thing on top that helps customers describe that data and lets everyone else find it, access it and do their own data discovery.”

Rice said that Looker Data Sciences markets mainly to business intelligence and analytics teams. “Business users are hungry for information,” he said. “Their previous tools are becoming the gatekeeper. Looker allows everyone to have access.”

Rice complimented HPE on the release of Vertica 8 (which introduces a unified architecture and advanced in-database analytics capabilities) and its emphasis on the cloud. Looker Data Sciences, he said, was born in the cloud. But it doesn’t worry much about the shift in consumer demand away from on-prem technology.

“We’ve seen that shift tremendously from every industry in our customer base, from healthcare to retail,” he explained. “With any new change you have to get over your fears. Whether they are regulatory fears or just general control fears.”

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE