As data management and analysis continues to mature in the context of utilization by businesses other than those primarily focused on technology, business intelligence tools are becoming more common-place, and enterprises are consequently looking to find the most flexible toolsets to meet their needs.

“If you’re trying to sell a full stack that’s integrated … I don’t think that’s what businesses want anymore,” said Bruno Aziza (pictured, left), chief marketing officer at AtScale Inc.

Aziza and Josh Klahr (pictured, right), vice president of product management at AtScale, met with John Furrier (@furrier) and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, at BigData SV 2017 in San Jose, CA. (*Disclosure below.)

Aziza and Klahr discussed their company’s role in BI, how they’ve distinguished themselves and what they see as some of the most important trends in that field.

AtScale is focusing on growing its partner ecosystem, and its customers are being increasingly recognized for the work they are  achieving while using AtScale’s services, they said. The maturation of big data and the wider recognition of the possibilities it enables are big motivators of these trends.

Two key aspects differentiating AtScale from its competitors, according to Aziza, are its status as the only BI platform that does not have a visualization tool and its ability to capitalize on “this idea that you can get the speed, the scale, and the security in big data sets without having to move the data.”

Following market direction

Klahr shared some perspective on how the desires of AtScale’s customers are influencing its developments, including efforts to fit into existing ecosystems, expansion and support of back-end platforms, anticipation of a possible move toward serverless data platforms and automation of standard tasks.

Allowing for usage of open systems and tools was another key point, one addressed by Aziza, who defined it as follows: “’Open’ means that you can choose whatever BI tool you want. … You’re going to need to provide this in a world where [users] expect that the tools they select will be open to the rest of the ecosystem.”

And while Klahr acknowledged an expectation that “over time, our customers are going to push us to build in more of our own functionality,” he made sure to emphasize that with AtScale, “what we’re building is essentially a business model.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of BigData SV 2017. (*Disclosure: Some segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE are sponsored. Sponsors have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE