One day, regular line-of-business people might be able to handle high-level data monetization themselves with a do it yourself tool. Today is not that day for The Honest Co. The natural home and personal care brand, co-founded by actress Jessica Alba, acquired and integrated a big data software as a service startup called Insnap Inc. in 2016 to become more data-driven.

“Insnap was more about instantaneously building personas and using machine learning and a big data stack; and Honest at that time was trying to find someone who could help them with the data challenge,” said Shafaq Abdullah (pictured), Insnap co-founder, now director of data infrastructure at The Honest Co.

Insnap’s focus was real-time machine learning models powered by the Apache Spark streaming data engine, Abdullah told George Gilbert (@ggilbert41) and David Goad (@davidgoad), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during this year’s Spark Summit event in San Francisco, California.

“We used that to basically help Honest to really become data driven, to solve their next-generation problem of making products which drive value out of data and understand their customers better,” Abdullah said. The Insnap team started applying machine learning to tune the business right away, greatly improving its search engine to start, according to Abdullah.

Many hats for Insnap

To be sure, Honest expects the Insnap acquisition to pull its weight and is relying on the algorithms the team builds for high business yield.

“Instead of just recommending or predicting LTV [Lifetime Value] or churn, what we are doing is we are trying to be more … descriptive in our analytics,” Abdullah said.

The team must in turn select high-efficiency tools and strategies to drive data across the whole business, he added.

“We don’t even have a dedicated DevOps on our team,” Abdullah said, explaining that they use the DataBricks Inc. analytics platform to spin up clusters for development.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Spark Summit 2017. (* Disclosure: DataBricks Inc. sponsored this Spark Summit 2017 segment on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither DataBricks nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE