If data is a mine, insights are the gold. And to improve the bottom line, businesses are mining data for key insights. But what happens after they find that gold? To be useful, data insights must empower a company to do better business, and now tech companies are discovering new ways to generate actionable business insights in real-time.

“There are two problems. One, is everyone wants to transform, the digital transformation mantra. They want to automate their operation environment to cut costs. And the other one is they want to improve customer engagement. These are the two key challenges for any business,” said Yaron Haviv (pictured), founder and chief technology officer at Iguazio Systems Ltd.

Haviv spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Jim Kobielus (@jameskobielus), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, during this week’s BigData NYC event. They discussed data insights, real-time services and application development. (* Disclosure below.)

Data is a tool, not the goal

While modern businesses need to collect and process data, data itself is not the goal. Companies are looking through the data for insights, according to Haviv. And translating data into actionable insights means more than just running queries and reports. General data processing tools don’t know how to find those insights.

Cloud services can help, and many companies do turn to cloud providers to produce their insights. However, this can take time. That’s a problem, because often actionable insights are most powerful in the moment. Real-time insights are now a vital part of business, Haviv reiterated.

Iguazio is a machine learning vendor that works with real-time concerns. “Every time I run machine learning tasks or any decision event, I have to collect [all the] data into one vector; it’s called feature vector, and take a decision on that,” Haviv said. Being able to assemble many types of data into that feature vector makes the Iguazio system flexible he added.

This gives customers a certain simplicity they can use to build applications. The end result is quick development. “Let’s focus on the application and build from the application all the way to the flash and the instruction set and adaptors in a network. That’s what’s different; we provide an application and service experience; we don’t provide the infrastructure,” Haviv concluded.

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE