Why is there so much data and so many tools to analyze it, yet so little resultant business value? Perhaps because tools are usually in the hands of data experts, while line-of-business laymen might accomplish more with them.

“We’ve separated the people who had the tools from the people who knew what they wanted to do with [them],” said Nenshad Bardoliwalla (pictured, left), co-founder and chief product officer of Paxata Inc. Companies that want to derive value from data will have to break open these silos, Bardoliwalla added.

Bardoliwalla and Pranav Rastogi (pictured, right), program manager of Azure at Microsoft Corp., spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and James Kobielus (@jameskobielus), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the recent BigData NYC event. (* Disclosure below.)

Big data comes down to earth

Big data analysts and practitioners have been calling for democratized, cross-department access to data for some time. However, “There’s no democracy without certain degrees of governance,” Bardoliwalla said.

Paxata partners with Microsoft to render big data technologies to business consumers in a hybrid cloud environment. “The benefit that you get in the cloud is the centralized authentication systems,” Rastogi said. Azure Active Directory, for example, enables policy-based governance to authorize different users to access data depending on circumstances.

Paxata users with no knowledge of say, Apache Spark or Hadoop big data frameworks, can get insights from data via a graphical user interface, Rastogi pointed out. This ease of use is not achieved by downsizing the data, according to Bardoliwalla.

“Our whole approach is to smash the batch paradigm and actually bring as much into the interactive world as possible,” Bardoliwalla said.

End users can point and click on a hundred million rows of data and get an instantaneous response. “We can actually take the tools that once were only in the hands of the shamans who know how to utter the right incantations, and instead move that to the common folk,” he 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: Paxata Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Paxata nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE