Big-data-as-a-service company Qubole Inc. is making some big claims ahead of Amazon Web Services Inc.’s AWS re:Invent conference next week, saying its data service platform has helped AWS users to save a serious $140 million in information technology costs.

The announcement came as Qubole introduced what it calls “optimized support” for AWS’s per-second billing that will help customers save even more on their cloud costs. In addition, Qubole said it’s providing a new online tool for AWS’s Elastic MapReduce service that can be used to estimate total-cost-of-ownership savings.

The company’s flagship, cloud-based Qubole Data Service offering, helps enterprises scale up their big-data teams and projects by automating many tedious and time-consuming tasks that were previously done by people. It was originally designed to democratize the Apache Hadoop framework by providing a simplified, cloud-based interface through which users can enter simple queries about their data without any particular skills.

QDS retrieves data via a series of connectors and uses algorithms to provide answers to user queries. The platform also allocates hardware resources for each specific request, freeing up the infrastructure once it’s finished as a way of minimizing overheads.

In September the company announced a major update to QDS, adding machine learning capabilities that enable the platform to “self-manage and self-optimize.” This allows QDS to provide alerts and insights to users and also make recommendations on cloud pricing. For example, the Qubole Spot Shopper Agent can be used to find the best deal at any given time on Amazon Web Services’ Spot Instances, saving companies an average of 68 percent on the cost of using them.

Helping companies save money is clearly a major part of Qubole’s strategy to grow its customer base. The company’s announcement is timely too, coming hot on the heels of an alarming study by cloud management firm RightScale Inc. that predicts companies will waste as much as $10 billion in cloud spending in 2018.

Qubole explained that its platform achieves its cost efficiencies because it takes advantage of the separation between compute and storage, in contrast to traditional on-premises big-data systems that rely on converged compute and storage. Essentially it helps customers to use their cloud computing resources more efficiently, so they only pay for what they use and avoid overprovisioning things like servers and virtual machines.

“Qubole currently processes more than 750 petabytes of data in the cloud each month, and a significant amount of that data is run by our customers through AWS,” said Ashish Thusoo, chief executive officer and cofounder, Qubole (pictured). “QDS features are intelligently designed to provide the most efficient way to process big data on AWS, and the cost savings our customers have seen in 2017 show that unequivocally. Our AWS customers see an average reduction of 50 percent in TCO, with some customers seeing as much as an 80 percent reduction in costs.”

One customer that has benefited from big savings with Qubole is Wikia Inc., the Wiki hosting service founded by Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales. Wikia recently moved much of its infrastructure to the cloud, and Qubole helped save it almost three-quarters of a million dollars during its transition.

“As we made the transition to the cloud, Qubole’s ability to automate the infrastructure and easily scale to meet the demands of our users saved us time and resources and reduced our TCO by over $700,000,” said Wade Warren, senior vice president of global engineering and tech ops at Wikia.

Thusoo and co-founder Joydeep Sen Sarma spoke with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, at Qubole’s Data Platforms conference in Phoenix in May:

Photo: Qubole