Business intelligence software has been around for years. Many big-data analytics tools have the goal of providing actionable business insight. But data silos, vast data lakes, and the tricky logistics of hybrid-cloud environments can spell a long, arduous trip to the promised land. Today’s digitally driven enterprise needs piping hot BI on demand to serve customers and innovate rapidly. Technologies that span hybrid environments and cloud elasticity can drastically shorten the route from query to insight.

Companies may miss the simplicity of operating in a single environment, but they clearly find the advantages of multicloud outweigh the headaches. A staggering 81 percent of enterprises have adopted multicloud, according to RightScale Inc.’s 2018 “State of the Cloud Survey”.

With so many enterprises spread out across clouds, it’s more important than ever that analytics are not confined to one place. They need tools that work seamlessly across environments — no tinkering required.

“Business users shouldn’t have to care whether the data is on-premises or in the hybrid cloud or in the cloud itself,” said Ajay Anand (pictured, right), vice president of product management and marketing at Kyvos Insights Inc. “They should get that same interactive response, the same familiar user interface.”

This requires a BI consumption layer that is exactly the same anywhere, anytime, he added. Kyvos delivers this with elasticity improvements in its recently released version 5.

Anand and Ankit Khandelwal (pictured, left), senior director of engineering at Kyvos, spoke with John Walls (@JohnWalls21) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. They discussed the best in technology available for multicloud BI and Kyvos version 5. (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE spotlights Kyvos in our Startup of the Week feature.

Too many tools in BI shed

The BI market is expected to grow from $17.09 billion in 2016 to $26.88 billion by 2021, at a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 9.5 percent, according to MarketsandMarkets Research Private Ltd. BI services are expected to grow at a higher CAGR than BI platforms during that same period. The market indeed seems to be crying out for solutions that power through the complexity of big data. Companies want a quicker, cleaner route to actionable insight.

“The BI and analytics space is a mess,” Frank Bien, chief executive officer of Looker Data Sciences Inc., told SiliconANGLE in December. “There’s a proliferation of tools for visualization, data preparation, cataloging, and the like, and customers need to piece them together.”

Looker aims to eliminate the data extraction and preparation processes by querying multiple sources directly allowing users to embed visualizations in other platforms. The company recently closed a late-stage financing round of $103 million, bringing its total funding to $280.5 million.

“Looker is about reducing the data supply chain,” Bien said.

OLAP accordion cost-effectively plays data, infrastructure

Kyvos’ consumption layer spans vast, messy big-data lakes and multiple on-prem or cloud environments. It shrinks the time it takes to get from query to insight, according to Anand. “We deliver the capability of doing instant business intelligence on data at massive scale,” he said.

Kyvos leverages online analytical processing, or OLAP technology, to provide scalable BI for big data across environments. Elastic OLAP in the cloud enables easy scale-up, scale-down flexibility, Anand explained.

Kyvos version 5 leverages the elasticity of cloud resources to ensure performance and to manage cost. Elastic OLAP in the cloud can scale out to deal with big loads and scale down as users build multi-dimensional cubes. They can decide to build a 100 terabyte cube and spin up just the right amount of infrastructure needed and then shrink it down.

“Once the load actually reduces, then you can reduce the resources that you are actually consuming,” Khandelwal said. “That’s how we reduce the cost that is borne by the customer and that is giving them better ROI on the hardware they are investing in.”

The elasticity extends to querying processes as well. Kyvos customer Walgreens Co. is solving problems with the platform that they had never imagined they’d solve, Anand expalined. They are querying hundreds of billions of rows of data and getting instant responses.

Kyvos customer winnings

Kyvos features built-in security functions that make use by a very large number of users safe, according to Anand.

“At Walgreens, they’ve got external users as well as internal users, all accessing the same cube, and they all need to see only what they’re allowed to see,” he said. “We maintain that security from the user to the data, and we keep track of who’s allowed to see what and expose only that.”

Kyvos also boasts Verizon Communications Inc. as a customer and is picking up users in finance. The faster query responses enable more natural, real-time exploration of data.

“We’ve got a bank that’s doing risk analysis as they look for new investments,” Anand said. “It used to take them days to do that risk analysis before they could make a decision. Now they can do it in seconds.”

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE