Do you know where your data is? Hybrid cloud solutions, where data is stored on-premises, in private and public clouds, and at the edge, are flexible and cost-effective. But they also introduce complexity as data becomes dispersed across these multiple environments.

“You can’t get optimal results if you don’t have optimal access to the pertinent data,” said Chris Lynch (pictured), executive chairman and chief executive officer of virtual data warehouse start-up AtScale Inc.

Lynch spoke with Dave Vellante and Paul Gillin, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the MIT CDOIQ Symposium in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They discussed AtScale’s promise of providing single API access for data analysis, eliminating the business intelligence bottleneck (see the full interview with transcript here).

A truly heterogeneous, universal semantic layer

Business intelligence is a huge market opportunity, but companies wanting to transition to the cloud have run into problems accessing data for analysis.

“The reason that today we haven’t seen the delivery of the promise of big data is because we don’t have [true] big data,” Lynch said. “Big data means you can have one logical view of that data and get the best data pumped into these models in these tools, and today that’s not the case. They’re constricted by location; they’re constricted by vendor; they’re constricted by whether it’s in the cloud or on-prem.”

The answer to the problem has been known for a while: creating a universal semantic layer. But although many companies have claimed to have come up with a solution, none has completely succeeded. So, Lynch was understandably dubious when he was first approached by AtScale founder Dave Mariani.

Doing his due diligence, Lynch assembled a technical team to check out AtScale’s architecture. When he saw AtScale was the real deal, he said, “I knew the market opportunity was to take that rifle and point it at that legacy $150 billion BI market.”

An evolution, not a revolution

Instead of moving the data to the user, the AtScale platform reverses the equation, minimizing business disruption by leaving the data in place. Dispersed data is linked in a virtual warehouse, and access through a single pane of glass.

“With AtScale as one single pane of glass, we are providing an API to the data and to the user — one single API,” Lynch said.

The majority of AtScale’s customers are traditional BI customers looking to modernize their environments, according to Lynch. They’re looking for a simple, easy-to-implement BI solution to provide insights to guide operational and strategic business decisions.

“We’re multicloud, and we’re hybrid cloud,” Lynch said. “But we do it without any disruption. You’re using [Microsoft] Excel; you just continue and use it. You just see the results are faster. You use [data visualization software] Tableau, same difference.”

This ability to “non-disruptively re-platform customers between legacy platforms or from legacy platforms to the cloud” puts the company in the interesting position of being both friend and foe of its peers in the BI marketplace, according to Lynch.

“They need to be friends with us, and at the same time I’m sure that they’re concerned about the capabilities we have,” he said.

With 162% growth quarter over quarter, and “significant announcements” coming in the next few months, AtScale is planning to continue to disrupt the market by “raising the bar for customers to be able to have the freedom of choice without any sort of vendor lock-in,” Lynch said. “We make every BI user a citizen data scientist, and that’s a game-changer.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the MIT CDOIQ Symposium:

Photo: SiliconANGLE