Because data is becoming more and more distributed by its very nature, technology must continue to innovate within that complex environment.

For many innovative technology companies — including Collibra NV, whose services help customers unlock the value of data with one seamless system — the possibilities for the universal value of data are tantalizing.

“Imagine being able to generate those instructions from everything that we have in our metadata repository to say, ‘This is exactly the data I need you to go get,’ and perform what we call a distributed query against those data sets and bringing it back to them,” said Jim Cushman (pictured), chief product offer of Collibra. “No code written.”

Cushman spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the Data Citizens ’21 event. They discussed the ideas around low code and no code, self service and automation. (* Disclosure below.)

The benefits of no code or low code, self-service and automation

The idea of low code or no code is gaining a lot of momentum in the industry. But while everybody’s talking about it, there are still a lot of questions. The data pipeline development is a relatively expensive thing today, and that’s why people spend a lot of money maintaining these pipelines, according to Cushman. However, the real beauty to low code and no code is that it could change this.

“Imagine if there was zero cost to building your pipeline. Would you spend any money to maintain it? Probably not,” Cushman said. “So if we can build it for no cost, then why maintain it? Just build it every time you need it … done on a self-service basis.”

When people hear self service, it’s usually about the hardcore developers, according to Cushman. But the reality is that at the end of the data pipeline is a business person waiting for data or wanting new data. Actually enabling service for business by simplification is the holy grail, because data is becoming more and more complex.

“What the industry is pulling us towards is far greater amounts of data — not that just millions or even tens of millions, but into the hundreds of millions and billions of things that we need to manage,” Cushman explained. “Not only are you dealing with large amounts at performance, but you have to do it in a global fashion. And the data needs to … go to the user as opposed to having the user come to the data as much as possible.”

This really does put a lot of emphasis on non-functional requirements, also known as the “ilities,” and the ability to automatically bring the data and handle those large enterprise grade capabilities at scale and performance, according to Cushman. It’s requirements like this that are driving Collibra’s current investments.

“One of the things we’ve done very successfully since our origin over a decade ago was building a business user-friendly software. So business users love working with our software. They can find what they’re looking for and they don’t need to have some cryptic key of how to work with it,” Cushman concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Data Citizens ’21 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Data Citizens ’21. Neither Collibra NV, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE