With data being continually harnessed for better business decision-making, presenting it in a language and method that is easy to use and cost efficient is a necessity now more than ever.

Data gathering has emerged as the new norm, as it’s involved in every aspect of business. But making data easily accessible continues to challenge organizations. Unified data operations company Nexla Inc. fills this void by democratizing data to users through a data mesh framework, according to Saket Saurabh (pictured), co-founder and chief executive officer of Nexla.

“Nexla’s purpose and mission has always been ready to use data in the hands of the users,” Saurabh explained. “What Nexla does today is make it possible for users across the board, whether they are data scientists, data analysts, or people in various business functions, to get the data that they need in the tools that they work with. We make that possible in a very no-code way for users to get access to the data.” 

Saurabh spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Lisa Martin in advance of the upcoming AWS Startup Showcase: “Data as Code — The Future of Enterprise Data and Analytics” event, an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, airing April 5. They discussed the AWS-Nexla partnership and how Nexla enables data to get to users through the data mesh concept involving data engineering and democratization. (* Disclosure below.)

Data mesh as a game-changer

The ability to harness the power and insights presented by data is critical for businesses to succeed. Data mesh makes this a reality by providing a framework that enables enterprises to scale, according to Saurabh.

“Data mesh is in the lineage of the concept of democratizing data … that bottleneck of depending on engineering to do everything for you is just not going to work,” he stated. “What the data mesh is doing is bringing a framework by which users of data, we call them the domains, the different functions that use data to use and manage the data themselves.”

The data mesh framework enables enterprises to carry out different roles, including analytics, operations and order tracking, Saurabh explained.

“We have customers like Marchex, Poshmark and Bed Bath & Beyond, and so on, who use us heavily to bring data for the analytics use cases,” he pointed out. “We have customers like Narvar that use us to connect to different shipping tracking systems. So the applications of data are in analytics, operations, which is core business, and in data science.” 

By running most of its infrastructure on Amazon Web Services, Saurabh believes this approach enables Nexla to offer a solid data framework.  

“We are very much partnered up with AWS because AWS covers the whole gamut, from companies that were started yesterday to extremely large enterprises, making our technology accessible to them,” he added.

Data product is at the heart of the data mesh framework

With data-driven applications becoming prevalent, Saurabh believes the data mesh framework offers flexible and cost-effective solutions when creating, governing and utilizing data products.

“Data mesh concept comes with the understanding that there should be an entity which we call a data product … a data product becomes that sort of common entity that becomes something that people can get access to or they can use and collaborate on,” Saurabh explained. “So, where Nexla comes in is we automatically generate these data products.”

Delivering dash mesh as a single tool that gives enterprises with varying levels of technical fluency the access needed is made possible by the data product aspect.  

“What we are able to do is to say that we can actually connect to data systems, look through the data, understand it, and package it up as a data product,” Saurabh added.

The data product is packaged in a way that other people can use it easily because it involves adding other structures to the raw materials. Therefore, the Nexsets concept is a manifestation of this entity, according to Saurabh. Nexsets are a modern take on the traditional dataset that are automatically generated by Nexla’s continuous metadata intelligence layer.

“In the world of data, APIs, files and database tables are the raw materials,” Saurabh stated.  “You take the core data and you put things around it, like what is the description of data? What is the structure of it? What are the validations that make it work? When you take that raw material and put all of those other structures around it, that’s when it sort of becomes a data product.” 

Just like the concept of containers in compute, Saurabh believes Nexsets are the logical entities that enable access to data resources. “So, data mesh is a much broader framework, but we are sort of the building block for that through this concept,” he added.

By offering better visibility, Nexla helps in mitigating challenges such as supply chain. 

“I think what happens is technologies like ours, which are the data layer, are at a fundamental foundational level,” Saurabh said. “One of the things about Nexla is that we are able to bring data into a much more real-time usage.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s pre-event coverage of the AWS Startup Showcase: “Data as Code — The Future of Enterprise Data and Analytics” event.

Photo: SiliconANGLE