Enterprises are sitting on top of a mass amount of data that they have no idea how to use.

And even if they have access to it, they aren’t au fait with what’s actually inside the collections — so it’s unworkable. This is according to a company that claims to catalog data automatically — and do it all within a 15-minute workload.

It’s a “missing gap in the market that I wanted to fulfill,” said veteran startup maven Shinji Kim (pictured), founder and chief executive officer of Select Star. “I saw lot of the issues starting to happen when enterprises are starting to try to use data.”

Kim previously launched streaming data startup Concord Systems, now owned by Akamai Technologies Inc. and renamed IoT Edge Connect. She spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Lisa Martin and Paul Gillin at the recent AWS re:Invent conference, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the concepts behind automated data discovery. (* Disclosure below.)

Data discovery gap

Scaling data is no longer a challenge for the types of automotive and consumer electronics companies that Kim worked with at Concord Systems. They’ve got a handle on that, and on collecting it, storing it and processing it, she stated. Cloud providers have been helping with those formerly difficult areas.

But it’s the data discovery where there’s still a hole: “There are a lot of customers out there looking for an easier, faster, time-to-value solution,” she says of why she thinks the business has legs. “It’s getting harder and harder for people that want to utilize data, make decisions around data, and analyze data.”

Cloud data warehouses and data lakes are prime areas of focus, in part, because data from different sources is arriving there. But also it’s the datum enterprises want to analyze.

“This is a place where you can join other data sets within the same infrastructural umbrella,” Kim stated. “We act like Google for data scientists, data analysts and data engineers.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent:

(* Disclosure: Select Star sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Select Star nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE