By providing in-depth visibility into an organization’s performance within specific areas, analytics and business intelligence are integral to the enterprise today.

But with issues such as tooling fragmentation and collaborative complexities plaguing an already-mature analytics industry, how is the status quo being improved for companies to unlock new value delivery and cost efficiency areas?

“We had sort of always felt this pain point around a lot of fragmentation and a lot of pain for organizations that actually want to make value [out] of all the data they’re bringing together,” said Barry McCardel (pictured), co-founder and chief executive officer of Hex Technologies Inc. “They’re spending millions and millions of dollars on data storage, ETL, compute, hiring out whole data teams. They want to get a lot of value from that. But then the fragmentation of the actual tools that people are using every day and the lack of collaboration really winds up holding these folks back.”

McCardel spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Lisa Martin during a CUBE Conversation in advance of the “Analytics and Cost Optimization” AWS Startup Showcase event on June 8. They discussed Hex’s unique approach to enterprise analytics, specifically through Hex Magic, which was built to augment and accelerate human insight. (* Disclosure below.)

Rejuvenating a stagnated BI space

Within IT teams, data analytics is often seen as a dreary but necessary undertaking. The dreary part of that perception stems from long-standing problems, such as tooling fatigue and fragmentation, leading to unwanted consequences, such as replicated work, inconsistent analysis and increased security risks. Hex is an integrated workspace for data analytics. It streamlines the entire analytics workflow through no-code reporting, collaborative notebooks, interactive visualizations and an AI assistant for generating, editing and debugging code — among other things.

“Then you can take that and actually publish it as an interactive report or dashboard that anyone can use,” McCardel explained. “You can really kind of go end to end. This is in contrast to a lot of existing tooling where you have to jump between a bunch of different things to do anything. All of this is cloud-based, it’s collaborative first, so it works like a modern productivity tool that you’d expect like a Google Doc, Figma or Notion.”

Magic is a set of features, powered by large language models, that is integrated right into any workflow on the Hex platform to perform tasks such as the generation, editing and cleaning of code. By taking on these tasks, Magic augments and accelerates human insights, allowing workers to get creative and ask the right questions of their data.

“If you’re a data scientist or data analyst, you can ask our magic features to help you generate, edit, explain, debug code right where you’re working,” McCardel explained. “It really helps people work more efficiently, more effectively and focus on the things humans are really great at, which is the creative aspect of work. Those features have been super well received, and bringing AI into more parts of the workflow is a big focus of ours.”

Here’s the complete video interview, and be sure to check out SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s upcoming “Analytics and Cost Optimization” AWS Startup Showcase event on June 8:

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE