We all know that Big Data is big for a reason: It takes a very large amount of data for an analytics tool to produce actionable intelligence. The problem is that when time is of the essence — and it usually is — extracting, cleansing and preparing data can take too long, allowing the window to value to close. According to one company, for data to be a usable tool for businesses, preparation has to be a sprint not a marathon.

“I like to say that there’s a data scientist in all of us,” said Prakash Nanduri, cofounder and CEO of Paxata, Inc. He told hosts John Furrier (@furrier) and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41) of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, “There may be 200,000 data scientists out there, but there are 200 million business analysts.” And the later could perform data science, he said, if we could automate data preparation.

The complete idiot’s guide to data

Nanduri said that Paxata has used machine learning and other technologies to automate preparation, so anyone can “go from data to information in minutes, not months, and with clicks, not code.” He contends that Paxata requires the least technical ability of any similar data tool available.

All or nothing

Nanduri said Paxata offers an independent platform to sit on top of your data lake or infrastructure that gathers it all in one place for manipulation and analytics. And it doesn’t matter where your data lives or how many analytics tools you use.

He said that using all data and not just samples for analytics is crucial in some spaces. “When you’re focused on a use case like anti-money laundering, saying that you’re going to try to pull samples of data to clean, it doesn’t cut it,” he said. “If you’re finding a bad guy, and you’re working in national security, you need to work with full datasets not samples.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Hadoop Summit US.

Photo by SiliconANGLE