Doing business in the modern world means collecting data. However, data that’s locked up in storage isn’t worth much to corporations. Neither, really, is processed data. For data to be useful, it must be part of a decision, leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to aid those people who need data the most. When they use the right data in the right way, people can make more impactful decisions.

“The thing we’ve observed, a lot of people in the data space are concerned about the data itself. We’re really concerned with the human side of it. Data is only valuable if it’s used by people,” said Aaron Kalb (pictured), head of product at Alation Inc.

Kalb spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the recent BigData NYC conference in New York. During his time with theCUBE, Kalb spoke about presenting data, working with where data lives and the cloud trend. (* Disclosure below.)

The right data, at the right time, in the right way

Data is important, but presenting that information is even more critical. For big data, that means presenting information in a way that humans can understand. It also means offering the right information on request. The right data presented in the right way enables better decisions, but the analytics systems need a degree of artificial intelligence to make that happen, according to Kalb.

The key is organization. Machine intelligence needs to watch the trends inside the data and catalog it in a useful way. Companies must categorize and understand the data in a “step zero” before processing. Context helps data processing provide the most useful insights, Kalb explained.

Data also doesn’t live all in one place. A proper organizational system needs a single point of reference, but it must also reach out to multiple data sources. “It’s kind of like Google. It’s one index of the whole web, even though the web is distributed all over the place,” Kalb said. To do this, it’s necessary to build partnerships with data world companies and vendors.

Because Alation has built those partnerships with companies like Cloudera Inc. and Hortonworks Inc., the business can offer products that work across clouds and on-premises setups, according to Kalb.

“I do think I’m seeing a trend more and more toward the cloud. People are realizing as each Equifax [data breach] happens, this old Wild West model where you surround your bank with people, data doesn’t like that,” Kalb said. Companies are turning to trusted clouds, such as Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google to secure their data.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of BigData NYC 2017. (* Disclosure: Alation Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Alation nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE