Being a data analyst isn’t easy. Keeping information flowing for decision makers requires specialized knowledge and expertise at investigating patterns in raw numbers – but for the most part, it involves cleaning, changing, organizing and validating data for processing.

This tedious and largely manual task takes up as much as 80 percent of analysts’ time, according to Prakash Nanduri, the co-founder and CEO of Paxata. His newly launched startup is helping analysts become more productive with a cloud service that bridges the gap between Hadoop and the front-end applications that serve up insights for business users.

Speaking on theCUBE, Nanduri details that his firm raised $10 million for the solution, which is already used by a number of major brands to automate data preparation. A pioneer in the field of information management, Nanduri was the first to recognize the “missing link” to delivering rapid insights at scale.

“The biggest challenge in an analytics exercise is for a business analyst to very rapidly prepare the data,” he says. “That is, to combine, to enrich, to merge and to clean the dataset – get it ready – so that they can visualize or analyze that data with any tool of their choice. And that’s where we thought that it’d be fantastic to have this piece, we thought that was a whitespace.”

Asked about the disruption BI and data warehousing, Nanduri notes that this transformation is driven primarily by evolving user requirements. As he sees it, the dramatic growth in data volumes is driving demand for self-service capabilities and rendering traditional warehousing architectures obsolete in the process.

Watch the video below for more details about Paxata and the secret to simplifying preprocessing across both structured and unstructured data sources.