New sources of information have created an opportunity for decision makers to gain unprecedented insight into the bottom line, but there remain a number of technical barriers to unlocking the true value of Big Data. In a recent interview with SiliconANGLE Senior Editor Kristen Nicole, Lawrence Schwartz, vice president of marketing at Attunity, detailed how his firm helps enterprise customers overcome these challenges and make the most out of their analytics investments.

Schwartz, who boasts of working in this space long before Big Data became a buzzword, joined Attunity in June after recognizing that the company is leading the way in making information more accessible and has a broad vision encompassing major market trends like the cloud. The vendor develops solutions that enable companies to gain real time visibility into multiple data sources across both legacy systems and NoSQL deployments.

“One of the challenges that companies face is ‘I got my data in one place, or in multiple sources, I’m pulling in all this information from sensors or other things. How do I manage all that information and get it to where it needs to go so I can do productive things with it and analyze it?’ And that’s what we focus on,” Schwartz explains.

Faster access to information can powerfully impact day-to-day operations, he continues, highlighting that credit reporting giant Equifax is leveraging Attunity tech to improve fraud detection. For data scientists, this functionality facilitates the creation of smarter algorithms that can exploit fast-moving information like shopping behavior. Storage supplier Smart Modular, another Attunity client, is using the vendor’s software to streamline manufacturing operations and enable a more efficient supply chain.

Schwartz’s firm is driving a lot of business value for users across multiple verticals, thanks in small part to extensive support for third party offerings like AWS. Amazon “has been a great partner” of Attunity, the executive says, noting that the e-commerce and IaaS giant is growing at breakneck speed. OpenStack is also making gains, but Schwartz observes that the lack of a cohesive vision is hurting the project and slowing adoption.

Asked about his forecast for 2014, he tells Kristen that new use causes like data pre-processing, compounded by improvements to security and integrability, will catapult Hadoop into the enterprise mainstream this coming year.

“On the data integration side, which we focus on, some of those same questions I mentioned that people grapple with, ‘how do I get my information into Vertica or Teradata or Exadata or some other platform?’ are the same type of questions that they grapple with in Hadoop,” Schwartz says. “So being able to simplify that data integration process…being able to automate a lot of that solution, make that easier for a new user to get in there and show value, those are the things people are tackling and companies like us are working on.”

Schwartz wraps up the interview by sharing his perspective on the Internet of Things, predicting that real time analytics will empower organizations to tap into machine data and ultimately provide better experiences for consumers.