Some analysts recommend that companies of all sizes should pursue Big Data strategies. They say that even smaller businesses can make significant gains from integrating data into their operations. Fair enough, but smaller companies tend to have smaller infrastructure and databases. Even very large enterprises can feel small in context with Big Data. So how do companies with limited means scale to match nearly unlimited datasets?

Itamar Ankorion, CMO of Attunity, Inc., talked about two issues driving companies looking to profit from Big Data. “One is a very specific analytic application. So a customer has a very specific analytic problem they are trying to solve,” Ankorion told ave Vellante (@dvellante) and Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during BigDataNYC 2016. “On the other hand, we’re seeing customers that are building infrastructure; they recognize that data is going to change their business, and they want to become more data-oriented companies. And they’re building data lakes as a foundation,” he explained.

“So they may not have a specific application or a specific use case yet in mind. They have few that they’re thinking about, but they want to make sure they’re building the right infrastructure to accommodate it,” Ankorion said.

The recurring scalability nightmare

Ankorian said for both types of customers, scaling out is like rolling a rock up a mountain that gets a little heavier with each step.

“When we look at scale, what we’re seeing is that customers are starting to scale as they move into production from having a smaller initial set of data feeds that they’re ingesting into the lake to having a much larger number of data feeds that they’re ingesting,” he said.

He claimed that configuring the feeds properly so that they don’t require individual development is one solution. Another is to cut out the need deploy agents on each database, which creates a “zero footprint” environment. Ankorian went on to claim that Attunity now makes available tools to help customers achieve these things easily.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of BigDataNYC 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE