If there’s one nugget among the heap of big data tools, tricks, and marketing fluff that businesses can actually use, it could be data democratization. This takes big data from a backroom concept to something business people can polish their product with day-in-day-out.

Tools like these are winning customers whose ongoing concern is product or experience improvement.

“It’s putting the power where it really needs to be,” said Ariel Molina (pictured, right), senior director of software engineering and enterprise architecture at Carnival Cruise Line, a division of Carnival Corp. “It’s the end users, the guys that are making the decisions, the product owners, the product managers that are making those slight tweaks to that interface or to that design or to that experience that makes a difference.”

Molina and Curt Persaud (pictured, left), director of IT guest technology at Carnival Cruise Line, spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Splunk .conf18 event in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. They discussed what goes into perfecting a cruise vacation and how converging siloed data can help. (* Disclosure below.)

Data answers SOS at the sushi bar

For Carnival, customer experience is pretty much everything. A customer boards their cruise ship expecting a good time, and if Carnival doesn’t deliver, it can probably kiss his or her business goodbye. The cruise line is greedily culling data together for analytics purposes, looking to anticipate customers’ needs.

Carnival uses data to help smooth out the guest journey. “We call the guest journey everything from planning a voyage, purchasing a voyage, purchasing all the data, all the auxiliary items that are up for sale, and then ultimately making it into the ship,” Persaud said.

Ensuring repeat business is also a goal. Splunk’s data-democratizing technologies — particularly its application program interfaces — activate data in distinct silos to provide a complete picture for business people making snap decisions, according to Persaud.

This ability to collate and analyze data on the fly is redefining customer service. “Say you had a bad experience at the sushi bar,” Molina said. “If we’re able to grab that information — whatever data points that allow us to understand what happened — and then do a quick recovery, we may have a guest for a repeat cruise.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Splunk .conf18 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Splunk .conf18. Neither Splunk Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE