SiliconANGLE Head Writer Winston Edmondson caught up with Ashish Thusoo,  co-founder and chief executive officer of Qubole, to discuss his company’s Big Data solution.

Qubole sells a managed Hadoop cluster called QDS. Thusoo tells Winston that the platform helps users free up resources for innovation by eliminating most of the plumbing work associated with Big Data environments. He describes it as a turnkey analytics service that offers all the benefits of a data scientist at fraction of the cost.

Analyzing data is relatively straightforward, Thusoo says, but collecting it is a different matter. For this reason, Qubole’s Hadoop stack features a set of connectors for several relational database management systems, as well as a number of NoSQL solutions such as MongoDB. The company plans to add support for REST-based services in the foreseeable future.

Thusoo boasts that QDS performs four to eight times faster and better than competing solutions. He says that this speed advantage enables organizations to gain insights that were not accessible before, and highlights that the platform’s auto-scaling capability helps users achieve their goals with minimal overhead. Winston asks him about use cases that could benefit from QDS. He lists a couple: online advertising and social media analytics. Both require a scalable solution that can handle large volumes of unstructured data.

Social networking is a major point of interest for Thusoo. He and fellow Qubole co-founder Joydeep Sarma originally created Hive, a widely-used open data warehouse that compliments Hadoop, to cure Facebook’s Big Data woes. He explains that only a few individuals knew how to use MapReduce at the time, and a simpler alternative was needed to make the framework accessible for a broader audience.

Check out the video below for the full interview.