Big data is getting the star treatment in many enterprises today. The problem is its lofty position in data lakes and highly secured vaults might put it above the reach of common people in business and analytics. How can they bring it down to terra firma for practical use?

The shelves full of big data software are not solving the puzzle for most businesses. “It’s a very crowded space. Everybody’s using the same words, and that makes it very hard for people to understand what’s going on,” said Jacques Nadeau (pictured), co-founder and chief technical officer of Dremio Corp.

Nadeau spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the BigData SV event in San Jose, California. They discussed how to dissolve the barriers to hands-on data use in organizations.

The middle way to analytics enlightenment

There are too many platforms and tools on the market requiring users to jog around a learning curve to reach value, according to Nadeau. “So many technologies are technologies — they’re not products. So you have to figure out how to use the product; you’ve got to figure out how you would customize it for your certain use case,” he said, adding that Dremio is an open-source self-service data platform that gets down to business out of the gate.

Even as the means for storing big data — data lakes, NoSQL databases, etc. — have evolved, the ability for people to actually access it has regressed, according to Nadeau. One of the main reasons for this is that the developer has become the controller of the data. “That brought a huge amount of great things to it, but analysis was not one of them,” he said.

An intermediate tier between the producers and consumers of data can give analysts easier access. “That tier may interact with different systems,” Nadaeu stated. “It may be more complex, or whatever, for certain organizations. But the tier is necessary in all organizations, because the analysts shouldn’t be shaken around every time the developers change how they’re doing data.”

This is basically what the Dremio product delivers. Users can start to see value within an hour or two from kickoff, Nadeau concluded.

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE