The SIIA is delighted to introduce one of the newest members to join SIIA’s Software & Services Division, Qubole. I had a chance to sit down with Ashish Thusoo, Co-Founder & CEO of Qubole to learn a little more their data services. Please find my interview below.

Rhianna: Tell us a little about Qubole and what makes you unique.

Ashish: Qubole has quickly become recognized as a leader in the nascent big data in the cloud space, and offers one of the most comprehensive, economical and easy-to-use solution for enterprises. Qubole is the only company that enables customers to perform big-data analytics in the three major public cloud environments, and offers a unified interface for a growing list of open-source data processing engines. By managing the costs of data projects by providing automatic scaling of servers, Qubole ensures the lowest cost operating environment. The simplicity, comprehensiveness, risk mitigation and sheer scalability are key reasons for Qubole’s incredibly rapid growth.

Rhianna: Why do you think companies struggle so much with their big data initiatives?

Ashish: Data scientists are limited in their ability to move independently and require a system admin to scale compute power, fine-tune clusters, or add a new data source, making it nearly impossible to capitalize on immediate opportunities. Companies taking on data projects often expect that big data insights will quickly ripple throughout the organization and all departments will have data to better inform their work. But the way that data teams are structured today stymies the data scientists’ ability to focus on more than one project at a time, much less transform the analysis into something understandable by department heads.  

The Qubole Data Service is fundamentally changing how data teams are structured by offering a self-service big data platform that automatically scales compute power as the needs change. Currently, most organizations have one system admin for every two data scientists – Qubole has reduced that ration to one system admin for every 21 data scientists. This allows data scientists to operate independently and act on opportunities as they arise.  

Rhianna: What are the keys to building a truly data-driven organization?

Ashish: To truly transform an organization to use data to guide the way it operates takes time and a massive amount of data from multiple data streams. Once it’s been analyzed, the data can’t just sit with the data team, it needs to infiltrate the marketing, finance, HR, operations and executive teams.  

In order for that to happen, data teams have to find a scalable way to process data in near real-time and feed those insights into business processes. They can’t be hindered by failures, throughput issues or cost, all of which occur when using an on-premise datacenter. The cloud was tailor made for big data because of its speed, scale and agility. Qubole provides the platform for organizations to process massive amounts of data quickly and automatically scales compute power with the current needs, removing much of the legwork that goes into the data science process.

Rhianna: You nominated for your first CODiE Award this year. What would a CODiE win mean for a young company like Qubole?

Ashish: This award would be a huge validator for Qubole. The CODiE awards are unique because the technology is evaluated by our peers – the people who would interact with QDS in their daily lives. The market has changed and technology buyers are realizing the opportunity that big data in the cloud presents, which is why we’ve has such tremendous growth and can name big brands like AutoDesk, Pinterest and Pearson among our customers. The CODiE Awards would not only further establish us as a leader in the space, but would also recognize the quality of our product to a hugely influential group that could help open doors for Qubole as we continue to grow.  

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA. Follow the Software team on Twitter at @SIIASoftware.