Aaron Kalb, Head of Product & Co-Founder, Alation | AWS re:Invent 2017 #reInvent #theCUBE https://siliconangle.com/2018/01/04/data-software-partners-copycat-aws-customer-game-reinvent/ Behavioral data science Making big data analytics accessible to relative laity lacking data science Ph.D.s is no mean feat. The big data lakes that many companies have amassed can often be an unholy mess to dig through in search of insight. “It’s kind of like having a huge basement,” said Aaron Kalb, co-founder and head of product at Alation Inc. Companies with data lakes can become hoarders, throwing every scrap of data into cheap storage, he told theCUBE hosts during the re:Invent conference. When business people actually have to find, understand and analyze the data, all those unlabeled boxes piled to the rafters present a time-consuming chore. “I think the key is to think about how do you make information searchable, discoverable, understandable, trustworthy,” he said. Alation modeled its data cataloging around the Amazon.com buying experience, with annotations and suggestions based on past behavior related to the data. The way people have used data in the past gives up hints about the way it can or should be used in the present, Kalb explained. This is Alation’s “behavior I/O” in a nutshell. Alation offers data lake support for S3, which many of its customers use along with Amazon Redshift data warehousing. “Our customers are so smart — we learn so much from them,” he said. One thing it’s learned is that additional tooling is often needed to make sense of data in the cloud. AWS is tops for containing storage and compute costs, but that does not help business people find out quickly what’s in all those boxes, Kalb stated. “Alation helps with the human side,” he said. Watch the complete video interview with Aaron Kalb below: