SiliconAngle Studio B host Winston Edmondson caught up with Scott Cappiello, the vice president of product management for business analytics specialist MicroStrategy, at the Hadoop Summit in San Jose. The two chatted about data visualization and MicroStrategy’s value proposition for enterprises that are implementing Hadoop in their environments. Cappiello observes that Hadoop Summit 2013 featured more customer presentations and use cases than previous years. He changes the topic to his company, and highlights that they leverage the Hive data warehousing system to integrate its BI software with Hadoop. He says that the system is a “natural fit” for the task, especially considering that the platform’s response times continue to improve as it matures. MicroStrategy’s software transforms large datasets into easily readable dashboards. According to Cappiello, the technology helps decision makers view insights without having to write MapReduce jobs, understand how Hadoop works, or consult a data scientist. He adds that his company’s memory layer solution complements the analytics framework by enabling users to query streaming data. Yahoo is one the many firms that leverage MicroStrategy’s platform. Cappiello tells Winston that the offering is gaining traction in a wide range of industries, including the financial services sector and retail. The executive explains that data visualization is becoming increasingly important because it simplifies the hardest part of analytics: turning raw data into value. He adds that CIOs who are interesting in deploying Hadoop should not approach it as an alternative to their existing data warehouse, but rather as a different platform with different benefits. He believes that companies should familiarize themselves with Big Data before importing legacy workloads into the platform.