Day 2 Wrap-Up at Tableau Conference 2014 with John Furrier and Jeff Kelly @theCUBE #Data14 he Strata Conference is now in full swing with a flurry of announcements from the biggest names in analytics. A major theme of this year’s event is making insights more consumable for business users, a challenge that Paxata is addressing with patent-pending technology for transforming raw data into information that can be used by front-end applications such as Tableau and QlikView. Prakash Nanduri, the co-founder and CEO of the venture-backed startup, explained in an interview on theCUBE last year that “the biggest challenge in an analytics exercise is for a business analyst to very rapidly prepare the data. That is, to combine, to enrich, to merge and to clean the dataset – get it ready – so that they can visualize or analyze that data with any tool of their choice. And that’s where we thought that it’d be fantastic to have this piece, we thought that was a whitespace.” Paxata offers a cloud-based service that automates all this manual work, which Naduri says takes up as much as 80 percent of an analyst’s time, to help organizations cut costs and gain faster access to insights. The latest version of the offering, showcased today at Strata, introduces much-needed governance capabilities, including change management auditing, role-based access control features and the ability to search for modifications at the tenant, user and cell levels. Finally, the firm added a simplified interface that lets customers get up and running in a matter of minutes. The next frontier for productivity Predictive analytics provider Alpine Labs is also helping business users make the most out of their information with a purpose-built collaboration solution called Chorus. On display at Strata, the web-based tool enables teams to work in tandem via a drag-and-drop data visualization component described as being “almost as easy as using Facebook.” “Alpine Chorus is a server-based solution that not only acts as the one-place for managing data access and models but it is also the central place for managing users,” said Steven Hillion, Chief Product Officer at Alpine Data Labs. “We do not actually store datasources on Chorus. In fact, we use a technology called “In-Cluster Analytics” which allows us to work with data, wherever it is stored – without ever having to move it around.” The software doubles as an application layer for running algorithms directly on Hadoop without having to move data back and forth from third party tools. Built-in search functionality rounds out the package, providing self-service access to different types of information that would not otherwise be immediately available. Hillion also noted that “with this new product, we are giving all ‘Data People’ the tools and processes they need to build a ‘Data Nation’ around them. This means engaging all relevant people in the process of Data Science — from executives to business analysts to data engineers, to partners.”