Data analytics shop Sisu today unveiled a Smart Waterfall Charts tool that automatically visualizes search results for users of its platform. The Sisu platform scans schemas, data types, cardinality, and other related attributes of data sets regardless of the physical location. It then automatically transforms the information into an index that can be queried using natural language. The challenge has been that, before now, someone still needed to manually massage the results of those queries to visualize them for users via a dashboard. The Smart Waterfall Charts tool now automates the visualization of queries launched via its search engine, said Sisu CEO Peter Bailis. Previously, analysts would have spent hours creating visualizations of the results of data queries, he noted.

Data lakes contain much more information than CFOs and other executives typically use to track performance, say data specialists. Companies are missing opportunities to grow revenue and improve margins by approaching the data they collect too narrowly, data specialists said in a SaaStr webcast last week. Many software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies are investing heavily in data collection, but they're only analyzing the most obvious results in their metrics, like churn. They can get a more accurate picture of performance, more quickly, by using AI to analyze a broader range of data, even if it's not obvious how it relates to a metric, said Berit Hoffmann, vice president of product at data analysis software company Sisu. One large business-to-business SaaS company Sisu worked with started seeing unusually heavy churn even though one of the main data points they look at regularly showed no change.

"The product was just never good," the noted venture capitalist said today in a wide-ranging fireside chat with Sisu CEO Peter Bailis during the Future Data Conference. There's no denying that Horowitz has had an outside influence on tech startups with Andreessen Horowitz, the Menlo Park, California investment firm that he co-founded with Marc Andreessen, the co-author of Mosaic and the founder of Netscape. The list of current investments and exits on the venture capital company's website is simply ridiculous. The storied Sandhill Road firm is currently invested in Sisu, which shows promise as a next-gen analytics system that uses machine learning to help people ask better questions of the data. Andressen Horowitz, which has $12 billion under management, has helped fund a variety of ecosystem tool players featured in these pages, like Alluxio, Anyscale, Cazena, Databricks, and Fivetran.

Subscribe to the O'Reilly Data Show Podcast to explore the opportunities and techniques driving big data, data science, and AI. Find us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Play, SoundCloud, and RSS. In this episode of the Data Show, I speak with Peter Bailis, founder and CEO of Sisu, a startup that is using machine learning to improve operational analytics. Bailis is also an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University, where he conducts research into data-intensive systems and where he is co-founder of the DAWN Lab. Get a free trial today and find answers on the fly, or master something new and useful.