Big Data Digest: Rise of the think-bots

The service company can then look for ways that different data sets could be combined to provide more insight.

"We believe that data warehousing is where data goes to die. Big data is not just about size, but also about how many different sources of data you are processing, and how fast you can process that data," Sanghavi said, in an interview.

For instance, Sherlock can pull together different sources of data and respond with a visualization to a query such as "What was our revenue for last year, based on geography" The system can even suggest other possible queries as well.

Sherlock has a few advantages over Watson, Sanghavi claimed. The training period is not as long, and the software can be run on-premise, rather than as a cloud service from IBM, for those shops that want to keep their computations in-house. "We're far more affordable than Watson," Sanghavi said.

Initially, DataRPM is marketing to the finance, telecommunications, manufacturing, transportation and retail sectors.