Feature
Hey Larry Ellison, Oracle isn’t the only company paving the way to a data-driven world. And while, yes, we know, you made big data news that we haven’t yet fully covered, worry not, we’ll make note of it here.
But you’ll have to wait because we’re breaking it down alphabetically and the “o” in Oracle doesn’t come first in the alphabet. (Maybe you should buy the character set and switch it up in your favor?)
AtScale Gets Funding
If you’ve never watched a startup grow from a seed round to one that impacts markets, keep your eye on AtScale. Its promise? BI on Hadoop.
“We make Hadoop disappear,” said Bruno Aziza, the company’s CMO, so that business users can mine big data lakes/hubs using BI tools they already know.
“We are the Switzerland of big data,” Aziza went on. “With AtScale there’s no need to rebuild the entire stack to run a query.”
AtScale gets installed on the edge node of a cluster, there’s no client side and no agent. AtScale works by making BI tools think that Hadoop is a relational database. “There’s nothing else like it,” said Aziza.
There are some pretty important investors who think he’s right; in fact they’re putting money on it.
Today AtScale announced that it has received Series A funding ($7 million) from UMC Capital AME Ventures (led by Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang), as well as Storm Ventures and XSeed Capital, who co-led the company’s seed round in 2013. It’s worth noting that Cloudera co-founder Amr Awadallah and Michael Franklin, a director of UC Berkley's AmpLab where Spark was born, are also investors.
We Know What Jut Is Up To
In 2013 big data startup Jut announced that it had raised $20 million in funding, but they didn’t tell anyone much of anything else. Today, they finally opened the kimono, announcing that its Operations Data Hub is now available in beta.
The hub is geared toward DevOps teams who don’t have a clear line of sight into what their company’s software is actually doing. Jut brings together metrics, log and event data into a single place so that DevOps teams can visually and in real-time ask questions to understand usage, improve software performance, react faster to anomalies and become predictive.
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MapR and Google Partner
We’ve already told you about MapR’s wildly successful (25,000 enrollment) free on–demand training for aspiring Hadoop experts. Today, Dave Jespersen, vice president, worldwide services, MapR Technologies announced that the company has partnered with Google to provide program participants with $500 of credit to spend on Google Cloud Platform services.
Those interested in receiving the credit should register for MapR On-Demand Hadoop training and follow the instructions provided within the training portal.
Should we expect to soon see a mass of Hadoop enthusiasts roaming the world evangelizing MapR?
Oracle Goes Big on Big Data
When Larry Ellison told the world that his company’s cloud apps and platform technologies were now complete, he didn’t leave out big data or NoSQL; in fact, there are clouds/platforms for each. Oracle’s Big Data Cloud Service and Big Data SQL Cloud Service provides a high-performance, secure platform for running diverse workloads on Hadoop and NoSQL databases to help enterprises acquire and organize big data.
According to a company spokesperson, the new Big Data SQL Cloud combined with the Oracle Big Data Cloud Service and Big Data SQL Cloud Service extends Oracle's “industry-leading” implementation of SQL to Hadoop and NoSQL, providing users with a comprehensive Big Data Management System in an enterprise cloud.
Will there be many takers? We have yet to see.
Snowflake’s Data Warehouse
What are the returns on an on-prem data warehouse thrown into the cloud? Not what they should be, says Bob Muglia, CEO of Snowflake Computing. “Simply ‘cloud-washing’ a conventional data warehouse misses that opportunity,” he said. “Organizations want to get more value from their data, not simply bring their current challenges into the cloud, or worse, create problems by deploying complex solutions that force them to retrain their staff and abandon existing tools and processes”
Muglia, a former Microsoft President who oversaw the company’s $16 billion Server and Tools Business, and was responsible for products such as Windows Server, SQL Server, System Center and Windows Azure, and his team, built a data warehouse specifically for the Cloud to solve the data analysis needs of customers.
Today Muglia announced the general availability of the Snowflake Elastic Data Cloud, a unique architecture that delivers the power of data warehousing, the flexibility of big data platforms and the elasticity of the cloud, “at a fraction of the cost of other solutions."
Muglia also announced that Snowflake has closed on $45 million in Series C funding led Altimeter Capital and joined by existing investors Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Wing Ventures.
Constant Change
The big data market is continuously disrupting itself — for enterprises embracing the technology. This is a good thing, provided that they stay focused on their own specific needs and aspirations. There will always something interesting and distracting around the corner, consider that all of this news was made in just 24 hours and we, no doubt, missed a few things.
