Platfora, a start-up with an ace or two in the hole, came out of stealth mode this week with the intention of taking the finicky, balky, ornery Hadoop mainstream and disrupting the $35 billion business analytics market.
The company’s aces include Andreessen Horowitz, the young VC with the seemingly Midas touch, and In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, which together put $7.18 million into the new venture. Both, shall we say, have some pretty interesting contacts.
Platfora describes its user-friendly widgetry as the first scale-out in-memory business intelligence platform for Hadoop.
That’s the fancy geek description.
Its founder Ben Werther, a former Apache Cassandra and Greenplum product strategy guy, describes the solution more trenchantly.
Hadoop, he says, is like a big cardboard box carelessly filled with Big Data. His widgetry can figure out what the data is and what it means and turn it into pictures without teams of IT staff reorganizing a data warehouse. In fact it eliminates data warehouses and ETL (extract, transform, and load) software altogether. Users can question the data right after it’s collected.