There's still lots of potential for vendors in the Hadoop ecosystem, and AtScale is in position to succeed
The Apache Hadoop ecosystem is a busy one.
Cloudera, HortonWorks, MapR, IBM, Microsoft, Datastax and Pivotal are but a few of the vendors either focusing purely on Hadoop or offering a Hadoop product on the side. And why not? The open-source software framework for distributed computing and data storage has grown from strength to strength.
The genesis of Hadoop came from a paper published back in 2003 by Google. A few years later, Doug Cutting, who at the time was working for Yahoo, took up the project and gave it a name (after his son’s toy elephant, no less). And from that humble beginning, a massive ecosystem has grown.
AtScale: business intelligence on Hadoop
One of the players in that ecosystem is AtScale. The company launched its product only a year ago, but since then has seen some good uptake—companies as diverse as Aetna, The Home Depot, Bloomberg, Groupon and Yellow Pages are customers.
AtScale is all about making business intelligence (BI) work easily on Hadoop. The company offers up the interactive and multi-dimensional analytics capabilities, sitting on top of Hadoop. Users can leverage existing tools—Microsoft Excel, Tableau or QlikView, for example. AtScale offers the governance, security and integration value that enterprises demand from an open source project. It’s a well-known fact that there is significant product and services revenue to be made alongside an open source product, since large enterprises want the certainty that a commercial vendor offers.
This opportunity and AtScale’s strong performance since its launch is why it has seemingly been easy for the company to raise an $11 million Series B round. The round, which takes total funding to date to $18 million, was led by Comcast Ventures. This round also saw the participation of UMC, AME Ventures, Storm Ventures and XSeed Capital. AtScale has a stellar executive team. In particular, Dave Mariani, founder and CEO of AtScale, previously led Yahoo’s foray into BI on Hadoop. Thereafter he ran analytics at Klout where his team managed a 200-node Hadoop cluster and powered the 1 trillion-row data warehouse that scored half of Facebook’s traffic.
Of course, there is way too much on offer in the Hadoop ecosystem, and over time we’ll see some consolidation and rationalization. But the fact that in this depressed market, and with only a year under its belt, AtScale can raise a healthy round like this bodes well for the company.
