AtScale, Marrying Business Intelligence and Hadoop, Nabs $7 Million

Throughout 2015, tools that demystify and function as useful front-ends and connectors for the open source Hadoop project are much in demand. Hadoop has been the driving technology behind much of the Big Data trend, and there are many administrators who can benefit from simplified dashboards and analytics tools that work with it. In fact, as we covered here, MapR's CEO predicted toward the beginning of the year that "in 2015, IT will embrace self-service Big Data to allow developers, data scientists and data analysts to directly conduct data exploration." At the same time, Gartner Researchers have found that Hadoop is just plain hard to use for many IT administrators.

Now, AtScale, billed as “the first company to allow business users to do business intelligence on Hadoop,” has raised a Series A round of $7 million in funding led by UMC Capital. It's more evidence that the BI arena is converging with the Hadoop arena.

 "We invest in companies that can drive massive industry shifts. AtScale is the technology that can connect the millions of analytics users to Hadoop in a natural and non-intrusive manner," said Jerry Yang, founding partner at AME Ventures and co-founder of Yahoo! (AME participated in the funding round.) "We believe it can become the standard for how business people interact with Hadoop and it is well positioned to monetize the opportunity that sits between two massive markets: the new Big Data space and the established Analytics world."

We've also covered Think Big and its Dashboard Engine for Hadoop, designed to make it easy for business users to cull insights from Hadoop data stores.  Think Big is a TeraData company, and its Dashboard Engine for Hadoop "offers exceptionally fast ingestion of new data, without requiring that the business users wait for data to be reloaded, or for the refresh of OLAP cube calculations," according to the company. 

According to AtScale, in summarizing its strategy:

"The Hadoop market is absolutely in need of a business interface. Enterprises have made significant investments to make Hadoop power their data infrastructure. And while, data platform leaders like Cloudera, HortonWorks and MapR have more than tripled revenue over the last two years, according to Gartner, no software vendor has enabled business users to tap into Hadoop's scale and functionality using the analytical tools they already know and love like Microsoft Excel, Tableau and Qliktech."

"AtScale is the glue between two fast-growing but currently disconnected markets: Big Data, estimated at $50B by Wikibon, and the Business Analytics industry, a space IDC predicts will reach $59.2B in 2018."