Pepperdata Nabs $15 Million to Scale its Enterprise Hadoop Biz

So far in 2015, tools that extend and enhance the open source Hadoop project are all the rage. Hadoop has been the driving technology behind much of the Big Data trend, and there are many administrators who can benefit from tools that either demystify it or optimize its power.

This week, immediately following startup company AtScale coming out of stealth mode to show its tools for making data stored in Hadoop's file system accessible within Business Intelligence (BI) applications, Think Big launched its Dashboard Engine for Hadoop, designed to make it easy for business users to cull insights from Hadoop data stores. And now,  Pepperdata, which develops Hadoop cluster optimization software, announced that it has secured more than $15 million in strategic and venture financing to scale to serve enterprises who rely on Hadoop in production.

Wing Venture Capital--a new investor--led the round, joined by existing investors, including Signia Venture Partners and Yahoo Chairman Maynard Webb. New strategic investors Citi Ventures and Silicon Valley Data Capital also invested.

Pepperdata serves some large Hadoop environments across a range of industries, including consumer electronics, media, finance, telecommunications, and energy.

"Pepperdata has emerged as a critical technology in production Hadoop environments at scale," said Peter Wagner, Founding Partner of Wing, who joins the board of Pepperdata. "As the market matures and enterprises run ever more diverse workloads on Hadoop, this technology is increasingly important to ensure the reliability of big data delivery. With the widespread adoption of Hadoop in the enterprise, Pepperdata has the opportunity to become the systems and performance management leader for this new age of distributed computing."

Notably, the company said that it will also accelerate its product innovation to support applications beyond traditional Hadoop.

Meanwhile, also on the Hadoop front, the Open Data Platform, recently announced by Pivotal, is shaping up to be, well, pivotal in the Hadoop and Big Data market. If you're not familiar with the Open Data Platform, its founding members are GE, Hortonworks, IBM, Infosys, Pivotal, SAS, AltiScale, Capgemini, CenturyLink, EMC, Teradata, Splunk, Verizon and VMware. They have pledged to test and certify a group of primary Apache components, which will then form the basis of their Hadoop platforms. It promises unified development and standards going forward, and it can help make Hadoop more accessible.