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I’m thrilled to announce that after almost two years of intense development, Platfora’s product is out of beta and GA (generally available). I want to congratulate and thank the entire Platfora team — brilliant engineers and designers who put their heart and soul into building a product that fundamentally changes what business users can do with data. I’m extremely proud of the product that we’ve built, really gratified by the reaction from customers and the industry, and at the same time very aware that we have a five to ten year long roadmap of innovation in front of us to …

Roll back a mere six months and put yourself in the shoes of an IT director looking for a platform to store and analyze large volumes of data. You’d have a stark choice: – Option 1 — buy into the traditional MPP database approach of Teradata, Oracle Exadata, etc., and spend 12+ months modeling and implementing schemas, ETL pipelines, aggregation jobs, maintenance scripts and more. It is expensive to purchase, and once implemented is rigid and hard to evolve, but on the plus side provides standard SQL support and good performance. Let’s call this the “Legacy Database Option.” – Option …

Today is a major milestone on the Platfora journey. But it is more than that. Today we reach out beyond our early beta customers and share what we know is possible. We’ve been living in the dark ages of data management. We’ve been conditioned to believe that it is right and proper to spend a year or more architecting and implementing a data warehouse and business intelligence solution. That you need teams of consultants and IT people to make sense of data. We are living in the status quo of practices developed 30 years ago — practices that are the …

We’re in the Big Data age. This isn’t business-as-usual with a new buzzword. We’re going to look back at the early part of this decade as marking a major disruption and rejuvenation in the decades-old way that companies use data to understand their business. The status quo is an intricate and expensive supply chain of data that is progressively stored, manipulated and processed until value is seen by a business user. The steps along this chain include storing data in a big (expensive) relational database such as Oracle or Teradata, loading data via a complex ETL (extraction, transformation, load) solution …

Everywhere you look today, ‘big data’ is a hot topic. Articles in the media conjure up images of data scientists with PhDs in stats and physics deftly navigating petabytes of data to decipher meaning and insight. Companies of all stripes are pivoting their marketing to embrace the big data moniker. And key enabling technologies such as Hadoop are moving from the lab to mainstream adoption in record time. THE ‘BIG DATA’ SHIFT “Big Data analysis is usually iterative: you ask one question or examine one data set, then think of more questions or decide to look at more data. That’s …

There are many challenges in building a new company. Possibly the greatest is recruiting a talented, energetic, and world-class team. Smart people are in high demand in Silicon Valley and, let’s face it, we’re in another boom in the tech world. I know this because it takes 45 minutes to go 10 miles on the 101 and because smart people are harder to find than they ever have been. We’ve got a few silver bullets though, and we just added another one. We had wrapped our Series A, and were done thinking about financing for now. But when Mike Speiser …

I’m very excited to share that Platfora has closed a Series A of $5.7 million, with Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) as the lead investor. We’ve had a superb experience working with the whole team at a16z, and we are thrilled that Scott Weiss is joining our board.We also received a strategic investment from In-Q-Tel, the strategic investment firm that works to identify, adapt, and deliver innovative technology solutions to support the missions of the U.S. Intelligence Community. And we are fortunate to have a number of prominent angels and seed investors participating in the round. Read more from Scott here …

The Hope. That Hadoop is the silver bullet that is going to save us from a relentless explosion of data. Data volumes are increasing 100x over the next 5 years, and Hadoop is THE answer to scalably storing and harnessing that data. Forget about relational databases — Hadoop has it all. The Reality. That one scratch below the surface and you realize that this whole thing is at a much earlier stage than most people appreciate. We’re still living the first baby steps — vendors battling to provide the best low-level Hadoop plumbing. Once you get the cluster up and …