Promising To Remake The Hadoop Analytics Arena, Startup AtScale Exits Stealth

Business analytics startup AtScale came out of stealth mode Tuesday, formally debuting its AtScale Intelligence Platform software that allows commonly used business intelligence tools to access data stored in Hadoop clusters.

AtScale is aiming to bridge what's become a growing disconnect within many companies: While more corporate data is being collected and stored in Hadoop, there are few straightforward ways to access that data with the kinds of reporting and business analytics tools many information workers use today.

That disconnect has proved to be a stumbling block for many big data projects.

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"Millions of information workers could derive value from Hadoop, but their organization has not been able to empower them to do so, either because their current toolset doesn't work natively with Hadoop or because IT doesn't have the tools to provision them with secure, self-service access," said AtScale founder and CEO Dave Mariani, in a statement.

AtScale, based in San Mateo, Calif., was founded in 2013 and raised $2 million in venture financing in September of that year. The company has since been quietly developing its technology and working with a handful of early customers such as Wargaming.net.

Mariani worked at Yahoo, managing the data pipelines and analytics teams there at the time the company was developing Hadoop. He's recruited talent from Yahoo, Pivotal, Oracle and Google, among others, to build the company. CTO Matthew Baird, for example, previously worked at PeopleSoft and Oracle.

The AtScale Intelligence Platform provides a semantic layer between Hadoop and business analytics tools, turning Hadoop into an OLAP (online analytical processing) server. Users can tap directly into Hadoop data for multidimensional analysis without the need for IT to develop custom code or move data from Hadoop into separate data stores or legacy business intelligence systems.

The company said that with its software business analytics applications, such as those from Tableau Software and QlikTech -- as well as Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet -- users could directly access Hadoop data. The AtScale Intelligence Platform supports Apache Hadoop and Hadoop distributions from Cloudera, HortonWorks and MapR Technologies.

While AtScale is in the early stages of selling its software directly to customers, a source at the startup said the company is talking with systems integrators about working with the AtScale Intelligence Platform with a more formal channel program expected to follow.

PUBLISHED APRIL 7, 2015