Arcadia Data Exits Stealth, Debuts Visual Analytics For Hadoop

Arcadia Data, a big data startup that's developing visual analytics software that can directly access data stored in Hadoop clusters, exited stealth mode Tuesday with its first product release.

The San Mateo, Calif.-based company also revealed that it has received $11.5 million in Series A funding, money the company said it will use to fuel its product development efforts and double the size of its sales and marketing teams by the end of the year.

An increasing number of businesses are implementing Hadoop systems, using them to collect huge volumes of disparate data from multiple sources. But the business analytics tools in use at most companies are unable to directly access that data -- IT must first clean, integrate and format the data, then move it to another database or data warehouse system to make it available for everyday business workers.

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And the IT expertise needed to do that work is in short supply, given Hadoop's complexity. In a recent study by research firm Gartner of Hadoop adoption, 57 percent of survey respondents said that skills gap was a hurdle to Hadoop adoption and use.

Arcadia is developing a unified front-end visual analytics tool and business intelligence platform that the company said will overcome those hurdles. "We see this as an opportunity to reinvent how data visualization and business intelligence is done," said Sushil Thomas, Arcadia co-founder and CEO, in an interview with CRN.

The Arcadia platform uses Hadoop as an operating system, allowing it to run directly on Hadoop servers and providing access to data stored in the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS).

Tuesday the company launched Arcadia Instant, a free download of the company's front-end data visualization tool for Windows and Macintosh computers. "We want people to download it and start building a community around it," Thomas said.

The complete business intelligence platform, Arcadia Enterprise, is expected to be ready by the end of the year, Thomas said.

Arcadia has been working with Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR Technologies and IBM and their distributions of Hadoop during the development work. It's also working with Altiscale and Qubole, who provide Hadoop-as-a-Service, and vendors like Amazon Web Services and Rackspace that host Hadoop in the cloud. Arcadia users also will be able to build apps that run across other data sources such as Oracle and MySQL databases and Teradata data warehouses.

Arcadia is in the process of establishing relationships with a couple of solution provider partners: Thomas named UST Global (based in Aliso Viejo, Calif.) and Tech Mahindra (based in Pune, India) as two such partners.

But Thomas said it would be 2016 before Arcadia really begins ramping up its channel efforts. "I see very strong channel possibilities for us," he said.

Thomas, along with other members of the company's startup team, came from such companies as Teradata, Aster Data, IBM and 3PAR.

The $11.5 million in Series A funding was provided by Mayfield, Blumberg Capital and Intel Capital, the company said.

PUBLISHED JUNE 9, 2015