Startup Kyvos Insights Exits Stealth, Offers OLAP For Hadoop Software

Startup Kyvos Insights emerged from stealth mode Tuesday, debuting its big data analytics software designed to glean insights from huge volumes of corporate data.

Kyvos Insights, based in Los Gatos, Calif., has developed OLAP (online analytical processing) software that can work with data stored in Hadoop, the open-source platform that's become something of a standard for corporate big data systems.

While Hadoop has been widely deployed for collecting and managing huge volumes of data, businesses have struggled to find the best way to provide analysts and everyday business users access to that data and the ability to derive value from it. Businesses, after centralizing data in Hadoop, often move it into a data warehouse or data mart system for business analytics tasks -- a move that increases costs and adds to data latency, said Ajay Anand, Kyvos Insights vice president of products, in an interview with CRN.

[Related: 2015 Big Data 100: Business Analytics]

In the past year or two, a number of startups have developed various technologies for directly accessing and analyzing Hadoop data. Some of those products are based on SQL technology and, Anand argues, SQL isn't as interactive as OLAP-based tools.

Kyvos Insights' new offering is a massively scalable "cubes on Hadoop" technology that supports OLAP-based multidimensional analytics. The Kyvos software, according to the company, can handle structured and unstructured Hadoop data "at any scale and granularity" and provide users with the ability to visualize and analyze big data interactively.

The software supports all major Hadoop distributions including Apache Hadoop, Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR Technologies, according to the company. The product has its own front-end analytics tools, but also supports Microsoft Excel and other data visualization applications such as Tableau.

Kyvos Insights has established technology partnerships with the Hadoop distributors, including MapR Technologies. "We're all about giving our customers flexibility and choice about how they use Hadoop," said Rich Brazeau, business development director at San Jose, Calif.-based MapR, in an interview about the relationship with Kyvos Insights. "We're a very open platform."

"I think this further promotes Hadoop [for] production environments," added Bill Peterson, MapR's product marketing director, in the same interview. "It's a further sign of Hadoop's maturity."

The Kyvos software is generally available now and is already running in several early customer Hadoop environments in the financial services industry. The company is also targeting customers in the telecommunications, travel, technology, retail, and media and entertainment industries, Anand said.

Currently Kyvos Insights is selling its software directly to customers, although Anand said the company will be leveraging its partnerships with MapR and other companies to expand its sales reach. Kyvos Insights has also begun recruiting systems integrator partners to work with.

PUBLISHED JUNE 30, 2015