AtScale, Inc., which provides a self-service BI platform for Hadoop, has raised a Series B round of $11 million, bringing its total funding to date to $20 million. Led by strategic partner Comcast Ventures, this round also had the participation of original investors UMC, AME Ventures, Storm Ventures, and XSeed Capital.
AtScale provides an open and Hadoop-native solution for BI on Hadoop. According to the vendor, AtScale requires no data movement, installs no new client driver on users’ machines and provides a dimensional semantic layer between Hadoop and any Business Intelligence tools.
The company has forged key partnerships with the leading big data infrastructure and visualization companies, including Tableau Software and Microsoft. In its latest release, the company announced the addition of key governance and security functionality.
Launched publicly a year ago, AtScale recently announced five-fold revenue growth and added Aetna, Home Depot, Bloomberg, Groupon, and Yellow Pages as customers.
The product was introduced at a time when organizations are adopting Hadoop and looking for solutions to connect their business users to the open source big data platform in a market that IDC valued at $122 billion.
According to Bruno Aziza, chief marketing officer of AtScale, its platform is different from others in three key ways, making it applicable to use cases in an array of industries including healthcare, telecommunications, retail, and financial services:
- Play the data where it lays: “We believe that after customers have done the work of putting data into Hadoop they should not have to move it out to gain value from it,” said Aziza.
- The lack of visualization tools is not a bug - it is a feature of the product: The analytics world is 30 years old, said Aziza, noting that companies have invested decades of effort in building analytics dashboards and BI reports. "We believe that Hadoop should not destroy that investment; it should not require them to adopt a new analytics or visual layer that is dedicated to Hadoop.” AtScale works with customers’ tools, including Excel, Tableau, and others, he said.
- Supports multiple engines in the same deployment: According to Aziza, AtScale works works with the entire open source ecosystem just as its competition does, “but we support every engine in the same deployment.” Impala is very optimized for concurrency, lots of users; Spark is optimized for speed; and Hive is optimized for reliability, he noted. "AtScale supports Hive when you are building a data pipeline, Impala when there are lots of users, and Spark when speed is required," Aziza said.
To find out more, go to www.atscale.com/try.