Top 10: Cloud Big Data platforms

2021. Firebolt raises $127M for its new approach to cheaper and more efficient big data analytics



Snowflake changed the conversation for many companies when it comes to the potentials of data warehousing. Now one of the startups that’s hoping to disrupt the disruptor, Firebolt, has raised $127 million Series B. The startup claims that its performance is up to 182 times faster than that of other data warehouses with a SQL-based system that works on academic research that had yet to be applied anywhere, around how to handle data in a lighter way, using new techniques in compression and how data is parsed. Data lakes in turn can be connected with a wider data ecosystem, and what it translates to is a much smaller requirement for cloud capacity. And lower costs.


2020. Firebolt raises $37M to take on Snowflake, Amazon and Google with a new approach to data warehousing



Firebolt, a startup that has built a more comprehensive way to assess, analyse and use that data is announcing $37M funding as it looks to take on Snowflake, Amazon, Google and others in the area of enterprise data analytics. Today's data warehouses are solving yesterday’s problem, which was: How do I migrate to the cloud and deal with scale? Firebolt changes the focuse from one of scale to one of speed and efficiency. The startup claims that its performance is up to 182 times faster than that of other data warehouses. It’s a SQL-based system that works on principles that Farkash said came out of academic research that had yet to be applied anywhere, around how to handle data in a lighter way, using new techniques in compression and how data is parsed. Data lakes in turn can be connected with a wider data ecosystem, and what it translates to is a much smaller requirement for cloud capacity.

2020. Panoply raises $10M for its cloud data platform



Panoply, a platform that makes it easier for businesses to set up a data warehouse and analyze that data with standard SQL queries, has raised $10M. The company, which launched back in 2015, has mostly stuck to its original vision, which was always about democratizing access to data warehousing and the analytics capabilities that go hand-in-hand with that. Over the last few years, it also built more code-free data integrations into the platform that make it easier for businesses to pull in data from a wide variety of sources, including the likes of Salesforce, HubSpot, NetSuite, Xero, Quickbooks, Freshworks and others. It also integrates with other data warehousing services like Google’s BigQuery and Amazon’s Redshift and all of the major BI and analytics tools.


2020. Qumulo scores $125M Series E on $1.2B valuation as storage biz accelerates



Qumulo, a storage startup helping companies store vast amounts of data, announced a $125 million Series E investment. What’s driving the growth of Qumulo is that the amount of unstructured data, which plays to the company’s storage strength, is accelerating during the pandemic as companies move more of their activities online. Today the company has 400 customers and more than 300 employees, with plans to add another 100 before year’s end. The company has been around since 2012 and spent the first couple of years conducting market research before building its first product. In 2014 it released a storage appliance, but over time it has shifted more toward hybrid solutions.


2018. Big Data platforms Cloudera and Hortonworks merge



Over the years, Hadoop, the once high-flying open-source platform, gave rise to many companies and an ecosystem of vendors emerged. The problem with Hadoop was the sheer complexity of it. That’s where companies like Hortonworks and Cloudera came in. They packaged it for IT departments that wanted the advantage of a big data processing platform, but didn’t necessarily want to build Hadoop from scratch. These companies offered different ways of helping to attack that complexity, but over time, with all the cloud-based big data solutions, rolling a Hadoop system seemed futile, even with the help of companies like Cloudera and Hortonworks. Today the two companies announced are merging in a deal worth $5.2 billion. The combined companies will boast 2,500 customers, $720 million in revenue and $500 million in cash with no debt, according to the companies.


2015. Hortonworks acquired dataflow solutions developer Onyara



Hortonworks, a publicly traded company selling a commercial distribution of the Hadoop open-source big data software, announced today that it has acquired Onyara, an early-stage startup whose employees developed Apache NiFi, a piece of open-source software that was first used inside the National Security Agency (NSA). Apache NiFi allows to to deliver sensor data to the right systems and keep track of what was happening to the data. Hortonworks, which itself spun out of Yahoo, has previously acquired XA Secure and SequenceIQ. Now Hortonworks will be selling a new subscription based on the Apache NiFi software, under the name Hortonworks DataFlow.


2014. Big Data as a Service company Qubole raises $13 million



Hadoop-as-a-service startup Qubole has raised a $13 million series B round of venture capital. Qubole is hosted on the Amazon Web Services cloud, but can also run on Google Compute Engine, and acts like one might expect a cloud-native Hadoop service to act. It has a graphical user interface, connectors to several common data sources (including cloud object stores), and it takes advantage of cloud capabilities such as autoscaling and spot pricing for compute. What’s interesting about Qubole is that although it originally boasted optimized versions of Hive and other MapReduce-based tools, the company also lets users analyze data using the Facebook-created Presto SQL-on-Hadoop engine, and is working on a service around the increasingly popular and very fast Apache Spark framework.


2014. Enterprise Hadoop provider Hortonworks filed for an IPO



Hortonworks, the company building commercial Hadoop technology, has filed for its initial public offering. The company claims more than $33 million in revenue for the year thus far and nearly $88 million in operating loss. Hortonworks spun off from Yahoo in 2011. It offers a big data processing platform that includes the ability to process various types of data including SQL and NoSQL sources then search across data, or use various analytics tools to visualize the data. Hortonworks has a reputation for being a pure Hadoop offering without any proprietary extensions.


2013. SAP makes big companies effective with Big Data. Competitors are crying


In recent years, SAP was probably the least innovative IT giant (compared to competitors Oracle, Microsoft, IBM). All SAP's own innovative projects mostly failed (remember Business ByDesign), and the only thing that SAP could do - is buying other companies (SuccessFactors, SyBase, Ariba). But at this time, SAP is going to outdo all the competitors on the wave of new trendy technology - Big Data. What is Big Data? ***