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During the last IT Press Tour (the 14th), in the Silicon Valley (December 1-5, 2014) we met several companies in different categories (Cloud, Storage and Big Data).

The last company that we met (on the last day) was Platfora, a company specialized in the the Big Data and Analytics world.

ITPressTour-LogoPlatfora is a relatively new company (founded on 2011) based on San Mateo (CA) with a really fast grow in the last years (grew customers by 4x and employees by 2x). In the 2014 they have also open an office in EMEA and probably in 2015 they will grow also in other regions.

Ben Werther (Founder and CEO) has explain the company origin and their vision and mission.

Hadoop-LogoPlatfora combined in a unique way the big data part with a really easy to use (and fast) Analytics platform. Platfora leverages on Hadoop to provide comprehensive, direct and fast answers against 100% of data whatever the source is, with the opportunity to ask new questions iteratively, against 100% of your data. Their solution is probably the 1st native BigData analytics platform operating on Hadoop. Somebody has defined this like a Big Data for Dummies, but is not only this.

Combining big data with analytics is the key aspect in order to build a full end-to-end platform built for multi-structure data with self-service, iterative, interactive and fast capabilities.

Why is so important handle multi-structure data? Because there are different type of sources with different (historical) scopes, but new analysis required to mix and match data from all those different sources.

Platfora-Multi-Structure

Platfora bring four values: multi-structured data support, interactive visual analytics, segmentation and behavioral analysis and extensible app platform. On multiple sources of data.

But in order to make this effective the data could not be analyzed directly from the Hadoop cluster and the HDFS source. This because of the performance and the required time to make complex analysis. Most solutions uses multiple system in order to bring (part of) those data in other environments and start the “business intelligence” from there.

In this case the approach is quite different: there is a data preparation phase that transform those data and brings the required part in memory (in what is called lenses) in order to be able to manage them really fast and build interactive Big Data analytics at the top of them.

Platfora-Architecture

And the interface for building the analysis is really simple, fast and easy to use, but also really powerful as visible in some snapshots from the product page. Multiple users can access this interface with different roles and the nice aspects is that each view is fully interactive and also collaborative: you can share and comment information or analysis with other users using tools like common social media and collaboration tools.

Actually this interface is not fully multi-tenant aware, but considering that it provide Restful-API is possible (and some customers as already provide it) build a multi-tenant environment in order to provide this solution as a service. And Platfora is also considering to integrate some multi-tenant features in next product releases.

For more information see also those other posts/articles:

Disclaimer: I’ve been invited to this event by Condor Consulting Group and they have paid for accommodation and travels, but I’m not compensated for my time and I’m not obliged to blog. Furthermore, the content is not reviewed, approved or published by any other person than me.

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Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Architect. Tech Field delegate. VMUG IT Co-Founder and board member. VMware VMTN Moderator and vExpert 2010-24. Dell TechCenter Rockstar 2014-15. Microsoft MVP 2014-16. Veeam Vanguard 2015-23. Nutanix NTC 2014-20. Several certifications including: VCDX-DCV, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, MCSA, MCSE, MCITP, CCA, NPP.