Tag: Ayasdi

Big Analytics Roundup (March 30, 2015)

Lots of Spark news this week, following last week’s Sparkalanche, plus some other non-Spark news just to show that Big Analytics isn’t entirely about Spark.

Alteryx

  • In IntelligentHQ, Maria Fonseca interviews Alteryx COO George Mathew, argues that analytics is for people.  Left unanswered: who else it could be for.

Analytic Startups

  • Analytics vendor Ayasdi lands a $55 million “C” round.
  • Localytics, which specializes in analytics for mobile and web apps, secures a $35 million “D” round.

Apache Drill

  • MicroStrategy announces certification of Apache Drill with MicroStrategy Analytics Enterprise Platform.

Apache Spark

Analysis

  • IBM Big Data “evangelist” James Kobelius confirms that IBM has no idea what to do with Spark.
  • In TechRepublic, Matt Asay argues that Hadoop won’t disappear just because it’s slow, knocking over several straw men in the process.   On readwrite, he makes similar points; and on InfoWorld, he goes for the hat trick.
  • In InfoWorld, Platfora’s Peter Schlampp offers five reasons why Spark is the next big thing.

Applications

  • On the Cloudera blog, Sam Shuster of Edmunds.com describes a dashboard built with Spark Streaming, SparkOnHbase and Morphlines.
  • In InfoQ, Srini Penchikala of Pinterest explains why he’s using Spark Streaming, Kafka and MemSQL for a real-time application.

Data Science

  • On the Databricks blog, Joseph Bradley writes an excellent article on Topic Modeling with Spark’s new Latent Dirichlet Allocation capability.

Developer

  • On the Databricks blog, Michael Armbrust describes new Spark SQL features in Spark 1.3
  • On Slideshare, Vida Ha and Holden Karau share tips for writing better Spark programs; video here.

Deep Learning

  • Tomasz Malisiewicz of Vision.ai blogs on Deep Learning versus Machine Learning versus Pattern Recognition.

RapidMiner

  • RapidMiner publishes a white paper on code-free analytics in Hadoop, and another on Hadoop security.

Smart Money: Venture Capital for Analytics 2013

Thanks to Crunchbase’s downloadable database, we can report that in 2013 investors poured more than $2 billion into Analytic startups, up 38% from 2012.  Crunchbase reports 2013 funding for Analytics ventures more than five times greater than in 2009.

Source: Crunchbase
Source: Crunchbase

Palantir led the pack in new funding, going to the well twice, in October and December, to raise a total of $304m based on a valuation of $9b.  As a point of reference, at 4X revenue, industry leader SAS is worth about $12b.

Funding flowed to companies that build advanced analytics into focused vertical or horizontal solutions.  Examples include:

Investors paid special attention to vendors who specialize in social media analytic platforms:

Capital also flowed to companies offering general-purpose software, platforms and services for analytics, including:

Investors continue to fund startups offering easy-to-use interfaces for the business user, including:

Top investors in Analytics for 2013 include:

Clearly, investors are placing bets on a robust future for analytics.