Tag: Dataminr

Big Analytics Roundup (March 23, 2015)

This week, Spark Summit East produced a deluge of news and analysis on Apache Spark and Databricks.  Also in the news: a couple of ventures landed funding, SAP released software and SAS soft-launched something new for SAS Visual Analytics.

Analytic Startups

Venture Capital Dispatch on WSJ.D reports that Andreeson Horowitz has invested $7.5 million in AMPLab spinout Tachyon Nexus.  Tachyon Nexus supports the eponymous Tachyon project, a memory-centric storage layer that runs underneath Apache Spark or independently.

Social media mining venture Dataminr pulls $130 million in “D” round financing, demonstrating that the real money in analytics is in applications, not algorithms.

Apache Flink

On the Flink project blog, Fabian Hueske posts an excellent article that describes how joins work in Flink.

Apache Spark

ADTMag rehashes the tired debate about whether Spark and Hadoop are “friends” or “foes”.  Sounds like teens whispering in the hallways of Silicon Valley High.  Spark works with HDFS, and it works with other datastores; it all depends on your use case.  If that means a little less buzz for Hadoop purists, get over it.

To that point, Matt Kalan explains how to use Spark with MongoDB on the Databricks blog.

A paper published by a team at Berkeley summarizes results from Spark benchmark testing, draws surprising conclusions.

In other commentary about Spark:

  • TechCrunch reports on the growth of Spark.
  • TechRepublic wonders if anything can dim Spark.
  • InfoWorld lists five reasons to use Spark for Big Data.

In VentureBeat, Sharmila Mulligan relates how ClearStory Data’s big bet on Spark paid off without explaining the nature of the payoff.  ClearStory has a nice product, but it seems a bit too early for a victory lap.

On the Spark blog, Justin Kestelyn describes exactly-once Spark Streaming with Apache Kafka, a new feature in Spark 1.3.

Databricks

Doug Henschen chides Ion Stoica for plugging Databricks Cloud at Spark Summit East, hinting darkly that some Big Data vendors are threatened by Spark and trying to plant FUD about it.  Vendors planting FUD about competitors that threaten them: who knew that people did such things?  It’s not clear what revenue model Henschen thinks Databricks should pursue; as Hortonworks’ numbers show, “contributing to open source” alone is not a viable business model.  If those Big Data vendors are unhappy that Databricks Cloud competes with what they offer, there is nothing to stop them from embracing Spark and standing up their own cloud service.

In other news:

  • On the Databricks blog, the folks from Uncharted Software describe PanTera, cool visualization software that runs in Databricks Cloud.
  • Rob Marvin of SD Times rounds up new product announcements from Spark Summit East.
  • In PCWorld, Joab Jackson touts the benefits of Databricks Cloud.
  • ConsumerElectronicsNet recaps Databricks’ announcement of the Jobs feature for Databricks Cloud, plus other news from Spark Summit East.
  • On ZDNet, Toby Wolpe reviews the new Jobs feature for production workloads in Databricks Cloud.
  • On the Databricks blog, Abi Mehta announces that Tresata’s TEAK application for AML will be implemented on Databricks Cloud.  Media coverage here, here and here.

Geospatial

MemSQL announced geospatial capabilities for its distributed in-memory NewSQL database.

J. Andrew Rogers asks why geospatial databases are hard to build, then answers his own question.

RapidMiner

Butler Analytics publishes a favorable review of RapidMiner.

SAP

SAP released a new on-premises version of Lumira Edge for visualization, adding to the list of software that is not as good as Tableau.  SAP also released Predictive Analytics 2.0, a product that marries the toylike SAP Predictive Analytics with KXEN InfiniteInsight, a product acquired in 2013.  According to SAP, Predictive Analytics 2.0 is a “single, unified analytics product” with two work environments, which sounds like SAP has bundled two different code bases into a marketing bundle with a common datastore.  Going for a “three-fer”, SAP also adds Lumira Edge to the bundle.

SAS

American Banker reports that SAS has “launched” SAS Transaction Monitoring Optimization for AML scenario testing; in this case, “launch”, means marketing collateral is available.  The product is said to run on top of SAS Visual Analytics, which itself runs on top of SAS LASR Server, SAS’ “other” distributed in-memory platform.

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.