Platfora, Now Available, Cuts Through Big Data Hype and Delivers Business Value on Hadoop

SAN MATEO, CA--(Marketwire - Mar 26, 2013) - After two years in development and a rigorous six-month private beta, Platfora, a native in-memory business intelligence (BI) platform for Hadoop, is now generally available for sale. Platfora puts business users directly in touch with big data and eliminates the need for complex and expensive data warehouse and ETL software. This fundamentally different approach to big data analytics has customers such as Edmunds.com finding meaningful insights from their data in hours instead of weeks or months. Platfora also enters the market today with support from the greater Hadoop community.

Apache Hadoop™ has become the de facto operating system to store and process big data. As more and more companies begin to standardize on Hadoop, the focus has turned to how to use the platform for business analytics, without involving IT at every step. Innovation and differentiation were needed at the intelligence layer -- to put the power of Hadoop quickly into the hands of more people within companies. This is where Platfora comes in.

"The promise of Hadoop and big data is enormous -- that companies can flow diverse data from across the enterprise into a 'data reservoir' and have business users directly and immediately derive value from it. That promise has remained elusive," said Ben Werther, Founder and CEO, Platfora. "Our customers have seen their worlds open up to new possibilities of data analysis with our product. Platfora puts every business user directly in touch with all of this data in a visually rich and immediate way that lets them make better decisions today."

Platfora customers find meaningful business value in big data
Platfora accelerates the process of accessing big data. This appeals to the entire organization, from IT admins to business executives. Prior attempts have leveraged the last generation of data access technology, limiting business users to a small window of data or waiting minutes to hours for queries to respond. IT staff have scrambled to respond to requests for more data and hiring more experts has been difficult for the business.

Platfora customers report their business users now have access to all the data collected in Hadoop, and queries are consistently fast -- enabling them to explore and find insights at the speed of thought. The combination of Platfora and Hadoop has made them more agile, significantly lowering the time required to add new datasets or ask different questions from months to hours.

Customers gaining insights from Platfora
Edmunds.com is the most comprehensive automotive research site on the Internet with millions of people researching cars via Edmunds.com each month. As data volume and variety grew due to their popular Edmunds.com mobile application, they looked to Hadoop to store data more economically, and combine data with more agility. With Platfora, the number of employees that can leverage this data grew from 5 to 50, and as new attributes arrived in the data they were able to put them to use in hours as opposed to months.

"Platfora's data solutions make it easier for us to deliver insights without having to tie up resources from our IT support staff. Edmunds.com generates an enormous amount of data, and Platfora has given our business users the agility to explore that data in ways that were not possible before," said Padraic Hannon, Vice President of Enterprise Software and Data Architecture, Edmunds.com.

The Hadoop Community Supports Platfora
To provide the best customer experience and widest deployment footprint, Platfora has partnered with all major Apache Hadoop distributions on the market today, including Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR and EMC/Greenplum. The company will continue to invest in supporting the latest technology in the Hadoop ecosystem, including the emerging category of faster SQL-style interfaces to Hadoop. Platfora's Hadoop partners will benefit from the increased storage and utilization of their software, as companies are able to put powerful big data BI in the hands of business analyst users.

Pricing & Availability
Platfora software is immediately available through Platfora's direct sales representatives. Platfora is server software that runs on-premise or in the cloud utilizing standard general-purpose hardware. Subscription software licenses are priced on a per server, per year basis. For more information, please contact the Platfora sales team at www.platfora.com.

Resources
*Read more about how companies are using Platfora: http://www.platfora.com/bi-is-better-on-hadoop/
*Read more about how the Hadoop ecosystem supports Platfora: http://www.platfora.com/hadoop-ecosystem-blog/
*Hear from Hadoop distribution vendors
*Watch video demonstrations and learn more about Platfora
*See how Platfora's approach is different
*Download product images

About Platfora, Inc.
Platfora changes the way businesses use data. Headquartered in San Mateo, CA, Platfora makes Hadoop amazing and puts the power of data in the hands of people who need it most, the end users. Platfora is funded by Andreessen Horowitz, In-Q-Tel, among others. For more details, visit www.platfora.com. Also, follow Platfora on Twitter: @platfora.