Platfora Unveils World's First In-Memory Business Intelligence Platform for Hadoop

SAN MATEO, CA--(Marketwire - Oct 23, 2012) - Platfora (www.platfora.com) revealed the first scale-out in-memory business intelligence platform for Hadoop today at the Strata + Hadoop World Conference in New York. For the first time, users can change their business intelligence questions without involving teams of IT staff to re-organize a data warehouse. Platfora will forever change the way businesses analyze data by allowing them to determine the questions after data is collected, essentially eliminating the need for a data warehouse or ETL (extract, transform, and load) software.

Today's Big Data Technology: Hadoop
Today, businesses perform a complex and rigid set of steps between the customer interactions that generate data and analyzing that data with Business Intelligence (BI) software. Businesses have been rapidly turning to Apache Hadoop™, a relatively new and open source technology to solve the big data storage and processing problem. A recent forecast from IDC shows that revenues for the worldwide Hadoop-MapReduce ecosystem software market are expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 60.2% over the 2011-2015 forecast period.[1]

"Hadoop is changing the economics of big data for businesses. Companies now want to store everything and be ready for unanticipated questions," said Merv Adrian, Research VP, Gartner. "Hadoop does not replace technologies like business intelligence software or the data warehouse today; it creates a foundation on which applications can deliver the full potential of new and underexploited information assets."

A New Breed of Product
Platfora is a fundamentally different kind of BI platform. It transforms raw data in Hadoop into interactive, in-memory BI without the need for a traditional data warehouse. End users are presented with a beautiful web-based analysis interface using HTML5 technology -- the first of its kind.

Platfora works by pulling data out of Hadoop into a scale-out in-memory data processing engine, making access to the data extremely fast. Platfora leverages the power of Hadoop to perform the heavy lifting, processing massive data sets into highly efficient, in-memory data stores, which can seamlessly span dozens or hundreds of servers to utilize their collective memory and processing.

Platfora's biggest innovation lies in how the layers work together seamlessly. It automatically refines the in-memory data based on the questions being asked by end users.

"Everyone talks about the promise of big data, but the real innovation lies in the data agility and exploration made possible by Hadoop," said Ben Werther, founder and CEO, Platfora. "Businesses want immediate answers -- they cannot wait days or months for insight into their own data. Unless businesses can explore and interact with this data, the promise of Hadoop is lost."

"As new software models continue to change the data center and drive better business outcomes, Platfora's approach removes the requirement for a data warehouse and the accompanying limitations," said Scott Weiss, partner, Andreessen Horowitz and Platfora board member. "Platfora up-ends traditional business intelligence, unlocks the potential of Hadoop and puts the power of data in the hands of the end user."

"Platfora helps us gain insights into our business and make decisions more quickly," said Ray Duong, founder and CTO at AdMobius, world's first mobile audience management platform for publishers and advertisers. "We have been using Hadoop to store tens of billions of advertising events combined with data from hundreds of millions of users. Without Platfora it could take us weeks of time to answer simple questions. Platfora makes it possible for us to work with the data in ways that were just not possible before."

Product Overview
Platfora is built from the ground up to present Hadoop raw data in entirely new ways. Key components of Platfora include:

• Unbounded, In-Memory BI: Platfora Vizboards™ allow business users to interactively build stunning visualizations. Vizboards are web-based, using HTML5 canvas technology, and feature a collaborative layer for sharing and collaboration.
• Scale-Out In-Memory Data Processing Engine: Using Fractal Cache™ technology, Platfora's in-memory data processing engine is natively connected with Hadoop. As the powerful core of Platfora's platform, Fractal Cache automatically refines itself, without the intervention of IT.
• Hadoop Data Refinery: Adaptive Job Synthesis™ automatically builds MapReduce jobs and pushes them down to Hadoop to produce aggregated, in-memory representations of the data.
• Platfora works with the following Hadoop platforms: Cloudera, Amazon Web Services, MapR and Hortonworks.

Platfora will be offered as a license on a per server, not per user, basis to be deployed either on premise in an enterprise data center or in the cloud.

About Platfora, Inc.
Platfora changes the way businesses use data. Headquartered in San Mateo, CA, we put the power of big data in the hands of people who need it most, the end users. Platfora makes Hadoop amazing. Platfora is funded by Andreessen Horowitz, Sutter Hill Ventures and In-Q-Tel. For more details, visit www.platfora.com and follow us @platfora.

[1] Source: IDC Press Release, IDC Releases First Worldwide Hadoop-MapReduce Ecosystem Software Forecast, Strong Growth Will Continue to Accelerate as Talent and Tools Develop, 07 May 2012