News Archive 2011

July 14, 2011 - Business intelligence vendor MicroStrategy has announced general availability of its Microstrategy Cloud platform.

The company said MicroStrategy Cloud provides customers with large-scale business intelligence capabilities based on a platform-as-a-service offering. It said the cloud-based offering combines the latest in-memory, 64-bit business intelligence technology with a secure, continuously monitored infrastructure.

“MicroStrategy Cloud will transform the way our customers build and deploy solutions and strategic information applications,” chief executive Michael Saylor said in a statement. “MicroStrategy is building and deploying this infrastructure so that each customer can avoid investing millions of dollars on their own hardware and human resources.”

The independent business intelligence and analytics vendor trails IBM and SAP on cloud deployment, but it appears to be blazing its own trail on social network analysis.

MicroStrategy on Tuesday jumped on the bandwagon of companies introducing cloud computing and social media capabilities. The business intelligence and analytics vendor is a follower on the cloud front, but it appears to be taking a unique approach where social analysis is concerned.

MicroStrategy's social announcement, made at the company's European user conference in Monte Carlo, is Gateway for Facebook, a cloud-based service that will enable companies to tap in Facebook's Social Graph API and convert that information into a relational format. Facebook holds a veritable treasure trove of information about consumers that far surpasses what most companies hold in their CRM databases.

MicroStrategy is rolling out a cloud-based service that allows the exchange of data between Facebook and enterprise applications, the BI (business intelligence) vendor announced Tuesday during its user conference in Monte Carlo.

Gateway for Facebook transforms Facebook's "social graph," the term for the collective interrelationships between users of the site, into a relational format, allowing ERP (enterprise resource planning), CRM (customer relationship management) and other applications to work with the data, according to Microstrategy. Enterprise applications can also send information out to Facebook.

Monte Carlo, July 12, 2011 – MicroStrategy® Incorporated (Nasdaq: MSTR), a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence (BI) software, today announced the general availability of MicroStrategy Cloud, a cloud-based platform-as-a-service. MicroStrategy Cloud is the first cloud-based service to enable rapid, cost-effective development of business intelligence, mobile and social apps, leveraging hundreds of terabytes of data and scaling to hundreds of thousands of users. The announcement of MicroStrategy Cloud was made today at the company’s worldwide launch event and European user conference in Monte Carlo.

Compared to traditional on-premises BI approaches, MicroStrategy Cloud is quicker to deploy (within 48 hours) and more flexible, delivers world-class performance, and offers significant financial advantages. MicroStrategy Cloud is powerful and flexible enough to support the full range of cloud use cases, from fast, flexible tactical BI solutions, to the largest implementations where performance and scalability are imperative.

ParAccel Inc. said Thursday it raised a new round of funding that included Amazon.com Inc.  Amazon.com Inc.Latest from The Business Journals DBJ Tech Watch for Wednesday 8/31: News of HP, Oracle, Apple, Yahoo and more George Soros goes shopping for Target stock George Soros increases stake in Target. Follow this company among a long list of other investors. The size of the transaction was not disclosed.

Campbell-based ParAccel has an analytics platform used by organizations to gain insight from large data sets.

Saying it was in no hurry to join several competitors who got acquired, high-performance database vendor ParAccel Inc. has raised a Series E round led by Amazon.com Inc.

Current investors Menlo Ventures, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Bay Partners, Walden International, Tao Venture Capital Partners and Silicon Valley Bank all participated "in balance in their pro-rata share," according to Chief Executive Chuck Berger.

The amount of the round is undisclosed, but ParAccel has now raised $73 million, with post-money valuation up about 50% since the last round.

Amazon.com is investing an undisclosed amount of money into ParAccel, a Campbell, California maker of business analytics software that helps executives and analysts “predict the future.”

“From “great leap” conceptual thinkers to “step-by-step” problem solvers, only ParAccel has the performance to both rocket through a chain of incremental questions and answer the intricately-modeled queries imagined by creatively-driven thinkers,” the company writes on its Web site.

Amazon.com is compiling massive amounts of data. Being able to mine that data for additional advantages — say in pricing or merchandising — could be huge. The ParAccel service also could integrate with the Amazon Web Services, offering additional functionality to its customers.

Amazon.com is making what appears to be a big investment in analytic database startup ParAccel. ParAccel today announced the close of a Series E round led by Amazon, along with existing investors Menlo Ventures, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Bay Partners, Walden International, Tao Venture Capital Partners and Silicon Valley Bank, but did not disclose the amount.

However, ParAccel CEO Chuck Berger told me that ParAccel has now raised $73 million since 2005. The company hasn’t disclosed total funding for its last two rounds, but it had raised upward of $50 million as of its Series C round in 2009. That $22 million round followed a $20 million Series B round in 2007.

Amazon is putting big bucks behind big data player ParAccel Inc. as a key investor in the Campbell, Calif.-based database analytic platform's latest funding round.

According to ParAccel, Amazon.com invested an undisclosed amount in the company, along with Menlo Ventures, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Bay Partners, Walden International, Tao Venture Capital Partners and Silicon Valley Bank.

It was unclear on Thursday what ParAccel would use the investment for, but Amazon's participation is a sign that the company could leverage ParAccel's database analytics capabilities to augment new capabilities for its Amazon Web Services cloud computing services or for its Amazon.com Web retail operations, both of which compile and handle massive amounts of data.

Several companies are developing new database technologies to solve what they see as the shortcomings of traditional, relational database management systems in a cloud environment. Four of them described the approaches they're taking during a panel at the GigaOm Structure conference on Thursday.

The basic problem they're trying to solve is the difficulty of scaling today's RDBMS systems across potentially massive clusters of commodity x86 servers, and doing so in a way that's "elastic," so that an organization can scale its infrastructure up and down as demand requires.

Cloud databases present their own challenges but opportunities abound. That’s the word from a collection of cloud database executives who shared their views at the GigaOM Structure conference on the future of cloud databases.

As more and more providers build databases specifically designed for the cloud, there are issues that crop up. Razi Sharir, CEO, Xeround said despite the on-demand nature of cloud computing, the promise of tapping additional machines isn’t always there when dealing with other cloud providers. That’s the danger of relying on public clouds, said Barry Zane, CTO of ParAccel, who noted that the hardware can be a step down from what he uses.

ParAccel, Inc., an analytic platform provider, announced the latest version of its flagship technology which introduces analytic integration for a wide range of analytic tools and data sources. ParAccel Analytic Database 3.1 (PADB 3.1) enables organizations to combine all internal and external data sources, both structured and unstructured, into analysis work.

"Analytic integration delivers new applications and analytic capabilities to our customers,"  says Tarun Loomba, chief marketing officer of ParAccel, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "Enterprises are accumulating more data than ever before. However, analysts are faced with two broad challenges - data is locked away in silos within the enterprise limiting the possibility of sharing data; and outdated technology has forced analysts to work with aggregated or sample data, as opposed to transactional level data, resulting in incomplete analyses."

The Red Herring editorial team selected the 2011 Top 100 North America June 15. This group of 100 companies are the most innovative companies from a pool of hundreds from across North America. The Top 100 are evaluated on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technology innovation, quality of management, execution of strategy, and integration into their respective industries.

Interclick's experience shows that getting answers within seconds can improve productivity, but sometimes it's also the only way to reach best prospects before they buy.

No doubt you've read about the advantages of modern, big-data analysis platforms. Queries that once took days or hours can be cut down to minutes or seconds. So what's the big hurry? Ad services company Interclick’s use of the platform illustrates the two key ways companies benefit from fast, big-data analysis.

Lots of people talk about the need for speed, but you don't often hear about scenarios in which insights are acted upon within minutes of their discovery. Let's call that a near-real-time scenario. Much more common are examples in which fast querying frees up time for more analysis -- either exploring more data or doing deeper queries. Let's call that a productivity scenario.

Financial companies are overhauling their data infrastructures just as new systemic risk regulatory requirements are kicking in.

Regardless of the business sector in which your company operates, chances are you’re struggling with data overload. In fact, the wrangling of data has become a huge area of focus for most IT organizations.

"Everybody is drowning in data, and we haven’t even seen a massive amount of data yet," says Hossein Eslambolchi, CEO of 2020 Venture Partners, which provides IT consulting service to venture capital firms. Eslambolchi is author of 2020 Vision (Silicon Press, 2006), an exploration of how IT will transform business over the next decade. He expects data to become a growing challenge over the next 10 years, as wireless carriers beef up networks to support data consumption via super-fast broadband connections.

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter's approach.

IBM's Watson's impressive "Jeopardy!" win demonstrated the awesome strides in computing power and ingenuity, but just as impressive was the way in which Watson's creators attacked an avalanche of information to come out victorious. Notably, Watson wasn't concerned with big data alone.

"Big data" is often cited as the core problem holding back companies from gaining a competitive advantage in this age of information overflow. Most organizations are fairly adept at capturing that information, but what ultimately matters is what they do with it, how quickly they utilize it to glean value. This is "big analytics." And though Watson is clearly a different animal than database analytics solutions for business, fundamentally, Watson is big analytics.

The computing industry is seeing dramatic growth in the use of "shared nothing" database architectures where each node functions independently of one another and is self-sufficient (Hadoop Distributed File System for example). For the sake of performance, contention among nodes for shared disk resources (SAN and NAS) is one of the things these architectures avoid by dedicating storage resources to each node, i.e. no shared disk.

While these computing architectures are best-known in the context of Web-based applications and development activities, they are no longer confined to the Web. EMC Greenplum, IBM Netezza, and ParAccel are all examples of shared-nothing database architectures that are being used increasingly in "big data" business analytics applications and within corporate data centers.

For our 2011 40 Vendors to Watch list, we rang up our most-trusted columnists and a few selected other sources for input, added our own ideas, did some background work and came up with a list we shaped and pared down to our standard. It's an editor's choice, to be sure, and like last year, we're happy to find many more positive stories than we can account for in our latest two score. Click here to skim the full list.

Greenplum, Netezza, Vertica, Aster Data Systems — one by one, they all got bought, leaving ParAccel standing all but alone as an independent company dedicated to the cause of analyzing big data. But CEO Chuck Berger doesn’t feel slighted in the least, doesn’t feel like the last kid picked for a playground kickball game. To the contrary, he thinks the recent craze around analytics M&A has left ParAccel in a great position, and he’s probably correct. For starters, the spate of acquisitions isn’t necessarily over yet — there are still a handful of large vendors that could stand to step up their big data efforts — and even if it is, ParAccel is well suited to playing the role of the “scrappy” little guy pushing the innovation envelope and keeping large vendors honest.

Following a burst of deal activity in the high-end database market, ParAccel Inc. finds itself competing almost exclusively against much larger companies.

But despite, or maybe because of, those deals, the Campbell, Calif.-based company is optimistic about its prospects.

“In my 30 years in technology, I’ve never seen a buying spree like this, with the possible exception of during the dot-com bubble,” said Chuck Berger, ParAccel’s chief executive.

The most recent deal in the database sector is last week’s announcement from Teradata Corp. that it would acquire Aster Data Systems Inc., a deal that values the start-up at $295.5 million. That came on the heels of Hewlett-Packard Co.’s acquisition of Vertica Systems Inc. for a similar price two weeks earlier.

The computing industry is seeing dramatic growth in the use of "shared nothing" database architectures where each node functions independently of one another and is self-sufficient (Hadoop Distributed File System for example). For the sake of performance, contention among nodes for shared disk resources (SAN and NAS) is one of the things these architectures avoid by dedicating storage resources to each node, i.e. no shared disk.

While these computing architectures are best-known in the context of Web-based applications and development activities, they are no longer confined to the Web. EMC Greenplum, IBM Netezza, and ParAccel are all examples of shared-nothing database architectures that are being used increasingly in "big data" business analytics applications and within corporate data centers.

ParAccel Inc. on Thursday named Paul Zolfaghari chief operating officer.

The Campbell company, which provides an analytic database, said Zolfaghari has been an executive for more than a decade in the business intelligence and data analytics industry.

He worked for more than 11 years at MicroStrategy Inc., a business intelligence software company where he most recently was executive vice president, worldwide sales and operations.

MicroStrategy's executive vice president for worldwide sales and operations is stepping down to take over as chief operating officer at ParAccel, an analytic database company headquartered in California. Paul N. Zolfaghari is leaving Jan. 14; his duties will be assumed by Sanju K. Bansal, MicroStrategy's president and chief operating officer. MicroStrategy said it had agreed to pay Zolfaghari various bonuses he earned in 2010, even though he will no longer be employed by the company.