In the News

Until recently, ParAccel was best known as the enabling technology behind Amazon’s Redshift cloud data-warehouse (DW) service offering.

Then, late last month, analytic database specialist Actian nabbed ParAccel in an acquisition gambit that few – if any – in the industry saw coming.

Less than a week later, ParAccel officials were on hand at SPARK! Austin, an industry event hosted by Radiant Advisors, a business intelligence (BI) research and advisory firm.

SPARK! was one of the first post-acquisition appearances by anyone at ParAccel. So the Actian acquisition dominated the discussion, right? Sadly, no: it barely came up.

The same can’t be said about ParAccel’s ongoing – and to some extent, still obscure – relationship with Amazon, however. This did come up, albeit cheekily.

Amazon’s Redshift DW-as-a-service is powered by ParAccel’s massively parallel processing (MPP) database engine. Industry veteran William McKnight, president and founder of McKnight Consulting Group, wanted to know if ParAccel planned to maintain “code parity” between its MPP DBMS engine and Amazon Redshift. ParAccel’s John Santaferraro coyly demurred: “The question would be, are they [i.e., Amazon] staying on code parity with you [i.e., Actian ParAccel]? And that is a great question to ask Amazon!”

McKnight’s exchange with Santaferraro, vice president of solutions and product marketing with ParAccel (“an Actian Company”), came at the end of a 60-minute panel discussion.

Businesses are struggling with the rapidly increasing volume, speed and variety of information being generated today -- what's come to be known as big data. Companies are seeking technologies that not only help them process and manage all that data, but tap into it to develop insights about the markets they compete in as well as their own performance within those markets.

Recognizing that need we present the inaugural Big Data 100 list, developed by the CRN editorial team, identifying vendors that have demonstrated an ability to innovate in bringing to market products and services that help businesses manage big data. Here are 50 business analytics companies, including industry stalwarts and startups.

ParAccel is a well-funded big data startup, with $64 million invested in the firm so far. Only a few companies can top this level of startup funding, and most of them are service-based rather than product-based companies. Amazon has a 20 percent stake in the company and is making a big bet on the company’s technology to run its Redshift data warehouse in the cloud initiative. MicroStrategy also uses ParAccel for its cloud offering, but holds no equity in the company.

ParAccel provides a software-based analytical platform that competes in the database appliance market, and as many in the space are increasingly trying to do, it is building analytic processes on top of the platform. On the base level, ParAccel is a massively parallel processing (MPP) database with columnar compression support, which allows for very fast query and analysis times. It is offered either as software or in an appliance configuration which, as we’ll discuss in a moment, is a different approach than many others in the space are taking. It connects with Teradata, Hadoop, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases as well as financial market data such as semi-structured trading data and NYSE data through what the company calls On Demand Integration (ODI). This allows joint analysis through SQL of relational and non-relational data sources. In-database analytics offer more than 600 functions (though places on the company’s website and datasheets still say just over 500).

ParAccel is a well-funded big data startup, with $64 million invested in the firm so far. Only a few companies can top this level of startup funding, and most of them are service-based rather than product-based companies. Amazon has a 20 percent stake in the company and is making a big bet on the company’s technology to run its Redshift data warehouse in the cloud initiative. Microstrategy also uses ParAccel for it’s cloud offering, but holds no equity in the company.

ParAccel provides a software-based analytical platform that competes in the database appliance market, and as many in the space are increasingly trying to do, it is building analytic processes on top of the platform. On the base level, ParAccel is a massively parallel processing (MPP) database with columnar compression support, which allows for very fast query and analysis times. It is offered either as software or in an appliance configuration which, as we’ll discuss in a moment, is a different approach than many others in the space are taking. It connects with Teradata, Hadoop, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases as well as financial market data such as semi-structured trading data and NYSE data through what the company calls On Demand Integration (ODI). This allows joint analysis through SQL of relational and non-relational data sources. In-database analytics offer more than 600 functions (though places on the company’s website and datasheets still say just over 500).

The emphasis on “big data” has grown mightily over the last year, as more companies strive to draw useful intelligence out of increasingly massive data volumes from web clickstreams, sensor data, social media data and other large datasets.

One technology approach has dominated the discussion: MapReduce. MapReduce is open-source technology used for distributed programming, and its current incarnation “Hadoop” (named for its inventor’s son’s stuffed elephant), has been trumpeted as the new solution on the scene, the silver bullet for getting value from big data.

TDWI BI Journal - BI Case Study

Customer relationship marketing agencies work with massive amounts of data as they help their customers create personalized marketing campaigns from many customer lists. After expanding its use of an analytic platform, one industry-leading agency can now process more data faster, allowing it to better compete.

ParAccel today announced a new analytics program and new analytic functions available on its high-performance analytic platform.

In its first release under the new program, ParAccel announced new text, transformation, and “task” analytics. ParAccel's new program speeds time to analytic value by reducing data preparation and turning complex analysis into simple routines. With the integration features of ParAccel’s platform, these new analytic functions on data that is often hidden in Hadoop or data warehouses can be executed.

Campbell, Calif.-based analytic database vendor ParAccel is rolling out a new licensing model, dubbed Right to Deploy, which allows customers to use its ParAccel Analytic Platform throughout their firms without any constraints placed on the amount of data, number of users, analytics or nodes, for the price of a single license, to provide firms with a more flexible model as data volumes and data requirements continue to grow.

To collect and analyze data on 200 million daily events, Evernote transitioned from a MySQL data warehouse to a hybrid environment of Hadoop and ParAccel

When a flood of data threatened to swamp Evernote's analytics system, the company modernized its analytic environment to handle big data -- without breaking the budget. The provider of popular personal organization and productivity applications has moved from a conventional data warehouse to a modern hybrid of Hadoop and ParAccel, a massively parallel processing (MPP) analytic database.

In 2013, major trends in analytics help enterprises deliver the data and capabilities they need.

This is a wildly inspiring, yet mildly overwhelming, time for analytics. It's inspiring because of the possibilities. What could you do if you could apply analytics across your entire datasphere with no constraints? What would you learn by connecting marketing response data, customer feedback, transactional data, predictive analysis, social sentiment, and product support records? How could you improve inventory management by looking across retail sales, marketing analytics, Web analytics, and supply chain data?

Data integration, columnar database solution enable marketing agency to crunch hundreds of terabytes, deliver 360-degree view of customers.

With more than $300 million in annual revenues and 1,600 employees, Merkle is a leading customer relationship marketing agency for such clients as Dell, Geico, DirecTV, and Chase. The company uses ParAccel's big data analytic platform to gain a 360-degree view of consumers so that Merkle's clients can work toward real-time marketing and measure campaign effectiveness more precisely.

Merkle has a long history of curating consumer information to provide "data as a service" for marketing purposes. Historically, this was achieved through monthly batch processing of huge flat files.