Startup Platfora released its business intelligence (BI) platform last month to help businesses analyze big data — enormous, complex data sets — more easily on its highly visual interface.
The San Mateo, California-based Platfora promises to reduce complexity and increase speed to help organizations transform raw data into business insights. In the release, Ben Werther, the company founder, said his business intelligence platform is built to render big data in a “visually rich and immediate way.”
Platfora boasts a user-friendly platform that enables business users and IT administrators to analyze big data sets through an array of visualization types. It already has scatter plots, heat maps and many different kinds of charts, and plans to add more in the future.
Platfora, which was operating in private beta mode for six months before its general release, uses the 100 percent open-source Apache Hadoop operating system. Hadoop allows users to store unlimited data of any type, irrespective of its native format. This means users can store pictures, audio files, log files or any other data type into the Hadoop system and then access the data later to find business value.
The startup also promises a speedy delivery of those insights: “The combination of Platfora and Hadoop has made them more agile,” the company said in the press release, “significantly lowering the time required to add new data sets or ask different questions from months to hours.”
Platfora is one of many new business intelligence tools to hit a growing market, as data analysis becomes more important for company operations. Tools like Platfora emphasize helping even non-experts to analyze large data sets, meaning companies won’t need to make special hires to do this kind of work — rather, many types of employees will have to adapt to the new technology and processes in the workplace.
Microsoft is also trying to “democratize” big data analysis by putting tools in the hands of non-experts. Eron Kelly, general manager for SQL Server with the company, writes in a blog post that, while the industry needs more data scientists, many organizations already have the personnel they need. New apps and tools will make it far easier for people to do this work without constantly bothering their IT departments.
But not everyone agrees: A report from Gartner Research predicts worldwide IT spending to increase by nearly 4 percent in 2013 compared to last year, and adds that the real story lies in big data jobs, according to their press release.
Gartner indicates 1.9 million big data jobs will be created in the United States by 2015, but a talent shortage will leave as many as two-thirds of those jobs unfilled. Data experts are a “scarce, valuable commodity,” according to Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president at Gartner and global head of Research, who went on to say that IT leaders need to be focused on how to attract top employees in the field.
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