Big data processing platform Alpine Data Labs received USD16 million in fresh capital from a recent venture capital round. Investors who participated in the venture capital round were UMC Capital, Robert Bosch Venture Capital, Sierra Ventures and Mission Ventures. Although the startup did not express directly where the funding should go, VentureBeat noted that with the data analytics market being saturated with the influx of analytics startups and companies who have expanded their businesses to this market segment, it is likely that the proceeds from the venture capital round would go towards improving Alpine's user experience.
Alpine chief executive Joe Otto said, "You can definitely use the Alpine system without understanding a language like MapReduce or Pig. It's now time for them to leverage that data into the ‘killer app' of big data: analytics." MapReduce and Pig are programming models designed to process large data sets.
The team in Alpine is focused on customers who had made bets on the startup's open source software framework named Hadoop. Hadoop had been a go-to option by most companies in their search to fund easier ways to manage large sets of external and internal data. This, VentureBeat noted, had pushed companies to use Hadoop, and Alpine in general as the platform was designed under the impression that the user is not a data scientist.
Otto claimed that the Alpine's technology had set the startup apart from other competitors in the big data business. He pointed out that Alpine's technology in Hadoop, besides the latter as its own product, provides value apart from simply providing data visuals. "Vendors focused on visualization aren't building complex algorithms," said Otto.
Alpine marketing chief Bruno Aziza added, "We (are) making our data scientists available to business people. We make sure they won't fail."
Alpine's customers reportedly come from different businesses, but most are big-time companies. Otto said several healthcare giants including Kaiser Permanente, and media conglomerates had also adopted Alpine's technology.
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