Datameer picks up $19M to help companies do analytics along with Hadoop
In simplifying Hadoop — which takes an elephant as it mascot — Datameer is helping more people process and analyze data. — Hadoop, the leading framework used by companies to process huge amounts of data, has become all the rage right now.
Context & Ripple Effects
Hadoop has moved from experimental infrastructure to mainstream corporate plumbing in 2013, and the money is following the whole stack. A year ago, distributor Cloudera closed a $65 million round at a $700 million valuation to commercialize the framework itself; now Datameer's $19 million round funds the layer above it — spreadsheet-style analytics that let business analysts, not just engineers, query Hadoop data.
The pickup was broad for a mid-stage round, with TechCrunch, Gigaom, SiliconANGLE, and PE Hub all carrying the news on the same day, which signals how much investor and press attention the Hadoop ecosystem commanded at the end of 2013.
First-order effects
- Datameer gets $19 million to scale its analytics product on top of Hadoop, betting that the bottleneck for enterprises is no longer storing big data but making it usable by non-technical staff.
- Companies already running Hadoop clusters gain another commercial option for self-service analysis without writing MapReduce jobs.
Second-order effects
- Hadoop distributors such as Cloudera benefit indirectly: easier-to-use analytics tools lower the skill barrier to adopting their platforms, expanding the addressable customer base for the whole ecosystem rather than competing head-on with it.
- Other venture-backed startups are pushed toward the same usability thesis — build the application layer on commodity big-data infrastructure rather than proprietary storage engines.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, value in big data migrates up the stack: infrastructure frameworks like Hadoop become commoditized utilities, and differentiation shifts to analytics applications sitting on top — a structure investors were already pricing into rounds like Cloudera's in 2012.
The trend: Enterprise data spending is climbing the stack, from commoditizing Hadoop-scale infrastructure toward funded startups competing to own the business-user analytics layer built on it.