Qubole’s mission to help every business turn data into business value via cloud computing has just received a massive boost. They have announced an impressive $13 million funding round, led by Norwest Venture Partners. With the money, the team plan to expand their signature offering, the Qubole Data Service, as well as offering more industry-specific features to their key client segments.
Speaking to Dataconomy about what avenues the new funding will open up, Ashish Thusoo, CEO and co-founder of Qubole highlighted expansion and amelioration across the board. “The latest invest in Qubole will enable us to further build out our sales force and partner program, to make Qubole available to more organizations with more industry specific solutions. We’ll also continue to invest in the Qubole Data Service, adding new features and capabilities.”
He added, “We’re seeing extraordinary growth. This time last year, our clients were processing about 10 petabytes of data per month using Qubole. Now, they’re processing more than 80 petabytes over approximately five million compute hours per month. The service has really taken off and this growth highlights the real and significant value we bring to our clients.”
A development which has been key in Qubole’s rapid growth is the service’s availability on Microsoft Azure, which we reported on last month. The Azure partnership meant customers were able to leverage a full-stack Hadoop environment using the Azure Object Store rather than HDFS, making big data analysis more time- and cost-effective.
However, whilst the tech is certainly robust, Qubole have always placed an emphasis on the availability and ease-of-use of their product. An oft-cited use case is Pinterest, who currently have 250 users in their Qubole environment, most of whom are not engineers.
Thusoo is a firm believer that the key to collaborative big data projects the whole company can understand and benefit from is the cloud. “The market is evolving extremely rapidly and prices are dropping quickly. Coupled with this, companies are becoming more comfortable with the cloud in general, as reliability, security and the overall experience continue to improve. All this means that companies are migrating more data and workloads to the cloud quicker.
“Big data is helping to drive this, too. Organizations are realizing that on-premise big data deployments are complicated and are less willing to take them on. Meanwhile, big data projects need the low cost, highly scalable and elastic infrastructure and resources that the cloud offers.
“This is why we firmly believe big data was made for the cloud.”
(Image credit: Qubole)
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