Big Data startup Waterline Data Science has emerged from stealth mode to scoop up $7 million in Series A round, and also announced the release of Waterline Data Inventory to enable “data self-service” on Hadoop, at the Strata + Hadoop World New York conference.
Essentially, their new product allows users (business analysts and data scientists) to find, understand, and help govern Hadoop data. Alex Gorelik, former IBM engineer, Waterline Data Science founder and chief executive, explains in brief “A major complaint with Hadoop is that once you’ve loaded the data, extracting value is like finding a needle in a stack of needles. Waterline Data Inventory lets business users find the best needle in the stack of needles, without having to write code, and without having to wrangle the entire stack.”
“That’s our secret sauce, and key to delivering faster time to value and broad Hadoop adoption,” he said.
Companies are deploying Hadoop “data lakes” to provide unprecedented access to data for data science and analytics to uncover new business insight. However, Hadoop’s advantages of frictionless ingest, flexible schema on read, coupled with the lack of data governance, present problems for users trying to find and understand the data.
Waterline Data Inventory addresses Hadoop deployment issues like lack of governance by building a complete inventory of data assets in Hadoop opening access to Hadoop data through data self-service, according to their press release.
Data scientists and business analysts, utilizing the application, can easily augment reporting and BI with Hadoop data without coding, and data governance teams can start controlling Hadoop data.
“The ultimately exciting thing is if you can get your arms around this data, you can extract real value–everything from medical research to marketing and optimizing people’s experience with everything,” Gorelik enthuses, reports WSJ.
The Series A round saw participation from Menlo Ventures, and Sigma West resulting in Waterline’s first ever funding since its founding in late 2013.
“Waterline’s product is the linchpin in making Hadoop consumable for the enterprise, and will provide much-needed data self-service as the market expands,” aid Venky Ganesan, Managing Director at Menlo Ventures.
Read more here
(Image Credit: Erik Eldridge)
