Datameer launched a new cloud service called Datameer Professional today that offers customers a Big Data solution without the hassle of installing, configuring and maintaining it themselves in-house. The goal of this new approach is to put the buying decision into the hands of business units, instead of being mainly driven by IT.
Datameer, which launched in 2009, offers big data and analytics running Hadoop for a range of applications. It has been selling an enterprise version since 2010 and boasts over 240 deployments including the three biggest credit card companies and two of the top three biggest banks, according to CEO Stefan Groschupf.
“The cool thing is that we can be useful in a broad range of use cases,” Groschupf said.
Yet, the company, which uses its own big data tools to analyze sales, started to see a decline in IT interest in the product in 2014. At the same time, it saw an 88 percent increase in interest from business units.
The installed version of Datameer is very much a long-term project, especially when you consider a Hadoop installation can take up to 12 months to implement. The Datameer project could be faster, but it involves a lot of technical moving parts resulting in what they call “a data lake or data hub.” They were hearing not every company wanted to take that long and they decided to make it easier by creating a cloud version based on the installed product.
“We were seeing these projects were slow moving and painful. Business users don’t want to wait 12 months. We started seeing a rush of interest from lines of business, where the conversation changes to business value,” Groschupf explained.
That meant finding a way to get to that value faster than on-premises would allow by its nature, and so Datameer responded by developing a cloud version. Since the code base is similar, customers can run a hybrid version where one or more clouds could co-exist with an on-premises installation.
This new product allows Datameer sales teams much greater flexibility to move into a customer at the department level, and eventually move that sale to IT to build a centralized data hub to bring all of the data together, regardless of the source or type of Datameer implementation the company is using.
Groschupf says they are still seeing enterprise sales in IT, but the rush of interest from departments was impossible to ignore. “We can spin this up in 6 hours instead of waiting for months,” he says. What’s more, it’s half the price of the $100,000 installed version.
The company always had a cloud version on its road map, but when they saw the accelerated interest from business units, they moved to create the cloud product to meet the growing business opportunity.
Datameer is partnering with Altiscale and Bigstep as its cloud hosts. Both services are a good fit for the company as they each specialize in Hadoop offerings in the cloud.
Datameer has raised $36.8M in four rounds, according to Crunchbase. Its most recent round was $19M in Series D in December, 2013.