A webinar I watched was titled for the announcement of Datameer Professional, but that’s not what caught my interest. I previously blogged about Datameer’s presentation to the BBBT, so you can see where I think they’re a good, basic company who seemed to have a better grasp on the market than most startups. Sadly, that wasn’t shown today. What was most interesting was the part of the presentation that covered Altiscale, a company partnering with Datameer to provide Datameer Professional.
The Basics
The presentation was a tag team between Stefan Groschupf, CEO of Datameer, and Mike Maciag, COO of Altiscale.
It began with Stefan giving a very generic overview of the market. There was little content and that which was there wasn’t a surprise. The main point is that the demand for Hadoop has moved from IT doing behind the scenes work to business users wanting quick analysis. The lack of technical knowledge makes staffing an issue.
That led directly to Mike Maciag talking about how Altiscale provides Hadoop as a service. They’re a cloud provider of Hadoop. With founders from Google, Yahoo and LinkedIn, they understand Hadoop, the cloud and the need of companies to quickly leverage external resources to get to Hadoop with better TCO than would be the case trying to build in-house.
The reason for that quick introduction became apparent as soon as Mike tossed back to Stefan. Datameer Professional is a cloud version of their product that runs on Altiscale in the US. During Q&A, it come out that they’re using a different, unnamed provider in the EU for compliance issues over there.
One feature is they’re claiming they’ll provide three sets of basic analytics with Professional, for customer analysis, operations and cyber security – in that order. However, there was the qualification from Mr. Groschupf of “over the next few months,” so no clue how much is there now or when they’re really be available.
Case Studies
One thing I noticed placed a clear difference between the two companies as for how far they understand business customers. The Datameer customers mentioned were never named. None are approved. Therefore, I have to question the veracity of claims.
The case study presented by Altisoft was a named client. Business users want to know reality and also want to confirm that a customer has enough confidence in a vendor to attach a name.
Summary
The summary combines what I heard today and what I heard at the BBBT presentation.
Datameer is a good startup, but is still focused on technology. BI has a short life cycle and companies need to rapidly prepare for the chasm. As they showed no updates in their UI, don’t have strong market messages and didn’t have a referenced customer, Datameer is a company to look at for technology but I again wonder about the long term strategy and think the technology will be acquisition bait. Look to them for a basic interface, strong underpinnings to they don’t seem focused clearly on end-user business messages.
Altiscale is also a good startup, but they seem better focused on a business message. Perhaps that’s because they are a cloud service company so they know it is important to do so. From the little I saw, they seem to be positioning themselves well as an alternative to Amazon and other choices to help business quickly take advantage of big data on Hadoop. I’d like to hear more.
Both Datameer and Altiscale are worth looking at, but for different reasons and they don’t have to be a set.