Thinking about how Hadoop can help your business? Appfluent is one provider that thinks it can help you.
Appfluent believes it is transforming the economics of data warehousing. The big data analytics player is young but growing. It’s about 30 employees, and they’re currently hiring aggressively.
”We’re at a unique time in history,” said Frank Gelbart, President and CEO. “The relational database is under siege. (There's) exploding data volumes, machine data, sensor data. The relational database infrastructure is just not adequate.”
The company is a provider of enterprise BI and data warehouse management software. Appfluent software non-disruptively captures and correlates user activity, data usage and query performance for detailed usage-analysis over time. “We are seeing an acceleration in the amount of data that companies are starting to collect, and they need to do something with it,” said Gelbart.
Insight Into Data Warehouses
Appfluent Visibility integrates with leading BI applications to provide insight into business activity and data usage for Data Managers, Data Architects, BI Application Managers and Data Warehouse Managers. It provides information to measure the value being delivered by your data warehouse so you can prioritize your initiatives based on your business activity. Appfluent provides granular information on how data is used and what data is unused, enabling a company to reduce the complexity and costs of data management.
We’re at a time where new technologies like Hadoop will continue to grow in importance, as companies need to deal with Internet scale volume problems in a cost effective way. Appfluent develops technologies that help extend the capabilities that allow companies to scale much more cost effectively. “Out of the box, we’re going to slash costs, improve efficiency and help you make the move to hadoop,” said Gelbart.
The company’s customers come from several verticals. Financial services is a growing segment, Gelbart says. Examples given include credit card companies trying to mitigate credit risk, and the ability to crunch through current transactions to immediately identify a potential problem. The company also has telecommunications customers, as well as government and defense customers. Other areas it plays in are heathcare and retailing. “We don’t have direct competitors,” said Gelbart. “We’re competing against a myriad of homegrown solutions and some database monitoring. But those solutions can’t accomplish as much, they’re bare bones.”
State of NJ A Happy Customer
The company has signed up companies like Pfizer, the Union Bank of California, and SAP Business Objects, as well as helps the State of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. "Since implementing Appfluent, we have improved the efficiency and productivity of our Data Management Services unit. It is able to quickly pinpoint application usage and performance inefficiencies, slow reports, and bad queries, allowing us to optimize our data stores and enhance performance. We are providing better service and will be able to support more projects more effectively using our existing staff," said Dan Paolini, the Director, Data Management Services for the State of New Jersey
“We can deliver a real ROI (Return On Investment) today by just taking existing workload and moving it,” said Gelbart. “This isn’t pie in the sky stuff. This is Hard ROI dollars, you can wheel Hadoop into your Enterprise Data Warehouse, and do it for a tenth of the cost.”
The company is partnered with Cloudera, one of three major independent Hadoop distribution companies.
Technologies like Hadoop have enabled the data processing power to accomplish great things. “Big companies were managing big data warehouse in the dark,” said Gelbart. “Companies can really understand today how their business users are interacting with data, and stop spending money on existing legacy data warehouse platforms. It’s about optimizing what you have, understanding usage so you can offload.”
Big Data Getting ... Bigger
Big Data, and by relation Hadoop usage, is on the rise. “The market would be growing even faster if more people were up to speed on Hadoop,” said Gelbart. “Part of the expertise comes down to new applications that can leverage Hadoop." the demand for expertise around Hadoop is outpacing the supply, leaving a massive opportunity for companies positioned where Appfluent is; companies helping the evolution to Hadoop, and driving real, usable analytics around Hadoop.
"We are continually developing products that address the evolving challenges of big data," said Gelbart. "Our goal is to help businesses significantly reduce their data warehouse costs by pinpointing underutilized data, optimizing the most frequently used data and enabling them to make the smart move to Hadoop and Big Data.”
