The Best Kept Secret in Big Analytics?

January 04, 2012

The Best Kept Secret in Big Analytics?

Nicole Hemsoth

When a company issues a press release that touts their offerings as the “best kept secret” in the industry, it’s hard to keep the bells and whistles of the BS detector at bay.

However, when a company emerges with such a statement, but can point to a quantifiable, large handful of household name new customers, not to mention boast some pretty outstanding numbers, one has to wonder if well-kept secrets in the analytics industry really can exist.

Such is the case with one “well-kept secret” in the ever-growing big data analytics space. 1010data, which traces its roots back to the 1980s on Wall Street (and keeps a NYC, versus Palo Alto address) issued an announcement today that detailed some rather impressive growth over the last few years in particular.

The company’s CEO, co-founder, and Wall Street convert Sandy Stier said that for a decade, “1010data was a well-kept secret among leading firms in financial services, retail and other industries, with customers using the analytics platform to achieve business gains from tens of millions to billions of dollars.”

In essence, 1010data has multiple ends to its business, which sees most of its business from finance and retail. The company began with the goal of building a scalable, simple to use data warehouse offering, which would allow customers to swap out their on-site infrastructure (and the people to run it) for a subscription-based model, which rendered them as an analytics as a service (for lack of a better term) company.

As the 1010data evolved, they moved past the crowd around hosted data services and came up with a “marketplace” approach. Users are able to tap into 1010data for everything from data management to pulling in new sources from outside sources and mesh it together in one location for analysis and visualization.

This week the company announced significant growth in the amount of data managed within their cloud (more than five trillion—yes, trillion—records, which comprises thousands of individual tables, the largest they say contains nearly a half-trillion rows). They also boasted an uptick in new customers, new users and higher system utilization. While the full numbers can be found here (including their statement that their customer base went up almost 50% in 2011 especially due to growth in retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG) industries), it is clear that the secret is getting out.

Among the company’s new users are recognizable brands, including SC Johnson, Coca-Cola, Purina, Nestle and Dollar General in addition to a number of financial services corporations—the original bread and butter for the company.

According to Steier, the company takes a different approach to analytics—one that has set it apart from the rest of the pack over the last ten years. The dividing point, Stier says, is the focus on direct, interactive access to raw source data and the ability to “easily perform complex analysis in minutes that would take days or longer on other systems.”

For more information, this is a pretty revealing contextual sense of what 1010data does, delivered by Robert Lefkowitz from 1010data…