Cirro Passes Go, Collects $8M for Data Federation

Among the chief challenges of predictive analytics is wrangling up the necessary data from the various silos through complicated ETL processes. One company, Cirro, claims that its platform eliminates many of these hassles, easing burdens for non-technical analysts. On Wednesday, the company announced that it has garnered $8 million dollars in Series A funding.

With a mission to “bring big data to the desktop,” Cirro says that it provides a single point of entry to access all of the data in a company’s data ecosystem. Calling its offering a “data federation platform,” the company says that its software can work with any type of data (be it structured, unstructured, or semi-structured) on any type of platform, including relational, Hadoop, NoSQL – and in any environment.

“Every day organizations are wrestling with strategies for integrating the old world of the data center and relational databases with the new world of Big Data, SaaS, and NoSQL data sources,” said Mark Theissen, CEO, Cirro.  “Cirro’s … platform simplifies access for all data sources and shifts the corporate analytic focus from asking questions you already know to answering disruptive questions that deliver new insights and ultimately bottom-line impact.”

Joining Cirro with the round of funding is Vinny Smith’s Toba Capital, an investment company that was formed in the wake of Dell’s $2.4-billion buy-out of Quest Software last summer. Toba was in the news last week with the funding announcement of Dataguise, a security software company. With its first investment in February of this year, Toba has been very active with 10 separate investment deals in 2013, including such names as WSO2, TeamSnap, Codenvy, Cloudant, Alteryx, and Bright Media .

Regarding this most recent funding venture with Cirro, Toba’s Smith explains that Cirro fits with his ideas around backing businesses that “map the fissures and are quick to build on shaking ground.” Without a doubt, wrangling data across silos is a challenge in enterprises that are strapped for talent. “Combining traditional data with new data sources and types represents an untapped opportunity to explore and seek business insights previously unavailable,” said Smith. “Cirro is a revolutionary approach to data federation that dramatically collapses the time required to conduct penetrating analysis of all enterprise data.”

For its part, Cirro has been busy rounding out its edges since the company’s launch last summer. Cirro has expanded to support SaaS applications, and offers the ability of offloading data warehouse slices into Hadoop. Where Hadoop is concerned, the company has canvassed the space pretty well, partnering with Cloudera, EMC/Pivotal, and Hortonworks. The company also counts Cassandra vendor DataStax among its partners.

Cirro isn’t alone in the federated data space. The company has plenty of company with vendors like IBM, Oracle, SAP, Informatica, Cisco, and Denodo Technologies vying for market share.