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September 30, 2016

Container Specialist Tops Strata Startup List

(2M media/Shutterstock)

A data lake startup whose platform utilizes Docker application containers to run an open source analytics engine is the winner of the startup showcase during this week’s Strata + Hadoop World in New York.

Pachyderm Inc. took first place in the biannual competition that included 11 other finalists. DataRole, a startup headquartered in Cincinnati that tracks home repair projects for the property and casualty insurance industry, was the “Audience Pick” winner.

San Francisco-base Pachyderm, which has raised just over $2 million in equity funding since its founding in 2014, caught the application container wave as a way to reimagine the data analytics infrastructure in general and Hadoop in particular. Hence, the startup embraced tools like Docker and CoreOS as a way to make data platforms more modular and able to scale from individual users to an entire company.

The agile data strategy reflects the growing shift toward flexible IT micro-services that startups such as Pachyderm are attempting to leverage in the data analytics market to promote “distributed computations.” Joe Doliner and Joey Zwicker co-founded Pachyderm. The startup has so far attracted about a dozen seed investors.

Its container-based data lake was pitched as offering version control for data while leveraging a container infrastructure to deliver “reproducible data processing.” Version 1.2 of the startup’s platform is said to be ready for production use for storing and analyzing big data on a container-based infrastructure.

The runner up in the fall startup showcase was Compellon Inc., a prescriptive analytics software developer based in the Orange County, California, city of Rancho Santa Margarita. The analytics startup founded in 2010 seeks to overcome what it calls the “trial and error” approach to data analytics with its proprietary predictive analytics platform touted as capable of automatically discovering, learning and adapting in dynamic data environments.

Compellon’s analysis engine targets the financial services, health care and advertising sectors and is said to eliminate the traditional analytics method of testing data against multiple statistical models.

The third-place finisher in the analytics startup competition was Panaseer, a U.K.-based developer of a “security data lake” designed to deliver business intelligence on vulnerabilities, likely cyber threats and the tools used to exploit enterprise vulnerabilities.

The two-year-old startup’s security data lake approach is intended to automate the process of spotting and measuring cyber threats, communicating those threats and then mitigating risks. The startup believes it has found a niche for automating security because “the finite time of security staff is being eaten up reporting to the [b]oard, auditors, regulators, customers and business partners.”

A complete list of the finalists for the Strata startup showcase is here.

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