Self-Serve Platform Promotes Collaboration

Among the goals of self-service big data analytics vendors is unifying the entire technology stack to allow business analytics to glean insights from data lakes. Combining the ability to run natively on Hadoop clusters and leveraging existing Spark deployments to preserve technology investments, one player in the self-service platform sector also claims to provide data preparation, visualization and other tools to quickly scan millions of rows and terabytes of scattered data.

In announcing the latest version of its ShareInsights big data analytics platform, infrastructure software vendor Accelerite attempts to give shape to the company’s mantra: collaboration is the key to overcoming a big data paradox: plenty of data but few easy ways to access the insights buried within.

Unlike competitors such as Alteryx (NYSE: AYX), AtScale and Tableau (NYSE: DATA) offering either data preparation (ETL), visualization or online analytical processing capabilities, Accelerite claims to have combined all these capabilities into a single analytics technology stack.

Along with attacking data volumes growing too fast for traditional business intelligence tools, the company also claims it collaborative approach addresses issues such as the growing cost of transforming unstructured data via BI tools. Another is the rise of “cross-functional” data stored in unstructured and unstructured formats.

The latest ShareInsights platform unveiled on Tuesday (Dec. 12) is billed as a single tool for managing the analytics “lifecycle” from data preparation and visualization while fostering greater collaboration among analysts. Its selling points also include “lightweight installation” of the platform over existing Hadoop infrastructure along with collaboration tools like links to enterprise data sources.

Visualizations of terabytes of data also can be shared on other visualization tools such as Tableau. Other collaboration features include the ability to share and reuse data sets from multiple sources, the company said.

“The biggest challenge most big data platforms pose is their complexity,” Mukund Deshpande, who heads the analytics practice in Accelerite, noted in a recent commentary. Given that complexity and soaring volumes, data must be cleanse, merged and mapped to business objectives. “Performing these operations calls for multiple tools and possibly writing code—not a simple operation for an average business user,” Deshpande noted.

“Collaboration and sharing has been broken [in data analytics] for a very long time,” he explained. “It’s because of different tools, proprietary formats, all of that.” Hence, Accelerite’s upgraded platform makes it easier to reuse other products, including embedding a data set or dashboard with others.

The latest version of the ShareInsights platform is available now. Pricing information is available here.

Accelerite, Santa Clara, Calif., said it product portfolio also includes hybrid cloud infrastructure that support both big data analytics and Internet of Things applications.

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