By Shira Ovide
The world of big data has its own version of Shakespeare's
Capulets and Montagues: those who believe an emerging technology
called Hadoop is a portal to data-driven utopia and those who think
Hadoop often is the wrong tool for storing and analyzing floods of
information.
The co-founders of Interana are in the latter camp. A
husband-and-wife team that joined forces at Caltech, Ann and Bobby
Johnson had illustrious careers at Facebook and Intel,
respectively, before launching their big-data analytics firm.
The Johnsons unveiled their company last October. This week,
they are announcing new $20 million financing that includes two big
Hadoop backers: Mike Volpi, a partner at Index Ventures and among
the earlier backers Hortonworks, a Hadoop standard-bearer, and Mike
Olson, a senior executive at another Hadoop startup called
Cloudera.
Interana's pitch, in part, is that it isn't based on Hadoop,
which banks, retailers and others use to gather reams of
uncategorized data from various digital sources. The technology has
been held back by limitations such as speed, which isn't fast
enough to react immediately to transactions such as purchases, for
example.
Interana says its technology can make sense of incoming
information in seconds and let users analyze their business without
requiring technicians who know how to work with Hadoop, which is
notorious for its complexity. Asana, which sells workplace
collaboration and task-management software, said it used Interana
to pinpoint hiccups in its service without forcing engineers to
spend hours sifting through records of its users' every online
interaction.
Interana is based in part on technology developed at Facebook to
do tasks like sniffing out quickly why the social network was
bogging down and providing easy-to-understand visual graphs to
explain the problem, so people who didn't have a Ph.D. in data
science could understand the results. Interana, in essence, is a
version of the Facebook tool, known as SCUBA, for the broader
corporate world.
Both the House of Hadoop and skeptics like Interana share the
same essential goal: To transform the data thrown off by every
website, road traffic camera or store checkout counter into
profitable revelations. How many additional sales could The Gap
ring up if it knew that customers planning ski trips were more
likely to buy flannel pajamas?
Mike Volpi believes that Hadoop backers and doubters can
coexist. "Our general thesis is that the market around business
insights is quite large, and there will be multiple technical
approaches that will be broadly used--even within the same customer
accounts," he said.
Write to Shira Ovide at shira.ovide@wsj.com
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