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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