Google BigQuery Makes Big Data More Accessible, Says French Startup
While Big Data has the potential to revolutionize business intelligence, it will first need to become considerably less complex, said Rachel Delacour, CEO and co-founder of BIME, a French company that offers a complete stack of business intelligence services and tools in the cloud.
Apache Hadoop, an open source framework for distributed computing and data storage, is the current focus of many companies hoping to leverage their largest data sets. Yet most of them lack the technical chops to work directly with Hadoop and contract with third parties to provide Hadoop-related software and services, Delacour said. Hadoop is better suited for batch-oriented tasks and thus not a good choice for real-time data analysis, she added.
With today’s release of version 4 of its software, BIME hopes to offer a more accessible option for analyzing Big Data. To that end, v4 includes a front-end connector for Google’s BigQuery, a pay-as-you-go data analysis service rolled out by Google earlier this month. “BigQuery is Big Data for the rest of us,” Delacour said. “It’s easy to use and easy to manage. It’s cost effective since you pay as you go, and virtually limitless in terms of scalability. We are proud to be the first vendor to offer a BI front-end for this exciting service.”
BIME offers BIME DB, a managed Web service that allows companies to create and configure analytics databases and gives users the ability to create dashboards and perform ad-hoc data analysis. The service, which runs on Amazon's Web Services compute cloud, can be purchased in workgroup, enterprise and premium editions. The cost for 10 users ranges from $60 to $240 per month, with no long-term contract required, Delacour said.
“We are offering the ability for anyone to query any kind of data, allowing business users to interact directly with data,” she said.
Business intelligence in the cloud will follow a similar trajectory to the one experienced by CRM, Delacour predicted, noting that a cloud delivery model helped Salesforce.com and other companies boost the appeal of CRM by broadening its use throughout organizations and making it easy for users to share information with each other.
Delacour’s company, founded in 2009 as We Are Cloud, was recognized as Best European Start Up of the Year at ICT Spring 2011 and Best Cloud Application by the Cloud Computing World Series Awards. Delacour said We Are Cloud is transitioning the company’s name from We Are Cloud to BIME.
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