ClearStory Data has created a solution to combine and analyse data from corporate and third party sources. Their software allows everyday business users to tap into more sources of data and drive deeper interactive, discovery-based and collaborative analysis for faster answers. It can help businesses look for and analyse data from all kind of sources such as relational databases, corporate databases, the web, Hadoop, social application interfaces and premium sources. The platform is built in such away that it is simple and easy to use and that no high profile IT staff is necessary to implement and use it. Finding the right staff however, can be difficult in the increasingly competitive talent market.
Their tool is especially interesting for companies who want to make smart, data-driven decisions based on a large amount of different data sets, without the need for a difficult IT integration process. They offer a complete backend stack combined with a front-end integrated application and includes four key patent pending around: (1) Spark-based Data Harmonization, (2) Data-aware Collaboration, (3) Semantic recognition/Data Inference, (4) and Interactive Visual ‘Smart Defaults’.
In total they have received over $ 31 million in funding from well-known investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, along with Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures. With this funding they can grow their experienced team and further develop the solution to simplify accessing and analysing large amount of data.
The goal of ClearStory Data is to advance self-driven big data exploration, so without the need for data scientists to perform quantitative analyses to give insights from multiple sources. If this tool works as seamlessly as they say it will work, this can help a lot of smaller companies to start using big data to improve their business decisions making. At the moment for smaller companies it is still rather difficult to combine all the relevant publicly available data with their corporate data and derive insights from it that can be used writing a business strategy. They are focussing on the following industries: Consumer packaged goods, Food & Beverage, Retail, Healthcare & Life Services, Media & Entertainment and Financial Services.
In 2014 they were named Cool Vendor in Big Data by Gartner as well as Silicon Valley Hottest Company. In the past years they have made a lot of progress and managed to develop a Big Data tool that can significantly help organisations. Therefore we give them a 7 bits rating.
