Big Data Startup Cirro Brings Big Data To The Desktop

Cirro wants to bring big data to the desktop and make it accessible and understandable for non-IT professionals. They have developed the Cirro suite to make data access and exploration of heterogeneous data simple. Users can mix big data sources stored for example on Hadoop with traditional sources and perform analysis on them without the need to be a data scientist.

Cirro is especially made for smaller organisations that want to start discover the possibilities of big data, without having to spend large amounts of money on IT and data scientists. It will provide these organisations with a single platform that incorporates any data form any source in any environment and allow them to conduct analysis or create integrate data views within Excel.

In order to start using Cirro, it does however lists HDFS and MapReduce, and quite often Apache Hive as well, as required components to work correctly. This does require some specialised knowledge to set-up, so the statement of Cirro that it can be used with minimal technical skills is not completely true.

Most of the tools using HDFS and MapReduce require data to be placed in one single location, while Cirro gets the data from different sources. Analyses that can be made with Cirro are among others combining public data from a live Twitter feed with customer data to offer the organisation detailed insights into for example the sentiment of its customers. This is of course nothing new, but Cirro claims that non-IT professionals can easily create these types of analyses.

Cirro has an agreement with Tableau Software that allows Tableau customers full access to their entire enterprise analytical data source. In this case, Cirro is the execution platform and with Tableau they can ask any questions regarding their data and visualize it. However, this does require more IT skills.

Cirro was launched late 2010 by the analytics and data warehousing expert Mark Theissen and in 2012 they were finalist in the GigaOM Structure LaunchPad competition. In 2012 they landed their first $ 2.5 million funding. Their product suite clearly stands out from the crowd by making big data accessible for smaller organisation who do not have the capacity for highly skilled IT analysts. Excel however, does have its limitation in visualizations, which could limit the insights users derive from their data. BigData-Startups therefore gives Cirro a 6 bits rating.