Trifacta Develops A Productivity Big Data Analytics Platform

Trifacta tries to solve the biggest problem of big data that awaits us in the coming years: the shortage of big data scientists and big data managers. They are not trying to do that by creating an education platform, but to build a system that makes big data easy to manipulate and rearrange so that there is not need for expensive big data scientists anymore in order to start with big data.

Trifacta was founded in 2012 by a professor in the Human-Computer Interaction research group at Stanford University, Jeffrey Heer, together with Sean Kandel and Joe Hellerstein who happens to be a professor of Computer Science at Berkeley. Together they want to rethink interfaces, systems and algorithms in order to make an intuitive, powerful and useful solution to analyse and manipulate data.

One of the problems Trifacta is addressing is called Data Munging or Data wrangling. Wikipedia defines it as the process of converting or mapping data from one raw form into another format that allows for more convenient consumption of the data. The problem with data munging is that is becomes harder as it scales bigger. The real problem starts when people will have to start working with such data. Therefore, Trifacta combines machine-learning with human-computer interaction. This allows for an intuitive and intelligent solution that is easy to understand as no more writing of code will be required to format big data problems. This will definitely increase productivity and make big data more accessible.

It intends to not only make the processing of data easier, but also the development of the correct queries and code. Trifacta will allow users different visualization options and options to extract a data set. After a preview is approved, Trifacta will do the rest. It can be built across multiple platforms, from extensive Hadoop clusters to a common well-known relational database. It looks very smart, cutting out the data scientist for the process of data wrangling, and when it does work they have something valuable at hand.

At the moment Trifacta just came out of stealth modus as well as landed a $ 4.3 million investment by among others Accel Partners. However, their productivity platforms for data analysis are still being developed and not open for the public yet. It seems that they do not have any patents (pending) and being just out of stealth modus they have not won any awards yet. Nevertheless, if they succeed in what they are doing it could make big data a lot easier to implement for a lot of organisations and therefore we give them a 7 bits rating.