Aster Data Systems is presenting with
Sharmila Shahani-Mulligan, EVP of Marketing, and
Stephanie McReynolds, Director of Product Marketing. Their slogan is "More Data and Big Insight" to e Aster Data was at BBBT in January 2009 as summarized with a
blog here.
. Their annual revenue has doubled over last two years. They have scaled up their staffing across the company with an emphasis in sales, marketing and management.
Customers were initially digital media and Internal-based firms,
but now represent financial services, national retailers, telecomm, with companies like Barnes
& Noble, LinkedIn, and Intuit. Many customers have Aster Data servers that co-exist with
Teradata, Oracle and IBM DB2.
In one customer example, Full-Tilt Poker, a leading online poker site, is using Aster Data for fraud detection. Reports generation was reduced from once per week to just 15 minutes. Further, the fraud detection
can check 140,000 electronic poker hands per second and can react to fraud situations within 90 seconds.
Partners are SAS with joint development for
in-DB analytics and go-to-market program, Carahsoft in federal sector, Dell with cloud services and PowerEdge
C-Series hardware, Microstrategy, Terremark, and Informatica. Dell will provide full integration
of Aster systems on PowerEdge C servers, doing the assembly, test, and delivery as a Dell order. Current competitors tend to be Vertica on the east coast and Greenplum on the west coast.
Sharmila remarked that 70% of the big data
problem relates to data that lives outside of the primary data
warehouse. The current use case focus upon understanding customers, decide/act situations, and complex systems monitoring.
We had a deep discussion on evolving definition for a data warehouse and the unique capabilities of MapReduce. The principle is to run analytics as close to the data as possible, eliminating data movement. Sharmila defined Advanced Analytics as iterative analytics that start with a few dimensions and expand to more dimensions. It should be easy to explore the data. Advanced analysis implies a more complex processing involving the reading data from the database, doing the analysis, and then writing the results back to the database.
Aster Data is now offering an Eclipse-based visual development studio plus a large library of functions for common analytics. We ended with an NDA discussion of their future product roadmap.
My Take...Aster Data is gaining traction among early technology adopters. However, broader acceptance is limited by general industry acceptance of database paradigm shift. It seems that many BI professionals are sitting on
the sideline waiting for others to mature and prove MapReduce technology. However, their current customers are impressive and number in the thirties. These customers are implementing innovative applications that enhance key business strategies, with use cases that are more varied. Aster Data's future products plans intend to enable further analytic innovation. My advice is: Watch this company, and understand their technology.
