Platfora hopes to take on IBM and EMC in big data management

Enterprise storage startup Platfora is looking to help companies organise and search information held in extremely large databases using the Hadoop framework to analyse and manage the data.

The company is planning to go live with the platform in 2012, and has recently secured $5.7m (£3.6m) in funding.

Chief executive Ben Werther told V3 that the software will solve a common problem in the enterprise space as employees and customers increasingly use multiple platforms and services.

Data levels are booming and many companies are left with huge amounts of data to store, manage and analyse, Werther explained.

"Hadoop has emerged as a new technology that allows users to store this data source very effectively, but the reality is that it is only a low-level solution, it is only the plumbing," he said.

"We are making it possible for users to get that data directly and use it to its full extent."

Platfora will find itself in a booming and increasingly competitive market for big data management. Enterprise kingpins such as IBM and EMC are preparing big data offerings of their own, and the startup could face formidable competition.

However, Werther believes that Platfora's small size and lack of legacy platforms are an advantage rather than a handicap.

The company is able to produce a more agile and flexible product than the established vendors can offer because Platfora runs with Hadoop and is not bound to proprietary platforms, according to Werther.

"When they try to use those solutions they need to start with IT implementing the pipeline and the back end of the data into a size that is small enough so the business intelligence products can work with it," he said.

"It is not just that these systems are expensive and not scalable, but they are built on a model of inherent inflexibility."