Snowflake Differentiates Itself in Strata Startup Showcase

Snowflake Computing, a big data warehousing as a service provider, took home top honors at the Startup Showcase event held during last week’s Strata + Hadoop World conference. The award is a boost to the Silicon Valley company, which aims to be a one-stop shop for analyzing data generated on the cloud.

Snowflake emerged from stealth mode in October with $26 million in cash and a vision to create an “elastic data warehouse” that lives in the cloud. The company, which was founded by database experts from Oracle, Teradata, Actian, Cloudera, Microsoft, and Google, claims to be able to store and analyze any size or type of data set, via SQL interfaces.

Snowflake foresees a time in the near future when data generated in the cloud begins to take precedence in our world. “Sometime either this year or next year, we will see more data being created in the cloud than in an on-premises environment,” Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia told EnterpriseTech last year. “Because the data is being created in the cloud, analysis of that data in the cloud is very appropriate.”

Taking home second place was Caspida, a cybersecurity startup that uses big data technologies to detect and prevent threats lurking on corporate networks. The Silicon Valley firm is seeking patents for its behavioral threat
detection technology, which uses machine learning and other techniques to plug what it perceives as gaps in the way existing tools work.

The proliferation of polymorphic viruses and other advanced strains of malware, combined with the growing sophistication of cyberattacks and the always-present threat of internal users with superuser access, is coming together to overwhelm existing tools. What’s more, “analyst fatigue” is setting in due to the high rate of false positives with existing tools, making companies even more vulnerable.

Third place goes to Unravel Data, another outfit based in the Silicon Valley. The folks at Unravel have focused their energies on simplifying the operational aspects of running big data systems, such Hadoop. Instead of asking operators to learn how to run big clusters efficiently through trial and error, the company says its software can “learn” the best way to run the systems, thereby enabling the customer to offer guaranteed SLAs with more confidence.

Unravel says its software works with all of the major Hadoop distributors–that is, Amazon, Cloudera, Hortonworks, IBM, and MapR–as well as many of the sub-projects that collectively make up the Hadoop platforms, including Spark, Tez, Hive, Pig, and Cascading (along with hearty doses of R and Python for good measure).

Rounding out the winner’s column in the Startup Showcase is a Redwood City, California-based Hadoop security software developer called BlueTalon. The company, which won the Audience Favorite award, is developing fine-grained user access controls for Hadoop that will help prevent the loss of data in a Hadoop cluster. The company, which Datanami profiled last week, is working with Hadoop distributors to ensure that big data clusters can abide by increasingly strict regulations around data security.

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