AtScale allows organizations to use their familiar BI tools like Tableau and Excel to process Big Data at extreme speeds. The new cloud marketplace initiative is aimed mainly at departments of enterprises.
Bruno Aziza, AtScale’s CMO.
San Mateo-based startup AtScale has announced the general availability of AtScale Cloud and its availability in the AWS, Azure and Google Cloud marketplaces. While AtScale has been in the cloud for approximately a year, this initiative is designed to expand its use there, particularly by providing enterprises with an easy way to try AtScale out in non-production environments or in smaller projects.
AtScale, which was founded in 2013 and first brought product to market in 2016, is a data management solution that offers ‘one-click’ provisioning of extremely complex Big Data analytics workloads on-prem, in one or multiple clouds, and in hybrid environments.
“We are a software middleware platform that fits between Big Data platforms and familiar Business Intelligence tools, like Tableau and Excel,” said Bruno Aziza, AtScale’s Chief Marketing Officer. “We enable the Big Data to be easily consumable with those tools. Most of these were built 25 years ago and have serious performance issues with Big Data. Tableau running on top of Hadoop is very slow, for instance.” Aziza also noted that these tools were not optimized for large data sets, and that they have no way to standardize on data governance, something that AtScale provides.
“AtScale lets customers do all these things while still using the same BI dashboard that they know,” he indicated.
“Our co-founder, Dave Mariani realized early on that to satisfy users, you had to take data out of the Big Data platforms and put it in a smaller one, but the legacy BI platforms could never provide all of the speed, security and scale for this,” Aziza said. “By achieving this, we are now deployed in some of the largest companies in the world. We focus on the enterprise because they have a very complex environment.”
AtScale sells through partners. Nominally these are the vendor whom they connect, although their partners also include other strategic platform providers like Cloudera, as well as elements of the channels of their vendor partners.
“We are extremely focused on our go-to-market strategy, getting points of leverage,” Aziza said. “With his new initiative, we will now be relying on the major cloud vendors’ marketplaces as well. We are betting on the three big players, and we expect that this will give us another point of leverage in our go-to-market strategy.”
Aziza said that the marketplaces are not intended to open up markets with smaller companies.
“We do have some smaller customers, but they are ones with unusual complexity for their size,” he said. “For us, there is a risk in getting customers who would be more expensive for us to support than we would gain in revenues. So the plan with the marketplaces is not to bring in sub-100 people customers or even midmarket customers. We are offering a new way for customers with existing AtScale deployments to purchase more. We are also providing a way for new customers to purchase us for a more limited kind or deployment, but we see that customer as more likely to be a department of a larger organization.” The initial purchase then becomes part of a broader ‘land and expand’ strategy to build a deeper presence in that organization.
AtScale Cloud isn’t AtScale moving into the cloud, but rather creating a market mechanism to allow broader and more structured access to it.
“We started on-prem, and focusing on selling to one customer at a time,” Aziza said. “However, our product is really sophisticated, and after three years, is battle-tested. The cloud is not new to us. We’ve been testing the cloud marketplaces for a year. Now we are welcoming more companies to use them.”
Aziza identified three likely use cases for AtScale Cloud in accelerating and simplifying cloud migration of Big Data across complex environments, using quickly deployable Data Lake Intelligence capabilities on any of the supported clouds.
“One is customers who have deployments like Hadoop on-prem, and are migrating some of them to the cloud. They need the same logic in the cloud as on-prem and we allow them to do that. We have been doing this now for about a year. The second is customers who are already in the cloud, who have data there. The third is an existing hybrid scenario, where they need a universal set of definitions for on-prem and cloud. We think that will be the majority of customers.”
AtScale Cloud is available now on the Amazon, Microsoft and Google Cloud marketplaces.
