Why we also feel Arcadia Data is very cool

Date posted
9 May 2017
Reading time
5 Minutes
Darragh McConville

Why we also feel Arcadia Data is very cool

Arcadia Data today announced that it has been included in the list of "Cool Vendors" in the Internet of Things Analytics report by Gartner Inc., published on April 27, 2017. This sees Arcadia Data follow in the footsteps of other "Cool Vendors" such as Cloudera in 2008 and the similarly-positioned Platfora in 2015, whose subsequent acquisition I blogged about last year.
Our data engineering and analytics experts are always on the lookout for the next data technology wave for our clients and 12 months ago we identified Arcadia Data as a unique Big Data Analytics platform providing native access to contemporary data management platforms such as Apache Hadoop, Apache Solr, Apache Drill and Amazon Redshift.
To continuously create compelling products and services, large enterprises can no longer afford to be out-manoeuvred by smaller, more agile, companies who are able to make rapid decisions based on better customer behaviour analysis and real-time data streams.
Whilst still inhibited by legacy estates with high run-costs, enterprises are now undertaking a fundamental re-shift in how they earlier identify fast-changing customer needs or operational inefficiencies through data discovery pipelines. This shift towards, adaptable, accessible, user-driven exploration is the progressive accompaniment to the traditional, governed, regimented and system-driven Business Intelligence workloads. Gartner describe this particularly well and have attributed the "Bi-modal BI" moniker to this way of working.
[caption id="attachment_18020" align=" width="467"] width= Traditional & Contemporary modes for data analytics (Gartner)[/caption]
Traditional BI tools typically work on a summarised view of transactional data which often requires significant discussion, effort, cost and elapsed time to model, aggregate and productionise. This aggregation process often necessitates the need to pre-determine data navigation paths thereby reducing the discovery process of finding 'unknown unknowns' across vast data sets.
Data Discovery tools such as Arcadia Data and data wrangling tools such as Trifacta, which allow data-savvy business users to perform data transformations on a self-service basis, are enabling the acceleration of data discovery pipelines and can greatly reduce the cost and time to attain insight, compared to IT-led, ETL-heavy processes.
There are many software vendors that are aspiring to deliver seamless Data Discovery for contemporary data management platforms. Many are still finding their feet, however, our hands on experience of working with Arcadia Data in the last 12 months has cemented our view that they are going to play a leading role in the contemporary BI world and we are recommending to our clients that they take a look.

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Darragh McConville