Want to harness the power of business intelligence but don’t have a six-figure budget to build a data warehouse? Why not try a cloud service instead?
Israel-based CoolaData is promising to ease the headaches, and start-up costs, of running a data warehouse with a cloud-based analysis service, one based on components of the Google Cloud Platform.
The service is aimed chiefly at mid-sized organizations, ones too small to have a dedicated team of data scientists and administrators to run data warehouses in-house, but with needs too large to make good use of the free and budget tiers of generic cloud based data analysis providers, said CoolaData’s CEO Tomer Ben Moshe.
The company is one of a number of providers using the cloud to simplify the complexities of running a data warehouse, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to deploy in-house.
CoolaData is competing with large cloud providers with similar offerings, such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. The company is also competing with other startups, such as Snowflake Computing, led by Microsoft veteran Bob Muglia.
CoolaData differentiates itself from the larger players in that all the components of its service are already assembled, whereas working with a Amazon or Azure still requires the users to integrate the needed components, Ben Moshe said.
The CoolaData service takes care of the database, storage, ETL (extract transform and load) tools, business intelligence analysis, and data visualization.
Users can pipe the data into the service by integrating their own applications through the use of a SDK (software development kit) provided by CoolaData. In addition to CoolaData’s own interface, users can also connect to the data through other analysis tools such as Tableau or Microsoft Excel.
CoolaData also offers an advantage in that it was designed to offer time-based behavioral analytics, an underserved niche within business intelligence, Ben Moshe said. Most BI operations are geared towards dividing up data among common characteristics, such as sales figures by region.
An increasing amount of analysis is temporal in mature, Ben Moshe pointed out. Businesses are looking for how a certain event unfolds over time. For instance, what were all the online actions of a user leading up to a purchase online? Or a gaming company may want to know if its users are progressing through all the levels of its game. These are the workloads CoolaData is especially suited for.
To help customers get a better handle on this type of information, CoolaData extended the SQL query language with its own proprietary set of commands, called CoolaSQL (CQL).
Formed two years ago, CoolaData is based in Tel Aviv, though the company has recently opened a New York office to serve U.S. clients. Investment firms 83North and Carmel Ventures have both financially backed the company. Prior to cofounding CoolaData, Ben Moshe served as Israel CTO for Microsoft.
Ben Moshe did not reveal pricing for the CoolaData service, other than to say it is based on the number of events processed each month.