Tableau deepens partnership with AtScale to accelerate data analytics for Hadoop

AtScale, a startup with software for improving the performance of business intelligence (BI) tools when they’re taking in data from the Hadoop open-source big data software, is announcing today a new technology partnership with publicly traded data visualization software company Tableau.

AtScale was already a certified Tableau partner, but now the companies are getting closer. AtScale now works with business-focused Tableau Server, and now the startup will offer its software at a discount to Tableau customers — cutting down the price by as much as 20 percent or so, AtScale chief marketing officer Bruno Aziza told VentureBeat.

What this means is that for big companies that choose Tableau, high performance is becoming more accessible.

“Our SLA [service level agreement] is 2 seconds or less on queries through AtScale,” founder and chief executive Dave Mariani told VentureBeat in an interview. “You’re talking about minutes, or sometimes even hours, without AtScale for most queries. No one’s going to wait that long.”

Rather than compete directly in the business intelligence, Hadoop, or data-cleaning markets, AtScale sees itself pursuing the intersection of BI and Hadoop. Mariani’s team is confident that others will follow suit. If anything, the companies with dedicated BI tools for Hadoop — like Platfora — come up in conversations. (Arcadia Data is also active in this area, but Mariani didn’t mention it by name.) Enterprises typically already pay for several BI tools and don’t want to buy new ones, said Mariani, who spent three years at Yahoo as its vice president of advertiser analytics, by way of the BlueLithium acquisition.

AtScale started in 2013 and is based in San Mateo, California. In June 2015 the startup announced a $7 million funding round. Investors include AME Ventures, Storm Ventures, UMC Capital, and XSeed Capital. Around 24 people work for the startup. In addition to the Tableau partnership, AtScale has deals in place with the big Hadoop distribution vendors — Cloudera, Hortonworks, and MapR — as well as Qlik and Microsoft, both of which offer BI software. One AtScale customer, Yellow Pages, can query 57 billion rows in less than a second in Tableau when it’s hooked up with AtScale, Mariani said.

A statement on the news is here.