Big Data On Demand

A while back I wrote a blog post suggesting that datacenter infrastructure would move from an on-premise operation to the cloud. It may have seemed counter-intuitive that the infrastructure itself would become available from the cloud, but that’s exactly what’s happening.

We’ve now seen everything from security to system management to storage evolve into as-a-service datacenter offerings, yielding all the benefits of SaaS — rapid innovation, pay-as-you-go, no hardware installation — while at the same time providing rich enterprise functionality.

As the datacenter gets dis-intermediated with the as-a-service paradigm, an interesting opportunity exists for the “big data” layer to move to the cloud. While big data is one of the newer parts of the infrastructure stack — and should have been architected and delivered as a service from the start — an estimated 90+% of Fortune 2000 companies carry out their big data analytics on-premise. These on-premise deployments are complex, hard to implement, and have already become something of a boat anchor when it comes to attempts to speed up big data analytics. They perfectly define the term “big drag.”

Without question the time has come to move big data to the cloud and deliver this part of the infrastructure stack as a service. Enter Cazena — our latest investment in the big data sector. The Cazena founders were former leaders at Netezza, the big data appliance leader that went public and was acquired by IBM for $1.7 billion. Prat Moghe, founder & CEO of Cazena, previously led strategy, product and marketing at Netezza. Prat has teamed up with Jit Saxena, co-founder of Netezza, and Jim Baum, the CEO of Netezza — all leaders in the big data industry.

This team knows a great deal about big data and agility of deployment. Ten years ago (long before the term big data was being used), the Netezza team came up with a radically simple big data appliance. Appliances reduced the sheer complexity of data warehouse projects — the amount of time and resources it took to deploy and implement big data.

In the next decade, even faster deployment cycles will be required as businesses want data on-demand. Additionally, the consumption pattern has changed as the newer data stack built using Hadoop and Spark has broadened the use of data. A new cloud-based, service-oriented deployment model will be required. The Cazena team is uniquely positioned to make this a reality.

We could not be more thrilled to be backing the team that has the domain expertise and thought leadership to change the face of big data deployments. Big data is changing the way the world processes information, and Cazena is uniquely positioned to accelerate these efforts.