Big Data Integration Made Simpler

Under the heading of turning lemons into lemonade, Xplenty has reinvented itself as a provider of data integration services delivered via the cloud that don’t require any programming expertise.

Xplenty founder and CEO Yaniv Mor originally created the Xplenty solution to provide the market with a platform for running Hadoop in the cloud. Unfortunately, however, in 2014, his company discovered that there just wasn’t enough demand for Hadoop delivered as a cloud service, he told Talkin’ Cloud. The two primary issues, said Mor, was that fierce competition in the form of services such as Amazon Redshift and the simple fact that when it came to Hadoop most organizations prefer to deploy the open source framework for managing big data on premise.

But during that same time, Mor said Xplenty noticed there was a lot of demand for moving data from one location to another for a wide variety of reasons. As part of rolling out the Hadoop service in the cloud, Mor said that Xplenty had created a data orchestration tool to simplify the movement of data into Hadoop.

Now armed with an additional $3 million in additional funding, Xplenty relaunched itself as a provider of a data integration service through which data can be easily moved not only in an out of Hadoop, but also between any number of data sources.

Mor acknowledges there are plenty of competitors in this space as well. But those competitors all require individuals with programming skills to make their service work. The Xplenty service presents a graphical user interface (GUI) that enables end users to move data between locations as they see fit.

Essentially an extract, transform and load (ETL) tool delivered as a service, Xplenty is trying to tap into an emerging “citizen integrator” phenomenon. Akin to the “citizen developer” phenomenon that has emerged in recent years around rapid application development tools in the age of the cloud, Xplenty enables end users to move data on their own using a pricing model that is based on actual usage of the Xplenty service.

For many solution providers across the channel, the existence of services such as Xplenty is something of a conundrum. Solution providers historically have made a lot of money first prepping data to be moved and then actually doing it. On an hourly cost basis such projects have been very profitable for the channel. On the other hand, data integration issues often limit the scope of other projects, so anything that simplifies the process can increase the size and scope of a project in which data integration is only one small piece of a much larger endeavor.

Regardless of the impact, the one thing that is for certain is that data integration services in the cloud are here to stay. The issue solution providers have to now contend with is how to best to respond to that new reality.