AtScale Offers Universal “BI on Hadoop” Interface, adds support for Microsoft Power BI

BI on Hadoop leader now natively compatible with 99.9% of BI tool ecosystem

SAN MATEO, CA, October 1, 2015 – AtScale, one of the first companies to provide business users with fast and security-enhanced self-service BI access to Hadoop, announced today that it will offer a universal business interface to Hadoop for all BI tools. With its newest addition – Microsoft Power BI – AtScale now supports one of the largest number of BI tools for the OLAP on Hadoop market.

By achieving this milestone, AtScale is a leading provider of OLAP on top of Hadoop. The company will preview this functionality at the upcoming Strata Big Data Conference at booth # 215.  To find out more about how AtScale works with your BI tools, sign up at: www.atscale.com/try

The latest BI tool AtScale has certified is Microsoft Power BI, which uses ODBC connectivity to AtScale to import data into Power BI desktop.  The new service, released by Microsoft Corp. in July, counts close to half a million users worldwide.

“We are committed to eradicating the pain involved with connecting standard BI tools to Hadoop,” says Dave Mariani, CEO and founder of AtScale. “The average enterprise has tens, sometimes hundreds of BI tools they are trying to connect to their Hadoop data lake.  The industry has been telling customers that they need to buy yet another BI tool for Hadoop. But no customer wants to add yet another BI tool to their ecosystem. Rather, companies want to leverage the tools their users already know and augment them with capabilities that allow them to take advantage of Hadoop.”

Democratizing access to Hadoop

“At Microsoft, our goal is to bring business intelligence and insights to everybody in an organization,” says John Doyle, Director of Business Intelligence Marketing at Microsoft. “AtScale helps with our vision by making Hadoop accessible to Power BI giving every user the ability to work with big data.”

AtScale, whose recent Series A included the participation of Jerry Yang (co-founder at Yahoo!) and Amr Awadallah (co-founder at Cloudera), has a long history of making BI work on Hadoop; Dave Mariani, its CEO, is one of the pioneers in this space.

At Yahoo! his team designed the world’s large OLAP cube on Hadoop and connected it to MicroStrategy and Microsoft Excel.

At Klout, his team managed a 200 node Hadoop cluster and connected it to Tableau. Along the way, he discovered the issues involved in connecting BI to Hadoop directly namely:

  • The need for Simplicity: Raw data in Hadoop is far too complex for business users to query.  Most BI tools do not come with modeling utilities that work natively with Hadoop.  Thus, when traditional tools connect to Hadoop natively, end-users are confronted with unfamiliar data structures, data types and formats they might not be familiar with.  AtScale provides the industry’s first universal business interface for Hadoop.
  • The need for Speed: Hadoop delivers tremendous value when it comes to storage and scalability.  However, querying data in Hadoop directly can be slow and cumbersome.  IT departments have struggled to provide fast, interactive, direct access for their business users to Hadoop.  The AtScale Intelligence Platform automatically speeds up and optimizes end-user queries to provide business users with the type of interactive response times they need.
  • The need for Security: Connecting a BI tool directly to the data in Hadoop may unintentionally expose sensitive data to business users.  While Hadoop offers coarse grain security options, it doesn’t provide IT without enough control.  The AtScale Intelligence Platform delivers a comprehensive set of data access and governance options so IT can easily configure the right data access for the right users.

Learn More

AtScale will preview this functionality at the Strata Big Data Conference (Booth # 215). To find out more about how AtScale works with your BI tools, sign up at: www.atscale.com/try

About AtScale

AtScale makes BI work on Hadoop. With AtScale, business users get interactive and multi-dimensional analysis capabilities, directly on Hadoop, at maximum speed, using the tools they already know, own and love – from Microsoft Excel to Tableau Software to QlikView. Built by Big Data Veterans from Yahoo!, Google and Oracle, AtScale is already enabling the BI on Hadoop revolution at major corporations. To see how AtScale can help you, go to: www.atscale.com/try