Hunt Valley software developer
Revelytix this month is selling its first product to process and manage massive amounts of data, known in the field as big data. Since last year, Revelytix has been transitioning into the big data space, and the release of Loom Dataset Management for Hadoop is the culmination of that process.
Founder and CEO Michael Lang calls Hadoop a “data lake,” into which clients’ data is dumped. Created by Yahoo engineers in 2005, it is a free, open-source software platform that supports systems with thousands of nodes, in the jargon, of data. Yahoo, Facebook, eBay and
IBM, among others, use Hadoop for data storage.
Loom Dataset, the new product, is intended to keep track of and manage a company’s data in Hadoop. Loom was launched as a beta product last February before putting it on the market.
“Whenever you have open-source software, there are always capabilities and feature gaps that many businesses want. We built software that runs with Hadoop and adds value,” says Lang.
Lang founded Revelytix in 2007. So far, its primary customer has been the U.S. Department of Defense. With the launch of Loom, however, the company is aiming for the commercial market although it will continue working for the federal defense department.
Loom is priced by size of the enterprise system. A “starter kit” for small enterprises using 20 Hadoop nodes costs $35,000 to $40,000; for larger enterprises using 1,000 nodes, $500,000 to $1 million, according to Lang. Revelytix has partners that service Loom, including Spry, Knowledgent, Hortonworks, Global IDs Inc and HP Squared LLC.
“The ability to process big data is life or death for large enterprises,” says Lang.
Revelytix is a private company with a staff of 19. Lang expects to hire more staffers in the future depending on sales of Loom.
Source: Michael Lang, Revelytix
Writer: Barbara Pash