Software firm BlueData says its sales surged 426 percent in 2016, and the company attributes much of that growth to increased interest from enterprises in Docker containers, cloud computing, and big data.
The company, which describes itself as a big data-as-a-service (BDaaS) platform provider, says that it signed deals with several new customers in 2016 including AIG, Attunity, Barclays, Equifax, Micron, and State Farm Insurance.
“As Docker grows as a platform, it’s becoming more mainstream and we are riding that wave. We are right at the intersection of big data and Docker,” said Jason Schroedl, vice president of marketing at BlueData.
Perhaps even more interesting is BlueData’s work with an unnamed banking client that has a large Hadoop deployment. According to Anant Chintameneni, vice president of products at BlueData, the customer is using BlueData’s BDaaS platform to increase the performance of its Hadoop infrastructure and then scale its compute and storage resources separately.
This often is a good solution when a customer finds that their storage needs are growing faster than their compute needs. “They achieve an imbalance when their storage is growing faster than their compute, so they have underutilized resources,” Chintameneni said.
In this case, the banking customer decided to manage the storage independently so it can scale up or down. That can be achieved, Chintameneni said, by either using storage-intensive servers or third party storage.
BlueData’s management team includes several former VMware executives including CEO and Co-founder Kumar Skreekani; Jim Lenox, vice president of worldwide sales; and Tom Phelon, co-founder and chief architect. Skreekani previously was vice president of R&D at VMware, Lenox was VMware’s senior director of cloud services and general manager of Asia-Pacific sales, and Phelon was a senior architect at VMware and also oversaw the R&D Storage and Availability group.
