Overview
Ocient is the leading hyperscale data solutions company that enables organizations to unlock value by analyzing trillions of data records at performance levels and costs previously unattainable. Leading organizations around the world trust Ocient’s team of industry experts to design and deploy proven complex solutions that enable and fast-track new revenue opportunities, streamline operations, and improve security on 5-10x more data while reducing their storage footprint by roughly 80%. Ocient’s pilot-to-production solutions are rapidly deployed on-prem or in the cloud with little to no resource-intensive integration. Ocient is a carbon-neutral company, headquartered in Chicago, and backed by leading investors including Greycroft, OCA Ventures and In-Q-Tel.
Supernova Award Category
Data to Decisions
The Problem
As technology evolves, it creates more data to analyze, expanding at exponential rates. The massive volume and availability of data generated in the world has introduced new challenges around harnessing data from an ever-growing number of diverse and disparate sources to extract valuable insights at massive scale. And yet, the next frontier in data science and analytics lies in massive, trillion - to quadrillion-row semi-structured data sets holding valuable information across all walks of life – a realm we call “hyperscale” data analytics. Analyzing hyperscale data sets from an increasing number of sources in interactive time –meaning seconds to minutes versus hours or days– empowers organizations to predict and model new opportunities across products, systems, and operations while democratizing access to data for existing end users, data scientists, additional business units, and more. Digital transformation is driven by data transformation.
The Solution
The goal of Ocient is to harness this data for organizations that need complex, continuous analysis on trillions of records without resource intensive customization in a timely and cost-effective manner. We want Ocient to help organizations deliver new products, services, and revenue streams faster while also reducing storage footprint with zero-copy reliability. Ocient gives consumers the ability to harness bigger data sets with increasing precision to evolve consumer experiences, enhance public safety measures, and bring about smarter, more intelligent environments that were previously only imaginable.
The results
Before, queries ran on hyperscale datasets took hours, if not days, to be completed, wasting the time and resources of companies who need answers as soon as possible. Now, Ocient is here to change that. Ocient performs all fabrication activities intra-database with large joins and data repurposing features. This allows Ocient to produce the fabricated data artifacts in record time with parallel operation at all points in the flow. Instead of extracting and reimporting terabytes of data, it continually flows within Ocient. Ocient’s data extraction capabilities then retrieve final data sets in a massively parallel fashion that automatically splits and formats results for end customers. The result is a more efficient data production pipeline with turnaround on critical reporting outputs within seconds to minutes and an 80% cost savings over three years, totaling millions of dollars.
Metrics
Data science and engineering talent is in increasingly high demand, and engineering hyperscale data analytics solutions is no easy feat. Delivering a new and innovative solution on trillions of records may take an organization 6-12 months and dozens of engineers to fully operationalize. The opportunity simply outweighs the ability of teams to hire multidisciplinary expertise required to design and implement end-to-end solutions and to operationalize those teams to deliver seamless, and easy to manage, solutions for an ever-growing list of data-intensive applications needs. Ocient addresses hyperscale data analytics use cases with complex business requirements to deliver the most price performant solution with guaranteed customer success. As data analytics needs grow by order of magnitude, so do the complexities of leveraging a data warehouse platform and the full ecosystem of tools supporting it. Ocient’s technical customer engagement model puts customer success at the core of the company’s business by offering design, configuration, and deployment support from a highly skilled and experienced team of database engineers and solutions architects. Ocient partners with customers at every step to operationalize and optimize end-to-end solutions that deliver the best price-performance and accelerate time to market.
The Technology
Ocient supports Kafka and S3 compatible interfaces to receive and load data. Horizontally scalable, parallelized ingest accelerates the loading process via techniques such as stream loading, file loading, indexing, and data transformation. Stream loading feeds information into the Ocient Loader Nodes where transformed information accumulates and is transparently made available for queries within seconds of ingestion.
Disruptive Factor
Ocient’s Hyperscale Data Warehouse is a new tool in the race to unlock the potential of data analytics at a scale previously only imaginable. With an innovative architecture built to maximize the benefits of modern NVMe SSDs, Ocient is delivering breakthrough performance on analytics workloads that process trillions of data records and beyond. The ease and familiarity of SQL make integration of Ocient a frictionless process for enterprises, driving fast adoption and expanding access to hyperscale insights in organizations. Industry leaders are deploying Ocient on-premises and in fully managed cloud deployments – reducing IT costs while creating new product opportunities where it was previously too slow or impractical to deliver insights. Ocient’s team of hyperscale data experts are deploying Ocient in partnership with enterprise data teams to solve some of today’s most challenging data problems.
Shining Moment
We spent over 200 person years developing the product before making it available for customer use case. We know good things take time, so we did not want to rush pushing the product to market without covering our bases first. After adding support, product, and marketing, we created a well-rounded product that is a game changer in the world of hyperscale data analytics.