Trifacta Cashing In On Cloud Analytics

Reflecting the booming market for data preparation technologies, many centering on emerging serverless tools, market leader Trifacta recently announced a $48 million funding round. Among the new investors is Google, which recently unveiled a managed data wrangling service developed in collaboration with Trifacta.

Along with Google, new investors include Columbia Pacific Advisors, Deutsche Börse, Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC) and New York Life. They joined existing investors Accel, Cathay Innovation, Greylock Partners, Ignition Partners and Ridge Ventures.

San Francisco-based Trifacta said is has so far raised $124 million in venture funding in six rounds.

Along with its managed data wrangling service called Google Cloud Dataprep, Trifacta’s push into cloud data wrangling also runs on Amazon Web Services (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Azure. The collaboration with Google resulted in a data prep tool that leverages the serverless data processing engine, Google Cloud Dataflow, which manages computing resources as needed.

Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) extended the Trifacta data prep service by adding support for BigQuery and cloud storage.

The embrace of serverless data prep tools underscores the steady enterprise shift of big data analytics away from on-premise Hadoop deployments to the public cloud, market analysts note.

As it extends its cloud-based data preparation tools to help reduce the time data scientists spend preparing data for analysis, Trifacta said its enterprise deployment now includes a collaboration functionality designed to support “groups and loops.” The idea is to build collective knowledge that can be transformed with repeated use into data wrangling workflows that accelerate preparation.

“Data is bigger, it’s messier and it’s changing faster than ever before,” said Trifacta CEO Adam Wilson. Hence, “It has become essential to democratize the production of new data assets with self-service data wrangling in much the same way enterprises previously democratized the consumption of data with self-service” business intelligence.

The company stresses that its platform strikes a balance between self-service and data governance by meshing “user experience” and machine learning.

Trifacta said the latest cash infusion would be used to fund continued development of its data prep platform along with its cloud expansion. The market for data wrangling tools is estimated to be growing more than twice as fast as the legacy data integration segment, according to an IDC forecast cited by Trifacta. In addition, Gartner forecasts that data prep tools will be used in half of all new data integration efforts for analytics by 2020.

Gartner (NYSE: IT) estimates global public cloud services will grow 18 percent this year to $247 billion, and that cloud services will account for the majority of analytics purchases by 2020.

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