If you don’t know Hadoop from a hole in the wall, please meet Justin Borgman. He’ll break it all down for you.
Borgman is the co-founder and CEO of Hadapt, a New Haven, CT-based startup that is coming out of stealth today at GigaOm’s Structure Big Data conference in New York City. Hadapt calls its product “the adaptive analytical platform for big data,” but trust me, it isn’t that boring.
The company is trying to merge the best features of advanced databases with a software platform called Hadoop to enable business customers to analyze enormous amounts of data, both structured (e.g., spreadsheets) and unstructured (e.g., free text), in a super-fast and efficient way.
OK, first things first. Hadoop is an open-source version of a software platform originally built by Google to store and analyze data generated from search indexes. But Hadoop is primarily used for unstructured data, and mostly by technical geeks. So, what Hadapt is trying to do is broaden the market for Hadoop by opening it up to all types of data and queries, by linking it to what’s called a relational database (which handles structured data).
“We’ve built a true hybrid,” says Borgman, a Yale MBA with Boston-area engineering roots. “You can have both structured and unstructured data in one platform, and do analytics across both.”
If you’re wondering how it’s different from the dozens of other companies trying to harness Hadoop, or otherwise help companies crunch huge amounts of data faster, well, it gets a bit
