With $8.7m series A funding in the bag, Cirro looks to shore up its federation business

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1 With $8.7m series A funding in the bag, Cirro looks to shore up its federation business Analyst: Krishna Roy 11 Jun, 2014 Cirro is building a business in the integration sector, where it provides a federated approach to the issue of combining multiple diverse data sets and querying them for analytical purposes. The company is looking to make investments in sales, marketing, product development and engineering using $8.7m in series A funding, which it landed in October Cirro also recently announced that it received a strategic investment from GE Ventures. The four-year-old company, which spent the first two years of its life in stealth development, is also gearing up to unleash a fresh cut of its enterprise-oriented data federation platform. The latest release includes capabilities aimed at appealing more to its heartland in financial services, while also making administration a more simple and user-friendly affair. The 451 Take Cirro is in a far stronger position than it was this time in The company has funding to execute on business and product development plans, has laid the groundwork for direct and indirect sales opportunities, and is about to unleash a fresh release that is likely to bump up its business in the financial services sector, which is proving to be a sweet spot. That said, we still think enterprise-oriented federation takes some evangelizing, and continues to get confused with virtualization. Although Cirro now has the likes of IBM and Teradata to help its case for federation in distributed environments, these behemoths may also present fresh rivalry in certain situations. Copyright The 451 Group 1

2 Context Cirro is in the midst of scaling up: management intends to increase headcount to over 30 employees by year-end, from roughly 20 staff currently, using the series A funding. The round was led by Toba Capital and also involved another new investor GE Ventures which was publicly disclosed in May. Existing investors Frost Venture Partners, Miramar Venture Partners and Mark IV Capital also participated in the financing round, which takes Cirro's total funding to $11.7m. Cirro which had about a dozen employees when we spoke with management in September 2013 is hiring in sales in order to build a direct sales force for enterprise-level accounts. Management hired a first dedicated salesperson in February and has subsequently executed on a judicious recruitment strategy in sales and other areas of its business. That said, the company deems indirect sales to herald the larger long-term sales opportunity. Don Howren, who was previously VP of marketing, has now taken on the dual role of marketing head honcho and VP of business development and channels, in order to kick-start indirect sales efforts. Cirro is also forging relationships with big-name systems integrators to grow its data federation business, which is horizontal in nature, although increasingly finding favor in certain vertical markets. Management reports that financial services is shaping up to be a sweet spot because companies in this industry sector tap into Cirro's ability to provide fast performance when it comes to running queries across multiple data sources for intra-day trading analytics and financial reconciliation, for example. Having cut its teeth on some early customer wins in media and entertainment, Cirro now claims a paying customer base approaching double digits. It reported a handful of paying customers in September Management also notes it is seeing significant customer demand for the ability to ingest multiple sources of data from the cloud, SaaS apps, social media, sensors, Hadoop and corporate datacenters, and bringing new data sources for analysis into the mix while preserving existing investments that enterprises have made in custom platforms. This scenario is a key driver behind its systems integrator partner strategy. Data warehousing off-loading and archiving scenarios also remain popular use cases. Over on the product front, Cirro has a new release of its enterprise-oriented data federation platform waiting in the wings. One noteworthy enhancement is support for Excel as a data source. It is not be confused with Cirro Analyst which is one component of its enterprise platform that essentially uses Excel to model results and also provides other features for exploration and discovery. The other components of the platform are Cirro Data Hub for a single point of data Copyright The 451 Group 2

3 access and Cirro Multi Store. The latter is an optional component consisting of a Hadoop cluster and a tightly integrated relational database, which can be used as a staging area or data mart. The new Excel feature essentially means customers can use a table in the spreadsheet as a source for a federated query in its query engine. To be more specific, Cirro isn't doing the actual processing in Excel. Instead, it moves the tables out of the spreadsheet and pushes them down to its back end, focusing on moving the smallest amount of data possible, and enabling it to be laterally joined and queried in tandem with data in the other various relational and non-relational environments it supports. The new function is also designed to be user friendly. We're told users simply point Cirro to an Excel worksheet and identify it as a source, and the data federation platform handles it as just another data source to be queried and analyzed. The debut of a Web console is the other noteworthy capability in the next release. Why? It means IT doesn't have to use database administration tools a primary method to manage Cirro to date, owing to the fact that its existing admin console has been somewhat crude. The new one is designed to embrace a wider range of capabilities and more easily manage its data federation stack. The new management console also aims to make it easier to create federated views, add new data sources and manage data sources. The new console also includes other capabilities required by administrators and others responsible for managing it, such as query histories and previous query plans, for audit and compliance purposes. Competition Cirro's focus on next-generation federation across multiple relational and non-relational sources isn't the same as data virtualization although the two approaches are often confused and used interchangeably. Market confusion probably isn't helped by the fact that Cirro reports encountering Denodo Technologies and Cisco's acquired Composite Software division. Denodo and Cisco/Composite are squarely in the data virtualization camp. That said, both vendors marketed around data federation before virtualization became a fashionable term. Cirro contends that data virtualization and federation are different and have different uses, arguing that virtualization is good for structured data processing workloads and doesn't provide true federated processing because the final joins are carried out on a virtualization server. While we see management's point, it is fair to say that to the uninitiated the two approaches can seem similar. Why? They are designed for distributed environments and offer the ability to create a Copyright The 451 Group 3

4 virtual data abstraction layer to federate data from multiple sources, as a more flexible approach to data integration than traditional ETL. Furthermore, Denodo and Composite have also expanded data virtualization targets to Hadoop and other less traditional data sources, which muddies the waters still further, even though both vendors don't combine query optimization with a federation engine as Cirro does. It is worth noting that Cirro's IP and patent-pending technology largely rest on its SQL-based cost-based optimization engine for data types of the structured and semi-structured variety, and its multi-layered query optimization techniques. It is also worth pointing out that federation is enjoying a renaissance led by other vendors aside from Cirro, including big firms, which validates Cirro's approach while also providing fresh competition. For example, IBM InfoSphere BigInsights 3.0, which is the latest release of Big Blue's Hadoop-based analysis platform, includes a federation capability that enables users to send distributed requests to multiple data sources, including DB2, Linux, Windows, IBM PureData System for Analytics, Teradata and Oracle. Teradata QueryGrid, which will become available in the third quarter, could also be seen as a type of federation. Although not quite the same as Cirro's data federation platform, it could be competitive in certain situations where the Teradata and Aster Data databases and Hadoop feature strongly. SWOT Analysis Strengths Weaknesses Cirro now has a decent chunk of change and some high-profile backers to take its business to the next level. It also has a release in the offing, which should appeal more deeply to its core audience and target market. Opportunities Threats Indirect sales should bode well, given the increasing move in the enterprise toward distributed IT architectures, where Cirro plays well. However, direct deals still remain the low-hanging fruit. The startup's business is nascent, which is exemplified by the number of customers it has amassed. Confusion still abounds when it comes to the difference between virtualization and federation, which could hinder sales cycles. IBM and Teradata are now talking about federation, which raises awareness for Cirro's case, but also ups the ante competitively. Composite appears to have revived inside Cisco and, as a result, is a more potent threat than previously. Copyright The 451 Group 4

5 Reproduced by permission of The 451 Group; This report was originally published within 451 Research's Market Insight Service. For additional information on 451 Research or to apply for trial access, go to: Copyright The 451 Group 5