Interana announces a new, fast and scalable event-based analytics solution to answer critical business questions about how customers behave and products are used. Interana allows users to analyze and explore the key business metrics that matter most in a data-driven world – such as growth, retention, conversion and engagement – in seconds, rather than the hours or days it often takes with existing solutions. Interana allows customers to discover and investigate these key insights easily through its visual and interactive interface, which makes data analysis a natural extension of everyone’s workflow. Interana has been in private beta for six months with customers including Sony, Jive, Asana, Tinder and Orange Silicon Valley.
Interana was founded by three top engineers with the goal of bringing the same cutting-edge data tools found at companies like Facebook to organizations of any size. Ann Johnson, CEO, and Bobby Johnson, CTO, are a wife and husband duo who envisioned starting the company years ago. B. Johnson, a former Facebook executive, was responsible for the infrastructure engineering team that scaled Facebook during its heaviest growth years from 2006-2012, taking the social-media giant from a few million college users to over a billion users globally. During his tenure, B. Johnson’s team solved difficult scaling and infrastructure challenges, adopted Hadoop, and built Hive and Cassandra. He personally wrote Scribe and Haystack. While at Facebook the third founder, Lior Abraham, invented SCUBA, the most popular internal analytics tool, used actively by more than half the company monthly. By helping solve some of the hardest scalability and infrastructure challenges at Facebook, Interana’s founding team saw the benefit of bringing these solutions to the broader market and empowering everyone to be data-informed.
Interana completed a series A round of funding in early 2013, raising in total $8.2 million from Battery Ventures, Data Collective, SV Angel, Fuel Capital and YCombinator. Board members include Mark Leslie, former CEO, Veritas; Jeff Rothschild, vice president of engineering, Facebook; and Alex Benik, partner, Battery Ventures.
Event Data Holds the Key Business Metrics Companies Care Most About
Interana is a fundamentally different kind of analytics solution. It stores billions of sequences of events (event data) from sources such as clickstreams, call detail records, transactions and sensor data, and allows users to ask questions and see answers in seconds. By directly interacting with data through a fast visual interface, users can perform ad-hoc queries to explore data and discover trends and patterns through features such as time series, distributions and funnels. Interana is helping business decision makers and data teams identify new opportunities for growth, customer retention, product conversion and engagement in a fraction of the time it takes today.
Interana is well suited for social, eCommerce, media and entertainment, gaming, telecommunications and SaaS companies that produce massive amounts of event data. Interana is highly scalable, is distributed on commodity hardware and has the flexibility to be deployed on-premises or in a private cloud.
Understanding our customers and how they use our software has always been at the center of our business. Interana is providing new insights on our products and customers at speeds we have not been able to achieve with other solutions,” said Justin Fitzhugh, CIO, Jive Software. “This all boils down to increasing our speed to innovation. We believe the analysis we get from Interana’s solution has revealed insights we have not previously had the opportunity to tap into.”
For many companies, event data is the source of the most important questions, such as how users find a new product, what users do before deciding to buy an item and what experiences users have before cancelling a service. But trying to analyze event data with existing tools is incredibly complex; it requires extensive programing skills, expensive systems, and a lot of time – and even then most users cannot always get answers to all the questions they want to ask. While new database designs have reduced query latency, they have not eliminated the need for error-prone ETL, the need to express questions with complex query languages, or the cost of building full data-visualization solutions.
Interana’s Full-Stack Solution Is a Fundamental Shift That Delivers Data-Driven Insights in Seconds
At the core of Interana’s solution is a proprietary database that organizes data by time and user to allow for single-pass queries with no intermediate sorts. This enables Interana to process raw data sets at massive scale, benchmarked at 100 million rows per core per second, allowing large and complex queries to be done at run-time rather than in offline ETL jobs.
Interana took a design-first approach to delivering consumer-grade visualization and usability. The fast processing of data allows for an interactive interface that enables users to explore data with real-time responsiveness. Ad-hoc exploration and the discovery of insights are simple with a visual query builder that features graphical feedback and type-aheads for field names and values. This eliminates the need to write code, bringing real-time, data-informed insights directly to business decision makers and data teams.
Interana enables collaboration on valuable insights by enabling users to easily pin them to a dashboard or share them via email. Dashboards are updated in real-time and computational elements of the charts are readily available. What’s more, with a single click, users can quickly drill down into the insights to further explore and discover.
Interana is a group of highly talented individuals with a common mission – to fill the event data analytics void; analytics holds the key to true understanding of how customers behave and products are used,” said Ann Johnson, CEO and co-founder of Interana. “With storage becoming drastically cheaper, companies can afford to save the massive amounts of rich event data that has previously gone largely untapped. My vision is to make data a valuable part of everyone’s day.”
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