Arcadia Data, Inc. last week launched the latest version of its visual analytics and business intelligence platform. With Arcadia Enterprise 4.0, Arcadia Data focuses on the citizen data scientist whose needs lie between self-service analytics and advanced analytics. The platform boasts an improved user interface, better user application workflow designs, and extranet security.

The Product

Arcadia Data’s mission, since its founding in 2012, has been to connect business users to Hadoop and other big data platforms. Arcadia Data received $11.5 million in series A funding in 2015 and will soon close its series B funding. Arcadia has 25 paid production customer deployments.

Arcadia Enterprise is a business intelligence (BI) and visualization platform that runs natively on Hadoop, Amazon S3, and other scale-out data platforms. Unlike most BI tools, Arcadia Enterprise doesn’t extract data and move it into a dedicated database. It processes data in place, simplifying data architectures. It also provides OLAP capabilities, delivering dimensional views of data running on big data platforms for large numbers of concurrent users.

“Running analytics on Hadoop is not easy because it is a batch processing platform,” says Wayne Eckerson, founder and principal consultant of Eckerson Group. “But Arcadia Data is striving to let users have their cake and eat it, too. That is, run analytics on a scale-out data platform with speed-of-thought analysis.”

According to Steve Wooledge, vice president of marketing at Arcadia Data, ”What’s unique about Arcadia Enterprise is that it gives end users immediate access and visualization on data, and learns over time to accelerate performance, recommending analytical views based on user queries.” In contrast, competing OLAP-on-Hadoop products, such as AtScale and Kyvos, require customers to design or build dimensional views or cubes upfront.

Enterprise 4.0

Version 4.0 meets the needs of the citizen data scientist who sits in the gap between self-service BI tools and advanced analytics. The citizen data scientist requires more complex data and analytics capabilities than a typical self-service BI user, while having  fewer analytics skills than a data scientist.

The new capabilities of Arcadia Enterprise are divided into four categories:

1. Redesigned User Interface – Arcadia Enterprise incorporates Google’s Material Design, a visual design framework, optimizing the colors, space, edges, and motion in Arcadia Enterprise’s user interface. Material Design also lets users more easily develop and edit professional quality visuals, dashboards, and data applications. In addition, Arcadia Enterprise minimizes extra tabs and popups and suggests next steps and actions so users can focus on the task at hand.
2. Workflow-Based Applications Design – Business users can design applications that step end users through a workflow by grouping dashboards in sequence and enable closed-loop feedback to drive business process and outcomes.
3. Secure Extranet Deployment – Arcadia Enterprise offers secure extranet deployments so external parties can view data applications safely

If you need a scalable OLAP application that sits on Hadoop or another big data platform, then Arcadia may be the right tool for you. Enterprise 4.0 offers an enhanced user experience, better application workflow designs, and extranet security.