bigdataphile
June 3, 2014
http://bigdataphile.com/2014/06/concurrent-raises-10-million-for-big-data-application-infrastructure

Big data applications infrastructure company Concurrent has raised $10 million in its Series B funding.

Bain Capital Ventures, a new investor in Concurrent, led the round with participation of existing investors Rembrandt Ventures and True Ventures. Previously, Concurrent had raised $4.9 million in funding.

Concurrent says it will use the financing to drive research and development of its high profile product Driven, an application performance management product for data-centric applications, and Cascading, an application development framework for building data-oriented applications.

Concurrent particularly helps enterprises and organizations who are adopting Hadoop to build, deploy and manage data-centric applications to meet growing business demands.

“Our investors’ confidence in Concurrent and this latest round of funding supports our strategy and proven leadership in providing Big Data application infrastructure to enterprises. Recognizing the maturing needs of the enterprise and emergence of new technologies, we are giving organizations the application development tools and management products they need to deliver today and in the future. This funding will not only enable us to drive our R&D execution, but will also allow us to expand operational capabilities to support our rapidly expanding user and customer base,” said Gary Nakamura, CEO, Concurrent, Inc.

“Concurrent continues to propel innovation forward and exemplifies just the type of company Bain Capital Ventures looks to invest in – a business at the forefront of a hot market, with a uniquely developed, defined and widely adopted technology, and a highly seasoned executive team that understands how to best serve the enterprise application infrastructure market. The growth opportunity is huge, and I look forward to serving on the company’s board to contribute to Concurrent’s future direction and growth,” commented Salil Deshpande, managing director, Bain Capital Ventures, and a new member of the Concurrent Board of Directors.

The San Francisco-based company services the market in Big Data application infrastructure with its products Cascading and Driven. Cascading recently surpassed more than 150,000+ user downloads per month.

The company also has strategic partnerships with Hortonworks, Rackspace, EPAM and Databricks.

Concurrent was selected to CRN’s Big Data 100 in the “Big Data Infrastructure Tools and Services” and “Emerging Big Data Vendors” categories.The company also received recognition from the SD Times editors for the publication’s annual SD Times 100 in the “Big Data and Business Intelligence” category.

Maria Deutscher, SiliconANGLE
June 3, 2014
http://siliconangle.com/blog/2014/06/03/concurrent-lands-10m-to-catalyze-the-big-data-app-economy

Concurrent, a San Francisco-based startup working to simplify the development of applications atop Hadoop, announced on Monday that it has raised $10 million in Series B financing led by new investor Bain Capital Ventures. Existing backers Rembrandt Ventures and True Ventures also participated in the round, which brings the firm’s total funding to nearly $15 million.

Concurrent said that it will use the capital to accelerate the development of its flagship Cascading framework, an open source library hatched up by founder Chris Wensel to make it easier for organizations to operationalize their vast troves of unstructured information. It acts an abstraction layer between Hadoop and the applications that use it and lets CIOs avoid investing in additional training or specialized talent.

“The requirement for the enterprise is not to learn new skills for Hadoop but to leverage existing skills, existing systems and existing investments they already made in their infrastructure,” Concurrent CEO Gary Nakamura, who took over the reins in conjunction with the firm’s previous $4 million funding round last March, told SiliconANGLE in an interview.

Because of that, Cascading is written in Java, the same language Hadoop and the majority of modern corporate applications are implemented in. It also provides support for popular enterprise technologies like SQL and Scala, which is especially useful for implementing data analysis algorithms in distributed environments like the batch processing platform. All that serves to shield developers from the inherent complexity of working with unstructured data and bring enterprises a step closer to crossing the chasm into the long overdue era of pre-packaged analytical apps.

The third and latest version of the framework, which rolled out last month, extends that functionality to Tez, a distributed execution engine that offers superior performance to MapReduce with lower latency. Cascading has promised to deliver support for other components in Hadoop ecosystem as well through a new query planner built into the release.

The framework is gaining traction in the marketplace. Concurrent boasts of more than 150,000 monthly downloads and already counts thousands of organizations among its users, including high-profile Internet companies like eBay, Twitter and Etsy. That success has not gone unnoticed by the vendor community: All three of the largest Hadoop distributors support Cascading, with the latest to jump on the bandwagon being Hortonworks, which in April committed to guarantee the compatibility of applications based on the framework with future releases of its platform.

Concurrent is trying to monetize the momentum behind Cascading with Driven, a recently introduced cloud service that provides visibility into data flows and program logic at runtime to simplify troubleshooting and help developers be more productive overall. The company disclosed that a part of the capital from today’s round will go towards fueling future development of the solution. It also revealed that Salil Deshpande, a managing director at Bain Capital’s Palo Alto office, is joining its board.

Jack Clark, The Register
June 2, 2014
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/02/cascading_data_analysis_funding

Hadoop startup Concurrent has slurped $10m in Series B filthy valley lucre as a new sense of enthusiasm breathes life into the “big data” community.

Concurrent announced its round on Monday. The company stewards Cascading, a free bit of software that helps devs do application development on top of Hadoop.

The company ran into trouble earlier last year when it took in $4m in Series A funding from True Ventures and Rembrand Venture Partners to fund the development of Cascading.

“In crisis there is opportunity,” chief technology officer Chris Wensel told us via email at the time. “By not having the capital and talent to boost our vision, we risk losing all we have done and will never reach the places we can see.”

Over a year later, things have improved dramatically at the company. “We’ve stabilized and built out the platform and made it very valuable,” Wensel told us by phone. Besides developing Cascading, the company has also pushed on with some associated projects such as “Pattern”, which makes it trivial to export machine-learning models from typical tech like MicroStrategies and onto Hadoop.

Concurrent is now seeing around “150,000 downloads a month” of its flagship Cascading software as of “a couple of months ago,” according to chief executive Gary Nakamura. It has also recently partnered with companies including Hortonworks, Rackspace, and Databricks.

This adoption and enthusiasm has compelled it to take in some more money to fund the development, sales, and marketing of its commercial application performance management product “Driven”. There will also be more investment into integrating various open source Hadoop-related projects to work with Concurrent’s tech, including things such as Spark, Storm, and Apache Tez, Nakamura said. Bain Capital Ventures led the $10m round, along with the existing investors True Ventures and Rembrandt Ventures.

In many ways the turnaround at the company is a reflection of trends in the broader Hadoop community, which spent much of last year dealing with the fallout of hyped tech claims and false promises. This year, by contrast, some businesses seem to be finally squeezing some real value out of the tech, bringing a new round of enthusiasm (and cash) into the startups involved with the tech.

Amit Chowdhry, Pulse 2.0
June 2, 2014
http://pulse2.com/2014/06/02/concurrent-raises-10-million-in-series-b-109630

Enterprise data application company Concurrent has raised $10 million in Series B funding from new investor Bain Capital Ventures. Existing investors Rembrandt Ventures and True Ventures also participated in this round. Concurrent will be using the funding for research and development related to its products called Driven and Cascading. Bain Capital Ventures managing director Salil Deshpande is joining the board of directors at Concurrent.

Driven is an application management product for data-centric applications and Cascading is an application development framework for building data-driven applications. Cascading sees over 150,000 user downloads per month.

Concurrent makes it possible for organizations to quickly build and deploy applications to meet the demands of its business. Concurrent has news and expanded strategic partnerships with Hortonworks, Rackspace, EPAM and Databricks.

“Our investors’ confidence in Concurrent and this latest round of funding supports our strategy and proven leadership in providing Big Data application infrastructure to enterprises. Recognizing the maturing needs of the enterprise and emergence of new technologies, we are giving organizations the application development tools and management products they need to deliver today and in the future. This funding will not only enable us to drive our R&D execution, but will also allow us to expand operational capabilities to support our rapidly expanding user and customer base,” stated Gary Nakamura, CEO of Concurrent.

Derrick Harris, GigaOM
June 2, 2014
http://gigaom.com/2014/06/02/cascading-champion-concurrent-raises-10m

Big data startup Concurrent has raised a $10 million series B round of venture capital from Bain Capital Ventures, Rembrandt Ventures and True Ventures (Disclosure: True Ventures is also an investor in Gigaom). The company actually made its name building and supporting Cascading, a framework that many folks use to build Hadoop applications and data workflows at a higher level than writing MapReduce jobs, but is now also pushing application performance management with a product called Driven. Concurrent launched in 2007 and has raised nearly $15 million since first taking venture financing in 2011.

Arnal Dayaratna, Ph.D., Cloud Computing Today
June 2, 2014
http://cloud-computing-today.com/2014/06/02/concurrent-inc-finalizes-10m-in-series-b-funding-for-technologies-to-facilitate-use-of-big-data

Concurrent Inc. today announces the finalization of $10M in Series B funding in a round led by new investor Bain Capital Ventures, with additional participation from existing investors Rembrandt Ventures and True Ventures. Salil Deshpande, Managing Director of Bain Capital Ventures, will join Concurrent Inc.’s board of directors as a result of today’s funding raise. The funding will be used to accelerate the development of Concurrent’s commercial product Driven as well as Cascading, the framework for developing and managing Big Data applications. Driven fills a critical void within the Big Data industry by providing customers with visibility regarding application performance on Hadoop while Cascading represents one of the most widely used frameworks for application development on Hadoop. Concurrent’s Series B funding raise comes hot on the heels of its elaboration of details regarding Cascading 3.0 and the announcement of partnerships with Hadoop vendor Hortonworks and Databricks. Scheduled for release in the early summer, Cascading 3.0 features support for technology platforms and computational frameworks such as local in-memory, Apache MapReduce and Apache Tez. Meanwhile, Cascading’s partnership with Hortonworks integrates the Cascading SDK into the Hortonworks Data Platform under the terms of an agreement whereby Hortonworks will certify, deliver and support the Cascading framework. Today’s funding raise provides further validation of Concurrent’s business model and empowers it to consolidate its early positioning as a leader in the Big Data space, with specializations in applications that streamline and simplify Hadoop application development and cluster management. With its new round of funding in hand, the industry expect Concurrent Inc. to obtain more traction around its flagship product Driven as it continues to innovate at the forefront of technology platforms that facilitate the effective operationalization of Big Data. Today’s Series B announcement brings the total capital raised by Concurrent Inc. to $14M by building upon a March 2013 Series A round of $4M.

CJ Ariotta, Talkin’ Cloud
June 2, 2014
http://talkincloud.com/cloud-companies/060214/big-data-startup-concurrent-secures-10m-series-b-funding

Big data startup Concurrent, Inc. on Monday secured $10 million in Series B financing, with the hopes of furthering its product development and operational capabilities.

The Series B financing round was led by new investor Bain Capital Ventures, with the participation of existing investors Rembrandt Ventures and True Ventures.

The San Francisco-based application development company that specializes in assisting developers with the Apache Hadoop open-source software framework said it will also use the additional funding to scale its operations to meet growing customer demand.

Concurrent’s portfolio includes two major solutions: Driven, an application performance management product for data-centric applications; and Cascading, an application development framework for building data-oriented applications

Concurrent CEO Gary Nakamura said in a prepared statement that the financing round will be used to execute the company’s research and development plans for the expansion of operational capabilities.

“Recognizing the maturing needs of the enterprise and emergence of new technologies, we are giving organizations the application development tools and management products they need to deliver today and in the future,” he said.

Concurrent raised $4 million in Series A funding back in March 2013, a round led by True Ventures and Rembrandt Venture Partners.

Kevin C, Entrepreneur Sky
June 2, 2014
http://entrepreneursky.com/hadoop-startup-concurrent-secures-10-million-series-b-funding/

Hadoops very own startup, Concurrent, has recently secured a total of $10 million Series B in financial funding as a the surging enthusiasm surrounding the Big Data space continuous to grow.

The company’s flagship product is Cascading, a free bit of software that help out developers do the application development on top of Hadoop.

Troubles.

The company had ran into some unfortunate trouble during the previous year when it it gained over $4 million in Series A funding from True Ventures and Rembrand Venture partners, so they could continue funding the development of Cascade.

“In crisis there is opportunity,” chief technology officer Chris Wensel stated. ”By not having the capital and talent to boost our vision, we risk losing all we have done and will never reach the places we can see.”

After a year later, Things have manage to gone up hill for the company.”We’ve stabilized and built out the platform and made it very valuable,” Wensel told us by phone. Besides developing Cascading, the company has also pushed on with some associated projects such as “Patterns”, which makes it trivial to export machine-learning models from typical tech like MicroStrategies and onto Hadoop.

Growth.

Concurrent is currently seeing over “150,000 downloads a month” of its flagship Cascading software as of ” couple of months ago”, according to information provided by the chief executive Gary Nakamure. It also has recently manage to strategically partner up with companies including Hortonworks, Rackspace, and Databricks.

The recent boost of its product being adopted lead them to deciding on taking on even more money to continue funding its development, sales, and marketing of its commercial application performance management product “Driven.” There will also be more investment into the integration of various open source Hadoop-related projects to work along with Concurrent’s tech, including things such as Spark, Storm, and Apache Tez, Namakamure stated.

Bain Capital Ventures led the $10m round, along with the existing investors True Ventures and Rembrandt Ventures.

FinSMEs
June 2, 2014
http://www.finsmes.com/2014/06/concurrent-interview-with-ceo-gary-nakamura

San Francisco, CA-based enterprise data application platform company Concurrent has just closed a $10M Series B funding round (read here). CEO Gary Nakamura answered our questions about the company, the products and some milestones, the funding and future plans.

FinSMEs: Hi Gary. First, can you tell us a little bit more about you? What’s your background?
Gary: I’m the CEO of Concurrent, Inc. Prior to Concurrent, I was general manager at Terracotta, Inc. (acquired by Software AG), where I built the commercial open-source business and operations. I also spent the previous 10 years at BEA Systems and Netscape.

FinSMEs: Let’s speak about Concurrent. What’s the issue you wanted to fix and the opportunity you found in the market?
Gary: Enterprises are rapidly adopting Hadoop to meet business challenges that require a reliable way to consistently operationalize their data and deliver data products to their customers. Concurrent provides products and technology to organizations enabling them to quickly build, deploy and manage data-centric applications to meet the growing demands of their business.
Concurrent leads the market in the Big Data application infrastructure. We are the team behind Cascading, the most widely used application development framework for building data-oriented applications with more than 150,000 user downloads a month. Used by thousands of businesses including eBay, Etsy and Twitter, Cascading is the de facto standard in open source application infrastructure technology. Additionally, our flagship enterprise product, Driven, is purpose built to address the pain points of enterprise data application development and data application performance management by providing unprecedented visibility and control to organizations who need to deliver operational excellence.
The market growth opportunity for us is immense. Hadoop is quickly becoming a critical piece of data infrastructure for enterprises, and the data applications built on top are business critical. Cascading and Driven are in the sweet spot for enterprise demand to build, monitor, and manage reliable and performing data applications.

FinSMEs: How does Cascading work? Tell me something about the features…
Gary: Cascading is a proven application development framework that enterprises can use to easily and reliably build data products to meet business needs. Cascading dramatically simplifies application development, accelerates time to market, and allows enterprises to leverage existing infrastructure and skill sets.
At its core, Cascading is a Java library that fits directly into any standard development process and abstracts the complexity of building applications on Hadoop. Cascading’s APIs allow developers to keep business and integration logic separated, giving them the ability to focus on developing complete applications with test-driven development practices that solve business problems. Once your application is written, Cascading then converts your business logic into efficient parallel jobs for running on your computation fabric of choice.
With the upcoming release of Cascading 3.0, Cascading will have a pluggable and customizable query planner that gives enterprises the ability to write their applications once, and then run their applications on any supported fabric that best meet their business needs. Cascading 3.0 will add support for Apache Tez. Soon after, with community support, Apache Spark, Apache Storm and others will be supported.

FinSMEs: Where are you now in terms of growth? Some numbers?
Gary:
– Employees: We are under 20 employees
– Cascading has more than 150,000 user downloads a month and over 7,000 production deployments.
– Cascading users include Twitter, Etsy, eBay, The Climate Corp, among thousands of others.

FinSMEs: You just raised funding. What can you tell me about the investors? How are you using the funds?
Gary: We have a new investor with this round – Bain Capital Ventures. Our existing investors, Rembrandt Ventures and True Ventures, also participated. We’ll use the financing to drive research and development of Driven and Cascading, as well as scale our operations to meet growing customer demand.

FinSMEs:…future plans?
Gary: Yes – We have them. Data applications are the combination of enterprise IP, their data and reliable delivery. As we all journey through this Big Data experience, one thing will emerge as paramount and that is that data is the new competitive landscape. We will continue to deliver products and technology to make it easier for enterprises to build, deploy and manage data-centric apps.