December 6, 2012
By Kelly Liyakasa,

ClearStory Data Gets $9M for Big Data Analytics

With the ever-growing need to analyze and act on high-volume data sets, more vendors playing in the big data analytics space are raising the cash to make that a reality for enterprises.

ClearStory Data has announced it has raised $9 million through a first line of funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers along with additional seed investment by initial investors Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures, to enable businesses to leverage data from corporate or third-party data sources.

Likewise, just days ago, software company Lattice Engines banked $20 million in funding from New Enterprise Associates and Sequoia Capital to pad out big data applications and predictive analytics for sales and marketing processes.

According to technology research firm IDC predictions, big data spending in the Asia-Pacific region alone, with the exception of Japan, could reach $603 million in 2013, a 42.6 percent increase from 2012. Two of the hottest growth areas when applying big data to business processes will come from financial crimes and prevention of network intrusion.

Another 2013 prediction from IDC is the rise of Big Data-as-a-Service (BDaaS) that would draw on platform, networking, storage, and compute services to answer the question of how customers can better onboard their data for analysis. IBM, for instance, just launched subscription-based Analytic Answers, an analytics-as-a-service solution for SMBs designed to run on IBM's SmartCloud.

In a survey of more than 800 SMBs, global market research organization Techaisle found that 40 percent of midmarket businesses are interested in predictive analytics and that 34 percent of small-to-midsize companies in the U.S. currently running business intelligence solutions have also expressed interest in big data analytics.

There has been a continuing push to bring large-scale data analysis down to department-level roles like marketing directors or even sales ops managers. According to Mike Abbott, a managing partner for Kleiner Perkins, what fueled the firm's decision to invest in ClearStory was "an opportunity that promises to disrupt, bringing big data into the hands of the true business user beyond the specialized domain of data scientists and quants," he said, in a statement.