A peek at Dremio’s latest report card
Companies that aren’t publicly traded often put out periodic reports to show the world how well they are doing. The press doesn’t cover them with much zeal for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that there are typically no significant numbers revealed and no regulatory body that holds anyone accountable for the claims.
That being said, when a company is young and evolving rapidly, a summary of all that has been accomplished in a 365-day period can be meaningful. Current and potential customers get a summary of new products and features, customer wins and so on.
So when data-as-a-service platform provider Dremio offered us a look at its 2018 report, we opted in.
A bit about Dremio
For anyone who isn’t familiar with the Santa Clara, Calif. — startup that came out of stealth 19 months ago, Dremio is a data-as-a-service platform that aims to make “your data engineers more productive, and your data consumers more self-sufficient.” Based on open source Apache Arrow, Dremio helps data consumers tie data together — whether it’s in OLTP relational, NoSQL, and/or data warehouse repositories as well as Hadoop, Spark and cloud storage — so that it can be analyzed via BI tools like Excel, Looker, Power BI, Python, Qlik, Spark, SQL, and Tableau among others.
The architecture behind Dremio is complex, but the end user would never know it. The self-service platform has been built for the data worker whether they are data scientist, a business analyst, or an executive level decision maker.
Meeting data workers where they are
“This generation doesn’t want to call someone into their office and say ‘Get me a report in the morning.’ They want to ask questions of their data and collaborate,” Dremio co-founder and CEO Tomer Shiran tells Digitizing Polaris. And not only is Shiran’s team assuring customers that they can connect their data sources and start running analytics at unprecedented speed in minutes,” but they are also schooling the new generation of data workers on topics such as:
- ETL Tools Explained
- Apache Arrow Explained
- What Are Data Pipelines
- What Are Data Warehouses
- What Is Data Engineering
- What Is Data As A Service
Going deeper
For data workers who want to go deeper, there is Dremio University which was launched last month. That’s not to say that Dremio is asking all of its users to become geeky. In its Dremio 2.0 release last April, it delivered capabilities like recommended joins, schema learning, and predictive data caching (see specifics here)to make everyone, no matter their level of sophistication, more productive.
Last October Dremio delivered Dremio 3.0. It includes advanced security and multi-tenant workload controls; integrated data catalog for self-directed data analysis; integration with Kubernetes and Helm charts; support for popular cloud platforms like AWS and Azure and much more. In addition Dremio launched a professional services organization to provide training to new customers.
“Some customers benefit from training at the beginning. We want to help them be successful right away and sometimes that requires human assistance,” says Shiran.
Down to business
Shiran claims that he has never worried whether there was a customer base waiting for a solution like Dremio. “When we were in stealth we were deliberate in working with prospects and thought leaders who wanted to push the envelope. We learned what is important and what is not,” he says. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that Dremio’s customer list features impressive names like Diageo, Microsoft, Standard Chartered, TransUnion, UBS, and VirginOrbit, or that its revenue has grown by a multiple of ten since it launch in July 2017.
Investors are certainly impressed with Dremio’s progress too. Cisco Investments, Norwest Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners Redpoint Ventures and others have infused $45 million into the startup.
“We’re not looking for new funding right now,” says Shiran, pointing out that they have a healthy stream of customer income flowing in.
Committed to open source
While Dremio didn’t address its commitment to open source in its self-assessment, Shiran says he doesn’t expect them to change their commitment to the Apache Way in the foreseeable future. In fact, late last year Dremio donated the LLVM-based execution kernel called the Gandiva Initiative for Apache Arrow to The Apache Software Foundation, where they expect that the project will continue to grow and thrive as part of the Apache Arrow community.
