NoSQL analytics platform Precog moved to general availability this week after about six months of its public beta stage. The Boulder-based startup and 2011 TechStars alum has had over 1,300 companies sign up since the public beta launch, Precog COO Jeff Carr said.
“We’ve had a tremendous response and it’s really because no one else is tackling this problem,” Carr said. “We had someone tweet that they were happy to see such a talented team tackling a difficult problem.”
And it really is a difficult problem that is Precog is solving: how do you perform advanced analytics on non-traditional data such as social media, log files or JSON? Precog’s solution is the creation of a new platform, as opposed to using “a set of tools that was built 30 years ago” for these new types of data.
“Nobody’s really doing the kinds of things we’re doing for analytics; there’s a lot of people playing around the space, but they’re using traditional tools like business intelligence or Oracle, which is all based on the notion of data being in a table,” Carr said.
Precog’s development of platforms that effectively deal with new data has attracted customers such as University of Massachusetts, CollegeMiner and SnapEngage. Carr said Precog is also currently targeting large enterprises to add to this list.
To serve the needs of large enterprises or pretty much any company “that needs to be able to use these new types of data and do analytics on them,” Precog also announced this week three new market solutions: Precog Social Insights, Precog Embedded Insights and Precog Web Insights.
These three tools, which are available through cloud, hardware or virtual appliance, will help to companies to analyze their “weird, freeform” data such as Tweets. Carr said that developing modern platforms such as these is Precog’s core goal: “the issue we are solving is we have new kinds of data and we need new tools to deal with those new kinds of data."
