Startup Hadapt Aims to Focus Hadoop for Users

NEW YORK–Hadapt, a new startup that focuses on the open source Hadoop technology and solutions for Big Data and big analytics has emerged on the scene.

At the GigaOM Structure Big Data conference here on March 23, Hadapt’s CEO and co-founder Justin Borgman introduced the new company and the Hadapt platform as “the adaptive analytical platform for big data. It’s the first analytical database designed for the cloud environment.”

Borgman said the company comes out of work the founders started at Yale University. In addition, Borgman announced initial financing and patent-pending innovations for high performance analytics across structured and unstructured data in private and public cloud environments.

Founded by Borgman, Daniel Abadi Ph.D., and Kamil Bajda-Pawlikowski, the company has raised initial funding to commercialize inventions around analytical database research in virtualized environments. Co-founders Abadi and Bajda-Pawlikowski led the original research team at Yale University where a prototype was developed and tested. They take on the roles of chief scientist and chief software architect, respectively.

Borgman said the financing enables the company to complete software development for general release later this year. The company’s product approach is a full integration of the Hadoop open-source parallel data processing framework. Hadapt is adapting and expanding the Hadoop architecture to bring a more complete SQL interface, a patent-pending Adaptive Query Execution capability, and a hybrid storage engine to handle structured as well as unstructured data in a single platform, the company said. Adaptive Query Execution dynamically load balances queries in virtualized environments and allows analytical workloads to be automatically split between relational database engines and Hadoop to get the best possible performance out of the system.

“Our patent-pending Adaptive Query Execution capability is unlike any other offering in the market,” Borgman said in a statement. “In testing conducted at Yale University, we were able to document query results 50 times faster than Hadoop with Hive and 600 times faster than Hadoop with HBase. Hadapt was born in the cloud and unlike other second-generation data warehousing companies, we have optimized our product architecture for big data and big analysis in virtualized environments.”