Cirro: On-Demand Analysis Across Multiple Data Sources

With the advent of new technologies like cloud computing, Hadoop, NoSQL and SaaS applications, customers are making huge investments in these new platforms yet need to elegantly access all their new analytic infrastructure too. The real market demand at this moment, therefore, is to be able to access new data sources and integrate them with traditional data sources to create a level of analysis that promotes fast, on-demand analytics across all data without the traditional bottlenecks of ETL, data virtualization or manual data movements. “This is what Cirro is all about,” says Mark Theissen, CEO, Cirro. Headquartered in Aliso Viejo, CA, Cirro provides an enterprise platform for analytic data services enabling the access of heterogeneous data platforms using only SQL leveraging the BI tools already on their desktops.

“In short, Cirro allows non-technical analysts to derive value from Big Data and traditional data sources in a self service way with little or no help from the IT team,” says Theissen. “It enables users to access all of their data sources with the BI and visualization tools they already have on their desktops. Cirro manages and orchestrates the data query across the increasing number of traditional data silos plus new data sources in near real-time therefore accelerating time to insight.

The company allows organizations to query any data and harvest value that was previously unavailable in disconnected corporate data silos. Cirro is able to do this without the need for buying new BI tools or additional data engines for query processing. One of the things customers like is the ability to use the visualization products that are already on their desktops. Cirro’s core product is the Cirro Data Hub. Additional products include Cirro Analyst for Excel and Cirro Multi Store. The Cirro Data Hub provides access to any data, on any platform and in any environment by federating queries across multiple sources of data. It delivers the best performance by ‘pushing the processing to the data’ without users having to know the location and any other physical characteristics of the data they are using.

Cirro Analyst for Excel is an analyst workbench used to process all types of data and supports self-service data exploration and data discovery.

Analysts who can work in Excel can use the Cirro Analyst to access and process the data along with other traditional data sources.The Cirro Multi Store is an optional component that provides an easily deployable data store for use as a staging area, workplace or datamart. It is scalable to hundreds of terabytes, optimized for cloud and is fault tolerant. The uniqueness of Cirro lies in the fact that their products have a great level of flexibility and are independently scalable to adjust and meet the needs of any customer.

Cirro allows non-technical analysts to derive value from Big Data and traditional data sources in a self service way with little or no help from the IT team

Cirro serves numerous clients across multiple verticals that include media and entertainment, financial services, life sciences/ health care and technology. One of Cirro’s clients, WildTangent Games who powers online gaming services, was facing the challenge of connecting distributed data from their internal databases, SaaS platforms and the Amazon Cloud. The goal was to collapse the analysis of game logs, user impressions and click stream analytics to improve advertising rate justification and effectiveness. Having to muddle through enormous volumes of customer information, ad impressions and instrumentation data along with legacy data, WildTangent needed the ability to insulate their users from an ever-changing set of analytic sources. Historically, WildTangent was challenged to conduct on demand analysis across multiple data sources. Cirro helped them to access data across multiple data sources on-the-fly including Google Analytics, RedShift and their internal data sources for fast answers to questions that sometimes took weeks to answer before.

“Cirro is the genesis of lot of years of experience in terms of data management and analytics and our vision is to be a core component of every enterprise architecture,” says Theissen.