YarcData discovers its place in the
analytic database ecosystem
Analyst: Matt Aslett
23 May, 2013
Having recently completed its first year of operation, Cray's YarcData graph database-appliance
business has now established its place in the database landscape, providing a platform for the
discovery of relationships between data as part of exploratory analysis approaches that promise
to encourage businesses to ask new questions, and to reveal new business insights.
The 451 Take
We previously stated that YarcData had modest plans for growth, but that was considered a
good thing, given the early nature of graph-database adoption. Considering the growing
interest in graph computing, it is perhaps not surprising that we believe YarcData exceeded
its expectations for the first year in operation. But that is still impressive, given the formation
of YarcData involved Cray dipping its toe into unknown waters. We believe the focus on
discovery should stand YarcData in good stead, because interest has increased in the
exploratory analytic approaches for which the graph database is well suited.
Context
When YarcData launched in early 2012, it was a somewhat unlikely new venture for the
supercomputing specialist Cray, which was hardly known for data and analytics expertise, or for
selling to traditional enterprises (rather than government agencies and academic research
institutions). However, the interest in graph analytics made sense on other levels: the need for
YarcData's Urika appliance was proved by its first customer (a US government organization) that
found its data-processing requirements were beyond those solved even by the high-volume
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distributed data-processing capabilities of Apache Hadoop and MapReduce. Urika also leans heavily
on a massively multithreaded processor design developed at Cray to achieve its high-performance
graph processing.
Although YarcData is still in its infancy, one year on the strategy appears to be paying off well. The
company previously told us that 2012 would be all about finding key use cases and landing 10-20
reference customers. While YarcData isn't revealing details of paying customers at this time, we
believe it has exceeded that goal in key verticals such as financial services, pharmaceuticals and
government and law enforcement agencies. Building on those early successes, 2013 is all about
building portfolios of five or so customers in each of the target markets.
YarcData has also refined its messaging in the past year. It initially launched with the inevitable 'big
data' reference and passing references to relationship analytics, but the company is now firmly
focused on discovery (what we call exploratory analytics) in identifying previously unknown
relationships between data that enable the formulation of new business opportunities. As an
example, Urika is being used by analysts at Oak Ridge National Lab to conduct research in
healthcare fraud analysis for a healthcare client, as well as other related areas such as analysis of
healthcare treatment outcomes, drug side effects, and proteins and gene pathways. Other potential
applications include the identification of new risk analysis and trading strategies in the financial
services sector, the identification of potential criminal and/or terrorist activity, the identification of
cyber-security threats, and discovery of influencers and patterns of influence for customer-retention
purposes.
Discovery is essentially about exploring data sets to discover and identify previously unknown
relationships. YarcData believes it is uniquely positioned to serve this role thanks to its combination
of technologies that go beyond its RDF (resource description framework0 data store and SPARQL
query engine: specifically, its shared global memory up to 512TB and I/O up to 350TB per hour, and
its Threadstorm massively multithreaded processor designed to support up to 128 simultaneous
threads per processor.
Competition
The competition for YarcData's graph data-processing capabilities ostensibly comes from other
graph database specialists such as Neo Technology, Objectivity, Sparsity, Aurelius and
NuvolaBase/Orient Technologies. However, given its appliance approach, the company maintains
that software-only graph databases and graph analytics frameworks can also serve as lead
generation by establishing the potential use cases for graph technologies in general. Despite the
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element of hubris here, we would not be surprised if Urika and the various graph databases did
have different user constituencies, given that developers are driving much of the adoption of open
source NoSQL databases.
YarcData's focus on data discovery applications means it might be more likely to find Urika being
compared to exploratory analytic platforms, such as Teradata's Aster Discovery Platform, Actian's
ParAccel or HP's Vertica. We also see some deployments of Apache Hadoop for exploratory
analytics purposes, and there are a variety of Hadoop-based graph-processing technologies
including Apache Giraph and GraphLab.
Meanwhile, the database incumbents are also taking note: IBM added a NoSQL graph store for rapid
application development of graph applications to its DB2 database in 2012, while Oracle renamed
the Oracle Spatial option for its Oracle Database to Oracle Spatial and Graph, highlighting its graph
capabilities. Microsoft is working on a couple of graph projects via Microsoft Research, including
Trinity, a distributed graph database.
SWOT Analysis
Strengths
Weaknesses
YarcData has obvious expertise when it comes to the
demands of large-scale high-performance computing.
The company is not known as a supplier to
mainstream enterprises, and is having to hire
enterprise sales staff and build a channel
accordingly.
Opportunities
Threats
Graph databases provide an opportunity to unlock
value in data that cannot be analyzed with traditional
data processing and analysis techniques.
Expect the incumbent database specialists to
expand their support for graph processing as
adoption of graph databases increases.
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Reproduced by permission of The 451 Group; © 2013. This report was originally published within 451
Research’s Market Insight Service. For additional information on 451 Research or to apply for trial access, go
to: www.451research.com
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