Enterprises are fast adopting data warehouse technologies, which offer a system for reporting and analyzing mission-critical data. At their best, data warehouses allow companies to process, transform, and leverage data from a range of sources within the organization for decision-making. For example, data warehousing can make the practice of data mining possible, assisting businesses in looking for data patterns that can lead to higher sales and profits — at least in theory.
The data warehouse market remains red-hot, with Yellowbrick estimating that it’ll be worth over $30 billion globally by 2025. But companies — whether due to pandemic headwinds or otherwise — are encountering roadblocks in implementing key data warehouse components. According to a recent BARC Research survey, the most pressing issues for enterprises adopting data warehouse technologies are a lack of agility in the development process, expensive software licenses, and an inability to provide the required data.
Vendors like Firebolt propose a solution for cloud data warehouses, which migrate the management of data warehouses from on-premises infrastructure to cloud datacenters. Firebolt — one of the larger suppliers in the space — allows for the scaling up and down of compute resources across public clouds like Amazon Simple Storage Service, letting customers work with data in common file formats to prep it for analytics.
The data warehouse market is on the cusp of switching from traditional deployment methods to becoming majority cloud-based, surveys show. A 2019 survey from Denodo found that more than half of businesses have a data warehouse in the cloud, a steep uptick from several years ago. Those embracing cloud solutions cite benefits including improved scalability, elasticity, and performance (in some cases) as well as more data storage.
Firebolt, which was founded in 2019 by Ariel Yaroshevich, Eldad Farkash, and Saar Bitner, claims that its cloud data warehouse software can support “over terabyte-scale” data analytics. Firebolt claims to be the first company to deliver a “sub-second” data analytics experience regardless of the size and usage patterns of a customer’s data.
“[I] was the founder and CTO of Sisense. In 2013, Bitner joined as CMO of Sisense and eventually became GM Israel. [We] saw firsthand how, with terabytes of data, cloud data warehouses could not scale to deliver the performance and efficiency companies needed to power their business intelligence tools and analytics,” CEO Farkash told VentureBeat via email. “Companies that need to analyze data, whether for internal or customer-facing purposes, are challenged with processing ever-growing amounts of data, while providing a great analytics experience.”
