Today I am excited to announce NEA’s investment in WibiData, an extraordinary company that is solving one of the fastest growing problems in Big Data – making Hadoop accessible in “real-time” for people and applications. Our history investing in the deluge of unstructured data began over 10 years ago when Data Domain (acquired by EMC for $2.3 billion) was incubated in our offices in the summer of 2001. Years later we invested in companies such as Vertica (acquired by HP), Tableau, Pentaho, and MapR, all of whom established themselves as leaders in enabling companies to process, visualize, and analyze large data sets. It’s been over a decade since our initial investment in this space but our core thesis has not changed -- storage costs have continued to plummet, cloud computing has become pervasive, and the world’s insatiable thirst for data can seemingly never be quenched.

Within the $80 billion market for data management, we are all witnessing the shift from traditional databases and data warehouses to “webscale” solutions built on Hadoop, designed from the ground up to handle the petabytes of data now captured by large organizations. Initially used by pioneers such as Google, Hadoop clusters now find themselves throughout the Fortune 1000 and are backed by industry heavyweights such as EMC, Oracle, and IBM. But harnessing the power of Hadoop is no small feat, requiring specialized expertise in file systems such as HDFS and the development of complex MapReduce engines to turn large data stores into actionable insights and intelligence. This complexity generally results in batch-process analytic jobs that require significant manpower from expert engineers, often consuming hours if not days designing algorithms and systems that render meaningful results.

WibiData solves one of the fastest growing pain points for Hadoop users – making Hadoop accessible to people and applications in “real-time”, without adding hard-to-find engineers. Their product abstracts away the complexity of Hadoop for organizations that need to look at large volumes of user data and serve insights in milliseconds, not hours. Many of their early beta customers are the largest internet, e-commerce, SaaS, mobile, and social gaming sites in the world, all of whom rely on Hadoop to drive better personalization, product recommendations, or end user experiences based on very large data sets. Many of NEA’s largest and most successful portfolio companies are trying WibiData today, and are excited by the transformative opportunities provided by (finally) having real-time access to Hadoop.

We are thrilled to be working with WibiData founders Christophe Bisciglia (CEO) and Aaron Kimball (CTO), two amazing entrepreneurs who are some of the brightest minds in Hadoop. Christophe has been famously profiled as one of Google’s smartest engineers and was a co-founder of Cloudera. Aaron was the first engineer hired at Cloudera and is widely recognized as one of the most influential members of the Hadoop community. Together, they have recruited a talented engineering team that has built a product that will unlock the potential of Big Data (for an in-depth technical review, please read Aaron’s latest blog post here). We are privileged to be working with Christophe, Aaron, and the team at WibiData and are excited to help them build a great company!

Jon’s perspectives on VC and entrepreneurship can be found at www.oneblockoffsandhillroad.com or on Twitter @jonsakoda.