Appistry, a cloud solutions provider out of St. Louis, has closed a Series D $12 million round of funding.

Appistry is best known for CloudIQ, its open platform designed for customers to create high-performance analytical applications used in the life sciences, banking, intelligence and defense fields.

The round was lead by Xome Capital. Stuart Mill and other private and existing investors also participated.

What’s unique about Appistry is its ties to early use cases for big data and perhaps more interesting the way it has created its own alternative Hadoop distribution.

Last Fall, Appistry teamed with Accenture to create what it calls Cloud MapReduce. It is essentially an on-premise, Hadoop distribution built on top of Cloud IQ. It includes real-time analytics of streaming data and its own Hadoop File Distribution System (HDFS).

With the move to the cloud, it may seem curious why there would be an investment in such an on-premise solution. It comes down to the customers and the concerns over a single point of failure.  As Derrick Harris pointed out last Fall, failures can happen at the NameNode in HDFS and with Hadoop in the job tracker. That doesn’t happen with Cloud MapReduce.  Further, the types of customers attracted to Cloud MapReduce prefer to have their data off the cloud.

Services Angle

Appistry is a services provider that is targeting the HDFS market with a degree of success. Its strength is in its real-time streaming, big data analytics capabilities. FedEx,  has developed a logistics application. GeoEye created an application for analyzing satellite images which is used by the military. Sprint created a scalable fraud detection application.

These are all use cases that have the flavor of first-generation technologies. It will be the services providers who will help companies develop a new application infrastructure that have more diversified commercial uses.