Mark Terenzoni, CEO of Sqrrl, joined Jeff Frick in theCUBE for a quick update on the company, during the BigData SV Conference in Santa Clara.

“We finished off 2013 ahead of plan on customers, ahead of plan on bookings, we doubled the staff and moved the offices. For sure, it was an exciting year for Sqrrl,” boasted Terenzoni. “We’re stepping into 2014 with still some pretty lofty goals ahead of us,” he confessed. “No doubt about it, we’ve got a great technology, but – in my opinion – technology is only the basis for solving the problems that customers have, and that’s exactly what we’re attempting to do. We targeted some very specific verticals (banking, financing, health-care, telecommunications) and we were able to penetrate all those verticals in 2013.”

Sqrrl prides themselves with having a couple of customers who are looking to put together a secure data store. One of Sqrrl’s major claims to fame and differentiators is their security modeling. Because a lot of personal information is being mishandled and misused, and that creates concern within companies, which are trying to figure out ways to manage that situation. Regulations are getting more stringent. As for the future challenges that he anticipates, Terenzoni comments:

“We think we’ve locked down the security aspect of it and we are building an enterprise ready NoSql data store that sits on top of Hadoop and we feel we have enough traction on the market with that solution, but customers want more.”

After having all their data, secure, in one place, the customers want to be able to do things with it. There’s a certain movement towards the operational analytics. The customers still want to be able to use their store in an operational way, but they also are interested in the analytics side of it.

“We’ve built those capabilities and we’ll grow them: we have full text search capabilities, we have Graph Search capabilities and we’re building some Graph based analytics.”

Explaining the open source core and the security applications, Terenzoni continued:

“The core product was developed by the NSA and it was kept internal for a long time, the value of that open core for us has been proven; it’s been running in a mission critical environment. There’s a tremendous amount of data in their back office and they are managing things in a real-time way, and this technology has been proven to scale pretty large, greater than anything else on the market.”

Talking in depth about the Sqrrl Enterprise, Terenzoni specified that it enables organizations to ingest, secure, index, and query massive amounts of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data:

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• Ingesting means streaming or bulk data ingest from any source.
• Securing means encryption and labeling of data with fine-grained access controls.
• Indexing – an extensible indexing framework to support full-text, graph, SQL, and document search.
• Query: Industry-standard APIs and query languages.

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“We’ve built a very rich API on top of that system and we allow programmers to develop on Java, Ruby on rails, Python, and it’s all about what types of insights our customers are looking for,” said Terenzoni.

Disclosing the immediate future plans, Terenzoni confessed:

“We are going to continue to invest in talent in the engineering side, in the go-to-market strategy, and in the partner strategy and, if we can execute on all three of those, 2014 will be a great year for Sqrrl.”