When considering how to do Big Data analytics, most IT people automatically think of Hadoop. But although the legendary elephant toy platform is by far and away the most popular choice, it’s far from being the only stat-crunching tool in the box.

A good example of an alternative solution is Interana Corp.’s behavioral analytics platform, which has just been selected by Microsoft to analyze the massive volumes of clickstream event data generated daily on its Bing search engine.

Interana’s software doesn’t have anything to do with Hadoop. Instead, it’s based on a distributed column-based database that allows rapid access to vast amounts of time-series data. The database runs on x86 servers, and is capable of processing up to 100 million rows per core per second, according to the company. Atop of this core, Interana has designed an interface that allows anyone – including the less technically-gifted of us – to query raw time-series data and generate reliable business insights.

It’s precisely this simplicity that’s gotten Microsoft so hooked, said Interana Co-founder and Head of Product Lior Abraham in an interview. His thinking is simple enough: “Hadoop is complicated to use and requires high level of technical skills, whereas Interana does not,” Abraham explained. He also pointed out that had Microsoft chosen Hadoop, it would have had to build its own analytics system, whereas Interana provides one right out of the box.

The Redmond firm agreed that Interana’s platform was far better suited than others to analyze the vast amounts of clickstream event data generated by Bing.

“Interana and Microsoft share a common vision of innovation. During the proof of concept, Interana met the challenge of delivering the insights we needed from our massive volumes of event data,” said Craig Miller, group engineering manager for Bing Experiences. “Interana’s scale is impressive. It took only minutes to get answers to questions, opening new possibilities as to what we can do with analytics at interactive speeds. We look forward to continuing to work with the team.”

Interana has proven so useful to Bing’s team because the software is designed specifically to help companies better know their customers by parsing through clickstreams. The platform was designed to let customers know exactly what is and what isn’t working on their websites, what turns people off, and what they’re most interested in.

There are other platforms that could conceivably do this work, but Interana sets itself apart with the immediacy in which it can return results, while giving users the freedom to explore their data in any way they want, explained Interana co-founder and CTO Bobby Johnson to Datanami.

“It’s just the immediate interactivity, that even on this huge data set, I can jump in and look at it,” he said.

To begin with, Bing’s team will use Interana to analyze their experiments at interactive speeds in use cases such as A/B testing, trend analysis, automated reporting, ad hoc exploration and discovery, the company said. Interana offers a nice mix of behavior-based tools like cohorts, funnels, metrics and sessions, that allows Bing’s team to how new and current features are performing, optimize the search engine, and carry out a variety of tests.

“Interana helps organizations like Bing better understand their customers and business,” said Ann Johnson, co-founder and CEO of Interana. “We do this with a solution that’s sophisticated enough to provide insights for seasoned data scientists and simple enough to produce value for business users.”

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