Growing interest in cloud services is driving the emergence of a new wave of startups that are applying the managed services model to analytics in hopes of setting themselves apart from the on-premise vendors reigning over the enterprise market today. There’s a lot of hype out there, but the benefits are very much real: the ability to seamlessly and cost-effectively scale according to business demand is a perfect fit with Big Data. The only question is which players will execute that vision effectively.

In an alert published last November, Wikibon principal research contributor Jeff Kelly took a deep look at one of the frontrunners in the cloud analytics race, a Mountain View-based startup called Treasure Data that develops a comprehensive service for turning information into actionable acknowledge. The firm aims to make it possible for resource-strapped organizations with legacy baggage to rapidly glean insights from various sources without breaking the bank.

“We’re feeling a lot of emphasis on how quickly you can do it, a lot of tools to enable you in this Big Data ecosystem, and Treasure Data fits right into that,” Hannah Smalltree, the director of marketing for the startup, told SiliconANGLE in a March interview.  “We’re right in the mix there, we get people into production in days, less than two oftentimes. So we’re really focused on how soon we can get you to run that first query.”

The company achieves that rapidity using a homegrown technology called Treasure Agent, a stream processing tool that allows customers to hook up their existing systems to its platform with just a few lines of code. From there, the data travels to Plazma, a proprietary distributed columnar database that leverages Amazon Web Services to provide “massive scalability” for a wide range of analytic workloads ranging from machine-generated data to the structured output of legacy business applications.

Treasure has recently been named a “Cool Vendor in Big Data” by Gartner for its unique approach to helping companies keep up with their information. As Kelly explained in his report, the strength of the firm’s offering is not in the individual components but rather the integrated whole, which acts to remove traditional barriers to analytics at large scale.

“Treasure Data provides an end-to-end managed service for large-scaled data warehousing in the cloud. Such an approach significantly reduces the level of upfront investment in money and time associated with traditional data warehouse deployments,” Kelly comments.

How Treasure Data can stay cool

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Gartner sees the convenience afforded by Treasure Agent as another major differentiator for the firm, but notes in its paper that the competition, including incumbent vendors such as Informatica and Talend as well as emerging players like Skydata, are improving upon their own information collection capabilities. As a result, the research firm believes the startup will have to double down on its vertical focus in order to retain its competitive advantage moving forward, a strategic reality that Smalltree made clear had been taken into account from the very start.

“We do have one primary service, but people use it in different ways,” Smalltree said in the interview. “One of our customers is a large retailer, they announced a mobile application and they wanted to understand how their mobile users engage with the product how that compares with what people are doing online and how that compares with one people were doing in their stores.” She said that Treasure also has plans to expand its presence in some of the other segments currently witnessing an explosion in the amount of available information.

“The two you’ll hear about are digital gaming – they have so much data, they’re collecting every interaction a player makes in a game – and also advertising technology,” she detailed. “All those clicks and impressions and where to put ads and which creative [assets] to use. And there are a few other industries where we have our toes in, increasingly Internet of Things.”