UPDATED 11:07 EDT / SEPTEMBER 29 2014

What you missed in Big Data: funding the fight against cancer

pink ribbon fight cancerNow that the analytics craze is settling down, the technology is starting to trickle down from the tech firms and global enterprises at the bleeding edge into more traditional parts of the market like the healthcare sector, where the potential for change is greater than anything we’ve seen so far. And the industry is shifting accordingly, creating a vacuum for a new generation of vendors to fill.

An emerging startup called COTA Inc. made headlines on Tuesday after raising $3.7 million to try and seize that opening with a cloud-based analytics platform aimed at helping hospitals elevate one of the single biggest challenges in delivering cancer treatment: the cost of care. The brainchild of a world-renowned oncologist, it provides a visual interface for doctors to explore the overlooked but exceedingly valuable patterns between clinical data and everyday operational metrics. The end-goal is to help hospitals along the journey from the old model of charging for services to value-based billing.

COTA said that the new $3.7 million in financing from fellow healthcare analytics provider Med-Metrix LCC. and New Jersey insurer Horizon Healthcare Services, Inc. will be used to accelerate the development of its namesake platform and expand marketing operations. It shares those priorities with Numerify Inc., which closed $15 million the next day in a funding round of its own to help streamline operations at a different category of organizations: IT departments.

Like COTA’s founder, the two entrepreneurs behind Numerify are also intimately familiar with the market they’re looking to disrupt. Chief executive Gaurav Rewari spent a stint leading product strategy at Oracle Corp., while Srikant Gokulnatha, the startup’s development head, ran the database giant’s core business intelligence unit. The long-time colleagues have hatched up a solution that provides visibility not only into the individual components that make up an IT environment but also the broader picture of service levels, user productivity and cost reduction.

That novel spin on what has become one of the single most common value propositions in the analytics ecosystem has earned Numerify the backing of venture capital giants Sequoia and Lightspeed Venture Partners along with a long list of high-profile angel investors. But the startup is hardly alone in wanting to bring a new perspective to infrastructure monitoring.

Platform-as-a-service powerhouse Heroku surprised developers last week with a major interface revamp that introduced a new panel for tracking application performance and related metrics such as resource utilization. The update also extended that visibility to the database layer with a dashboard that enables users to gain real-time insight into how their Postgres instances are handling the load.

photo credit: krazydad / jbum via photopin cc

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