Everyone knows that there is no shortage of data sources today. From internal corporate databases and applications to social media feeds and other publicly available data, the possibilities for mixing and merging data are nearly endless.

But that doesn’t mean actually performing Big Data integration is a trivial exercise. In fact, it requires significant expertise and is largely a manual effort. Two start-ups are trying to change that paradigm in the belief that the easier it is to integrate and combine data sources the faster enterprises will adopt Big Data technologies and developers will build Big Data applications.

A company called Flow Corporation came out of stealth mode last week to unveil its Big Data Platform-as-a-Service that allows application developers to pull together multiple streaming data sources to build new real-time Big Data applications. The cloud-based platform exposes real-time data sources via APIs and performs data transformations in milliseconds so that the data is consumable by applications upon arrival.

The Flow Platform provides access to social media feeds including Twitter and Facebook, but CEO Eric Alterman told me he expects the majority of data feeds customers want to integrate in real-time are actually internal feeds such as sales, inventory or customer relationship management data. Alterman said his vision for Flow was inspired in part by his time at Mesh Networks, a company he founded in 2000 to simplify moving telecommunications data between networks.

Alterman expands on his vision here:

“It has become abundantly clear that applications must be both real-time and information-rich to remain relevant in the current app economy. The last several years have been about applications connecting socially, but the future will be about applications connecting on a deeper data level. Apps will ‘curate’ real-time data streams from many sources to provide fresher and richer end-user experiences. Whether in the enterprise or consumer space, our goal is to expedite the real-time interoperability phase of the data revolution.”

A second startup called ClearStory is similarly trying to make accessing and consuming Big Data easier, but in this case for casual business users looking to perform analytics on their own. I haven’t had an opportunity to talk with the company yet, but based on this post from the New York Times the company is working on developing a platform to allow business users to discover and merge multiple data sources in an easy-to-use Web-based analytic environment.

Whether the ClearStory platform itself proves a success I can’t say, but I think Founder and CEO Sharmila Shahani-Mulligan makes a very good point:

“The world is talking about the size of Big Data sources, but at the end of the day it will be about the ease of consumption.”

ServicesANGLE

Big Data isn’t of much use if you can’t access, manipulate or otherwise derive value from it via applications and analytic tools. Getting Big Data to the people who need is therefor paramount. I love the idea of cloud-based services that abstract away the complexity of Big Data integration such as Flow and ClearStory are attempting. The easier it is to steer data sources to applications and tools the faster traditional enterprises can begin leveraging Big Data.