Iguazio Systems Ltd. today launched its “continuous analytics” platform that it unveiled in concept over a year ago, promising a faster and simpler way to use massive amounts of data in real time

The Israel-based company said its Unified Data Platform, which has been in testing by a number of companies such as stock exchanges, banks and cloud service companies, is now generally available. The platform attempts to reduce the complexity of handling and making sense of multiple data streams and software for analyzing all that data.

At the same time, the three-year-old startup announced that Singapore ride-hailing giant Grab will use iguazio’s Unified Data Platform. The company will use the platform for analyzing driver data to determine real-time incentives, analyzing heat maps to reduce passenger wait times and optimize surge pricing based not just on demand data but outside data such as news, weather and social media (pictured, below).

Iguazio’s data platform consolidates data into a repository and makes it available to many applications as files, messages, streams and other forms each application needs. To simplify processing of the data, the product has key applications, including artificial intelligence and machine learning software such as Apache Spark, Google LLC-developed TensorFlow, and Kubernetes, which manages software “containers” that allow applications to run the same on many different computing environments.

Yaron Haviv (pictured), iguazio’s co-founder and chief technology officer, said in an interview that the Unified Data Platform helps make cloud computing simpler by including much of the software needed to analyze data from many sources. That’s also potentially less expensive, as much as a third as doing something similar through Amazon Web Services Inc.’s cloud services.

“Cloud is shifting from infrastructure to business services,” he said, so companies want more integrated services. “Users of our platform don’t need to think about infrastructure.”

The platform is available as an appliance with the software installed on standard servers such as those made by Dell Technologies or Super Micro Computer Inc., as licensed software for running on customers’ own servers, or as a service hosted in Equinix Inc. data centers — or as a combination of those for companies with hybrid computing setups.

“Iguazio is trying to invent a solution to a pressing problem: a software cloud stack that works and is independent of any supplier of cloud services,” said Peter Burris, chief research officer at Wikibon, the analyst group owned by SiliconANGLE Media. “They face so many challenges not under their control: technology evolution, business model changes, customer uncertainty about best paths to the cloud. However, they have a rock-solid grasp of the hardware, software and networking trends at work and they appear to be skating to where all those pucks are converging.”

Burris said that although the technology is critical, savvy marketing may prove to be key for the company. Iguazio appears ready to push ahead on that front. In July, it announced it had raised a $33 million Series B round, bringing total funding to $48 million.

Haviv spoke at the BigData SV event in March held by SiliconANGLE Media’s video unit theCUBE in San Jose, California, where he talked about the changing big data and cloud landscapes:

Photo: SiliconANGLE