IncortaProduct Evaluation

By Wayne W. Eckerson July 2017

Product Evaluation

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Summary

Founded in 2013, Incorta is a new vendor that has reimagined how to deliver real-time reporting and analytics against complex, relational data. The company’s flagship product, also called Incorta, accelerates reporting and analytics deployment by eliminating the need for ETL, data models, and database indexes. Rather than transform data, Incorta ingests data into its database and then uses its Direct Data Mapping technology to identify all record-level relationships. This virtual mapping empowers the tool to execute complex joins without calculating a query plan, creating aggregates, pre-joining or denormalizing data, or employing temporary tables, database indexes, or other query acceleration techniques. Incorta is ideal for reporting against operational data in business applications that have complex relational data structures. Because Incorta mirrors operational database schema, the tool makes it easy to capture updates and deliver real-time data to business users. It also leverages source system security, making it easy to support row-level security. To simplify data access, Incorta administrators usua y cra a semantic ayer on top of the operationa schema But because Incorta persists data as Parquet files, customers can store Incorta data in Hadoop and use Drill, which ships with Incorta, to query larger data sets. Data scientists can model the underlying Parquet data sets and feed results back into the Incorta engine for broader consumption. Incorta provides its own search-based visualization tool, but supports any SQL-based reporting or analytics tool that has a JDBC driver. It also has a REST API for programmatic access to its query engine.

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Strategy

Now. Today, Incorta sells primarily to IT administrators who want a robust operational reporting solution without having to make a heavy investment in data modeling, ETL, and data warehousing. Once customers bring the too in house, they o en find other uses for the product, such as providing operational data to data scientists. Two-thirds of Incorta customers have expanded their licenses.

ecause the product offers oth a and , it slips easily into existing customer reporting and analysis environments. Many customers currently use Tableau

o ware and other disco ery products to uery ncorta

Founded

Headquarters

Revenues

Ownership

CEO

Employees

Customers

Website

2013

San Mateo, CA

N/A

Private

Osama Elkady

60

20 paid in production

www.incorta.com

Company Profile

data. Most current customers deploy Incorta on-premises using Linux or Windows servers, although the product also runs on the cloud if you bring your own license. Future. To broaden its appeal, Incorta needs to expand its big data capabilities to support large volumes of non-relational data as well as extend its relationships with BI, analytics, and data preparation vendors to ensure seamless integration with Incorta and create mutually beneficial marketing relationships. It also needs to make inroads with the business community.

Customer Perspective

“Whenever we come across a business challenge, we first ask ourselves how Incorta can help.” Alan Davidson, Director of IT Infrastructure at Broadcom

“By implementing Incorta, we went from almost a total absence of reporting to immediate access to virtually real-time information. We’re seeing a big increase in productivity and feedback from our users.” Business Systems Manager, Top Ten U.S. University

“[Incorta is] saving our team an entire week’s worth of time each month, which means we can perform ad hoc analysis that improves department performance.” Jennifer DiRico, Financial Planning and Analysis Manager at Toast

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Key Differentiators

Query complex schema. Incorta Direct Data Mapping technology enables the product to execute joins against complex relational schema without calculating a query plan, pre-joining or denormalizing data, creating aggregates, or employing temporary tables or database indexes. The tool automatically executes joins against tables in the same database, while IT administrators manually link databases with at least one cross-table join.

Eliminate ETL. Because Incorta queries complex relational schema, it does not require customers to transform the data using ETL or other tools. Customers simply ingest the data into the Incorta engine and Incorta immediately makes the data available for query processing.

Near-real-time access. Incorta ingests up to 1 billion records per hour. Most customers ingest data once a week and then trickle updates in near real time, typically every five minutes. Because Incorta’s database schema mirrors source system schema, users can access current data without affecting the processing of the source system.

Row-level security. Incorta mirrors source system schema, making it easier to apply row-level security to Incorta data compared to other analytics products. Incorta integrates source system security mechanisms directly and does not require complex security mapping to apply rules.

Fast deployment. Because Incorta doesn’t require ETL, data modeling, or data warehouses, customers can develop reports quickly. It also has its own visualization tool, so customers get everything they need to deliver a robust reporting environment in a single package. Most customers do spend time creating a semantic layer to shield users from the complexity of the source system schema stored in the Incorta database.

Product name

Year shipped

Current version

Platforms

Top competitors

Videos

Incorta

2014

2.9

Cloud or on-premises (Windows or Linux)

Analytic databases (e.g., Oracle Exadata, HPE Vertica, IBM Netezza) and

database-centric BI tools

Incorta in One Minute

Product Profile

Product Evaluation

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Key Use Cases

1. Operational reporting. Most customers purchase Incorta to fulfill an operational reporting need where users require fast and direct access to data in one or more operational systems that have complex relational schema. 2. Advanced analytics. Because Incorta does not transform operational data and maintains its original schema, data scientists find the tool provides a quick and easy way to access raw data for analytic modeling. Incorta converts incoming data into Parquet files, so IT administrators can store the data in Hadoop and give data scientists access to it via Drill and Spark (bundled with Incorta). From there, IT administrators can ingest model output back into Incorta through its ingestion engine and make the results (or scores) available to other Incorta users via analytic tools or embed them into standard reports and dashboards.

Consistent query performance. Incorta understands record relationships, so it doesn’t need to execute complex query plans or require IT administrators to develop and maintain summary tables and database indexes. Query performance is fast, resolving most requests in seconds, and remains fast as the number of tables grows, avoiding performance bottlenecks common with other approaches.

Open. Although Incorta comes with a visualization layer, some customers run their existing BI and data preparation tools against the Incorta database using open APIs (e.g., SQL or REST).

Strategy

Model

Free trial?

Free version?

Published?

Cloud

Starting price

250-User Scenario

Premium pricing

Subscription (annual)

Yes

No

No

Coming soon

$100,000 (includes 1 developer, 5 analyzers, and 10 consumer licenses)

$300,000 list (includes 225 consumers, 20 analyzers, and 5 developer licenses)

Pricing

250-User Scenario $300,000 list (includes 225 consumers, 20 analyzers, and 5 developer licenses)

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Incorta Architecture

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Summary

Companies traditionally analyze operational data either by querying source systems directly or by building a data warehouse. Each approach has its drawbacks: direct queries bog down the source system performance, while data warehouses are time-consuming and expensive to build and maintain.

Incorta overcomes both of these limitations, providing near-real-time access to complex operational data without hampering source system performance or extending a data warehouse. This makes it ideal for operational reporting and to support data scientists who want fast access to raw operational data.

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About Eckerson Group

Eckerson Group is a research and consulting firm that helps organizations turn data into insight and action. Our consultants and researchers each have more than 20 years of experience in the field and are uniquely qualified to help business and technical leaders use data and technology to drive better insights and actions.

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