1010data's approach to data management and analysis traces its origins to the early days of analytics. In their business-side experience on Wall Street, 1010data's founders identified and leveraged techniques and technologies that gave them an edge in a highly competitive industry. As early as 1980, they began to derive great value from vector languages, columnar databases, and parallel and distributed processing.
In the decades that followed Kaplan and Steier's original efforts, the world has made large investments in such things as relational databases, object-oriented programming, database appliances and, most recently, MapReduce and Hadoop. Yet even as hardware and user interfaces have changed it turns out that many of the former technologies are more suited to supporting modern data analysis. So Kaplan and Steier continued to advance their techniques and founded 1010data in 2000 with the idea that their methodologies could form the basis of a new approach to data management and analysis.
Simply put, the idea was to offer a spreadsheet-like platform over the internet, what we now call the Trillion-Row Spreadsheet. In modern parlance, the idea was to provide a Cloud-based data analysis platform as a SaaS offering that could operate on Big Data. Of course the terms "Cloud", "SaaS" and "Big Data" were ten years in the future but that was the product that 1010data revealed in 2000; it just took a decade for the lexicon to catch up with the reality.
The first significant customer for the service was the New York Stock Exchange and over the years more and more major companies have discovered the benefits of 1010data's service. As data volumes have grown, and they certainly have grown dramatically in the case of the NYSE, 1010data's platform has scaled seamlessly. We now have over two hundred active customers.