As companies of every stripe and size turn to data as a guide for their day-to-day operations, important questions arise: where and how should that data be stored? And what tools are best suited for drawing insights from it?
Many large companies build their own server farms. But building and maintaining a private cloud can be costly. In addition to the initial charges of purchasing and setting up servers, companies will need to employ people to maintain and upgrade servers on a regular basis. Add the security risks associated with storing large quantities of potentially sensitive data on servers operated by a bare-bones staff, and it’s easy to see why many companies aren’t utilizing their data to its fullest potential.
That’s where Bigstep comes in.
Founded by former Argonne computer scientist Lucas Roh (pictured right), Bigstep provides private cloud environments specifically tailored to handle Big Data projects. With its “bare metal” setup, the company also differentiates itself from cloud services like AWS and Azure by granting companies direct control over their own individual servers rather than splitting server capacity with a number of other companies.
According to Roh, this approach improves security as well as performance, since the additional layer of virtualization required by the shared server approach can be a significant suck on a server’s data processing capacity.
But Roh’s biggest point of pride, he said, is its ease of use.
“Big Data is a buzzword and sort of becoming a more widely used term, but it’s a mystery to a lot of customers,” said Roh. “A lot of them want to do something, but they don’t know how to go about doing it. There’s tons of data being generated, and there’s some useful analytics that can be done. We can help them by making it easier.”
Since Bigstep places a number of the most popular Big Data applications within a single control panel, Roh said his customers can go from signing up to doing meaningful data analytics in as little as 20 minutes.
Though he lives in the Chicagoland area, Roh founded Bigstep in London in 2013 to build out its technology base and get its footing in the European market. This week, the company announced that it is opening new headquarters and a data center in the Loop to prepare for a launch in the United States market.
“The U.S. is really the premium market. This is where the adoption of Big Data and cloud is ahead of other countries,” said Roh, adding that Chicago’s talent pool and its thriving B2B startup ecosystem was a major factor in choosing the city as a new home base.
Having recently raised an undisclosed amount of funding from investors including Chicago's OCA Ventures, Bigstep plans to add between 24 and 36 employees in Chicago by the end of this year, on top of its staff of 60 in the United Kingdom.
Bigstep’s Chicago headquarters will be located in the Civic Opera Building, and the data center will also be located in the Loop.
Image via Bigstep.
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