ParAccel

History

ParAccel was a venture-backed company focused on developing software for data analysis. It acquired some intellectual property from the company XPrime, which ended operations in 2005. It was officially incorporated in February 2006, founded by Barry Zane who became chief technology officer, Tom Clancey as interim-CEO, and was first funded by angel investors.

In August 2006 the first series of venture capital came from Mohr Davidow Ventures, Bay Partners and Tao Venture Partners.

In 2007 the company was based in San Diego, California, with an office in Ann Arbor, Michigan. David J. Ehrlich was chief executive, and Bruce Scott, vice president of engineering. In November 2007, a second round of $20 million included previous investors and was led by Walden Ventures. In December the company opened an office in Cupertino, California (part of Silicon Valley).

A third round of $22 million in June 2009 was led by Menlo Ventures. In January 2010 Mark Lockareff replaced Ehrlich as interim chief executive. In March 2010 the Wall Street Journal listed ParAccel in a list of 50 top venture backed companies. A result from the TPC-H benchmark from the Transaction Processing Performance Council in April 2010 had record performance at 1 TB data size using VMware. Charles W. Berger was appointed chairman and CEO in September 2010.

By early 2011 many of its competitors had been acquired. During its July 2011 funding round, existing investors were led by Amazon.com. In December 2012, the Amazon Redshift database service was announced (and generally available in early 2013) using ParAccel technology.

ParAccel was based in California with offices in Campbell and San Diego. Competitors included Greenplum (from Pivotal), EXASOL, Vertica (from Hewlett-Packard), Netezza (from IBM), Oracle Corporation, and Teradata (including its Aster Data Systems technology). ParAccel was acquired by Actian in April 2013. Berger left at that time to become CEO of Extreme Networks.

Products

In 2006 ParAccel offered two different products: Amigo and Maverick. Amigo was designed to accelerate queries directed at an existing data warehouse while leaving the data warehouse as the database of record. In contrast Maverick was designed as a stand-alone data store. ParAccel discontinued Amigo in favor of the stand-alone offering which evolved into the ParAccel Analytic Database (PADB).

The ParAccel Analytic Database was a parallel relational database system using a shared-nothing architecture with a columnar orientation, adaptive compression, memory-centric design. ParAccel's DBMS engine is built for analytics, initially based on PostgreSQL. ParAccel began phasing in a new optimizer (Omne) in release 2.0 and made significant changes to Omne in subsequent releases (3.1 released in June 2011). ParAccel implements compiled queries, and a proprietary interconnect protocol for inter-node communications.

ParAccel offered on-demand integration (ODI) modules for analytics and data outside of the ParAccel Analytic Platform.

References

References

1. Maria Duetscher. (April 29, 2013). "Actian Picks Up ParAccel to Boost Analytics Portfolio". Silicon Angle.
2. Philip Howard. (December 13, 2005). "Warehouse appliances: boom or bust?". The Register.
3. Philip Howard. (March 30, 2006). "ParACCEL up and running: The new boy on the data warehouse appliance block". The Register.
4. "Company: Accelerating Business Intelligence". Old ParAccel web page.
5. (November 28, 2007). "Notice of Sale of Securities [Regulation D and Section 4(6) of the Securities Act of 1933], item 06". US Securities and Exchange Commission.
6. (December 10, 2007). "ParAccel Secures $20 Million in Venture Financing and Opens Cupertino Office". Press release.
7. (September 8, 2010). "ParAccel Appoints Charles W. Berger as CEO". Press release.
8. (March 9, 2010). "The Next Big Thing: The Top 50 Venture-Backed Companies". The Wall Street Journal.
9. (April 12, 2010). "ParAccel, VMware Break 1TB TPC-H Performance Record with World's First Virtualized TPC-H". Press release.
10. (April 11, 2010). "VMware ESXi platform/HP DL380/ParAccel Analytic". TPC-H Result Highlight.
11. Derrick Harris. (March 11, 2011). "Why ParAccel's Time on the Big Data Singles Circuit Won't Be Long". Giga Om.
12. Derrick Harris. (July 7, 2011). "Amazon invests big in big data startup". Giga Om.
13. Doug Henschen. (December 6, 2012). "Amazon Redshift Leaves On-Premises Opening, Says ParAccel". Information Week.
14. Barb Darrow. (February 15, 2013). "Watch out HP, IBM, Teradata, Oracle: Amazon Redshift is here". Giga Om.
15. Curt Monash. (August 19, 2008). "Comparing Vertica, ParAccel and Exasol". Information Week.
16. Doug Henschen. (April 25, 2013). "Actian Acquires ParAccel, Fuel Behind Amazon RedShift". Information Week.
17. Jim Duffy. (April 25, 2013). "Extreme Networks replaces its CEO again". Network World.
18. Thomas C. Briggs. (February 25, 2008). "Getting to Know ParAccel, Part II". Full Table Scan blog.
19. (March 4, 2009). "ParAccel Corporate Brief". HP partner web site.
20. Yijou Chen. (June 29, 2009). "Proceedings of the 2009 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of data".
21. Rahmouni, Mohamed. "From Machine-to-Machine to the Internet of Things".