SnappyData

SnappyData developed a high-performance, in-memory data platform designed for mixed workload applications. The company was founded in 2016 by Richard Lamb, Sudhir Menon, and Jags Ramnarayan, who had previously collaborated on building Pivotal GemFire, an in-memory data grid product. The founders leveraged their deep expertise in in-memory data management to address the market need for a unified solution that could handle streaming, transactional, and analytical workloads simultaneously.

The business operated by providing a hybrid transactional/analytical processing (HTAP) database built upon Apache Spark. It fused the Apache Spark stack with Apache Geode, a distributed in-memory database, to create a single cluster capable of stream analytics, OLTP (Online Transaction Processing), and OLAP (Online Analytical Processing). This architecture was designed to eliminate the complexity and cost of integrating multiple disparate systems for real-time operational analytics. SnappyData offered both open-source and enterprise versions of its platform, targeting clients in sectors like IoT, manufacturing, financial services, and telecom.

The core product provided a unified programming model for streaming, transactions, machine learning, and SQL analytics, aiming to be up to 20 times faster than native Apache Spark. A key feature was its ability to perform analytics on data both in motion and at rest, making it suitable for real-time use cases like predictive maintenance and anomaly detection. The platform also featured Approximate Query Processing (AQP), which used stratified data samples to provide nearly instant, highly accurate answers for aggregation queries on massive datasets, a significant benefit for visual analytics.

SnappyData was spun out of Pivotal Software in 2015. In April 2016, the company announced a $3.65 million Series A funding round led by investors including Pivotal, GE Digital (formerly GE Ventures), and GTD Capital. This investment was aimed at expanding its engineering and sales teams. On March 7, 2019, TIBCO Software acquired SnappyData for an undisclosed amount, integrating its technology to enhance the TIBCO Connected Intelligence platform and bolster its real-time analytics capabilities.

Keywords: in-memory database, Apache Spark, hybrid transactional/analytical processing, HTAP, data platform, stream analytics, real-time analytics, OLTP, OLAP, Apache Geode, Pivotal GemFire, data fabric, Jags Ramnarayan, Sudhir Menon, Richard Lamb, Approximate Query Processing, AQP, big data analytics, IoT analytics, financial services data, TIBCO, unified data platform