Trifacta has launched the Wrangler Partner Program -- the latest sign that big data, analytics, Hadoop and data preparation companies are working more closely with resellers, consulting companies, and technology firms.
Trifacta, a four-year-old company, began life as a research project at Stanford University. In many ways, Trifacta is synonymous with the data wrangler term -- which emerged from the process of manually converting or mapping data from one "raw" form into another format that allows for more convenient consumption of the data with the help of semi-automated tools, according to Wikipedia.
Trifacta's Data Preparation Solution
But what does that mean in layman's terms? On the end-user front, companies typically spend a huge amount cleaning and preparing data for analysis, according to Fergus Moroney, VP of business development and alliances, Trifacta.
To address that challenge, Trifacta's data preparation platform helps to accelerate Hadoop adoption, execute new analytics initiatives and improve reporting efficiency.
"If you want to do self-service analytics, you need to do self-service data preparation as well," says Moroney. Trifacta's Data Wrangler offering solves that need. It also accelerates Hadoop adoption and new analytics initiatives, and improves reporting efficiency, the company asserts.
Trifacta's Partner Program
Trifacta has just over 100 employees -- not nearly enough to reach all target customers. The newly launched partner program includes 50 partners, and the company will look to double its partner base by the end of 2016.
Trifacta has close working relationships across the big data ecosystem of technology providers -- including Cloudera, Hortonworks, Infosys, MapR and Tableau, among others. Each alliance engagement typically uncovers new use cases -- which should lead to more projects for IT consulting firms and partners, Moroney says.
MSP opportunities also are emerging. Datapipe, for one, helps customers to leverage Cloudera and Trifacta to transform raw Hadoop cluster data into clean, structured formats for analysis. Moroney concedes these are the early days of Trifacta working with MSPs, but he believes end-to-end data management will increasingly become a managed service.
In North America, Trifacta's first mover partners are mainly systems integrators and IT consulting firms -- though there are some resellers in the mix as well, particularly Lockheed Martin in the federal market. On the international front, resellers have a bigger footprint in Latin America and Asia in particular. In Europe, the company has 15 employees focused on four core countries, with resellers covering the rest.
Generally speaking, VARs and MSPs have been somewhat late to the big data and analytics conversation. But that began to change in late 2015, particularly as Hadoop and analytics companies began to formalize their partner programs.
