Data Access Start-Up Starburst Launches Channel Program
Top public cloud providers AWS, Microsoft, Google among founding members of initiative
Start-up Starburst Data, whose offering leverages the open-source Presto SQL query engine for Big Data analytics, is rolling out a partner program that counts major cloud service providers Microsoft, Google Cloud, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) among its initial members.
The Lowdown: The 3-year-old Boston-based company this week unveiled the Starburst Orbit channel program to extend the reach of Starburst Enterprise for Presto, a distributed query engine that enables enterprises to rapidly access data wherever it sits, making it available for analysis and quick insights.
The Details: With the Starburst product, companies can pull together newer data sources and existing data in their data warehouses or data lakes. The demand for such capabilities is on the rise during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has seen organizations having to adapt to and manage increasingly distributed workforces and IT environments and more rapidly embrace cloud services.
The Starburst Orbit program offers partners connectors, access controls, and 24/7 support to enable them to bring the vendor’s query engine to end clients, giving customers fast data access at scale.
The program includes a number of options that are designed to align with each partner’s strategy. The program is targeting:
> Consultants and systems integrators: This option offers a co-selling relationship with Starburst that includes access to financial benefits, knowledge, and sales enablement resources.
> Resellers: This is aimed at go-to-market efforts to generate revenue and profit and drive new customer acquisition and overall growth.
> Technology partners: For these partners, Starburst wants to create alignment, value-added solutions, tight integration, and co-selling relationships to generate referral fees and joint solution offerings.
Along with the top-tier cloud providers, other founding members of Starburst Orbit include Red Hat, Abzooba, Insight, Looker, and Trace3.
The Impact: The enterprise IT environment was already becoming more decentralized before the public health crisis, with companies adopting multicloud and hybrid cloud strategies and pushing out to the edge, which meant that corporate data that traditionally sat in core data centers was now housed in multiple environments. The coronavirus outbreak has accelerated the use of cloud services. Being able to access and manage that data at scale has become a key demand among enterprises.
Background: Starburst launched its Presto query engine in December 2017 and in recent months has announced its availability on cloud marketplaces from Microsoft Azure, Red Hat, AWS, and Google Cloud. The company in June said it had raised $42 million in a Series B financing round, less than a year after it raised $22 million in November 2019.
In February, Starburst officials said the company had seen a 600% year-over-year jump in recurring revenue and 620% growth in the number of customers. The company will host a two-day virtual conference called Datanova on Feb. 9-10, 2021.
The Buzz: “Starburst offers a critical decision-making engine that gives teams fast access to all data, which is now even more urgent given that COVID has rendered some historical data obsolete,” Starburst CEO Justin Borgman said. “We’re excited to launch our partner program because we see our partner ecosystem as critical to making our customers successful. Starburst Orbit empowers our partner community to help companies across the globe unlock the potential of all of their data regardless of its location, enabling them to make better decisions faster that will impact revenue, customer engagement, and their overall strategy.”
“By teaming with Starburst, Looker users can now access all their disparate data sources as if they’re in one place, all without first having to consolidate them. We’re excited to be collaborating with the Starburst team to help organizations leverage even the most siloed data across departments,” said Shohei Narron, technology partner manager at Looker, a business intelligence and analytics platform from Google Cloud.
“As organizations look to transform and develop a modern culture of data, Slalom is focused on helping them achieve new levels of velocity and become insight-driven businesses,” said Greg Taylor, Southwest regional delivery team director at Slalom. “With Starburst, Slalom is rapidly helping our clients scale their data fabric through a single source of access for analytics across the enterprise.”
“At Trace3, we find technology leaders are looking to take their data and use it to drive business outcomes. We’ve found that Starburst and their latest offering Orbit is another amazing solution to bring to Trace3’s Enterprise data customers,” said Josh Lindstrom, principal consultant for data intelligence at Trace3. “It fits perfect into our strategy of ‘ingest to insight’ and we are excited to partner with Starburst on their new Orbit program.”
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