This was an exciting year for Pepperdata! We’ve crammed the past twelve months with growth and expansion on all fronts, from funding to product features to team size and more. So as we raise our glasses to toast in a bright new year, we want to acknowledge the milestones of 2015 and to thank our customers and investors — without whom, none of our achievements would be possible.
Funding and company growth
We had a terrific start to the year with a cool $15 million in Series B venture capital funding to help us grow and expand our operations, bringing Pepperdata’s total funding to $20 million. The B round was led by Citi Ventures, Wing Venture Partners, and Silicon Valley Data Capital — we are thrilled to be partnering with these well-respected names in the venture capital scene.
We also added several new members to our sales, engineering, and marketing teams this year, increasing our headcount by a whopping 70%. We made a key strategic hire in Ed Colonna, our new VP of Marketing, who will broaden our already successful go-to-market efforts and ramp up marketing to position Pepperdata for the growth we’re planning in 2016.
And speaking of growth, we grew our customer base over 200% YoY — adding new clients from the insurance, financial services, online, telecommunications, mobile analytics, and gaming industries, to name a few. A third Fortune 50 firm signed up to be to our client, too, which is really exciting!
Also, it’s time to update your address books: Pepperdata is moving! That’s right; we’re leaving our cozy (and increasingly cramped) office space in Sunnyvale for a new home in Cupertino. The move is happening as we speak, and we’re thrilled to have a bit more room to grow.
New features and product enhancements
We also significantly expanded the functionality of our Pepperdata software, which is a powerful, set-it-and-forget-it solution for Hadoop application performance issues and the only available product that operates dynamically, in real time, to ensure quality of service (QoS) for Hadoop applications as they run. So what features did we add?
We kicked off 2015 by incorporating our dynamic allocation feature into our newly-minted YARN support. This means that Pepperdata-enabled clusters running YARN workloads can automatically experience significant throughput gains on their existing cluster — typically a 30%-50% increase in performance — just by installing Pepperdata’s software.
We also added full support for Spark, so customers get the same run-time QoS control over Spark applications that they do with MapReduce and YARN workloads, the same automatic throughput gains on their existing cluster, as well as visibility into Spark-specific metrics over time series via the Pepperdata dashboard.
We’re also happy to announce that full Tez support is currently in beta — so keep your eyes peeled for updates in the new year.
In the second half of 2015, we debuted our Comprehensive Chargeback Reporting feature, which allows customers to view the costs of using shared cluster resources — like memory or CPU — over a specified period of time and quickly learn which jobs, users, or workflows are most impactful. For organizations looking to provide Hadoop-as-a-Service, Chargeback Reporting helps them build the business processes needed to allocate costs across departments or workgroup.
Getting the word out
We also kicked off the trade show season in earnest, with a presence at Strata+Hadoop in San Jose in February, Hadoop Summit and Spark Summit in the Bay Area in June, and Strata+Hadoop in New York — along with several other shows in Boston and Washington, DC. We had a great time meeting lots of folks interested in finding ways to ensure their Hadoop clusters are performing optimally, and we learned a lot about the everyday concerns of organizations managing Hadoop, running multiple workloads, and trying to service several Hadoop users simultaneously.
While we’re on the topic to shows, we added some great new swag for booth giveaways: hot sauce. After several taste testings at our office, we decided upon the perfect sauce — and yes, we would argue it’s amazing! So, if you’re attending a show next year, we’d highly suggest you swing by our booth, introduce yourself, and snag a bottle.
Finally, we’re thrilled to have received some great mentions in the press this year. Whether it’s making CRN’s 2015 Emerging Vendors and Ten Coolest Big Data Products of 2015 lists or getting mentioned in analyst reports and press articles, we’re happy the word is getting out that Hadoop operators no longer need to waste hours poring over the minutia of Hadoop configuration settings in order to enable true, automatic application performance — and that, in fact, with Pepperdata software, the performance boosts go way beyond anything possible with manual tuning.
2015, it’s a wrap!
As we say goodbye to a fantastic year, we’re gearing up for an even better 2016. We look forward to expanding our product with even more innovative, game-changing technology, to providing even more value to our customers, and to changing the entire way the world thinks about Hadoop application performance. In many ways, the future is already here — and we can’t wait to show you!
Happy holidays from the entire Pepperdata team!