Another one of Andreessen Horowitz's seemingly endless supply of gold-tinged start-ups whose future is supposed to be theirs to lose has come out of start-up hiding to proclaim the existence of its newfangled SaaS-style data-warehouse-as-a-service for Big Data analytics running initially on Amazon.

It's called BitYota - a name derived from the combination of the smallest element of computer storage and the yotta, the biggest number, or 10²⁴ - and besides Andreessen Horowitz BitYota's $12 million in seed and Series A funding comes from Globespan Capital, the Social+Capital Partnership, Dawn Capital, Crosslink Capital, Morado Ventures and individual investors like Yahoo founder Jerry Yang; Yahoo board member and former eBay COO, angel investor Maynard Webb; investor and financial writer Graham Summers; and MapReduce BitYota-like start-up ClearStory Data founder and Marc Andreessen buddy Sharmila Mulligan, who's evidently spreading her bets on Big Data analytics.

BitYota was one of eight start-ups hand-selected by Amazon to be showcased at re:Invent, the Amazon Web Service (AWS) inaugural customer and partner event in Las Vegas this week, where AWS happened to announce Redshift, its own strategic data warehouse service in the cloud currently in closed beta.

It's unclear if that surprised BitYota, which has garnered six beta customers in the last few months including an ad tech, an edu tech and a mobile house. All it can really do is characterize Amazon's move as validation.

The start-up says its widgetry is designed to run on cloud infrastructure without compromising functionality or scalability. It plans to expand its service to other public clouds besides Amazon in the near future and with Redshift in the offing guess it'll have to.

BitYota dramatically claims its SaaS platform frees Big Data "from the shackles of Big Costs and Big Headaches" and makes its analytics solution accessible in the fastest, most affordable way to the most users, with no compromise on functionality or service levels.

Its attributes include one-click data integration, fast analytics at scale and accessibility using familiar tools.

It was built from the ground up around its own shared-nothing massively parallel relational database and is supposed to unite the feature-rich functionality of a full-scale data warehouse with the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of Amazon's cloud infrastructure so any company can unleash the value of their data to gain insights and make better business decisions.

BitYota figures it's got a fundamentally improved approach for those looking to harness the power of Big Data analytics. Key features include:

• Affordable SaaS: Customers no longer have headaches about hardware provisioning or maintaining homogeneous configurations; software versions, upgrades and installations; database administrators manage and maintain the throughput of workloads; advance planning for growth and burst needs; and concurrent users.
• Click Data Integration: Customers can load data from data sources such as S3, NoSQL stores and RDBMs and combine all their data including event logs, user profiles and transactions in a single place in the cloud. BitYota auto-detects varying data formats and schemas; understands the rate of arrival/change of new data and seamlessly loads it on a pre-determined schedule.
• Fast Analytics at Scale using Familiar Tools: BitYota's patent-pending massive parallel analytics engine enables analysis over fresh, fully detailed data. It works in the existing ecosystem of programming languages and BI tools; supports SQL92 natively and integrates via an industry-standard ODBC API with popular business intelligence tools and dashboards to visualize results. Access is via industry-standard languages like JavaScript, Perl, and Python and tools that analyze data without any new or intermediary language skills.

"Companies across every spectrum have an undeniable need to use data to unlock new sources of economic value but relatively few companies have invested sufficient time, money or people to do this right," BitYota CEO Dev Patel, who worked on Hadoop at Yahoo, said. "We believe that data and analytics should be broadly accessible to everyone inside the company and it shouldn't take a fortune to analyze data. I'm proud to say that today BitYota launched a data warehouse-as-a-service that allows just that. We are a cost-effective, self-managing and intuitive service that empowers users to work with their own data in familiar ways, with little retooling or disruption."

The starter widgetry costs $1,500 a month for five users starting with 10 EC2 compute unit and 500GB. It's capable of five concurrent queries. There's a week's free trial on a smaller configuration at www.bityota.com/pricing/.

The market for Big Data technology and services is supposed to grow from $3.2 billion in 2010 to $16.9 billion in 2015, at a 40% CAGR. The forecast is split between 34.2% software, 27.3% servers and 61.4% storage.

BitYota's addressable target market is supposed to be a portion of the $5.8 billion operating on public clouds or roughly $3 billion.

It has visions of being to data warehousing what Salesforce has been to customer relationship management.

However, its immediate market would be companies with relatively small data warehouses, or folks already generating their data on Amazon cloud, if Amazon doesn't gobble them all up.

The company, which so far has 15 people, was founded in 2011 by executives and senior engineers with Big Data experience from Yahoo, Oracle, Veritas/Symantec, Informix, BMC, Kabira/Tibco and Twitter.

One of its founders, chief of cloud services Soren Riise, was an honest-to-God rocket scientist at the European Space Agency. Another co-founder, CTO Harmeek Bedi, used to be a lead database architect at Oracle and Informix after IBM bought it.