Chinese analytics-related service provider Datapps (聚云位智) recently announced a CNY 50 million Series A round of funding, led by 4Paradigm (第四范式) and Zhengxuan Investment (正轩投资). According to Zhang Dehui (张德辉), CEO of the company, this financing will be mainly used for marketing activities and product development.

Founded in 2013, the Beijing-based company is an enterprise data warehouse product and solution provider. The product is now serving clients in multiple areas such as military, transportation, telecommunications and finance.

An analytical processing database is mainly used for storing and analyzing large amounts of data. At present, the traditional product providers, like Teradata (TDC: NYSE), Oracle (ORCL: NYSE) and Greenplum, own more than 70% market share in China.

However, with the development of big data and artificial intelligence, enterprises have to face explosive data volume and more complex processing requirements. This is beginning to expose the limitations of traditional analytical databases in terms of cost and processing power.

Targeting this issue, Datapps launched its independently developed databaseLinkoop DB (LDB). While keeping the functions of a traditional analytical database, it is empowered with more advanced data processing capability at the same time. This allows the unit data processing cost to be reduced significantly. Its competitive advantage mainly lies in two aspects:

Improvement of the timeliness of data

Due to the limitation of cost and technical architecture, the traditional analytical database can only treat large volumes of data with the standard batch processing. This implies that there will always be a time delay between the collection of data (transaction receiving) and getting the result (output in the master file).

LDB, however, supports both streams and batch processing, which sees not only enhancement of the batch processing capabilities by 40% (TPC-DS standard test), but also allows the realization of real-time data processing with millisecond latencies.

This means the database can be employed to support real-time analysis in business scenarios – for example, online data analysis and real-time event detection.

Standardized and user-friendly

LDB leverages the standard SQL language, and extends the syntax of Stream Data Processing (SQL Stream) and AI with SQL servers. It is currently the only self-innovated analytical database in China that provides a unified SQL interface for batch processing, stream processing and AI computing simultaneously. This greatly improves code readability, as well as speeding up the application building process.

Datappsprovides universal database products, and works with upstream and downstream companies to customize solutions for clients. At present, the company has 50-60 clients, mainly attracted through direct sales and channel marketing. The company charges licensing and service fees, and the average transaction value is at CNY 1.5 million – CNY 2 million levels.

China's enterprise data warehouse providers are now facing big opportunities. According to Chinairn (中研产业研究院), it's market size witnessed a 24.7% year-on-year increase to reach CNY 15 billion, and is expected to hit CNY 20 billion by 2020.

“The effectiveness of data processing relies on three points: data quality, modeling algorithms and computing power,” said Chen Guanhua (陈冠华), CSO of Datapps.“The first two points require the company's own accumulation of data and business knowledge. Then through data management and computing capabilities provided by the database, companies can realize efficient data processing and analysis, which can bring high added value to their business.”