Cloudscale is one of 65 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2010 event taking place this week. These companies do pay a fee to present, but our coverage of them remains objective.
There's a lot of excitement in the startup world about data, specifically around technologies like Hadoop that help companies process the large amounts of information they're collecting from the web. For a non-techie, though, there's a good chance "data processing" still means "look it up on Excel."
That's why a company called Cloudscale is launching a new product at DEMO called Cloudcel. The application connects Excel with online, cloud computing infrastructure like Amazon and Windows Azure on the back-end. That means users get the power of cloud computing, like the ability to store massive amounts of data, while using the Excel interface they're used to. They can also build applications for Excel that further manipulate the data.
Here are a couple of examples from founder and chief executive Bill McColl about how someone might use Cloudcel:
- Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could sit in Excel and develop Big Data apps in minutes that would take even a team of expert programmers at Google or on Wall Street months to develop?
- Imagine you could sit in Excel and, with one click, launch an app on billions of rows of data that would normally take days to compute, but you get the answer back in less than a minute.