Concurrent has raised $4 million in a Series A round for its big data application development platform. The investment was led by True Ventures and Rembrandt Venture Partners. Concurrent received a $900,000 seed round in 2011.

The company has also announced Gary Nakamura as its new CEO. Nakamura previously worked as a senior vice president at Terracotta, which was sold to Software AG. At Terracotta, Nakumura led strategy, oversaw operating profit and loss, and ran business operations, including sales, marketing and product management.

Normalizing data is a big challenge for developers. Concurrent addresses the complexity of developing applications on Apache Hadoop. It fits right between the app layer and the database and uses a Yahoo Pipes-type metaphor of “pipes-sinks-pipes” for moving data, cleansing it and preparing for app developers or data scientists.

Its customers include eBay, Etsy, FlightCaster and Twitter, which are all using the Cascading Java framework to streamline data processing, data filtering and workflow optimization for large volumes of data.

Airbnb has used Cascading to normalize data and gain control over its Map Reduce runs. According to an Airbnb case study:

With these tools, analysts are able to study data important to their business such as click-through rates, page statistics, drop-off rates and number of bookings. The analysts create queries for other interesting indicators, such as comparing regional performance and identifying potential problems with the site.

As data scales, app frameworks will play an increasingly important role for developers. With advances in automation and simpler deployment on Hadoop clusters, developers will increasingly pool data resources so they can create apps that provide a differentiated advantage.

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