According to a recent press release, “Ascend, provider of the world’s first Autonomous Dataflow Service, today emerged from stealth with $19M in funding to de-risk big data projects and accelerate digital transformations. Ascend operates the only solution with which data engineering teams can quickly build, scale, and operate continuously optimized, Apache Spark-based pipelines. By combining declarative configurations and deep automation, the Ascend Service manages cloud infrastructure, optimizes pipelines, and eliminates maintenance across the entire data lifecycle.”

Scott McNealy, Ascend advisor and former Sun Microsystems CEO, commented, “The market is on the cusp of a new wave… The winners of the past decade are those who best leveraged data to fuel their business, yet increased competition necessitates they do more, faster, and with greater efficiency. We’ve seen automation transform every industry and this will be no exception. I have worked with dozens of startups, and it’s rare a company possesses both the experience to define the root of a monumental problem and the talent to do something amazing about it. Ascend is such a company, and their innovation will unequivocally usher in a new era of data engineering.”

The release goes on, “Data pipelines are the lifeblood of every big data project and transformation strategy. Building these pipelines, however, is a time-consuming process for data engineers, requiring fragmented infrastructure and specialized tooling, extensive manual coding, and painful trial and error. Even then, these pipelines become more brittle and prone to failure as data changes, dependencies grow, and the interconnectedness of data movement among systems becomes increasingly complex. As a result, scarce data engineers spend the majority of their time combing through code and logs just to keep everything running, rather than building for new business opportunities.”

Read more at PR Newswire.

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