A New Analytics Civilization is Possible: Q&A with Kyligence CEO Luke Han.

The founders of Apache Kylin and venture-backed Kyligence founded the company. It is dual-based in San Jose, California, and Shanghai, China. The company raised a new round of funding earlier this year to keep its focus on customer productivity. It automates data management, discovery, interaction, and insight generation. Luke Han, Kyligence’s co-founder and CEO has recently spoken out about the company’s relationship with the open-source project and its future goals. He also explained how Kyligence fits in the global data management ecosystem and how it intends to stand out from the rest.

Kyligence announced in April a $70 million Series D funding round. How will this new investment be put to use?

Luke Han: We will focus our investors’ funds on three main areas. We have ambitious plans for continuing to innovate and improve our products using greater automation via the expanded use of AI and machine learning. Second, we plan to use cloud-native architecture to increase flexibility and scale fully. The new level of intelligent automation will continue to focus on providing exceptional user experiences that simplify data management and analysis by expanding our automated expert recommendation.

What are your other goals?

LH: We will also continue to invest in open-source communities with new contributions to Apache Kylin. We will continue introducing open-source projects that aim to simplify the adoption and use of machine learning and AI. We will also accelerate global expansion through a world-class go-to-market initiative, expanded sales, and business development footprint. We will also increase our global partner network with system integrators and industry-leading cloud vendors.

What does the Apache Kylin Project offer to those who aren’t familiar?

LH: Kylin, an Apache Software Foundation open-source project contributed by eBay in 2014, is a Kylin. It is a distributed OLAP platform responsible for delivering sub-second responses to SQL queries on datasets up to petabyte size. More than 1500 organizations worldwide have adopted the project, including eBay, Baidu, Cisco, Microsoft, Tencent, and OLX.

What is Kyligence’s relationship with Kylin?

LH: Kyligence was founded by the creators of Apache Kylin back in 2016. It is an enterprise-grade data analytics platform that uses Apache Kylin. It can run both on-premises as well as in the cloud. Kyligence has enhanced the capabilities of Kylin with advanced features such as an AI-augmented engine and cloud-native architecture. There are many other enterprise-grade features, too. Kyligence automates data analytics and makes it easier and more cost-effective. Kyligence is the company name, which comes from the combination of Kylin intelligence.

What can Kyligence offer customers that aren’t available through Kylin?

LH: Kyligence provides an enhanced unified semantic layer that increases the productivity of BI teams and data scientists by providing a centralized, well-managed golden dataset across multiple data sources. It also offers a unified SQL [MultiDimensional eXpressions] interface to all downstream users, including BI tools and machine learning frameworks.

Kyligence’s automation layer provides recommendations for creating and updating data models using SQL histories. It also suggests optimizations for slow queries and executes smart pushdowns for ad-hoc questions.

Kyligence has a robust global partner network and can work with Azure, AWS, and other cloud platforms. It also works with BI tools such as PowerBI and Tableau. Data analysts can access and analyze large-scale data sets with Kyligence using their secret weapon, Microsoft Excel. They don’t need to export or import any data.

What is the difference between this technology and other open-source projects?

LH: Apache Kylin is more interested in generic OLAP than other purpose-built systems like time series databases. Kylin is better suited to human beings performing analytics work in that world. The critical difference between space and time is how much storage you have, and the less time it takes to answer queries. A small investment in data storage can make a massive difference in the processing time of most applications. Kylin/Kyligence also offers a vastly improved concurrency, which allows for many applications that can be reduced to data as a service for AI, machine learning, and SaaS infrastructure.

Is any other software compatible with Kyligence, or does it require them to?

LH: Kyligence has been certified with the top Hadoop and cloud platforms, BI tools such as Tableau, PowerBI, and MicroStrategy, and open-source tools like Apache Superset.

Is Kyligence able to help with Hadoop’s limitations?

LH: The majority of Hadoop workloads concern data marts or data warehousing. Kyligence offers cutting-edge technology that allows you to offload these workloads from Hadoop with greater efficiency and concurrency. These workloads can now be easily migrated to private cloud platforms or on-prem cloud providers with Kyligence, eliminating any Hadoop dependencies.