When talking with the less-technical people in your enterprise, which may include end users and many others on the leadership team, it always pays to have non technical expressions to describe new capabilities.

Here are some thoughts on Platfora that may be of use in discussions like that.

Here is how to describe Platfora to a non-technical person:

• Platfora gives users a better ability to interact with information. They can ask their own questions, follow their own theories, run their own “what-if” scenarios, and ask unbounded questions in iterative ways over their data.
• To a user, Platfora provides subsecond-interactive, responsive visualizations and analytical tools. Users can interact with data even before they know what they are looking for.
• To a user, Platfora is a fast, interactive analytical tool that lets them make sense over more data than they ever thought possible.

As a technologist you need to understand more about how that works. But most users will not care about the detail. They are going to be too excited getting their job done and finding new ways to contribute to organizational missions.

But here are a few bullets for the technologist:

• Platfora’s strength is in transforming Apache Hadoop from a batch engine into a subsecond-interactive, exploratory business intelligence and analytics platform designed for business analysts. This has never been done before. It required savvy engineering and resulted in a system that will work with your data holdings and existing Hadoop clusters.
• The user end of Platfora is built on HTML5. It is accessible anywhere. The browser-based experience is awesome and very well engineered. Collaboration and sharing tools are built in. Analysts use this front end to interact with the data and they get results lightning fast.
• The speed comes because of “in-memory lenses” powered by Fractal Cache technology. Platfora automatically transforms massive datasets into highly responsive lenses. The high-performance query engine makes access to big data fast and scales-out to terabytes of in-memory data. Lenses are refined and updated based on the needs of the end-user.
• Lenses are built by Platfora’s Adaptive Job Synthesis capability. This synthesizes specialized MapReduce jobs that automatically extract detail, perform calculations and support downstream analysis, building lenses efficiently and on demand. All datasets in Hadoop are cataloged and can be securely browsed by any Platfora user.

For more see http://platfora.com