Maureen O'Gara

Elasticsearch, the real-time Big Data search and analytics concern formed to commercialize the eponymous open source project that one of its founders started, has gotten a $10 million A round.

The financing was led by Benchmark Capital with Rod Johnson, the creator of Spring and co-founder of SpringSource, and Data Collective kicking in.

The company says it will use the money to build out the organization in all functional areas and expand into key geographic regions to support the adoption of Elasticsearch.

The Amsterdam-base start-up means to open an office in Silicon Valley with the money.

The analytics software has reportedly emerged in the last six months as one of the most popular open source projects in the Big Data market. It's supposedly being used by thousands of companies worldwide in virtually every vertical market.

It claims there's no other simple user-friendly way to quickly search through petabytes of structured and unstructured data to deliver the exact information businesses require to make intelligent real-time actionable decisions.

Elasticsearch was started by co-founder and CTO Shay Banon and released in 2009. It's been downloaded 1.5 million times and is reportedly clocking 200,000 downloads a month now, making it one of the top open source projects in the world.

The widgetry is written in Java as a distributed RESTful search server based on Apache Lucene.

Rod Johnson, comparing it to the perfect storm (words you don't want to use around New Yorkers or New Jerseyians right now), brags that "In just four months Elasticsearch is already light years ahead of where even the most successful open source companies were at the same stage. He says it can quickly search and extract information from massive amounts of data stored in the most complex distributed cloud environments.