Maureen O'Gara

Tel Aviv-based start-up SiSense Ltd raised $8 million and bought a ticket to California, where it's set up shop across the street from Oracle, a definite competitor.

See, SiSense, which obviously has a sense of humor, has a business intelligence tool dubbed Prism that it calls the "world's smallest Big Data analytics solution." It can crunch a terabyte of data on a sub-$750 laptop with 8GB of RAM.

The company's Elasticube technology with its in-memory columnar data store, strong data compression, parallel processing and advanced query optimization is supposed to offer analytical processing power previously available only with high-end solutions.

It claims non-technical users can analyze 100 times more data at least 10 times the speed of current in-memory analytics solutions.

It offers a high-performance analytical database, simple data extraction (ETL) from all the major databases including SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Intuit QuickBase as well as applications like Salesforce, Google Adwords, Google Analytics, Google Spreadsheets, Zendesk, Intuit QuickBooks, not to mention Hadoop/Hive and web-based data visualization based on HTML 5 and JavaScript.

It doesn't need a data warehouse or OLAP cubes and it's coding- and scripting-free.

It's targeting start-ups, SMBs and the enterprise, folks who need to handle hundreds of millions of records, and claims Merck and Target as customers.

CEO Amit Bendov says, "There's a lot of hype around Big Data analytics but even the biggest companies are struggling because of the massive infrastructure, budgets and specialized skills required. Prism levels the Big Data playing field so that businesses of all sizes can get in the game."

He points to the SAP Hana licenses that run between $300,000 and $2 million and a Wall Street Journal calculation that Big Data projects can cost upwards of $10 million.

Since starting in 2005 the company has raised a total of $13.5 million from investors such as Opus Capital and Genesis Partners according to Globes. The Journal says it means to raise more money next year to take on HP's Vertica and Teradata.

SiSense Prism can be downloaded at www.sisense.com/prism-free-trial.