Xplenty’s mission to simplify Big data for non-geeks is attracting investors.

Photo Credit: PR

Xplenty, the big data processing platform powered by Hadoop, today announced it has raised $3 million in Series A funding from Waarde Capital and Magma Venture Partners of Israel.

Based in Tel Aviv and founded by Yaniv Mor, Xplenty aims to sell to expand its sales to business customers in the United States.

Powered by Hadoop, Xplenty enables organizations to integrate, process, and prepare data for analytics both on the cloud and on-premise. In the past, this was often done by data scientists or a company’s IT department. But Xplenty says its platform allows people without a technical background to prepare and analyze data.

This is important, because according to the company’s press release, “the U.S. will face a peak shortage of data scientists by 2018, making it especially challenging to build expert data teams to manage Hadoop initiatives in-house.^”

In other words, the hunger for big data analysis is so great that there aren’t enough smart, tech-savvy people to oversee the process. Xplenty supposedly dumbs it down so that even English majors or MBAs can crunch their own data.

“The key benefit of the Xplenty platform is the ability to run data processing on top of Hadoop in a short time, and without the need of in-house Hadoop expertise,” said Sasha Babitsky, the Head of Waarde Capital’s Israeli Office.

What’s the big deal about big data?

Any reader of Harvard Business Review and other quasi-academic publications catering to business readers will know that today’s businesses, especially retailers and B2C vendors, are running scared. In a world where customers can comparison shop on the Internet what will allow their business to survive, among other things, is the speed and skill with which they deploy Big Data analysis to find, track and give their customers what they want.

Economist Erik Brynjolfson and his colleagues from MIT and and Penn’s Wharton School have shown that the more data-driven a firm is, the more profitable. One standard deviation higher on a scale they devised of data-driven decision making is linked to a 4-6 percent increase in productivity.

And yet, business leaders are slow to adopt.

In a 2013 survey of close to one thousand Harvard Business Review readers, only 28 percent said their organizations were “currently using big data to make better business decisions or create new business opportunities.” Only 6 percent strongly agreed that “my organization has considered the impact of big data on key functions within the business and only 3.5 percent said, “my organization knows how to apply big data to our business.”

What this spells is enormous potential for any company that make big data easy, even for the poor sop in the marketing or sales department who failed high school algebra.

Xplently joins other startups like SiSense, Crayon Data, and ClearStory Data in the big data for Dummies space. Good luck guys, and keep it simple.