Harish Butani
Co-founder & CTO
A veteran engineer of the business-intelligence and relational-database world — three decades building the engines underneath analytics.
Background
Harish is a seasoned engineer in the BI and relational space, with deep contributions across the analytics stack. Over his career he has built four BI engines — culminating in OLAP on Spark, the Apache Spark–native engine he founded as SparklineData and sold to Oracle. He made significant contributions to Oracle IFS, the SAP HANA MDX engine, and Apache Hive, and was a founding engineer at Digital Markets (acquired by Agile) and Cloud 9 Analytics. With Venkatesh Seetharam, he co-created Apache Atlas, the first open-source metadata catalog.
Selected work
- OLAP on Spark / SparklineData — founder. An Apache Spark–native BI engine, acquired by Oracle.
- Four BI engines — architected across his career, from Cloud 9 to OLAP on Spark.
- Apache Atlas — co-creator, with Venkatesh Seetharam. The first open-source metadata catalog.
- Oracle IFS, SAP HANA MDX engine, Apache Hive — core contributions to BI and relational engines.
- Cloud 9 Analytics & Digital Markets (acquired by Agile) — founding engineer.
Why us
We are a team of diverse, experienced engineers and leaders spanning infrastructure engineering, business-intelligence engines, and analytics practices at Fortune 1000 companies. We have built platforms and products at Yahoo!, Oracle, Hortonworks, and numerous startups. We have built and retained high-performing teams both onshore and offshore, led analytics organizations, and established best practices grounded in user empathy and a product-centric approach.
Why we’re uniquely positioned
- Customer obsession is the only winning strategy. We have led data teams at Yahoo!, Hortonworks, and others — so we know intimately how data teams are structured and how they work with the business. We understand our users.
- We have built BI before — many times over. Between us we have built four BI engines (including OLAP on Spark, sold to Oracle), co-created the first open-source enterprise data catalog (Apache Atlas), and built an open-source distributed data-pipeline platform (Apache Falcon).
- We intend to make a deep impact. We are determined to be the change agent the analytics industry needs.
“The LLM proposes the plan. The algebra closes it. The same accepted plan compiles to the same SQL — every time. Math, not probability.”