Entrepreneur: The Goliath of Big Data Meets Its David

For many businesses in 2012, Big Data is a fact of life. The phrase has infiltrated our conversations for a reason: the increasing complexity of the world, and the increasing sophistication of our methods for analyzing it, are yielding enormous amounts of information. The challenge has become how to manage these extremely large data sets, on the order of hundreds of gigabytes or more, in a cost-effective way.

The founders of a new Silicon Valley business-to-business startup, Peaxy, think they have the answer. By eliminating dependence on a certain brand of hardware or generation of server, Francesco Lacapra, 63, and Manuel Terranova, 42, intend to to free client data from individual silos — groups of servers that isolate information sets from each other. (Read more about how startups are addressing big data in our article, “The Biggest Trends in Business for 2013.”)