Hadoop, Hadoop distros and the technologies and analytics around big data keep getting more widespread and more pragmatic to use because the benefits of leveraging them are now both proven and obvious.

Rather than pontificate further, we’ll just bring you the notable news we think is worthy of your attention. 

Data Torrent Hooks a Big Fish

Data Torrent hooked a big fish last week when it landed Hortonworks cofounder and Hadoop pioneer Eric Baldeschwieler as its strategic adviser.

Baldeschwieler will offer expert counsel to the Santa Clara, Calif.-based start-up as it continues to refine and build out its big data streaming Hadoop 2.0 YARN-native application platform. Unlike anything else on the market, it can monitor tens of millions of real time events on a per-second basis which is becoming increasingly important with the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT).

This will allow managers to make decisions based on information as it flows in versus making predictions based on what has happened in the past.

Last Friday Data Torrent was selected to present in the Lightning Round at TiEcon, the world’s largest innovation conference. In addition to that, in April it was selected as one of 10 “Hot Hadoop Startups to Watch” by CIO Magazine. The company also won GigaOm’s Structure Data Reader’s Choice Award in February.

You can bet that we’ll keep an eye on the start-up.

SnapLogic Makes Big Data More Exploitable via SnapReduce

We know, “exploitable” seems like a bad word, but in this context it just means that you get to work with and glean insights from more data. That’s what SnapLogic makes possible because it connects clouds.

And while more data is important, so is speed.

SnapLogic, which calls itself an Elastic Integration company, does something special: it busts silos. Its integration platform as a service (iPaaS) connects cloud applications (such as Salesforce, ServiceNow and WorkDay) APIs, and disparate data sources with the rest of the enterprise thereby making it possible for you to work with and gain insights from more, and more kinds of, data. SnapLogic has now introduced SnapReduce 2.0, which the company says makes SnapLogic a Hadoop 2 YARN application.

The win here is that enables Hadoop users to take advantage of an HTML5-based drag-and-drop user interface, breadth of connectivity and modern architecture.

SnapReduce 2.0 offers:

  • Improved big data acquisition via instantaneous access to more than 160 data sources from within Hadoop via pre-built connectors, called Snaps. Going beyond developer tools like Sqoop and Flume, SnapLogic allows Hadoop users to access and inspect cloud and on premises data sources in an easy-to-use graphical interface. Updates to the SnapLogic Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) Snap also take advantage of Hadoop 2.0 innovations.
  • Double Data Scientist Productivity: Most data scientists spend the majority of their time on cumbersome coding tasks, data gathering and data preparation. SnapReduce 2.0 doubles data scientist productivity by simplifying complex data shaping tasks such as transformations, joins and unions.
  • Universal Big Data Delivery: Make Hadoop data and analytics results easily available to off-cluster applications and data stores such as statistical packages and business intelligence (BI) or visualization tools.

SAP Analytics are Officially Cloud Bound

SAP prides itself in its analytics leadership -- it has been top rated by Gartner for five years and counting. Late last week SAP's Senior Vice President and General Manager, Analytics, Christian Rodatus announced that SAP Analytics would be extending its leadership “in other analytics solution areas, we’ve made it our mission to become the cloud company powered by SAP HANA.”

So it goes to follow that SAP will be offering its solutions in business intelligence, predictive analytics, enterprise performance management (EPM), and governance, risk and compliance (GRC) in the Cloud.

SAP says that its “comprehensive analytics portfolio" will provide:

  • Enterprise Business Intelligence Rapidly connect individuals, data, and processes on any device, across any platform, to help drive better decisions.
  • Agile Visualization Intuitively explore and visualize data to reveal new insights at a glance.
  • Advanced Analytics Confidently anticipate what comes next to drive better business outcomes.
  • EPM Achieve better top- and bottom-line performance through agile financial planning and analysis.
  • GRC Balance risk and opportunity.

These are subscription services and are also available in self-service mode via the Lumira Cloud.

Cloudera Makes its Bloomberg Debut in the Big Apple

If you turned on Bloomberg radio at just the right time today, you heard Cloudera’s Chief Strategy Officer Mike Olson being interviewed live from Bloomberg’s CFO Summit. The topic up for discussion was making a business case for new technologies.

Olson did a great job at making Hadoop palatable to the general public. He often referred to it as a technology invented at Google, or the Google technology, rather than by its name. He explained commodity storage and he presented the business wins available to  enterprises as they leverage the insights gained from more and more data.

What the host of the discussion didn’t ask him was why he was there. While pitching Cloudera’s products and services to a large audience of decision makers is certainly one reason, letting CFOs know that data processing via Hadoop is a whole lot cheaper is another.

It’s interesting to note that he focused more on its “save money" than “make money” benefits.

The conference is focused around liquidity strategies, newsmaking deals of the year, and putting the market environment into context.

You can’t help but ask if one of Olson’s tasks was to get to know the financial community?

Hortonworks Makes a Big Data Play of its Own

Last week Hortonworks announced its purchase and intent to open source XA Secure which promises to give CIOs the confidence they need to leverage Hadoop enterprise-wide.

While some of the enterprises that have already leveraged Hadoop have used tools like Open Source Sentry, which was developed at Cloudera, KNOX Gateway (an Apache project), Zettaset’s Orchestrator and even NFS (which MapR offers with its distro), XA Secure offers definite advantages because it was built specifically for enterprise-grade Hadoop and provides a management interface and framework for Hadoop clusters across several distro components and workloads.

Hortonworks’ hope is that XA Secure becomes integrated with core Hadoop and other Hadoop distros, thereby making it a core component of the Hadoop platform. Whether it will play out that way is anyone’s guess -- we probably won’t know for quite a while.