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March 29, 2012

MarkLogic Looks to New Generation of Developers

Datanami Staff

This week MarkLogic tipped its collective hat to the next generation of big data talent by announcing free academic licensing for MarkLogic 5 server that extends to both students and faculty.

The license, which is directed at data-intensive science and research, comes with no strings attached on the storage side and can extend across thousands of nodes to work on petabyte-sized data sets.

In essence, students and faculty will have a two-year window to tap into the core components of the enterprise edition, including clustering, replication, failover, alerting, geospatial indexing and search and conversion.

The company says that with the functionality allotted, just as with the enterprise version students can build their cluster, load up and go in the cloud or on site. The problem with free licensing, however, is that if you run into problems, it’s the job of the community to support you since there is none offered with the free licensing.

On that note, the company’s CEO, Mark Avenur describes why he thinks MarkLogic 5 is noteworthy, with a nod to what it could mean for the new generation of big data applications.

According to Keith Carlson, COO at MarkLogic, “Students and educators are on the front lines of the next generation work force. We’re excited to see the types of applications that are built with the MarkLogic academic license.” Carlson points to the many students at institutions worldwide that are working on unique big data applications and says that granting access to MarkLogic “will lead to some very compelling use cases.”

The “free license” pitch is one that MarkLogic already understands well. Not long ago the company incentivized developers with a free version of MarkLogic Express to build production apps.

To tap into the free academic license, potential users need to join up with MarkLogic and go through a procedure to request and verify the license.

This is a great lead generation program for a company that’s tying its string to the future of big data developers. The company gets digs on who the new crop of developer students will be and can direct their offerings at them again after they (presumably) land a job. Ideally, they will have grown to love MarkLogic so much in the meantime that living it without would be misery.

Aside from that, as Carlson stated, what better way to show what’s possible from the developer side than shove a product under the noses of some of the brightest young minds yet to enter the workforce?

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