WANdisco Announces Big Data Deal With Compare The Market

SAN RAMON, Calif., April 21 — WANdisco today announced that Compare The Market has signed a deal with the firm that will see the UK’s leading price-comparison website implement WANdisco Fusion across its existing data centers.

Launched today, WANdisco Fusion is the only Hadoop-compatible product that shares data across clusters, distributions, and file systems.

WANdisco Fusion will play a crucial role in allowing Compare The Market to implement its Big Data strategy globally, providing the firm with a much deeper insight into customer behavior. It forms part of a wider initiative to boost sales and deliver a much richer user experience.

By ensuring that Compare The Market’s data is continuously available and allowing it 100% use of its data centers, WANdisco Fusion is helping the firm significantly improve performance while remaining fully operational.

WANdisco Fusion’s agnostic architecture prevents vendor lock-in and is a reflection of WANdisco’s on-going commitment to the Open Data Platform initiative, which aims to promote and advance the state of Apache Hadoop® and Big Data technologies for the enterprise. By bridging the gap between different distributions, storage, and file systems, WANdisco Fusion provides a future-proof platform that affords agility and choice even if an organization uses multiple vendors.

Based on strong customer demand and supported by Wikibon’s Big Data Analytics Survey, which revealed that 70 per cent of Big Data early adopters already have more than one cluster, WANdisco Fusion enables data sharing in a diverse Hadoop environment. This means that customers with a mixed set of Hadoop distributions, or applications tied to a specific version or storage system, can break down information silos without expensive data transfer efforts.

WANdisco Fusion also introduces a simple method for burst-out processing in private or public clouds. Bimodal and multimodal Hadoop architectures, backed by WANdisco Fusion, make it possible to support innovative new applications without jeopardizing key SLAs.

Fusion is an evolution of WANdisco’s existing product offering that allows the firm’s patented replication technology to be applied across data centers, eliminating architectural challenges that previously inhibited global big data strategies.

David Richards, CEO, co-founder and president of WANdisco, comments, “We’re delighted to be playing such an important role in Compare The Market’s Big Data strategy.

“But this deal also reflects the industry-wide need to better address the market’s data challenges, to which WANdisco Fusion offers a unique solution.

“A recent Wikibon survey found that only 18% of non-IT early adopters are happy with the results of their Big Data initiatives. Data analytics is transforming the way the world’s most successful businesses operate, but the transition from potential to impact is based on enterprise-enabled products delivering efficiency and quality. WANdisco Fusion marries the two and makes Big Data possible for global businesses.”

Randy DeFauw, director of product marketing at WANdisco, comments, “WANdisco Fusion represents the evolution of our existing product offering to better reflect the diversity of Big Data solutions being applied in today’s production deployments. As reflected by Compare The Market’s specific data needs, operating across clusters is a major requirement for our customers and this product will maintain quality of service across any number of servers and locations.”

Jeff Kelly, Lead Big Data Analyst at Wikibon, comments, “The CIO community is well aware of the transformative impact of Big Data, but fragmented solutions make implementation of bespoke solutions across diverse networks a challenge. WANdisco Fusion will form part of the ODP Core platform and is a powerful Hadoop solution for the enterprise.”