This Week’s Big Data Big Five

This week’s top five from the ecosystem of big data includes key items from major Hadoop player, Hortonworks, which has refreshed its approach to its Apache roots; Mellanox, which is moving the Hadoop hardware needle, and more from companies like ParAccel and GoodData. In case you missed it, look back at last week’s big data top five for a sense of how the news is evolving as we head into conference and event season.

Without further delay, let’s dig in, starting first with a smaller company that is seeking to bring the real time web to the needs of the financial services sector.

DataSift Rolls Out Platform for Financial Industry

This week DataSift ushered in a new social-based data platform aimed at the financial services industry called DataSift Financial.

The company says this is a prepackaged historical and real-time social feed that makes it easier for the finance industry to identify and analyze stock and company information to make faster, more informed trading decisions. DataSift’s new social feeds aggregate public Tweets that mention a stock symbol, and classify Tweets to identify articles from news-providers, positive or negative mentions, and chatter from market analysts.

Twitter provides a wealth of real-time information and public opinion on news for companies, stocks and industries. There are more than 400 million Tweets per day, and DataSift taps into this explosive stream of information to quickly identify trends that will support varying trading models and decisions.

DataSift Financial allows finance professionals to easily integrate prepackaged social feeds into their own systems to filter out the noise and get a historical and real-time pulse on companies, stocks and trends. For example, a fund manager can track financial news of a specific high-tech manufacturer through its stock symbol and also aggregate additional information on the company to get a closer look into its market performance and sentiment around its products or news.

NEXT — Hortonworks Refreshes Platform >

Hortonworks Refreshes Platform

Hortonworks, a leading contributor to Apache Hadoop projects, this week announced the newest version of their Hortonworks Data Platform(HDP), a fully open source platform powered by Apache Hadoop.

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the High Availability Add-On, Flume integration, monitoring API enhancements and core platform performance improvements, HDP 1.1 strengthens Apache Hadoop as a reliable, next-generation enterprise data platform for deriving greater business value and insight from big data.

The Hortonworks Data Platform continues to help accelerate Apache Hadoop’s move into production environments at the world’s leading enterprise organizations. HDP 1.1 is built on Apache Hadoop 1.0, the most stable and reliable Hadoop code available today, providing enterprise organizations with a proven and trusted data management infrastructure for harnessing the power of big data. By delivering new full stack, high availability on the most trusted and current versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), HDP is providing an Apache Hadoop platform with the availability required by today’s businesses.

“Apache Hadoop is rapidly becoming the open source standard for big data management, storage and analysis, and we are excited to support the Hortonworks Data Platform on Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” said Jim Totton, vice president and general manager Platform Business Unit, Red Hat. “A standard, tested and reliable solution for providing on-demand failover, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the High Availability Add-On makes the HDP distribution of Apache Hadoop mission-critical by addressing single points of failure. We look forward to working with the Hortonworks team to help accelerate deployments of Apache Hadoop across enterprise environments.”

By providing more data capture options with Flume integration, the Hortonworks Data Platform enables enterprises to extract value from high-volume data streams and event processing. HDP also accelerates Apache Hadoop’s role as a mainstream component of the modern data architecture, delivering enhanced integration with existing operations and management tools to ensure performance and availability. In addition, HDP now delivers improved performance for HDFS with faster read and write performance and faster MapReduce execution.

NEXT — Mellanox Hadoop Booster Garners Stevie >

Mellanox Hadoop Booster Garners Stevie

Mellanox Technologies, a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions for data center servers and storage systems, today announced that PHAT-DATA40G, a high performance Hadoop appliance over a Mellanox end-to-end 40 Gigabit Ethernet adapter and switch solution, won Gold for Best New Hardware Product at the Stevie International Business Awards.

PHAT-DATA40G is a joint solution by Mellanox, AMAX, STEC and Zettaset that delivers best-in-class performance and ease-of-use for Big Data users, delivering at least 40 percent performance enhancement, which is well above existing competitive solutions.

The Stevie Awards honor and generate awareness of the achievements and positive contributions of businesses worldwide. Stevie’s annual International Business Awards are judged by more than 300 executives and sponsored by top global business publishers and marketers. More than 3,200 nominations from organizations of all sizes were submitted this year for consideration in a wide range of categories.

“Winning Gold at this year’s Stevie Awards recognizes the industry-leading throughput, latency and efficiency provided by this successful joint solution,” said Julia Shih, director of strategic alliance at AMAX. “Leveraging Mellanox’s high-speed 40GbE interconnect, combined with our server and storage solutions and robust manufacturing capability, PHAT-DATA40G provides companies with data-driven business intelligence that offers a dynamic competitive edge.”

“Mellanox’s fast server and storage interconnect solutions enable data center applications to achieve the highest efficiency and scalability while reducing capital and operational expenses,” said Gilad Shainer, vice president of market development at Mellanox. “The PHAT-DATA40G appliance, accelerated by Mellanox 40GbE adapters and switches, provides a very high performance, turn-key, easy to use solution for Big Data users, enabling them to take advantage of their collected information to better serve their customers and achieve their business goals.”

NEXT — ParAccel Points to Analytics on Over 2.5 Billion Data Rows >

ParAccel Points to Analytics on Over 2.5 Billion Data Rows

Every day, companies look to Merkle, an industry leading customer relationship marketing agency, to provide them with the ability to segment their customer base and create personalized marketing campaigns for competitive advantage. To accomplish this, Merkle has expanded its use of the ParAccel Analytic Platform, which is at the core of its customer data integration application.

Because ParAccel is built from the ground up to handle any type of analytics on massive amounts of data, Merkle is able to use data in a more granular form. The agency is able to generate a targeted list of consumers based on over 100 specific attributes for each client’s marketing objectives and audience. ParAccel’s support for detailed data allows its clients to get more accurate results, while processing more data, faster than competing offerings.

“With the customer database at the core of our business, we consistently beat our competitors with more customer dimensions, more recent data, more sophisticated analytics, better matching, and quicker response times,” said Peter Rogers, vice president, technology at Merkle. “ParAccel currently allows our clients to match new customer records to 2.5 billion rows of customer data on a daily basis.”

The expanded application now stores 200 terabytes of raw data, compressing it down to 50 terabytes on ParAccel, giving Merkle the ability to offer its clients better matching options to fine tune its targeted marketing and improve conversion rates. The company has also added new regions, increased the number of analysts accessing their system, and moved to daily updates compared to previous weekly updates.

ParAccel’s massively parallel architecture allows Merkle to predict growth, scale in linear fashion, and add new clients with node-by-node expansion. This flexibility aligns the cost of infrastructure with revenue and customer requirements.

“Merkle originally selected ParAccel because of winning execution speed and price performance,” said Rogers, citing that the agency plans continued expansion of the application footprint because of ParAccel’s ongoing speed of innovation, new additions of in-database analytics, increased support of analytic functions, and on-demand integration of external data sources.

NEXT – GoodData Strategizes for Big Data Monetization >

GoodData Strategizes for Big Data Monetization

This week GoodData unveiled a new strategy for empowering businesses to find sources of revenue and profit from Big Data. GoodData is the leading maker of cloud-based analytics business mashups and platform, enabling companies of any size to convert data into business advantage.

The rapid growth of cloud, social and mobile computing has created a new class of Big Data that is relevant to business, called BizData. Many companies struggle to glean actionable insight from the wealth of BizData they have collected and stored, as existing business intelligence systems have failed to deliver on their promise.

“Today, the difference between success and failure is the ability to monetize a new class of data,” said Roman Stanek, founder and CEO of GoodData. “It’s ironic that, despite billions of dollars spent on business intelligence systems, we are still data-bankrupt. BizData Monetization will turn data into powerful insights and a revenue-generating source, completely revolutionizing how we think of and leverage data.”

The company says the GoodData platform gives companies an easy and inexpensive way to collect, store and analyze structured and unstructured BizData across information silos.

“GoodData’s BizData Monetization Platform enables our customers to gain insight into community engagement that identifies intent, such as product interest by prospects,” said Jeff Nolan VP Business Development at Get Satisfaction. “Our customers can now leverage the Get Satisfaction Community Health Analytics 2.0 powered by GoodData to easily identify product interest, champions and leverage that insight to increase customer acquisition and deliver better customer service.”