by Angela Guess
Michael Singer recently reported on a collaboration between four companies to create a so-called Big Data stack: “The consortium, comprising open-source firms Cloudera, Couchbase, Jaspersoft, and Revolution Analytics, says it will be offering a combination of analytics and presentation software based on open-source technologies like NoSQL (for accessing non-relational databases) and Hadoop (for distributed applications). NoSQL and Hadoop have made headlines recently as companies like Yahoo, AOL, Facebook, and Twitter use the technology to gather and analyze information on a very broad scale, to help them react more expeditiously to customer demands.”
The article continues, “While not an exclusive partnership, executives in the four open-source companies are bringing attention to a growing need of enterprises to use data discovery tools and analytics applications from any vendor they want. Revolution Analytics is ‘working together on offering an integrated solution, but it was the customers choosing with their pocketbooks that led us here,’ David Smith, the firm’s vice president, told us during a telephone interview.”
The article states, “The parallels are there. Cloudera and its partners see an opportunity to provide an alternative to business intelligence (BI) products from the big four vendors: SAS, IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft. The open-source challenge comes as the BI market, including analytics and performance management software, achieved $10.5 billion in global revenues in 2010, according to analysts with Gartner Inc. They suggest the growth is due in part to a shift away from name-brand BI software. ‘Business users care less about who they buy from; they want domain-specific functionality and usability that meet their needs,’ Gartner research analyst Dan Sommer said in his current assessment of the BI marketplace.”
photo credit: Aidan Jones
