Katherine Noyes, Fortune
June 13, 2014

http://fortune.com/2014/06/13/these-big-data-companies-are-ones-to-watch/

Which companies are breaking new ground with big data technology? We ask 10 industry experts.

“I think graphs have a great future since they show data in its connections rather than a traditional atomic view,” [Gartner’s Sicular] said. “Graph technologies are mostly unexplored by the enterprises but they are the solution that can deliver truly new insights from data.” (She also named Pivotal, The Hive and Concurrent.)

Dan Primack
Jun 2, 2014

http://fortune.com/2014/06/02/deals-of-the-day-trinseo-sets-ipo-terms/

Today’s VC, PE, IPO and M&A news.

Venture Capital Deals

Concurrent Inc., a San Francisco-based enterprise data application platform company, has raised $10 million in Series B funding. Bain Capital Ventures led the round, and was joined by return backers Rembrandt Ventures and True Ventures.

Zoran Basich, Wall Street Journal
Jun 2, 2014

http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/06/02/the-daily-startup-venture-debt-firms-making-deals-despite-competition/

Concurrent, whose software enables customers to more quickly build and manage big-data applications, raised $10 million in Series B funding led by Bain Capital Ventures.

May 30, 2014

http://sdtimes.com/sdtimes-100/2014/best-in-show/big-data-business-intelligence-2014/

Big Data & Business Intelligence 2014

Big Data has hit it big. Every company that has reams of data is looking for ways to effectively store, retrieve and interpret it all. Fortunately these vendors are working on handling this otherwise daunting task, making the mountain of Big Data look like a much more manageable molehill.

• Apache Hadoop
• Cloudera
• Concurrent
• DataStax
• Hortonworks
• MongoDB (10gen)
• Pentaho
• Splunk
• Talend
• Zettaset

See more at: http://sdtimes.com/sdtimes-100/2014/best-in-show/big-data-business-intelligence-2014/#sthash.lFftrYWU.dpuf

May 28,2014
Alex Handy

http://sdtimes.com/getting-a-handle-on-hadoop/

Tune and monitor the cluster
A single bad stick of RAM in one machine can make an entire cluster sluggish. When you’re building your applications and your Hadoop cluster itself, you’ll want to be sure you’re able to monitor your jobs all the way through the process. Chris Wensel, CTO and founder of Concurrent, said that you and your team have some important decisions to make as you’re designing your processes and your cluster.

Wensel said that, overall, “reducing latency is your ultimate goal, but also reducing the likelihood of failure. The way these technologies were built, they weren’t intended for operational systems.” As such, it is only recently that Hadoop and its many sub-projects have even added high availability support for the underlying file system.

That means Hadoop can still be somewhat brittle. Wensel said teams must first “decide if your application is something with an SLA. Is it something that has to complete in two hours every day, or every 10 minutes? Is it something you don’t want to think about at 10 p.m. when the pager goes off? If it’s an application that’s driving revenue, you need to really think about that. If you decide it has an SLA, you need to adopt some structural integrity in the application itself.”

Be ready for change
This is a two-sided tip, as it pertains to your cluster, and to Hadoop as a whole. On the micro scale, be sure you keep in mind the fact that your application is going to change once it hits the live data. Said Concurrent’s Wensel: “The other side of the problem is that as you’re developing an application, as you get larger and larger data sets, your application changes. It is a challenge to build an application and have it grow to larger data sets. Be very conscious of the fact that things are changing.” – See more at: http://sdtimes.com/getting-a-handle-on-hadoop/4/#sthash.BFJyRsNc.dpuf

May 22, 2014
Rick Whiting

http://www.crn.com/slide-shows/applications-os/300072896/big-data-100-the-emerging-big-data-vendors.htm/pgno/0/12

Concurrent

Top Executive: CEO Gary Nakamura

Concurrent, founded in 2008, offers application middleware technology that businesses use to develop, deploy, run and manage big data applications. The company’s products include the Cascading application development framework and Driven application performance management software.

Last month the San Francisco-based company debuted Cascading 3.0 with support for local in-memory, Apache MapReduce and Apache Tez. Concurrent closed on $4 million in Series A funding last year.

May 21, 2014
Dan Kusnetzky

http://kusnetzky.net/virtual-worlds/concurrent-releases-cascadi.html
http://www.zdnet.com/concurrent-launches-cascading-3-0-7000029718/

From time to time the folks at Concurrent, Inc. let me know about improvements to its technology or about new products. This time, Cascading has been enhanced to support Mapreduce and Tez.

What Concurrent has to say about Concurrent 3.0
Cascading 3.0 Sets the Standard for Enterprise Application Development

With more than 150,000 user downloads a month, Cascading is the de facto standard in open source application infrastructure technology. Supported by key strategic partnerships with Hortonworks and Databricks, and broad support with all major Hadoop distributions, Cascading is the enterprise development framework of choice for data-centric applications. Cascading accelerates and simplifies enterprise application development, and meets a variety of enterprise use cases from simple to complex.

Cascading 3.0 is a major leap forward in enterprise data-centric application development. Features and benefits include:

• Cascading 3.0 provides the most comprehensive data application framework to meet business challenges and solve a variety of business problems ranging from simple to complex, regardless of latency or scale.
• Cascading 3.0 allows enterprises to build their data applications once, while providing the flexibility to run applications on the fabric that best meets their business needs.
• Cascading 3.0 will ship with support for: local in-memory, Apache MapReduce, and Apache Tez.
• Soon thereafter, with community support, Apache Spark™, Apache Storm and others will be supported through its new pluggable and customizable query planner.
• Third party products, data applications, frameworks and dynamic programming languages built on Cascading will immediately benefit from this portability.
• Cascading offers compatibility with all major Hadoop vendors and service providers: Altiscale, Amazon EMR, Cloudera, Hortonworks, Intel, MapR and Qubole, among others.

Snapshot analysis
I’ve written about Concurrent before (see Concurrent Driven: Big data application performance management for more information). This announcement focuses on allowing Cascading users to develop data-focused applications for both the Apache Mapreduce and Apache Tez environments as well as other Big Data platforms the company currently supports (all major Hadoop vendors and service providers: Altiscale, Amazon EMR, Cloudera, Hortonworks, Intel, MapR and Qubole, among others).

The company’s goal clearly is to make its application framework a necessary part of Big Data application development. Concurrent has promised to integrate its application framework with Apache Spark and Storm in the near future.

If your company is developing Big Data applications, Concurrent should be on your watch list.

May 14, 2014
Angela Guess

http://www.dataversity.net/concurrent-inc-leads-market-data-driven-enterprise-application-development/

According to a recent article out of the company, “Concurrent, Inc., the enterprise data application platform company, today announced product and corporate momentum securing the company’s leadership in enterprise application development. The company recently announced strategic industry partnerships with Hortonworks and Databricks, as well as new product innovation with the introduction of Driven, the industry’s first application performance management product for data-centric applications. Today Concurrent also introduced the next version of Cascading, the most widely used application development framework for building data applications on technologies like Apache Hadoop.”

The article continues, “Enterprises have always been operationalizing their data. But as business needs continue to change and new technologies – such as Apache Hadoop and now Apache Tez – emerge, organizations need a reliable way to quickly build and consistently deliver these data products. This requires leveraging existing skill sets, while meeting new requirements (i.e. latency, scale, service level agreements) supported by these emerging technologies. With more than 150,000 user downloads a month, Cascading is the de facto standard in open source application infrastructure technology. Supported by key strategic partnerships with Hortonworks and Databricks, and broad support with all major Hadoop distributions, Cascading is the enterprise development framework of choice for data-centric applications. Cascading accelerates and simplifies enterprise application development, and meets a variety of enterprise use cases, from simple to complex.”

Apr 27, 2014
Maria Deutscher

http://siliconangle.com/blog/2014/04/27/what-you-missed-in-big-data-hadoop-applications-watson-at-the-forefront/?angle=silicon

Data-driven applications returned to the headlines this week after Hortonworks announced that it will bundle the open source Cascading development framework into its flagship Hadoop distribution. Created and maintained by a company called Concurrent, Cascading is a Java-based abstraction layer that allows users to take advantage of the batch processing platform without mastering MapReduce or even changing the way they work.

Cascading supports a broad range of enterprise technologies, including Java, SQL and a number of popular data science tools. Future releases of the version, which the Yahoo! spin off has committed to certifying as part of its partnership with Concurrent, will also feature integration with the emerging Apache Tez Hadoop query framework.

Apr 25, 2014
Jeffrey Kelly

http://siliconangle.com/blog/2014/04/25/the-data-economy-meet-the-hybrid-data-scientist-application-developer/

Hadoop meets application development tooling

On the tools set side of the equation, Hortonworks recently expanded its partnership with Concurrent, which sells support services for the open source Cascading application development framework. When I spoke with the company last fall, Concurrent Founder and CTO Chris Wensel described Cascading as a Java library used by application developers to quickly create complex, data oriented applications. Concurrent’s Cascading SDK abstract’s away the complexity of dealing with things like MapReduce and Pig, allowing developers to integrate data sources via APIs and easily migrate predictive models into Hadoop. (You can explore sample Cascading-based apps on GitHub here.)

HDP with Cascading (Source: Hortonworks)

As part of the expanded partnership, Hortonworks said it will ensure ongoing compatibility of Cascading-based apps with the Hortonworks Data Platform and will provide level 1 and level 2 Cascading support for customers (Concurrent will still handle level 3 support.) This compatibility includes the ability to execute Cascading-based apps on Apache Tez, a recently developed Hadoop-based execution engine for real-time Big Data workloads. While Concurrent itself is still in its early days, open source Cascading is quite popular with application developers, garnering over 90,000 downloads per month.