Ellen Messmer, NetworkWorld
Jun 30, 2014
http://www.networkworld.com/article/2449011/security/157851-new-products-of-the-week-06-30-14.html

Visit the link above to view the full slideshow. Driven 1.0 is featured on slide #25.

Staff, Information Management
Jun 27, 2014
http://www.information-management.com/news/tableau-cambridge-semantics-pentaho-others-introduce-new-products-10025782-1

ASG Software Solutions launched version 8.0 of its CloudFactory platform. CloudFactory 8.0 provides one tool to manage all of an organization’s IT environments – from the mainframe to the cloud, and everything in between – solving efficiency, productivity, security and compliance issues.

BlazeMeter, provider of the JMeter-based performance testing cloud, announced FollowMe, scriptless performance testing for its cloud-based platform. FollowMe speeds up and simplifies performance testing by eliminating complex, costly and time-consuming scripting procedures. Developers can run large-scale performance tests of their API, mobile app, mobile website or Web app in real-time by clicking through their product, with virtual users following their every move to simulate load.

Cambridge Semantics, a provider of smart data solutions driven by semantic Web technology, announced the launch of its Anzo Smart Data Integration (ASDI) software to help enterprises rapidly understand and integrate information assets. ASDI uses common, conceptual business models to automate traditional data integration tasks, eliminating the need for hand-coding and direct data exchanges between teams.

Concurrent, Inc., an enterprise data application platform company, announced the general availability of Driven, an application performance management product for data-centric applications. Driven is purpose-built to address the pain points of enterprise application development and application performance management to organizations that need to deliver operational excellence, enabling businesses to make the most from their data.

Compuware Corporation, a technology performance company delivering application performance management, announced new mobile capabilities across the Compuware APMaaS platform that further extends its functionality in mobile performance and user experience management. This new release is a unified APM solution that offers an end-to-end view of how apps are being used, how they are performing as seen from the users and what code improvements can help improve satisfaction and conversion.

DataNumen Inc., a provider of data recovery software technologies, released version 4.5 of DataNumen Exchange Recovery, a recovery tool for Microsoft Exchange offline storage (.OST) files. DataNumen Exchange Recovery makes it easy to recover as much data as possible and save it in standard Outlook files. Improvements in version 4.5 include support for Outlook 2013 OST files.

GoodData announced its agile data warehousing service to power greater performance, scalability and flexibility within its Open Analytics Platform. The new service leverages a columnar database and fully integrated governance and integration processes to support end-to-end automation for customers.

MEGA introduced HOPEX Regulatory Compliance to help companies meet the increasing volume of compliance requirements. The solution will also aid organizations in reducing risks and streamlining compliance activities to meet governance challenges.

Pentaho Corporation announced the general availability of version 5.1 of its business analytics and data integration platform, offering companies enhanced capabilities to scale up their big data operations. Building upon the foundation of enterprise big data blueprints, the Pentaho 5.1 platform enables companies large or small to take full advantage of big data without having to endure a lengthy, specialized process.

Tableau Software announced the general availability of Tableau 8.2, an update that brings Tableau to Mac users around the world and adds a feature to help people tell stories with their data. With Tableau 8.2, Mac users will have a fully featured analytics application that lets them ask questions of their data. Story Points will allow everyone to create interactive, data-driven stories that they can share with their organizations, networks and the world.

TIBCO announced LogLogic 5.5, the newest version of its log management platform for machine data management, visual analytics and compliance. LogLogic 5.5 boosts operational intelligence capabilities and enables enterprises and managed security service providers to increase productivity by using machine data management to act and respond more efficiently when identifying issues related to compliance, IT operations and security.

Treasure Data, a cloud-based, managed service provider for big data, announced a new offering empowering advertising technology companies to collect, store and analyze enormous data volumes in near-real-time, without operating a costly infrastructure. Treasure Data’s cloud-based, managed service has been transformational for publishers, advertisers and marketplaces. It offers fast, easy and cost-effective capabilities for data processing at massive scales.

Unisys Corporation announced the second generation of its Forward! by Unisys enterprise computing platform. New features include support for the new Intel Xeon Processor E7 v2 Family and capabilities that expand the power and flexibility of the Forward! platform for a range of mission-critical applications.

Zendesk, Inc. launched Insights, its next-generation analytics tool for organizations to measure and visualize the impact of their customer service interactions managed through its cloud-based customer service platform. Zendesk built Insights to deliver easy-to-understand visualizations and reports that quickly allow any organization to measure the effectiveness of their customer support, benchmark themselves against industry peers and better understand their customers.

Andrew Brust, GigaOM
Jun 25, 2014
http://research.gigaom.com/2014/06/data-analytics-world-gets-new-releases-new-partnerships-en-masse

During my week in San Francisco for the Gigaom Structure conference last week, and continuing the early part of this week, a slew of important announcements were made in the Big Data and analytics space. While the volume of announcements would normally be a lot to cover, we can save some time by breaking the announcements into groups: data visualization favorites on new platforms; support for Hadoop 2.0 and YARN; new products; as well as alliances and acquisitions.

New platforms
On the new platforms front, Tableau Desktop and Tableau Public, which had previously been available only for Windows PCs, are now available for the Mac; and Roambi, a mobile data visualization platform, which had been iOS-exclusive, will available on Android starting next month.

Tableau’s release comes as part of a new version (8.2) of the venerable data discovery package, so Windows users benefit too, and Tableau achieves parity on both platforms. Tableau 8.2 sports a new “Story Points” facility which mashes up presentation and dashboard features, and also includes a redesigned data connection experience, updated maps and improvements to Tableau Server.

Roambi Analytics for Android will support the Card, Catalist, Layers and Superlist views, with support for additional visualizations, and the Roambi Flow publishing product, to be added “throughout the remainder of the year.”

Hadoop 2.0 gains adoption
Two different new version releases, announced this past week, add support for Hadoop 2.0 and YARN, Hadoop’s cluster management layer that decouples from the high-overhead MapReduce processing algorithm.

Pentaho announced version 5.1 of its Business Analytics platform, which includes full support for YARN. It also includes support for in-place processing of data with MongoDB, and a new Data Science Pack that provides interfaces from Pentaho Data Integration to the R programming language, and to Weka, Pentaho’s open source data mining engine.

RainStor, which has for some time provided advanced data compression for the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), has released a new Archive Application, part of its RainStor 6 release, that is fully YARN-compatible. This application works much faster than its predecessor, since it no longer needs to use MapReduce under the covers.

New products
There are two news items in the new products arena. The first is the release of “Driven” an application performance management (APM) tool geared specifically to Big Data applications, from Concurrent. Concurrent is best known for its Cascading product, which provides a developer platform for building such Big Data applications, be they on a single server node or an entire Hadoop cluster.

The other announcement here is, I must admit, not exactly around a new product. It concerns, Aerospike, a previously proprietary in-memory NoSQL database, that the company announced is now available in open source format. While Aerospike will not (at least not yet) be rolled out as an Apache Software Foundation project, it will nonetheless be an Apache-licensed project, which may put it on par with NoSQL databases like MongoDB, Cassandra and HBase.

New unions
Closing out this week’s array of industry developments are an acquisition and two partnerships. Specifically, rising predictive analytics star RapidMiner has acquired Budapest-based Radoop; Splunk has formed a partnership with Syncsort; and GigaSpaces has announced it’s teaming up with SanDisk.

RapidMiner makes an eponymous open source data mining/machine learning package that is visually-oriented, eliminating the need for complex programming to build predictive data models. Radoop also makes an eponymous product, focused on Hadoop analytics functionality, that is also visually-oriented and is “powered by” RapidMiner itself, making the union quite logical.

What’s also logical is performing what Splunk calls “operational intelligence” on top of mainframe machine data data. Splunk’s alliance with Syncsort does just that, specifically providing for collection and analysis of data from IBM z/OS systems.

Finally, GigaSpaces Technologies, the company behind an in-memory data grid called XAP, has announced a partnership with major flash memory player SanDisk, based around the latter’s ZetaScale software. The result is a new version of the product: XAP MemoryXtend, which allows XAP to use flash-based SSD storage at what the company calls “near the speed of DRAM memory.” This allows for the processing of larger datasets, at a lower cost basis than purely DRAM-based systems.

New resolve
Taken together, this past week’s sprawl of announcements show that analytics products are moving solidly across platforms, beyond MapReduce, in-memory, and into the predictive analytics arena. Why so much activity in one fine week in June? Maybe to get ready for a slower summer…but I doubt we’ll have one.

Jeff Bertolucci, Information Week
Jun 18, 2014
http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/hardware-architectures/10-more-powerful-facts-about-big-data–/d/d-id/1278598

I know what you Hadoop-ed last summer:

Welcome to big data facts, the sequel. When we recently posted a slideshow examining the latest trends in big data, readers responded in a big way. You want more facts and context on big data — though the term itself defies an easy definition and even makes some people groan. It’s certainly more than Hadoop, although the open source software framework with the cute elephant mascot is the dominant big data platform to date. And its meaning will only evolve as billions of Internet-enabled sensors, appliances, and other devices begin sharing data in the coming years.

How do you define big data? And what does it mean to your organization? Consider these divergent observations from industry leaders:

Scott Schlesinger, senior VP at Capgemini, December 2013: “There’s no doubt that companies’ pursuits of big data initiatives have the best intentions to improve operational decision making across the enterprise. That being said, companies shouldn’t get stuck on the term ‘big data.’ The true initiative and what they ultimately need to be concerned with is how they’re implementing better data management practices that account for the variety and complexity of the data being acquired for analysis.”

Gary Nakamura, CEO of Concurrent, December 2013: “More Hadoop projects will be swept under the rug as businesses devote major resources to their big data projects before doing their due diligence, which results in a costly, disillusioning project failure.”

Joel Young, chief technical officer of Digi International, on companies that want to implement a big data strategy — but aren’t sure why (March 2014): “It’s like, okay, let’s back up here. What is the biggest problem you have? Why do you want to collect all this data? What kind of insight are you looking for? Just saying ‘insight’ and ‘innovation’ is a wonderful thing, but first and foremost you need to focus.”

Kathy Reece, business analytics leader at IBM Global Business Services, commenting on findings from a November 2013 IBM survey: “It’s interesting that only one quarter of CEOs or COOs are the lead advocates for the use of analytic insights, even though they realize that innovation and revenue growth is the chief value of applying analytics. So we need to get more senior leadership advocating for the use of analytics.”

Chris Taylor, marketing director for TIBCO, March 2013: “There’s been a perception that if you get enough data, you can find something in it that’s meaningful. I think that’s a big mistake. The answer might be not big data at all, but small data.”

Which of these statements do you agree with? Let us know in the comments section.

Now explore our stats-filled look at big data trends and a few big questions. Which sports league is trailing the big data race? How will Internet of Things change the landscape? And is data quality getting any better? Dig in.

Jeff Bertolucci, InformationWeek
Jun 18, 2014
http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/hardware-architectures/10-more-powerful-facts-about-big-data–/d/d-id/1278598

I know what you Hadoop-ed last summer:

Welcome to big data facts, the sequel. When we recently posted a slideshow examining the latest trends in big data, readers responded in a big way. You want more facts and context on big data — though the term itself defies an easy definition and even makes some people groan. It’s certainly more than Hadoop, although the open source software framework with the cute elephant mascot is the dominant big data platform to date. And its meaning will only evolve as billions of Internet-enabled sensors, appliances, and other devices begin sharing data in the coming years.

How do you define big data? And what does it mean to your organization? Consider these divergent observations from industry leaders:

Scott Schlesinger, senior VP at Capgemini, December 2013: “There’s no doubt that companies’ pursuits of big data initiatives have the best intentions to improve operational decision making across the enterprise. That being said, companies shouldn’t get stuck on the term ‘big data.’ The true initiative and what they ultimately need to be concerned with is how they’re implementing better data management practices that account for the variety and complexity of the data being acquired for analysis.”

Gary Nakamura, CEO of Concurrent, December 2013: “More Hadoop projects will be swept under the rug as businesses devote major resources to their big data projects before doing their due diligence, which results in a costly, disillusioning project failure.”

Joel Young, chief technical officer of Digi International, on companies that want to implement a big data strategy — but aren’t sure why (March 2014): “It’s like, okay, let’s back up here. What is the biggest problem you have? Why do you want to collect all this data? What kind of insight are you looking for? Just saying ‘insight’ and ‘innovation’ is a wonderful thing, but first and foremost you need to focus.”

Kathy Reece, business analytics leader at IBM Global Business Services, commenting on findings from a November 2013 IBM survey: “It’s interesting that only one quarter of CEOs or COOs are the lead advocates for the use of analytic insights, even though they realize that innovation and revenue growth is the chief value of applying analytics. So we need to get more senior leadership advocating for the use of analytics.”

Chris Taylor, marketing director for TIBCO, March 2013: “There’s been a perception that if you get enough data, you can find something in it that’s meaningful. I think that’s a big mistake. The answer might be not big data at all, but small data.”

Which of these statements do you agree with? Let us know in the comments section.

Now explore our stats-filled look at big data trends and a few big questions. Which sports league is trailing the big data race? How will Internet of Things change the landscape? And is data quality getting any better? Dig in.

Svetlana Sicular, Gartner
June 17, 2014
http://blogs.gartner.com/svetlana-sicular/5-big-data-companies-to-watch

People often ask me if there is a magic quadrant for big data. There isn’t. What we have is a Hype Cycle for Big Data with abundance of big data technologies, some of which are just nascent, some are on the plateau of productivity, and some, like Hadoop distributions, are in the unrightfully dreaded and largely misunderstood trough of disillusionment.

Gartner also has annual cool vendor reports where analysts write about up and coming companies with innovative ideas, services and technologies. Many reports cover awesome big data vendors, for example, Cool Vendors in Big Data, Cool Vendors in Data Science and Cool Vendors in Information Innovation.

At Gartner for Technical Professionals (where I am), we usually publish vendor-neutral research and do not write for cool vendor reports (to be fair, we submit our choices and peer-review these reports). Yet, our clients constantly ask me and my colleagues about vendors. Last week, Fortune magazine published my opinion on big data companies to watch. My opinion was not about the best or the most prominent, most hyped or most intriguing, most funded or most profitable companies, but about the companies to watch.

Katherine Noyes, the author of the Fortune Magazine article, asked me to name five big data companies to watch and to comment on some published big data vendors lists. Below is my full response, it explains my choices:

Hi Katherine,

Well, selecting just five companies is a challenge since there are many more companies that do interesting things around big data. I have technical and non-technical considerations for giving my list of five. My top noteworthy big data companies would be:

• Neo Technology is a force behind an open source graph database Neo4j – I think graphs have a great future since they show data in its connections rather than as a traditional view of atomic elements. Graph technologies are mostly unexplored by the enterprises but they are the solution that can deliver truly new insights from data. I wrote about graphs some time ago in my blog post Think Graph.
• Splunk has an excellent technology, and it was among the first big data companies to go public. Now, Splunk also has a strong product called Hunk (Splunk on Hadoop) directly delivering big data solutions that are more mature than most products in the market. Hunk is easy to use compared to many big data products, and generally, most customers I spoke with expressed their love to Splunk without any soliciting on my side.
• MemSQL – an in-memory relational database that would be effective for mixed workloads and for analytics. While SAP draws so much attention to in-memory databases by marketing their Hana database, MemSQL seems to be a less expensive and more agile solution in this space.
• Pivotal – while it might not be the most perfect big data solution, Pivotal is solving a much larger problem – the convergence of cloud, mobile, social and big data forces (which Gartner calls the Nexus of Forces). Eventually, big data is not a standalone technology but it should deliver actionable insights about the rapidly changing modern world with its social interactions, mobility, Internet of Things etc. That’s why GE is one of the major investors in Pivotal with the purpose of building the Industrial Internet.
• Teradata – it might be a surprising choice for many big data aficionados who chose Teradata as a target for religious wars of new big data technologies against the data warehouse, where Teradata is an easy prey because it’s a pure play in the data warehousing (as opposed to Oracle, IBM or Microsoft who have many more products). Meanwhile, Teradata delivers a unified data architecture that combines best of both worlds, and enterprises need both.

As you may have noticed, I am covering various segments of big data technologies. If I had more than five companies to choose from, I’d also add companies in other segments:

• Big data analytics: Actian and Datameer
• Predictive analytics: Revolution Analytics and Ayasdi
• Data integration: Pentaho and Denodo (particularly for data virtualization)
• Big data cloud providers: Qubole and Altiscale
• Hadoop: Cloudera – “first in space” for big data, huge recent investments from an interesting set of investors, most notably, Intel.
• Development framework: Concurrent with the open source product called Cascading, now included in some Hadoop distributions. Given that applications are about to explode on Hadoop, Concurrent should do very well.

Please note, this is not a comprehensive research and there are more very good companies. The companies I listed are “to watch” rather than best overall.

Now, to comment on the list of 100 big data companies you pointed me to. Out of this list, the following companies look appealing to me: Dataguise, MapR, MatterSight, Manhattan Software (an excellent player in real estate!) and Data Tamer (I would prefer Paxata though) – see my blog post Big Data Quantity vs. Quality.

I’d like to especially stop on The Hive. This VC company specializing in data has an unusual approach that I personally greatly appreciate. It conducts weekly live meetups, which cover diverse subjects and draw diverse people who are interested in big data. The Hive became one of the most well-known gatherings that attracts the brightest minds in big data as speakers (and as attendees). It became a social “big data hub” in Silicon Valley, and I believe, in India too. Being in the center of the big data life, the Hive has a great opportunity to make successful investments on early stages of data companies.

theCUBE
Jun 5, 2014
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GG76ZfSWe5I&list=PLenh213llmcaIG_3TR7Ql89F9i9

Chris Wensel talks to theCUBE about Concurrent’s funding, product vision, and what he sees happening to professionals working in Big Data.

bigdataphile
June 3, 2014
http://bigdataphile.com/2014/06/concurrent-raises-10-million-for-big-data-application-infrastructure

Big data applications infrastructure company Concurrent has raised $10 million in its Series B funding.

Bain Capital Ventures, a new investor in Concurrent, led the round with participation of existing investors Rembrandt Ventures and True Ventures. Previously, Concurrent had raised $4.9 million in funding.

Concurrent says it will use the financing to drive research and development of its high profile product Driven, an application performance management product for data-centric applications, and Cascading, an application development framework for building data-oriented applications.

Concurrent particularly helps enterprises and organizations who are adopting Hadoop to build, deploy and manage data-centric applications to meet growing business demands.

“Our investors’ confidence in Concurrent and this latest round of funding supports our strategy and proven leadership in providing Big Data application infrastructure to enterprises. Recognizing the maturing needs of the enterprise and emergence of new technologies, we are giving organizations the application development tools and management products they need to deliver today and in the future. This funding will not only enable us to drive our R&D execution, but will also allow us to expand operational capabilities to support our rapidly expanding user and customer base,” said Gary Nakamura, CEO, Concurrent, Inc.

“Concurrent continues to propel innovation forward and exemplifies just the type of company Bain Capital Ventures looks to invest in – a business at the forefront of a hot market, with a uniquely developed, defined and widely adopted technology, and a highly seasoned executive team that understands how to best serve the enterprise application infrastructure market. The growth opportunity is huge, and I look forward to serving on the company’s board to contribute to Concurrent’s future direction and growth,” commented Salil Deshpande, managing director, Bain Capital Ventures, and a new member of the Concurrent Board of Directors.

The San Francisco-based company services the market in Big Data application infrastructure with its products Cascading and Driven. Cascading recently surpassed more than 150,000+ user downloads per month.

The company also has strategic partnerships with Hortonworks, Rackspace, EPAM and Databricks.

Concurrent was selected to CRN’s Big Data 100 in the “Big Data Infrastructure Tools and Services” and “Emerging Big Data Vendors” categories.The company also received recognition from the SD Times editors for the publication’s annual SD Times 100 in the “Big Data and Business Intelligence” category.

Maria Deutscher, SiliconANGLE
June 3, 2014
http://siliconangle.com/blog/2014/06/03/concurrent-lands-10m-to-catalyze-the-big-data-app-economy

Concurrent, a San Francisco-based startup working to simplify the development of applications atop Hadoop, announced on Monday that it has raised $10 million in Series B financing led by new investor Bain Capital Ventures. Existing backers Rembrandt Ventures and True Ventures also participated in the round, which brings the firm’s total funding to nearly $15 million.

Concurrent said that it will use the capital to accelerate the development of its flagship Cascading framework, an open source library hatched up by founder Chris Wensel to make it easier for organizations to operationalize their vast troves of unstructured information. It acts an abstraction layer between Hadoop and the applications that use it and lets CIOs avoid investing in additional training or specialized talent.

“The requirement for the enterprise is not to learn new skills for Hadoop but to leverage existing skills, existing systems and existing investments they already made in their infrastructure,” Concurrent CEO Gary Nakamura, who took over the reins in conjunction with the firm’s previous $4 million funding round last March, told SiliconANGLE in an interview.

Because of that, Cascading is written in Java, the same language Hadoop and the majority of modern corporate applications are implemented in. It also provides support for popular enterprise technologies like SQL and Scala, which is especially useful for implementing data analysis algorithms in distributed environments like the batch processing platform. All that serves to shield developers from the inherent complexity of working with unstructured data and bring enterprises a step closer to crossing the chasm into the long overdue era of pre-packaged analytical apps.

The third and latest version of the framework, which rolled out last month, extends that functionality to Tez, a distributed execution engine that offers superior performance to MapReduce with lower latency. Cascading has promised to deliver support for other components in Hadoop ecosystem as well through a new query planner built into the release.

The framework is gaining traction in the marketplace. Concurrent boasts of more than 150,000 monthly downloads and already counts thousands of organizations among its users, including high-profile Internet companies like eBay, Twitter and Etsy. That success has not gone unnoticed by the vendor community: All three of the largest Hadoop distributors support Cascading, with the latest to jump on the bandwagon being Hortonworks, which in April committed to guarantee the compatibility of applications based on the framework with future releases of its platform.

Concurrent is trying to monetize the momentum behind Cascading with Driven, a recently introduced cloud service that provides visibility into data flows and program logic at runtime to simplify troubleshooting and help developers be more productive overall. The company disclosed that a part of the capital from today’s round will go towards fueling future development of the solution. It also revealed that Salil Deshpande, a managing director at Bain Capital’s Palo Alto office, is joining its board.

Jack Clark, The Register
June 2, 2014
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/02/cascading_data_analysis_funding

Hadoop startup Concurrent has slurped $10m in Series B filthy valley lucre as a new sense of enthusiasm breathes life into the “big data” community.

Concurrent announced its round on Monday. The company stewards Cascading, a free bit of software that helps devs do application development on top of Hadoop.

The company ran into trouble earlier last year when it took in $4m in Series A funding from True Ventures and Rembrand Venture Partners to fund the development of Cascading.

“In crisis there is opportunity,” chief technology officer Chris Wensel told us via email at the time. “By not having the capital and talent to boost our vision, we risk losing all we have done and will never reach the places we can see.”

Over a year later, things have improved dramatically at the company. “We’ve stabilized and built out the platform and made it very valuable,” Wensel told us by phone. Besides developing Cascading, the company has also pushed on with some associated projects such as “Pattern”, which makes it trivial to export machine-learning models from typical tech like MicroStrategies and onto Hadoop.

Concurrent is now seeing around “150,000 downloads a month” of its flagship Cascading software as of “a couple of months ago,” according to chief executive Gary Nakamura. It has also recently partnered with companies including Hortonworks, Rackspace, and Databricks.

This adoption and enthusiasm has compelled it to take in some more money to fund the development, sales, and marketing of its commercial application performance management product “Driven”. There will also be more investment into integrating various open source Hadoop-related projects to work with Concurrent’s tech, including things such as Spark, Storm, and Apache Tez, Nakamura said. Bain Capital Ventures led the $10m round, along with the existing investors True Ventures and Rembrandt Ventures.

In many ways the turnaround at the company is a reflection of trends in the broader Hadoop community, which spent much of last year dealing with the fallout of hyped tech claims and false promises. This year, by contrast, some businesses seem to be finally squeezing some real value out of the tech, bringing a new round of enthusiasm (and cash) into the startups involved with the tech.