News

Datameer Aims Hadoop Service at Department-Level Users

• By David Ramel
• February 12, 2015

Datameer Inc. has introduced what it calls the first enterprise-grade Big Data analytics platform targeting department-specific deployments.

Datameer Professional is a "Hadoop-as-a-Service" offering, part of a growing trend of simplifying the once-complicated Hadoop ecosystem comprising myriad components. The idea is to help enterprises more quickly get on the Big Data bandwagon without expending enormous resources or relying on data scientists or developers with highly specialized knowledge, which are hard to come by these days and command big salaries.

In disrupting that traditional "multi-process system," Datameer's approach provides a single application running atop Hadoop, aided by more than 70 pre-built data connectors and more than 270 pre-built, point-and-click analytic functions.

Customers use the connectors to hook up to data that can come from many sources, then check it out for problems with visual tools, then leverage the ready-made analytic functions to process the data and finally visualize it to help discover business insights.

For its new service, Datameer is partnering with two cloud service providers: Altiscale Inc. for North American customers and London-based Bigstep Cloud Ltd. for user in Europe, the Middle East or Asia. Altiscale has recently been making waves with its Data-as-a-Service offerings, while Bigstep offers a "full-metal cloud" purposely built for Big Data analytics.

Altiscale uses the open source Apache Hadoop distribution, while Bigstep combines the Datameer service with the Cloudera Inc. Hadoop distribution and its full-metal cloud.

"It's clear that the success of enterprise Hadoop adoption is driving this growing demand for [Software-as-a-Service] access," said Datameer exec Kenneth Jakobsen in a blog post this week. "More and more business users with limited IT or Hadoop expert resources want direct and immediate access to their data, regardless of its size. They want to get started now, while IT works on an enterprise-wide deployment."

The San Francisco-based Datameer said the new service will be available the first quarter of this year. The company asks potential customers to inquire about pricing.