It’s a new year, and it’s off to a fast start for the Hadoop ecosystem. Today we’re announcing a new, streamlined Cloudera Enterprise lineup and commercial support for Apache Spark (currently incubating at Apache), as part of our vision to deliver an enterprise data hub.
While the concept of an enterprise data hub still feels aspirational to some, it seems to be a trend that’s gaining momentum as more customers understand the value of having a single place to land, explore, process and analyze all their data. In our customer base we have seen a strong latent demand for a simpler, more scalable and more flexible architecture.
The power of an enterprise data hub is even more obvious once it’s deployed and in use, and we think 2014 is going to be an inflection point as enterprises move away from just building a Hadoop cluster.
Here are just two of my favorite recent examples:
- Epsilon, a subsidiary of Alliance Data, is a world-leading marketing services firm that empowers marketing programs for leading brands including Ford, Merck and JP Morgan Chase. They’ve built a new cloud-based digital messaging platform service on top of Cloudera called Agility Harmony, which allows Epsilon clients to harness multiple sources of data into marketing campaigns – email, mobile, and social – and integrated with existing marketing and database systems, so they can deliver thousands of campaigns per second and billions of customized messages per year through these different channels. Epsilon considers Agility Harmony to be a “marketing enterprise data hub” for its customers, a single platform for data processing, analytics, and data-driven applications, while also allowing users to directly interact with the data using familiar tools like SAS, Business Objects, and Tableau.
- AutoScout24, one of Europe’s largest internet properties, serves more than 10 million users across 18 European countries every month. They provide an online marketplace for private customers, car dealers, and other organizations in the automotive space to share information about vehicles, parts, and accessories. AutoScout24 has deployed an enterprise data hub to power the company’s data collection, processing, storage, and analytics, while continuing to feed specialized database systems that power their online web platform.
Our mission is to help organizations leverage the power of all their data, and we’re looking forward to supporting Epsilon, AutoScout24, and the rest of our great customers in this new year.
With that said, we’re always looking for ways to improve. In that spirit, today we are announcing a major facelift to Cloudera Enterprise, based on customer feedback.
First some background. As we worked with our hundreds of customers, we learned that many found Cloudera Enterprise’s model of a core subscription plus optional add-ons to be, frankly, somewhat confusing and difficult to adopt. Cloudera Enterprise has evolved rapidly over the past few years as we’ve added new capabilities and corresponding subscriptions: RTD (Apache HBase or Apache Accumulo), RTQ (Impala), RTS (Cloudera Search), BDR (backup and disaster recovery) and Cloudera Navigator (for data management.) We learned that customers wanted to incrementally adopt these into their own emerging visions of an enterprise data hub, but didn’t want to have to go through a separate procurement cycle each time. Others, either earlier in their big data journey or more self-sufficient, wanted a cost-effective way to leverage our trusted support team and management tools while leaving room for future expansion.
With customer input, and in alignment with our vision for delivering an enterprise data hub, we are pleased to offer a new, simplified product lineup for 2014, with just three straightforward editions within the Cloudera Enterprise family:
- Data Hub Edition, which – as the name implies – provides everything customers need to build an enterprise data hub, ready to integrate into an existing environment. It includes unlimited supported use of components in Cloudera Enterprise:
- Cloudera Impala for interactive analytic SQL queries
- Cloudera Search for interactive search
- Cloudera Navigator for data management including data auditing, lineage and discovery
- Apache Spark (incubating) for interactive analytics and stream processing (more on this in a minute)
- Apache HBase or Apache Accumulo for online NoSQL storage and applications
- Flex Edition, for supporting dedicated mission-critical applications on Hadoop, using only one of the above components. For example, if building a real-time ad serving platform on HBase.
- Basic Edition, for customers who rely on Cloudera for Hadoop in production environments, yet need only simple batch processing and storage, at an economical price.
Every edition includes CDH, our 100% open source distribution including Apache Hadoop, Cloudera’s unique proactive and predictive support and advanced system management. A couple of other key updates:
- Automated backup and disaster recovery is now included in every edition of Cloudera Enterprise. We just don’t think Hadoop makes sense in the enterprise without it.
- In addition to a choice of 8×5 or 24×7 support, we now offer an additional premium support tier that delivers 24×7 support plus a guaranteed 15-minute time to first response for critical issues. As Hadoop has grown into mission-critical roles this is something customers require and we are pleased to offer.
We’re also excited to add official support for Apache Spark, an open source, parallel data processing framework that complements Hadoop, making it easy to develop fast, unified applications that combine batch, streaming and interactive analytics. Spark is 10-100x faster than Hadoop MapReduce for data processing, and also enables easy development of stream processing applications for the Hadoop ecosystem. Cloudera is working closely with Databricks – the leading company behind the Spark project – to ensure Spark is deeply integrated with Hadoop, sharing common data, metadata, security and resource management. Stay tuned for more details in an upcoming series of blog posts.
We believe the powerful combination of this new model for Cloudera Enterprise, together with the addition of support for Apache Spark, will help our customers more rapidly realize the value from their data, better manage risk and compliance, and control costs. You can find more information on our website, or contact our Sales or Support teams to discuss how this applies specifically to your organization.
Again, we look forward to working with our customers and community in 2014 as Hadoop continues to mature from a standalone silo into a central data management platform. It should be a great year for everyone.
Matt Brandwein is Director of Product Marketing at Cloudera.