BlueData CEO: "We’re Democratizing Big Data" | @BigDataExpo [#BigData]

BlueData aims to “democratize Big Data” with its launch of EPIC Enterprise, which it calls “the industry’s first Big Data software to enable enterprises to create a self-service cloud experience on premise.” This self-service private cloud allows enterprises to create 100-node Hadoop and Spark clusters in less than 10 minutes. The company is also offering a Community Edition via free download. We had a few questions for BlueData CEO Kumar Sreekanti about all this, and here's what he had to say: Cloud Computing Journal: It looks like you're on a mission to simplify Big Data. Kumar Sreekanti: Yes, simple is our goal As the pioneer in Big Data private clouds, BlueData’s mission is to simplify, and thus democratize, Big Data by streamlining and simplifying Big Data infrastructure and eliminating complexity as a barrier to adoption. CCJ: Who are your target customers? Kumar: Our target customers are enterprises of all sizes that want to build agile, secure and cost-effective Big Data deployments that deliver value in days, instead of months, and at a cost savings of 50%-75% compared with traditional approaches. By making Big Data accessible to all, enterprises can get the same value out of their on-premise Big Data as companies like Google, Facebook and Yahoo at a fraction of the cost, and with far fewer resources. Specifically, we are targeting Fortune 1000 enterprises in retail, financial services, healthcare, pharmaceutical, insurance, media, telco and federal. These are companies with large volumes of existing structured data, such as sales transactions and supply chain metrics, as well as semi-structured and unstructured data, such as log files, emails, social media, documents, sensor data and audio/video. These companies will have large volumes of structured and unstructured data stored in on-premise enterprise storage systems such as NAS, Gluster and Ceph Within the companies, we're looking at enterprise IT and line-of-business IT departments with business initiatives that require Big Data analytics and processing to validate new market opportunities and/or create new products and services. CCJ: How do you and they define Big Data? Kumar: The most immediate opportunity is to combine existing structured data with large volumes of underutilized unstructured data to identify patterns or insights in a cost-effective manner previously not possible with traditional data warehousing platforms. We also see ways to continue to expand the use of Big Data. Our target customers see a tremendous opportunity to use data in new ways: to learn about customers, speed business cycles, and transform themselves to gain a competitive advantage. CCJ: How much data are we talking about here? Kumar: Most companies in our target market have at least 50TB of unstructured data locked away in their enterprise repositories that can be utilized for data-driven strategies. CCJ: What are the key things you've done to simplify all this for people and enterprises, while also imbuing flexibility into it? Kumar: Big data no longer means “big moves” or “big storage” so our target customers can gain immediate value from their terabytes of unstructured data in their existing storage systems at the lowest cost. The BlueData EPIC platform can connect any enterprise data source to the big data app of choice. That means no more moving and replicating data. The BlueData EPIC platform helps IT to deliver Big Data as a high-performing on-premise service to run any distributed application on any server from any storage. CCJ: How does your vision interact with the IoT, which seems to be driving a lot of Big Data today? Kumar: The IoT requires the ability to collect and reason over large volumes of real-time data generated by sensors and other embedded systems. In addition to demanding new Big Data architectures and real-time processing run times beyond Hadoop, IoT introduces significant level of complexity to an already rigid, inflexible infrastructure that can barely meet the existing requirements for batch processing. CCJ: And how do you address this issue? Kumar: Our vision around enabling any application on any server with any storage provides enterprises the foundation to adapt as well as scale their infrastructure to meet Big/Fast Data characteristics of the IoT. By supporting quick provisioning and scaling of distributed applications like Apache Spark that provide fast in-memory processing (e.g. Spark Streaming) and noSQL technologies (e.g Hbase, Cassandra), BlueData enables enterprises to support the fast data and time series processing requirements of the IoT. Further, by enabling an agile infrastructure that can simultaneously support real-time (Spark), noSQL (Hbase) and batch (Hadoop) analytics, customers gain unprecedented levels of flexibility to create solution architectures that can easily combine IoT data with the rest of the enterprise data (e.g. transactions, social media, text/email etc) as opposed to silos. CCJ: Please tell us more about the Community Edition. How to access it, what it does, why people should try it. Kumar: We offer EPIC One, a full-featured community edition, which allows users to  experience the power of multi-app, multi-version instant clusters on a single physical node. Users can deploy a Big Data private cloud in a matter of seven steps and create distributed application clusters ranging from Hadoop to Hbase and Spark in a matter of minutes versus the typical weeks or months for each type of cluster. It can be downloaded directly from www.bluedata.com

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