Hadoop Becomes A Cloud Service

As Hadoop has gained momentum there has been a lot of concern about the general shortage of skillsets available to master a platform that is rapidly becoming an emerging standard. But in the age of the cloud just how much hands-in experience organizations need to have with Hadoop is debatable.

Datameer, for example, today launched Datameer Professional, a Hadoop-as-a-service (HaaS) environment based on Big Data cloud services provided by Altiscale and Bigstep.

Matthew Schumpert, director of product management for Datameer, said that rather than asking organizations to spend six-figures to hire a data scientist that will spent the first year on the job addressing Hadoop plumbing issues, Datameer Professional is designed to allow individual business units to get started working in a big data analytics environment almost immediately.

To facilitate that process Datameer provides a Big Data analytics framework that is designed to make Hadoop data more accessible using a construct that is similar to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. While Datameer currently offers a version of its software that runs on premise, Schumpert said that Datameer envisions departments within many organizations using Datameer Professional to jumpstart a Big Data analytics project without having to rely on support from the internal IT organization or small to medium businesses (SMBs) opting for a cloud service because they don’t have any Hadoop expertise at all.

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Schumpert says now that Datameer has this offering in place the next step will be to extend the ecosystem of partners that can effectively sell a HaaS platform. For solution providers the rise of HaaS environments in the cloud solves a troubling issue. Clearly there is a lot of demand for access to Big Data analytics. But most solution providers also don’t have much expertise when it comes to platforms such as Hadoop, so the emergence of multiple HaaS environments in the cloud represents a new opportunity.

The only thing solution providers should remain cognizant of as more HaaS environments show up in the cloud is that thanks to the laws of data gravity applications tend to go where the data is. Most developers prefer to host their applications as close to the source of data as possible. As more data moves into the cloud the weight of all that data will pull more applications along with it, which is exactly the scenario most cloud service providers such as Altiscale and Bigstep are counting on.

In the meantime, many solution providers just might want to concentrate more on the business value of the analytics applications enabled by Hadoop, rather than getting all caught up in mastering the nuances of how to deploy and manage a Hadoop cluster.