What’s new in the world of Big Data and Cloud

Three things you need to know from the week of September 7 – 13, 2014

Apache Cassandra –

 Cassandra continues to gather momentum as a preferred noSQL database, both in terms of commercial backing and performance. Apache Cassandra v2.1, was announced at September 11 at the Cassandra Summit.

The most important change is a significant improvement in performance (up to x2). Fortunately the API is remaining stable.  The noSQL environment continues to be a battleground between different products optimized for, and targeted at, different applications ranging from document stores to tables or key-value pairs.

HP’s Purchase of Eucalyptus –

By contrast the Cloud market is starting to stabilize into a few offerings.  HP’s announcement that it had purchased Eucalyptus was greeted with surprise as HP is a major contributor to its competitor OpenStack.

HP clearly is trying to differentiate itself from the other systems suppliers, such as Cisco, Dell and IBM, by having its own AWS-compatible approach. Eucalyptus has already developed such a platform. HP management must have decided that it would be less costly to purchase the company to obtain a working AWS compatible platform that it would be to create one from scratch.

Maybe a merger is in the cards?

Big Success with Big Data –

 More than 90 percent of executives at organizations that are actively leveraging analytics in their production environments are satisfied with the results, according to a poll of more than 4,300 technology and business published by Accenture plc published last week.

Executives report big data delivering business outcomes for a wide spectrum of strategic corporate goals — from new revenue generation and new market development to enhancing the customer experience and improving enterprise-wide performance. Organizations regard big data as extremely important and central to their digital strategy. The landmark report concludes that only a negligible fraction of enterprises are not realizing what they consider adequate returns on their data investments.