SAP sets out to turbo-charge real-time analytics
Seeking to take advantage of the surging interest in real-time analytics, SAP announced a landmark partnership that binds Databricks’ Apache Spark 1.0 distribution to SAP’s HANA real-time analytics platform.
Databricks is a year-old startup is led by the original developers of Apache Spark, which is considered a rising star of the Hadoop ecosystem. SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier has called it the “next big thing” in Big Data.
Spark is an alternative to the MapReduce processing component of the batch analytics framework that is claimed to be up to 100 times faster when running against data stored in memory. It’s also five to ten times faster when accessing data on disk, according to its creators.
Real-time analytics is a subset of Big Data that captures information from sensors, point-of-sale devices and process control equipment to enable businesses to make on-the-spot decisions. for example, a retailer could customize discounts for individual customers based upon the contents of their shopping carts.
SAP and Databricks have released a HANA-certified version of Databricks’ Spark distribution for immediate download. The companies said HANA customers will not only be able to take advantage of the automatic speed boost afforded by the technology but pull in data directly from the Hadoop File System (HDFS) as well, which saves time and effort that would have to be spent on manually connecting the two.
The news comes just days after Databricks completed the first leg of an alliance with DataStax to make Spark compatible with the open-source Cassandra database and a few weeks after Hortonworks became the third major Hadoop distributor to support the fast processing engine. The partnership is the most significant to date for Databricks, which now has a foot in the door of SAP’s massive user base and is in a position to take advantage of its global sales reach. By extension, that’s also good news growth for Spark, which is poised to draw additional contributors as it attracts more industry interest.
photo credit: jonycunha via photopin cc
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