IBM has Hadoop cloud for big, unstructured data

IBM said it is continuing to strive to offer firms data management solutions as the amount of data generated threatens to get out of control for most companies. IT is seeking to build on its BigData management, and cloud and mobile data access offerings.
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New BigInsights technology on the IBM SmartCloud offering will help clients make sense of massive amounts of unstructured data from a variety of sources, including social networks and mobile devices. It is estimated that 80 percent of a company's data is unstructured.   

  
Caleb Garling adds:

IBM will wade even further into the unstructured data analytics market, offering its Hadoop-based InfoSphere BigInsights tool as service atop the IBM SmartCloud platform. ... [IBM] will offer a basic, free version of the new tool as well as an for-pay enterprise-level service. IBM says anyone can start using the service “in under 30 minutes” to analyze unstructured data...in addition to standard structured data.
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[The] announcement comes on the heels of IBM’s acquisition of Platform Computing, an analytics firm that specializes in Hadoop, and the release of several other Big Blue analytics tools.   

Kim Davis blogs on behalf of IBM:

Enter the elephant. Hadoop the elephant, that is, a framework for storing data on a distributed file system, potentially based across hundreds or thousands of servers, and running operations across the servers.
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IBM is leveraging Hadoop to support InfoSphere BigInsights, an unstructured data analytics tool sitting on the SmartCloud platform. Both free and pay versions are preconfigured and can be operated by clients almost immediately to analyze mixed collections of text, video, images, and social media content.   

And Dj Walker-Morgan fills in the blanks with a bit of a run-on sentence:

Apache Hadoop has become the open source standard in "big data", implementing a MapReduce algorithm to harness the power of large clusters of machines to analyse large amounts of data. Originally developed at Yahoo, it became an Apache project and has developed its own ecosystem of tools and related technology. Earlier this month, Oracle announced that its Oracle Big Data Appliance would run Hadoop and Microsoft revealed plans to support Hadoop on its Azure cloud platform and Windows Server. Amazon's Elastic MapReduce cloud service is also based on Hadoop.   

Meanwhile, Derrick Harris muses thuswise:

By getting into the game now, IBM might be able to get a taste of of the first-mover advantage that thus far has been limited to Amazon Web Services. ... Big data — and Hadoop, in particular — has largely been relegated to on-premise deployments because of the sheer amount of data involved, but the cloud will be a more natural home for those workloads.
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IBM InfoSphere BigInsights...targets business users rather than skilled programmers. BigInsights utilizes a spreadsheet interface...and includes a query language...that’s similar to SQL...designed to query both structured and unstructured data. The product also provides a variety of data-visualization options.   

  
And Finally...
Fight For The Future: The PROTECT-IP a/k/a E-PARASITES Act "will make the net worse"
  
 
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Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and security. He's the creator and main author of Computerworld's IT Blogwatch -- for which he has won American Society of Business Publication Editors and Jesse H. Neal awards on behalf of Computerworld. He also writes The Long View for IDG Enterprise. A cross-functional IT geek since 1985, you can follow him as @richi on Twitter, pretend to be richij's friend on Facebook, or just use good old email: itbw@richij.com. You can also read Richi's full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.