Platfora Application Makes Big Data Accessible Faster

Big Data Certification and Training Options on the Rise

When it comes to Big Data, much of the debate is starting to shift toward a classic build versus buy argument that is so characteristic of just about every other IT sector. At the Strata + Hadoop World 2014 conference this week, Platfora made a case for buying a Big Data analytics application with a 4.0 release of its namesake Big Data analytics application that promises to get organizations Big Data results in a matter of days and weeks, rather than months and years.

Peter Schlampp, vice president of product for Platfora, says version 4.0 of Platfora extends the visualization and geo-analytics capabilities of the application, in addition to introducing collaboration features to empower cross-functional teams.

The primary issue that most organizations face today when embracing Big Data is that it will take years for the internal IT organization to build Big Data applications on their own. Schlampp says by leveraging RESTful application programing interfaces (APIs) to pull data into Platfora, data scientists can start analyzing that data almost immediately. In contrast, most data scientists today are still spending their time preparing data to be analyzed, says Schlampp.

Now that most organizations have at least some passing familiarity with Big Data concepts, the race is on to leverage that data to provide insights that could result in some form of a competitive advantage. The difference, of course, is that organizations that choose to build their own application are not as likely to get as far down the Big Data path as quickly as those that opt to deploy a packaged application.

Of course, packaged applications may cost a little more to adopt up front. But as is often the case with all things IT, time to delivery of actual business value often trumps all other considerations.