Karmasphere has announced Karmasphere 2.0, a new version of its solution for big data analytics. According to the company, Karmasphere 2.0 is for organizations that want to optimize their business by using big data to find opportunities for new products and services and deliver improved customer satisfaction. With Hadoop and Karmasphere 2.0, the company seeks to enable massive amounts of customer interaction and product data from web, mobile, social, sensor, video and call center channels to be analyzed affordably.
The 2.0 release has two main themes, Rich Guth, chief marketing officer, Karmasphere, tells 5 Minute Briefing. One is to support users who are working collaboratively and the other is to enable self-service use for business users and business analysts.
In the year and a half that Karmasphere has been working with customers, Guth says, “We have learned that big data analytics on Hadoop is not a solo task. It is definitely a team project.” Often, Guth says, users are spread out all over the world and want to collaborate and share their work and learn from each other. As a result, Karmasphere 2.0 supports the workflow for insight discovery including the ability to ingest data into the Hadoop cluster, visually explore data for patterns and trends, iteratively analyze the data using familiar queries, visualizations and skills, and easily publish insights into the business. Through the new web-based social interface, users can collaborate by setting up projects, inviting diverse project team members, and sharing and re-using each other’s work. Karmasphere 2.0 is designed to work with any Hadoop distribution and leverages Apache Hive, the Hadoop SQL standard, for the portability of analytic assets.
The other key theme of the new release is self-service, says Guth. “These teams are made up of business users and business analysts as well as data analysts and they all want to get at the data directly. They don’t want to have to go through a data warehouse or lengthy ETL process.” To achieve this self-service, Karmasphere provides intuitive and simple-to-use wizards for ingestion, filtering, sorting, and charting so anyone can get involved in capturing value from all the data.
Karmasphere is an open, extensible, and 100% standards-based solution, enabling customers to take advantage of the innovation from the community and also have portability of access without vendor lock-in “which is very important when there is so much change and innovation going on,” Guth emphasizes. “A lot of traditional BI vendors are able to report off Hadoop, which is great, but essentially what they are using is a JDBC interface to a Hive table. We doing everything native which is really going to help people going forward to scale and bring on new teams, and to share and collaborate.”
The product is available in June through an Early Access Program and will be generally available in July. Companies interested in trying the product may pre-register for a trial. Learn more at www.karmasphere.com.