Attendees of Strata + Hadoop saw their fair share of solutions that tout that they are “next big thing” to solve a multitude of big data problems. Eric Sammer, CTO and co-founder, and Bryce Hein, vice president of Marketing, at Rocana observed that the focus is more on how platforms can help issues rather than the infrastructure behind it.
“I think that if you look at the audience and sort of how the audience is changing from the in the weeds engineers, it’s shifting towards people at the VP and director level looking to solve problems,” Sammer said. “They don’t care so much about the file system and SQL engine. They care about reducing fraud and customer experience more so than their growing infrastructure.”
Sammer said Rocana can be that turnkey that can help customers understand what’s going on with their data center, how they can bring forward that data and use it, gauge customer experience, and solve problems before they can occur.
Machine learning tailored for specific use cases and applications was another trend Hein saw.
“This is an example of what we’re trying to do is apply analytics to the problem of operations and you’re going to see more and more tailored machine learning,” Hein said.
The company is currently working on additions to its platform’s 2.0 release scheduled for later this year, Sammer said.
“We’re really going to be able to make good on our promise around total visibility, understanding what’s happening in the data center, and really focusing on those kinds of deep analytics in that space,” Sammer said.
Additionally, Rocana helped launch a new open initiative called OSSO that makes it easy to communicate any operational event – from metric samples, to ad clicks, to log messages – between systems and processes.
“We’ve always had an open de facto standard for how we represent data inside of Rocana but our customers are naturally building applications on top of this,” Sammer said. “We thought we should create an open source project and initiative sort of standardizing how this data is represented and then work with our partners and, or, our customers so they can work on top of this data the way that they want to do it.”