Big Data Goes Social With EMC’s Greenplum Unified Analytics Platform

EMC announced the release of its Greenplum Unified Analytics Platform (UAP) on Thursday. The Greenplum Unified Analytics Platform, a unified platform for processing structured and unstructured data, represents EMC’s latest move to consolidate its positioning in the Big Data space and compete squarely with Big Data offerings recently elaborated by Oracle, Microsoft and HP. EMC’s announcement comes scarcely two weeks after HP’s disclosure of the integration of its Autonomy and Vertica offerings within a unified Next Generation Information Platform called Autonomy IDOL 10 that specializes in the processing of structured and unstructured data. EMC’s Unified Analytics Platform features integration with Hadoop, the software framework for analyzing massive amounts of structured and unstructured data.

The EMC Greenplum UAP contains the following three components:

• The EMC Greenplum platform for the analysis of structured data.
• Enterprise-grade Hadoop for analyzing structured and unstructured data.
• EMC Greenplum Chorus, a collaboration and productivity software tool that enables social networking amongst constituents in an organization that are leveraging Big Data.

EMC Greenplum Chorus recognizes the way in which Big Data scientists and analysts may be geographically dispersed across different enterprise locations, even as they need to collaborate to deliver enterprise-wide analysis that integrates structured and unstructured data from different data sets. GigaOM reports data exploration represents one of the most significant features of Chorus because it provides users with a Facebook-like user interface which enables data scientists to “launch a sandbox environment and start analyzing the data with just a few clicks.” According to EMC’s press release, Chorus facilitates collaboration amongst Big Data teams as follows:

EMC Greenplum Chorus opens data science teams up to an entirely new way to collaborate across dispersed geographies and with very large data sets. Through the Chorus interface, users get ready access to tools, data and supporting resources that enable enterprise-wide Big Data productivity. Frictionless and rapid collaboration across data science teams helps to ensure useful insights get back to the business in time to take the right actions, thus increasing agility and innovation.

Like IBM’s artificial intelligence supercomputer Watson, Chorus provides an interface for translating human questions into queries that run against petabytes of data. Chorus also allows users to share results from and refine approaches to data analysis. The social networking component of EMC’s Unified Analytics Platform ensures that diverse constituents can examine Big Data and iteratively refine their approach to data analysis as a collective. Chorus, the collaborative platform of UAP, profoundly differentiates EMC’s Big Data offering from competing products from HP, Oracle, Microsoft, Cloudera and Odiago.

EMC’s Unified Analytic Platform represents the convergence of the hottest trends in technology today: cloud computing, Big Data, virtualization and social networking. The question now is whether social networking and Big Data represents a fad that will pass, or an innovation that forever changes the landscape of products in the Big Data space.