Etsy gets crafty with big data
Handmade marketplace Etsy has grown to 800,000 sellers and 40+ million monthly visitors. All that activity generates enormous quantities of data, which Etsy uses to drive site improvements.
Handmade marketplace Etsy has grown to 800,000 sellers and 40+ million monthly visitors. All that activity generates enormous quantities of data, which Etsy uses to drive site improvements.
The challenges and promise of big data are front and center for CIOs and other business leaders. The initial applications that have leveraged big data have provided organizations with significant returns and given a glimpse into the power of big data and how it can be used to disrupt their competitive landscape.
IBM today rolled out a tool it says can cull massive terabytes of data, including email -- to help customers detect external attacks aimed at stealing sensitive information or insider threats that might reveal corporate secrets.
Two public cloud service providers have rolled out hosted versions of Hadoop clusters, including SkyTap announcing a partnership with Hadoop distributor Cloudera, and Joyent teaming with HortonWorks on a cloud-based Hadoop service that's available today.
Average salaries for tech pros climbed 5.3% to $85,619 last year, up from $81,327 in 2011. It's the largest salary jump in more than a decade, according to career site Dice.
"Big data" is the buzzword of the day, and learning to manage it and extract value from it is top of mind for executives across industries. A contributing factor to the surge in big data is a shift in prevailing corporate data management philosophies.
For some time Microsoft didn't offer a solution for processing big data in cloud environments. SQL Server is good for storage, but its ability to analyze terabytes of data is limited. Hadoop, which was designed for this purpose, is written in Java and was not available to .Net developers. So, Microsoft launched the Hadoop on Windows Azure service to make it possible to distribute the load and speed up big data computations.
Rackspace says it is now offering customers the ability to create customized virtual networks in a public cloud, using software defined networking-like capabilities.
Every enterprise software vendor will tell you how hot and in-demand their products are, but the notion rings fairly true with respect to BI (business intelligence) and advanced analytics. The products just kept selling throughout the global recession, as companies looked to gain insights into their business and subsequently, more efficiency as well as new ideas.
LexisNexis is planning to release its internally developed supercomputing platform as open source, providing developers with an alternative to the Hadoop framework for large-scale data processing, the company said Wednesday.
Yahoo is discontinuing its distribution of the Hadoop platform and will instead focus on Apache Hadoop, the Hadoop Team at Yahoo said this week.
Informatica has modified its business intelligence software so that it can work with Cloudera's Hadoop distribution, the two companies announced Monday.
James Gosling, the key developer of the Java platform while he was at now-defunct Sun Microsystems, said Tuesday that Oracle, which bought Sun earlier this year, has an excellent understanding of the server-side Java but is confused about what to do with Java on desktops and cell phones.
Cloudera has unveiled a new set of Hadoop management tools, called Cloudera Enterprise, that the company will offer for an annual subscription fee, it announced on Tuesday. It has also updated its open-source distribution package of Hadoop.
A startup called Datameer is offering a simpler way for business analysts to use Hadoop, the open-source framework for large-scale data processing on clusters of commodity hardware.