Endeca Tackles Big Data, but Is the Concept Valid?
August 17, 2011
This week Endeca announced it would integrate Apache Hadoop in with their Endeca Latitude product, thus providing a better environment for processing big data. In, “Endeca Attacks Big data with Hadoop integration,” the enterprise search vendor continues to move away from traditional models and address specific business needs.
Hadoop is an open source data processing tool that according to the Endeca release works particularly well with unstructured data. One of the advantages of working with Hadoop is that it offers what is essentially a fail-safe approach because if one server shuts down or just slows down, Hadoop compensates across the remaining servers and keeps running . . . This all comes together to provide a better environment for processing big data, something that according to Donald Feinberg, VP distinguished analyst at Gartner, is a growing concern at many organizations.
But is big data a growing concern or a corporate myth? In “There’s no such thing as big data,” Alistair Croll contends that big data may exist in theory but not in practice. While they may accumulate virtual vaults of data, Croll contends, “It takes an employee, deciding that the loss of high-value customers is important, to run a query of all their data and find him, and then turn that into a business advantage. Without the right questions, there really is no such thing as big data — and today, it’s the upstarts that are asking all the good questions.”
Croll maintains that small start-ups are winning the marketing game because they are approaching from a more agile, more creative position. However, large companies have plenty of power to leverage in their holdings of big data, if only they knew how to ask the right questions. Why do we have Netflix instead of a reinvented Blockbuster? This is the heart of Croll’s question.
So while Endeca might have found a favorable selling point for Latitude, the business plan is still lacking for how to incorporate the big data concept into a profitable model. Maybe big business will learn from the start-ups, allowing big data to become a topic of relevance.
Emily Rae Aldridge, August 17, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
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