Pivotal Updates Hadoop, Launches Self-Service Big Data Product For Enterprises

Pivotal, the EMC-VMware spin-off that's developing a big data-infused platform-as-a-service, unveiled a pair of new products Wednesday aimed at making it easier to find and extract business value from enterprise data.

Enterprises generate tons of data, and it's often hard to get to because it lives in multiple silos. Oftentimes, IT departments need to get involved to let users access this data, which slows down the process and adds expense.

Pivotal is addressing this challenge with Pivotal Data Dispatch, a new self-service offering that lets end users discover data on their own, both inside and outside their organization.

[Related: Pivotal Makes First Big Move, Acquiring Mobile App Dev Firm Xtreme Labs ]

Being able to search for data on Hadoop data stores, transactional systems, data warehouse systems and regular databases is going to help enterprises be more productive, Todd Paoletti, vice president of product marketing at Pivotal, said in an interview.

Pivotal Data Dispatch lets users access all these different data sources from a single place, and it also lets user provision their own sandboxes for reporting and data analytics purposes, with IT setting rules and policies, said Paoletti.

"End users have been struggling to get rapid access to data and are looking for a way to run analytics on it," Paoletti said. "This is a way to make data accessible to any end user."

Pivotal also unveiled Pivotal HD 1.1, an update to its commercial Hadoop distribution, which will be available Nov. 1. It adds integration with GemFire XD, an in-memory data management service that now runs on native Hadoop.

While Pivotal Data Dispatch is aimed at making end users more productive, Pivotal HD 1.1 has more of an operational efficiency focus, Paoletti said. GemFire XD will complement HAWQ, a Greenplum-developed technology that allows queries of HDFS data using standard SQL queries, he said.

"This takes in-memory data and correlates it with historical archive data that lives in some systems, which bridges the real-time world with the archive world," said Paoletti.

PUBLISHED OCT. 24, 2013