Partners: Dell, Solix Move In Big Data Is Good Setup For Future Growth

Forrester outlines opportunities for big data.

Partners say Dell's reseller agreement with Solix Technologies is looking ahead to a day when big data means big money.

"It's not a bad move, but it'll take time to monetize," said Stephen Monteros, vice president of sales operations at Ontario, Calif.-based Dell partner Sigmanet. "It's not immediate. For most of my peers, big data is something we talk about, but we're closer to the leading edge than we are to widespread adoption. Dell is betting on something that will happen."

Likewise, Mark McKeever, partner at Microage, a Tempe, Ariz.-based Dell partner, said big data is becoming "massively important," but it's gaining the most traction among large companies with money to spend on analyzing the data they produce.

"Both big data and business intelligence are massively important for a competitive edge in big business," McKeever said. "It's large companies that have amassed big data and they're the ones with the budget to spend on business intelligence tools and analysis. Most resellers aren't remotely geared to do anything but provide the hardware."

John Ottman, executive chairman of Santa Clara, Calif.-based Solix, said that while big data has been slow to catch on outside of very large enterprise users, adoption rates are climbing.

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"The adoption rate is exploding right now," Ottman said. "The big guys have data scientists, and they're the early adopters. Now, we're seeing midsize companies. Manufacturers, they've got requirements to archive their Oracle databases, they have spreadsheets and all kinds of information, but they don't have a common platform for all that data. Hadoop can store and manage that data 50 times cheaper than Tier 1 enterprise servers."

Dell Services has partnered with Solix to resell Solix's information life cycle management solutions for Hadoop in an all-in-one, 30 terabyte, Unix- or Linux-based Dell PowerEdge DR730 rack server that will also come with Cloudera or Hortonworks Hadoop and Dell application management services for about $750,000.

The Solix solution is meant to help end users manage the data they dump into Hadoop for efficiency and compliance. Solix handles enterprise archiving, application retirement, test data management and data masking on Apache Hadoop.

"This is a better process for enterprise analytics," Ottman said. "The biggest challenge is to have a process that really works for everybody.