Alpine Predictive Analytics Takes Aim at Hadoop
Hadoop support is quickly emerging as a prerequisite for predictive analytics software makers.
San Mateo, Calif.-based Alpine Data Labs is the latest firm to announce Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) support, enabling the company's newly-released Alpine 2.8 software to bring its predictive analytics technology to the popular open source Big Data platform. Alpine is betting enterprises will not only use its tech to embrace an expanded set of data sources, but that they'll derive actionable business intelligence from them with nothing more than Web browser.
“What's truly exciting about this release is not just that we've figured out how to leverage a framework that until now has remained too difficult to master, but that we're delivering it in a manner that turns a Web browser into an analytics playground,” said Steven Hillion, Alpine Data Labs ‘chief product officer, in a statement.
Alpine is hardly alone in harnessing Hadoop for predictive analytics. Just last week, SAS announced HDFS support for its SAS High-Performance Analytics Server, a move that opens up its predictive modeling capabilities to a rapidly expanding Hadoop-driven Big Data ecosystem.
Similarly, Alpine 2.8 now casts a wider net for companies looking to pluck business insights from large and technologically varied data repositories. Moving data to explore tables and files is a thing of the past, according to the company.
Big Data via the Browser
In addition to predictive modeling, Alpine delivers data transformation and visualization of Hadoop datasets. And in a sign that the consumerization of Big Data is gathering steam, the company touts Alpine's user-friendly interface. “Users can generate insights by performing statistical analyses and building scalable models on massive datasets without writing a line of code, using an intuitive interface,” says Alpine.
A Web-based interface provides complete workflow controls, including workflow editing, data browsing and visualization, and provides a framework for collaborative data analysis. Alpine claims that its software supports all major Web browsers.
Alpine uses a common set of operators to analyze raw data from several sources, including massively parallel processing (MPP) databases and now Hadoop (Apache Hadoop 0.20.2+, Greenplum GPHD 1.0+ and Cloudera CDH3). Alpine 2.8 also supports Greenplum, Oracle 11g, Oracle Exadata, Netezza, DB2 and PostgreSQL.
Alpine 2.8 is available now.
Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.
Pedro Hernandez contributes to Enterprise Apps Today, and 11Press, the technology network. He was previously the managing editor of Internet.com, an IT-related website network. He has expertise in Smart Tech, CRM, and Mobile Tech, Helping Banks and Fintechs, Telcos and Automotive OEMs, and Healthcare and Identity Service Providers to Protect Mobile Apps.
