Monday, July 30, 2018

Compatibility between the Big Data vendors

What the Big Data vendors have to offer?

Finally that the Big Data wars have pretty much ended, we have got Cloudera, MapR and Hortonworks as the major Big Data vendors. There are also other pure vendors that focus on one or two Big Data softwares (like DataStax on Apache Cassandra), but the above mentioned Cloudera, MapR and Hortonworks vendors provide a complete suite of softwares covering storage, processing, security, easy installation etc. These vendors solve some of the problems like

  • Integrating the different softwares from Apache. Not every Big Data software from Apache is compatible with other. These vendors make sure that the different softwares from Apache play nice with each other.

  • Installation and fine tuning of the Big Data softwares is not easy. It's no more download and click. These vendors make the installation process easier and automate as much as possible.

  • Although the software from Apache is free to use. Apache Software Foundation doesn't provide any commercial support. Companies like Cloudera, MapR and Hortonworks fill the gap as long as the software from these vendors is being used.

Friday, July 6, 2018

What is DIGITAL?

Very often we hear the word DIGITAL in the quarterly results of the different IT companies especially in India. The revenue from the DIGITAL business is compared with the traditional business. So, what is DIGITAL? There is no formal definition of DIGITAL, but has been loosely used by different companies as mentioned lately.

But, here is the definition of DIGITAL in an interview at MoneyControl (here) by Rostow Ravanan, Mindtree CEO and MD. This is a bit vague, but the best I could get till now. The vagueness comes from the fact that it doesn't say what BETTER is. Does anyone see something missing? I see IOT missing. Lately I had been working on IOT and would be writing my opinion on where IOT stands as of now.

Q: Digital is still a vague term in the minds of many. What does it mean for you?

A: So let me go back a little bit and tell you what we define as digital. We define digital and we put that in our factsheet, whenever we declare results every quarter.

In our definition of digital, we take one or two ways of defining it. To a business user, we definite digital from a business process perspective to say anything that allows my customer to connect to their customer better or anything that allows my customer to connect to their people better is one way of defining digital from a business process point of view.

Or if you were to look at digital from a technology definition point of view, we say it is social, mobility, analytics, cloud, and e-commerce. From a technology point of view, that is how we define digital.