The Hadoop Summit 2016 opened in the Convention Centre Dublin today, with 1,400 attendees, an increase of around 25%, according to HortonWorks president, Herb Cunitz.
Cunitz said that the company now has more than 800 subscribing customers, 1,600 partners and a growing ecosystem of developers committed to its 100% open source philosophy. From a business perspective, Cunitz said HortonWorks would be cash flow breakeven this year, adding that Barclays said in 2015 it had achieved the fastest time ever for a software company to reach $100 million in revenues.
The company’s customers are diverse, but among them are the likes of eBay, Worldpay, the Royal Mail and Yahoo. Cunitz said that 55 of the top 100 financial services companies, 8 of the top 9 US telcos and three quarters of the top 100 retail companies are HortonWorks customers.
HortonWorks’ vision, said Cunitz, has modified in its 10-year existence. At the outset, the founders wanted to manage half the world’s data. Now, he said, the company’s vision is: to manage the world’s data.
Opportunity
Describing the market opportunity, Cunitz broke it down into data at rest and data in motion. The data at rest opportunity is worth in the region of $50 billion, based on how modern data applications access and use data. The data in motion opportunity will be worth around $1.7 trillion by 2020, due to the growing use of the Internet of Things (IoT), said Cunitz.
While Hadoop is the foundation for managing data at rest, he said, the explosion of data and the IoT creates the need to manage data in motion. Both states of data enable modern data applications, and HortonWorks’ expanded product portfolios unlock these opportunities.
Cunitz introduced the key themes for the conference, which included being able to ingest evermore data into connected data platforms, bringing all data under management. Making platforms even more ready for enterprise scale, and building appropriate ecosystems on top of connected data platforms were also key themes.
Connected data platforms
Scott Gnau, CTO, Hortonworks, said connected data platforms would power the future of data.
Gnau said that the new drive was to produce “actionable intelligence” from connected data platforms. This would mean capturing “perishable insights” from data in motion, and ensuring rich, historical insights on data at rest, all of which is necessary for modern data applications.
He said the data journey can be split between two “swim lanes”, or straight paths. One is to renovate, or try to improve old infrastructures, while the other is to innovate through exploration, optimisation and transformation. While the latter is more desirable, Gnau acknowledged that the former is often necessary first.
“HortonWork’s customers leverage our connected data platforms to transform their industries – renovating their IT architectures and innovating with their data at rest and data in motion to power actionable intelligence through modern data applications.”
Cybersecurity focus
There were a number of significant announcements on the opening day. The company announced a new “open approach” to cybersecurity with Apache Metron. It described Metron as “an incubating open source Apache project dedicated to providing an extensible and scalable advanced security analytics platform to detect and mitigate security risks in real time”. Apache Metron is the next evolution of Security Incident Event Management (SIEM).
According to Matthew Morgan, VP of product and alliance marketing, Hortonworks, “data is the foundation of modern threat detection”. He said the company is investing heavily in cybersecurity and Metron is combined with the data governance initiatives represented by Apache Atlas and Ranger projects.
Metron helps users process unprecedented volumes of data per second, changing the game for malware detection and prevention, the company said. When an organisation is attacked, Metron users can process and compare data from comprehensive feeds across the platform in real time. This not only facilitates enhanced detection of malware campaigns, but also impacts the economics for attackers by requiring them to customise malware for each target.
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