Datameer isn’t the only company with an updated set of tools designed to bring Hadoop to the business masses: Karmasphere announced a new version of its eponymous Big Data platform June 11, with an emphasis on self-service analysis and data visualization. Hadoop is a framework for reliably running applications on large hardware clusters, and prized by many companies for its ability to scale from relatively few servers to thousands. Karmasphere 2.0 includes a Web-based social interface, which supposedly will allow workers to more easily collaborate over data. Its creators have apparently made it compatible with any Hadoop distribution; the platform also leverages Apache Hive, the Hadoop SQL standard. Analysis involves submitting Hive SQL queries natively against Big Data; workers can view data as an interactive table complete with filterable statistics and histograms. In a departure from similar releases, wherein the IT vendor tends to emphasize its tool’s supposed ease of use, Karmasphere is choosing to focus on the collaborative elements of its platform update. “For data-driven companies, finding and acting on Big Data Insights is about helping teams of people more effectively collaborate to discover, reuse and share their learnings and insights,” Gail Ennis, CEO of Karmasphere, wrote in a June 11 statement. “By working with companies who are at the forefront of Big Data Analytics,” she added, “it has become obvious that data scientists, analysts and business users all need to work together to leverage Big Data Insights that can make a real difference.” Datameer also chose June 11 as the date for rolling out the updates to its own data analytics platform. In addition to what the company calls a “simple spreadsheet interface” that leverages Hadoop for crunching data, Datameer 2.0 offers simultaneous data integration, dynamic data management, and self-service analytics; its newest supported data sources include Twitter, Facebook, COBOL, and Netezza. Individual features aside, the Datameer and Karmasphere releases illustrate the increasing importance of Hadoop to both IT vendors and companies with large amounts of data to digest. Indeed, third-party research firms see Hadoop as ripe for expansion. IDC predicts that revenues for Hadoop-MapReduce ecosystem software (MapReduce is another framework for processing problems across huge datasets and clusters of machines) will increase from $77 million in 2011 to $812.8 million in 2016. “Hadoop and MapReduce are taking the software world by storm, inspiring a wide range of products that collect both structured and unstructured data and producing output that may be used to answer a single question,” Carl Olofson, program vice president for IDC’s Information Management software research, wrote in a May 7 statement accompanying that revenue data. The software, he added, can also “serve as the foundation for a range of other questions, queries or searches.” But startups and midsize IT vendors aren’t the only companies looking to create B.I. tools that effectively leverage Hadoop; tech behemoths ranging from Dell to IBM are also integrating the framework into their own offerings—leading to that revenue uptick predicted by IDC, while making competition in the space that much fiercer.   Image: Karmasphere