Guest Blog by Jack Norris

Jack is responsible for worldwide marketing for MapR Technologies, the leading provider of a enterprise grade Hadoop platform. He has over 20 years of enterprise software marketing experience and has demonstrated success from defining new markets for small companies to increasing sales of new products for large public companies.Jack's broad experience includes launching and establishing analytic, virtualization, and storage companies and leading marketing and business development for an early-stage cloud storage software provider.

Big Data use cases are changing the competitive dynamics for organizations with a range of operational use cases. Operational intelligence refers to applications that combine real-time, dynamic, analytics that deliver insights to business operations. Operational intelligence requires high performance. "Performance" is a word that is used quite liberally and means different things to different people. Everyone wants something faster. When was the last time you said, "No, give me the slow one"?

When it comes to operations, performance is about the ability to take advantage of market opportunities as they arise. To do this requires the ability to quickly monitor what is happening. It requires both real-time data feeds and the ability to quickly react. The beauty of Apache Hadoop, and specifically MapR's platform, is that data can be ingested as a real-time stream; analysis can be performed directly on the data, and automated responses can be executed. This is true for a range of applications across organizations, from advertising platforms, to on-line retail recommendation engines, to fraud and security detection.

When looking at harnessing Big Data, organizations need to realize that multiple applications will need to be supported. Regardless of which application you introduce first, more will quickly follow. Not all Hadoop distributions are created equal. Or more precisely, most Hadoop distributions are very similar with only minor value-added services separating them. The exception is MapR. With the best of the Hadoop community updates coupled with MapR's innovations, the broadest set of applications can be supported including mission-critical applications that require a depth and breadth of enterprise-grade Hadoop features.

With multiple applications comes the need to run complex workloads and coordinate all data flows across these applications. Event-driven, enterprise-ready, workload automation are an important part of the entire solution and MapR is working closely with Cisco on a number of fronts including the Cisco Tidal Enterprise Scheduler (TES). TES ensures peak workload performance, efficiency, and scalability across enterprise environments through a single pane of glass that controls automated Hadoop workloads. The powerful and cost-effective Cisco Unified Computing System C-Series Rack Servers are increasingly being deployed in our customer's data centers. As you look at your organization identify where to start but realize that it's a journey.

Do you plan on attending Informatica World next week, June 4-7? If so, you don't want to miss the Andrew Blaisdell's presentation on Integrating Informatica and Hadoop for Seamless BI Data Extraction. Thursday, June 6 from 9:00 - 10:00 am.

Abstract:
The Cisco Tidal Enterprise Scheduler (TES) Informatica Adapter is a critical part of Cisco Customer Value Chain IT's integrated workflow. Connecting ERP data sources with Informatica's data transformation capabilities for Hadoop consumption and extraction to Teradata, with output to Tableau BI, Cisco has created a high performance data-mining engine that has delivered immediate ROI through closed sales opportunities.

In this session, you will learn:

• How Cisco IT is easily solving the Big Data dilemma by using a single pane of glass to develop and run automated Hadoop workloads
• How to use the Cisco TES API integrations and standards-based controls to create event-based data mining techniques
• How Cisco's best practices for Hadoop architecture achieve immediate ROI and lowers the cost of managing Big Data mining environments

You can also visit the Cisco booth at Informatica World to see a demo of the Cisco Tidal Enterprise Scheduler and MapR.

See you at the show!