IBM BigInsights Basic Plan Ready for a Successful Journey

It seems to me that more and more companies are adding Apache Hadoop to their mix of technologies in attempts to spend less time in the creation of an Hadoop infrastructure and focus more on gaining the benefits. IBM BigInsights (our implementation of Hadoop) is ready to take on that challenge. It provides a complete solution that is not only open and combines Hadoop and Spark, but also provides the right tools to help make Big Data easier and more scalable, while integrating it seamlessly with SQL, noSQL and other data types.

Community and customer feedback has been consistent: increasing demands for elasticity, automation and ‘pay as you go’ resulting in a shift in the market towards Hadoop in the cloud. Even large enterprises that successfully run Hadoop on-premise are seeing the cloud as a strategic platform that can help support their Big Data needs. They are looking for a broad range of cloud services and a well-integrated portfolio that helps enable them to have an enterprise-ready solution for their business critical applications.

IBM as a leader is ready for the challenge. BigInsights is IBM’s premier Big Data cloud solution par excellence. It offers customers an opportunity to deliver next-generation insights both quickly and economically. The Hadoop Cloud market appears to be gaining momentum across many industries[1] But prospects become even better when we consider that more and more customers are moving away from an “on-premise only” model and are looking out for a cloud solution that fits their needs. According to a recent Forrester Business Technographics® survey, 51% of companies plan to increase their spending on data management in the public cloud. IBM BigInsights is planning to answer the need with solutions in both ‘pay as you go’ model and a dedicated, subscription based model.

The Forrester Wave report, Big Data Hadoop Cloud Solutions (Q2 2016) [1], evaluated 8 Hadoop cloud vendors based on 37 criteria. Among the eight, IBM was identified as a leader (click to read full report).

I believe the results confirm IBM’s claim of the solidity of the BigInsights offering. In the evaluation of different Big Data Hadoop cloud vendors, out of 8 IBM received top scores in 5 current offering criteria, namely: solution configuration, data security, data management, development, cloud platform integration. Similarly in the strategy category, IBM received top scores in 4 of 6 criteria, those being: ability to execute, road map, professional services, fixes.

But that’s not where the road stops. BigInsights has now released (beta) the Basic plan, a solution where you pay for the cloud services as you use them. No commitments, no other contracts, just plain Big Data cloud services as needed. The beta version is already showing some impressive results. Based on the usage of 390 users, the add-node action was 100% successful and the cluster creation 99.99%. Average deployment time varied between 6 and 12 minutes. In other words, a very positive start.

The big data shift towards cloud is undoubtedly a great opportunity for IBM. As a ‘more-than-just Hadoop’ Service solution, BigInsights stands out as an end-to-end analytical cloud platform and enables companies to adopt enterprise-scale / scale-out workloads and performance much more effectively. I believe such a robust Hadoop offering can truly help customers address their most business critical business needs.

Dinesh Nirmal – Vice President, IBM Analytics Development

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[1] The Forrester Wave: Big Data Hadoop Cloud Solutions, Q2 2016, N. Yuhanna and M. Gualtieri, Forrester Research, Inc., April 22, 2016.