Endeca Buy Boosts Oracle’s Big Data Management

In a blog post, Forrester analyst Boris Evelson, said of the Oracle/Endeca deal: “This is a very smart move by Oracle. Until the Siebel and Hyperion acquisitions, Oracle was not a leader in the BI and analytics space. Those acquisitions put them squarely in the top 3 spot (together with IBM and SAP).

“However, until this morning Oracle played mostly in the traditional BI space: reporting, querying and analytics based on relational databases. But these mainstream relational databases are an awkward fit for BI. You can use them, but it requires lots of tuning and customisation and constant optimisation  –  which is difficult, time-consuming and costly,” he said.

Oracle’s acquisition of Endeca is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close before the end of 2011. Until the deal closes, each company will continue to operate independently.

Weblogs, social media feeds, smart meters, sensors and other devices generate massive volumes of data  –  commonly defined as Big Data  –  that is not readily accessible in enterprise data warehouses and business intelligence applications today.

Facing new data challenges

Oracle’s Big Data Appliance includes an open-source distribution of Apache Hadoop, Oracle NoSQL Database, Oracle Data Integrator with Application Adapter for Hadoop, Oracle Loader for Hadoop, an open-source distribution of R, Oracle Linux and Oracle Java HotSpot Virtual Machine.

“With the explosion of data in the past decade, including more machine-generated data and social data, companies are faced with the challenge of acquiring, organising and analysing this data to make better business decisions, said Andrew Mendelsohn, senior vice president of Oracle Server Technologies, in a statement. “New technologies, such as Hadoop, offer some relief, but don’t provide a holistic solution for customers’ Big Data needs.”

In August 2011, Endeca announced native integration of Endeca Latitude with Apache Hadoop. By uniting the reach and agility of Endeca Latitude with the power of Apache Hadoop, agility is achieved for both business and IT, Endeca officials said.

Endeca Latitude, based on the Endeca MDEX hybrid search-analytical database, helps unlock the power of Apache Hadoop. Apache Hadoop is adept at manipulating semi-structured data, which is a challenge for traditional relational databases. Thus the combination of Endeca Latitude and Hadoop provides flexibility and agility in combining diverse and changing data, as well as superior performance in analysing that data.

Not just a buzzword

“Big data isn’t just a buzzword, but a legitimate concern for many organisations, across all sectors,” said Donald Feinberg, a Gartner analyst, in a statement following Endeca’s Hadoop announcement. “There is great interest in the tools to take advantage of a greater opportunity for analysis of all this data because it enables IT leaders not only to focus on the issue of volume, but also the important demands of data velocity, variety and complexity.”

Meanwhile, some players in the Big Data and NoSQL space have criticised Oracle for its move in Big Data. One such competitor, Couchbase, voiced its concerns to eWEEK.

“Oracle has historically been cautious about touting new technologies that could be viewed as disruptive to their core business model,” said James Phillips, co-founder and senior vice president of products at Couchbase. “The unveiling of their NoSQL and Big Data technology indicates that Oracle is now validating what we at Couchbase have long accepted as the new market reality: there is a fundamental shift in how modern applications are being built, and what those applications need from a data management system.

“Customers are investing time and money across the ‘big three’ themes in data management – Big Data, NoSQL and mobile – and Oracle clearly doesn’t want to miss yet another market shift,” he added.

Bob Wiederhold, CEO of Couchbase, said: “To date, Oracle has told their customers that NoSQL is useless or, at best, should be used only for a very limited set of use cases. Despite this, over the past two years, we are unaware of a single, internet application for which Oracle was picked as the database.

“If Oracle is now ready to join the party on the scalability, performance, and data-model-flexibility advantages of NoSQL, we welcome them. We know firsthand that NoSQL is a huge market opportunity, and Oracle would be missing the boat on a major disruptive force in the database market were they to ignore it,” he commented.