Massive IT services provider CSC has 87,000 employees and one chimp.
That's after CSC, a company that pulls in $13.8 billion in revenue a year, acquired big data platform-as-a-service (do we call this BPaaS?) vendor Infochimps.
Infochimps has a decidedly open source and a markedly cloud approach to big data, which fits the service strategy of CSC to a T.
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The Infochimps technology and its people will boost CSC’s big data business.
The Infochimps Cloud for Big Data has three main components: batch Hadoop, streaming and real-time processing, and the ability to run ad hoc queries with these analytics leading to actions and decisions.
“CSC’s customers are looking for both deep analytics and real-time correlation through a pre-integrated cloud platform,” said Dan Hushon, CSC's chief technology officer. “The joint CSC-Infochimps capabilities give our customers the ability to provision their analytic platform, point their data streams and deliver new industry insights.”
Big Data as a Service
CSC may be big, but it has big competition in big data. Don’t forget, Amazon AWS includes a big data service. “Amazon Elastic MapReduce provides a managed, easy to use analytics platform built around the powerful Hadoop framework. Focus on your map/reduce queries and take advantage of the broad ecosystem of Hadoop tools, while deploying to a high scale, secure infrastructure platform,” Amazon explained.
Even if CCS can handle Amazon, there is another giant in the field – Microsoft. Windows Azure HDInsight is “a Big Data solution powered by Apache Hadoop. Surface those insights from all types of data to business users through Microsoft Excel,” said Microsoft of its Excel-centric approach.
There are other superpowers in this market including EMC and HP.
Big data needs big and fast infrastructure, and if you use in-memory processing the servers can be terribly expensive. That makes the services approach attractive. And once your data is in the cloud there shouldn’t be that much that has to traverse the WAN so the performance is adequate and you shouldn’t need a WAN forklift upgrade.
Market Forces
One reason so many major players are playing in big data? Big money. IDC says “the worldwide big data technology and services market will grow at a 31.7 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) – about seven times the rate of the overall information and communication technology (ICT) market – with revenues reaching $23.8 billion in 2016.”
“The big data market is expanding rapidly as large IT companies and startups vie for customers and market share, providing technology buyers with more opportunities to use big data technology to improve operational efficiency and to drive innovation. Additionally, major IT vendors are increasingly offering both database solutions and configurations supporting big data by evolving their own products as well as by acquisition,” the research house wrote.
This last point is clearly underscored by the Infochimps acquisition.
Edited by
Alisen Downey
