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Platfora Further Democratizes Big Data Discovery

Platfora_LogoPlatfora, the Big Data Discovery platform built natively on Apache Hadoop and Spark, announced the general availability of Platfora 5.2. The new release democratizes big data across an organization, moving it beyond IT and early adopters by enabling business users to explore big data and discover new insights through their favorite business intelligence (BI) tool.  With its flexible, open platform, Platfora makes it easy for customers to maximize and extend existing IT investments while getting measurable value out of big data. Platfora 5.2 features native integration to Tableau, Lens-Accelerated SQL accessible through any SQL client, and the option to run directly on the Hadoop cluster using YARN.

Achieving value from big data implementations has been elusive for enterprises, and connecting traditional BI tools to Hadoop data lakes has been a difficult, slow process, with many organizations doing far more work with virtually no new answers to show for it. Platfora’s Big Data Discovery platform enables citizen data scientists to conduct self-service data preparation, visual analysis, and behavioral analytics in a single platform. With this release, Platfora puts all this smart data and analysis in the hands of any business user leveraging any BI tool, so they can ask and answer the important questions for their business, like customer behavior and segmentation. Platfora provides the tools and tight iterative discovery loop to make new insights possible in a matter of minutes to hours, rather than the days or weeks it could take using an alternative solution.

Getting value out of big data is more than just slicing and dicing billions of records and it can’t only be the domain of a data scientist. It requires discovering what you have and getting the data ready for analysis to use without boundaries,” said Peter Schlampp, VP of Products, Platfora. “We are dedicated to providing flexible, open tools that can address modern data challenges, and Platfora 5.2 opens up the transformative power of big data to business users by enabling them to use the BI tools they know and love, further empowering ‘citizen data scientists’ across enterprises.”

Platfora cohort analysis

Platfora cohort analysis

Platfora Big Data Discovery 5.2 includes a variety of new features and technical enhancements that make make it possible for both business and technical users to easily integrate with their favorite tools, including:

  • Native Tableau Integration: Directly export prepared and enriched data in TDE format to Tableau Desktop or schedule data pushes automatically to Tableau Server.

  • Lens-Accelerated SQL: Platfora lenses make access to petabyte-scale data 100s to 1000s of times faster than querying the data directly. Now any BI tool can query lenses live via SparkSQL and ODBC, opening big data to any business user. Compared to standalone SQL accelerators for Hadoop, Platfora’s lenses are more scalable, easier to maintain and manage, and enterprise-ready.

  • Run on Hadoop Cluster: With the development and maturity of the YARN resource manager for Hadoop, it is now possible to run Platfora directly on the Hadoop cluster or in the traditional dedicated configuration. IT departments can take advantage of existing hardware investments and repurpose computing resources on-demand.

  • Enhanced Vizboards™: The easiest and best way to visualize data gets better in Platfora 5.2 with responsive layout, smarter default visualizations and more consistent use of color.

Big data discovery will help advance the analytics maturity of the organization, will start training some of the future data scientists, can provide the first batch of insights that may raise awareness to new opportunities and may provide enough return on investment to justify the business case for big data analytics,” said Joao Tapadinhas, Research Director, Gartner. “It is the missing link that will make big data go mainstream.”

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Source: insideBigData