Enterprise search vendor Endeca has moved away from traditional search for several years, opting instead for applications built on top of the Endeca platform that address specific business needs. More recently they have moved toward business intelligence and to that end they announced this week integration of Apache Hadoop with their Endeca Latitude product.

Hadoop is an open source data processing tool that according to the Endeca release works particularly well with unstructured data. One of the advantages of working with Hadoop is that it offers what is essentially a fail-safe approach because if one server shuts down or just slows down, Hadoop compensates across the remaining servers and keeps running.

In fact, according to an explanation of Hadoop on the Cloudera website, this is one of the key strengths of the Hadoop approach. "Hadoop, in other words, is self-healing. It can deliver data--and can run large-scale, high-performance processing jobs--in spite of system changes or failures," the Cloudera post states.

This all comes together to provide a better environment for processing big data, something that according to Donald Feinberg, VP distinguished analyst at Gartner, is a growing concern at many organizations. "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," Feinberg said.

John Rueter, vice president of Latitude Marketing at Endeca says that adopters of Hadoop are learning how well it integrates large volumes of diverse data and content. He adds, "These organizations are augmenting this strategy with Endeca Latitude which empowers users to explore and analyze this data for daily decision making."

For more information:
- see the Endeca press release

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