IBM will wade even further into the unstructured data analytics market, offering its Hadoop-based InfoSphere BigInsights tool as service atop the IBM SmartCloud platform, the company announced today at its Business Analytics Forum today in Las Vegas.
The computing giant will offer a basic, free version of the new tool as well as an for-pay enterprise-level service. IBM says anyone can start using the service "in under 30 minutes" to analyze unstructured data such as tweets, videos, log files and even the weather data, in addition to standard structured data such as revenue forecasts.
"This will change more than one market, this will change business," David Barnes, IBM's director of emerging technologies, told Wired. "The whole web is your data."
Today's announcement comes on the heels of IBM's acquisition of Platform Computing, an analytics firm that specializes in Hadoop, and the release of several other Big Blue analytics tools. Over the last five years, the company has spent over $14 billion acquiring outfits that specialize in analytics.
IBM is one of many big names that have recently embraced Hadoop, an open source distributed number-crunching platform originally developed at Yahoo. Oracle said at its OpenWorld conference earlier this month that it would offer Hadoop with its new Big Data Appliance, and Microsoft recently announced that it will integrate Hadoop with future versions of its relational database, SQL Server, and its platform-as-a-service offering, Windows Azure.
Named after a stuffed elephant that belonged to the son of its founder, Hadoop already underpins the back-ends of such internet giants as eBay, Twitter, Yahoo!, and Facebook.
