April 2015 Oak Brook, IL
Today, software developer mrc announces Hadoop connectivity within m-Power. m-Power is a web application development platform that businesses use across their organizations. It creates web applications such as report-writing, Business Intelligence, executive dashboards, customer portals, and mobile applications to name a few.
What is Hadoop?
Hadoop is an open-source software framework for storing and processing large data sets. It stores data in a distributed fashion on clusters of commodity hardware, and is designed to scale up easily as needed. Hadoop helps businesses store and process massive amounts of data without purchasing expensive hardware.
Why use Hadoop?
Businesses now generate (or have access to) more data than ever before. While this data holds massive business potential, much of it goes unused. For example, businesses can use data found in:
- Software and web traffic logs: Business software generates massive amounts of data in the form of log files. These log files track everything about that software usage. Data in these log files could help businesses gain insights on application usage, web traffic trends, user behaviors, and much more.
- Machine sensors:As more hardware connects to the web, sensor data provides huge opportunities for real-time insights. For instance, location-tracking sensors help transportation companies track and analyze their fleets. Sensors are even making their way into homes and businesses, tracking energy usage, activity, and more. The data generated from these sensors can help businesses improve efficiency, cut costs, and more.
- Social sites and forums: Customers and prospects increasingly share opinions about companies across social sites and forums. Not only does this information highlight a company’s perception in the market, it can provide other valuable insights such as: problems with a product, features that customers want, and more.
Capturing this unused data is the first step in turning it into meaningful business insights. This is where Hadoop can help. Hadoop provides businesses with a scalable framework where they can store massive amounts of structured and unstructured data.
What does this enhancement offer?
Hadoop provides the framework to store and process data, but that data offers no value unless businesses can easily transform it into meaningful management information. This new enhancement gives businesses an easy way to solve this problem. Now, m-Power users can build applications over their Hadoop data. This lets businesses:
- Convert Hadoop data into meaningful management information:
m-Power lets users create all types of BI apps, reports, and dashboards without programming. With this enhancement, users can now easily analyze their Hadoop data in minutes. - Access Hadoop data in real-time:
Hadoop is optimized to handle large sets of data, but was designed as a batch-processing tool. It doesn’t lend itself to fast data analysis. This enhancement offers a solution to this problem—letting m-Power users build real-time applications over their Hadoop data. - Combine Hadoop data with other data sources:
While Hadoop stores both structured and unstructured data, it doesn’t replace a company’s transactional database. Since m-Power works with any database, it can create applications that combine data from both Hadoop and traditional databases. Merging this data together can help companies uncover new insights into their business.
"Many businesses are sitting on a goldmine of data that they never use," says Tyler Wassell, mrc's Manager of Software Development. "Those who start capturing this data in Hadoop, and converting it into usable information will gain a significant competitive advantage in the coming years."
In addition to this enhancement, mrc has also recently partnered with Splice Machine—creators of the only Hadoop RDBMS. Splice Machine combines the scalability of Hadoop with the features of an RDBMS. With the recent partnership, m-Power can now create real-time web applications over Splice Machine’s Hadoop RDBMS. This offers businesses yet another method to capitalize on the scalability of Hadoop.
###For additional information contact mrc via phone at 630.916.0662; via fax at 630.916.0663; via e-mail at mrc@mrc-productivity.com.
About mrc
mrc's development tool suite, m-Power, is used to create business applications and can run on any database or platform that supports Java (e.g. OS/400, Linux, Unix, and Windows). m-Power is used to create an endless variety of business web applications such as: Mobile apps, Web reports, dashboards, eCommerce apps, business intelligence, and more.
mrc was a recipient of the Apex Award for application development, is a long-time IBM Business Partner, and has been producing award-winning development software since 1981.