AsterData still alive;/launches SQL-MapReduce Developer Portal

so apparantly ole client AsterData continues to thrive under gentle touch of Terrific Data

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Aster Data today launched the SQL-MapReduce Developer Portal, a new online community for data scientists and analytic developers. For your convenience, I copied the release below and it can also be found here. Please let me know if you have any questions or if there is anything else I can help you with.

Sara Korolevich

Point Communications Group for Aster Data

sarak@pointcgroup.com

Office: 602.279.1137

Mobile: 623.326.0881

Teradata Accelerates Big Data Analytics with First Collaborative Community for SQL-MapReduce®

New online community for data scientists and analytic developers enables development and sharing of powerful MapReduce analytics


San Carlos, California – Teradata Corporation (NYSE:TDC) today announced the launch of the Aster Data SQL-MapReduce® Developer Portal. This portal is the first collaborative online developer community for SQL-MapReduce analytics, an emerging framework for processing non-relational data and ultra-fast analytics.

“Aster Data continues to deliver on its unique vision for powerful analytics with a rich set of tools to make development of those analytics quick and easy,” said Tasso Argyros, vice president of Aster Data Marketing and Product Management, Teradata Corporation. “This new developer portal builds on Aster Data’s continuing SQL-MapReduce innovation, leveraging the flexibility and power of SQL-MapReduce for analytics that were previously impossible or impractical.”

The developer portal showcases the power and flexibility of Aster Data’s SQL-MapReduce – which uniquely combines standard SQL with the popular MapReduce distributed computing technology for processing big data – by providing a collaborative community for sharing SQL-MapReduce expert insights in addition to sharing SQL-MapReduce analytic functions and sample code. Data scientists, quantitative analysts, and developers can now leverage the experience, knowledge, and best practices of a community of experts to easily harness the power of SQL-MapReduce for big data analytics.

A recent report from IDC Research, “Taking Care of Your Quants: Focusing Data Warehousing Resources on Quantitative Analysts Matters,” has shown that by enabling data scientists with the tools to harness emerging types and sources of data, companies create significant competitive advantage and become leaders in their respective industry.

“The biggest positive differences among leaders and the rest come from the introduction of new types of data,” says Dan Vesset, program vice president, Business Analytics Solutions, IDC Research. “This may include either new transactional data sources or new external data feeds of transactional or multi-structured interactional data — the latter may include click stream or other data that is a by-product of social networking.”

Vesset goes on to say, “Aster Data provides a comprehensive platform for analytics and their SQL-MapReduce Developer Portal provides a community for sharing best practices and functions which can have an even greater impact to an organization’s business.”

With this announcement Aster Data extends its industry leadership in delivering the most comprehensive analytic platform for big data analytics — not only capable of processing massive volumes of multi-structured data, but also providing an extensive set of tools and capabilities that make it simple to leverage the power of MapReduce analytics. The Aster Data

SQL-MapReduce Developer Portal brings the power of SQL-MapReduce accessible to data scientists, quantitative analysis, and analytic developers by making it easy to share and collaborate with experts in developing SQL-MapReduce analytics. This portal builds on Aster Data’s history of SQL-MapReduce innovations, including:

  • The first deep integration of SQL with MapReduce
  • The first MapReduce support for .NET
  • The first integrated development environment, Aster Data
    Developer Express
  • A comprehensive suite of analytic functions, Aster Data
    Analytic Foundation

Aster Data’s patent-pending SQL-MapReduce enables analytic applications and functions that can deliver faster, deeper insights on terabytes to petabytes of data. These applications are implemented using MapReduce but delivered through standard SQL and business intelligence (BI) tools.

SQL-MapReduce makes it possible for data scientists and developers to empower business analysts with the ability to make informed decisions, incorporating vast amounts of data, regardless of query complexity or data type. Aster Data customers are using SQL-MapReduce for rich analytics including analytic applications for social network analysis, digital marketing optimization, and on-the-fly fraud detection and prevention.

“Collaboration is at the core of our success as one of the leading providers, and pioneers of social software,” said Navdeep Alam, director of Data Architecture at Mzinga. “We are pleased to be one of the early members of The Aster Data SQL-MapReduce Developer Portal, which will allow us the ability to share and leverage insights with others in using big data analytics to attain a deeper understanding of customers’ behavior and create competitive advantage for our business.”

SQL-MapReduce is one of the core capabilities within Aster Data’s flagship product. Aster DatanCluster™ 4.6, the industry’s first massively parallel processing (MPP) analytic platform has an integrated analytics engine that stores and processes both relational and non-relational data at scale. With Aster Data’s unique analytics framework that supports both SQL and
SQL-MapReduce™, customers benefit from rich, new analytics on large data volumes with complex data types. Aster Data analytic functions are embedded within the analytic platform and processed locally with data, which allows for faster data exploration. The SQL-MapReduce framework provides scalable fault-tolerance for new analytics, providing users with superior reliability, regardless of number of users, query size, or data types.


About Aster Data
Aster Data is a market leader in big data analytics, enabling the powerful combination of cost-effective storage and ultra-fast analysis of new sources and types of data. The Aster Data nCluster analytic platform is a massively parallel software solution that embeds MapReduce analytic processing with data stores for deeper insights on new data sources and types to deliver new analytic capabilities with breakthrough performance and scalability. Aster Data’s solution utilizes Aster Data’s patent-pending SQL-MapReduce to parallelize processing of data and applications and deliver rich analytic insights at scale. Companies including Barnes & Noble, Intuit, LinkedIn, Akamai, and MySpace use Aster Data to deliver applications such as digital marketing optimization, social network and relationship analysis, and fraud detection and prevention.


About Teradata
Teradata is the world’s leader in data warehousing and integrated marketing management through itsdatabase softwaredata warehouse appliances, and enterprise analytics. For more information, visitteradata.com.

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Teradata is a trademark or registered trademark of Teradata Corporation in the United States and other countries.

Aster Data hires Quentin Gallivan as CEO

AsterData formally marked phase 2 of it’s rapid growth story by getting as new CEO Quentin Gallivan (of Postini before it was sold to Google and also Pivotlink).

Founders (and Stanfordians) Mayan Bawa stays as Chief Customer Officer and Tasso Argyros as CTO. It has a very deja vu feel -like Eric Schmidt coming in CEO of Google in the glory days past.  Indeed the investment team in Google and AsterData is quite similar and so are the backgrounds of the founders.

AsterData of course creates the leading MapReduce (also created by Google) solution for providing BI infrastructure for big data and has been rapidly been expanding into new frontiers for Big Data.

Aster Data Appoints New Chief Executive Officer

Quentin Gallivan Joins Aster Data as CEO to Lead Company to Next Level of Growth

San Carlos, CA – September 9, 2010– Aster Data, a proven leader dedicated to providing the best data management and data processing platform for big data management and analytics, today announced the appointment of Quentin Gallivan as President and CEO. Gallivan brings more than 20 years of senior executive experience to the leading analytics and database company. With Aster Data achieving tremendous growth in the past year, Gallivan will take Aster Data to the next level, further accelerating its market leadership, sales, channel partnerships and international expansion.  Founding CEO Mayank Bawa, who grew the company from its inception based on the founders’ research at Stanford University, and whose passion for helping customers uniquely unlock the value of their data, will take on the role of Chief Customer Officer.  Bawa, in his new role, will lead the Company’s organization devoted to ensuring the success, longevity and innovation of its fast-growing customer base. Together, Gallivan and Bawa, along with co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Tasso Argyros, will deliver on the the Company’s mission to help customers discover more value from their data, achieve deep insights through rich analytics and do more with their massive data volumes than has ever been possible.

Gallivan joins Aster Data with over 20 years of leadership experience in the high-tech industry and has held a variety of CEO and senior executive positions with leading technology companies. Before joining Aster Data, Gallivan served as CEO at PivotLink, the leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions delivered via Software as a Service (SaaS), where he rapidly grew the company to over 15,000 business users, from mid-sized companies to Fortune 1000 companies, across key industries including financial services, retail, CPG manufacturing and high technology. Prior to Pivotlink, Gallivan served as CEO of Postini where he scaled the company to 35,000 customers and over 10 million users until its eventual acquisition by Google in 2007.  Gallivan also served as executive vice president of worldwide sales and services at VeriSign where he was instrumental in growing the business from $20 million to $1.2 billion and was responsible for the design and execution of the global distribution strategy for the company’s security and services business. Gallivan also held a number of key executive and leadership positions at Netscape Communications and GE Information Services.

“We are delighted to have someone of Quentin’s caliber, who is a veteran of both emerging and established technology companies, lead Aster Data through our next stage of growth,” said Mayank Bawa, Chief Customer Officer and co-founder, Aster Data. “His significant experience around growing organizations and driving operational excellence will be invaluable as he takes Aster Data forward. I’m excited to shift my focus to customers and their success; to bring our innovations to our customers worldwide to help them unlock deep value from their growing data volumes.”

“I am very excited to be joining Aster Data and taking on the challenge of augmenting its already impressive level of growth and success.  Aster Data is very well respected and established in the marketplace, has an enviable solution for big data management that uniquely addresses both big data storage and data processing, an impressive client list and a very talented team,” said Quentin Gallivan, President and CEO, Aster Data. “My task will be to leverage these assets, help shape a new market and provide operational guidance and strategic direction to drive even greater value for shareholders, customers and employees alike.”

MapReduce Analytics Apps- AsterData's Developer Express Plugin

AsterData continues to wow with it’s efforts on bridging MapReduce and Analytics, with it’s new Developer Express plug-in for Eclipse. As any Eclipse user knows, that greatly improves ability to write code or develop ( similar to creating Android apps if you have tried to). I did my winter internship at AsterData last December last year in San Carlos, and its an amazing place with giga-level bright people.

Here are some details ( Note I plan to play a bit more on the plugin on my currently downUbuntu on this and let you know)

http://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/aster-data-developer-express-plug-eclipse

Aster Data Developer Express provides an integrated set of tools for development of SQL and MapReduce analytics for Aster Data nCluster, a massively parallel database with an integrated analytics engine.

The Aster Data Developer Express plug-in for Eclipse enables developers to easily create new analytic application projects with the help of an intuitive set of wizards, immediately test their applications on their desktop, and push down their applications into the nCluster database with a single click.

Using Developer Express, analysts can significantly reduce the complexity and time needed to create advanced analytic applications so that they can more rapidly deliver deeper and richer analytic insights from their data.

and from the Press Release

Now, any developer or analyst that is familiar with the Java programming language can complete a rich analytic application in under an hour using the simple yet powerful Aster Data Developer Express environment in Eclipse. Aster Data Developer Express delivers both rapid development and local testing of advanced analytic applications for any project, regardless of size.

The free, downloadable Aster Data Developer Express IDE now brings the power of SQL-MapReduce to any organization that is looking to build richer analytic applications that can leverage massive data volumes. Much of the MapReduce coding, including programming concepts like parallelization and distributed data analysis, is addressed by the IDE without the developer or analyst needing to have expertise in these areas. This simplification makes it much easier for developers to be successful quickly and eliminates the need for them to have any deep knowledge of the MapReduce parallel processing framework. Google first published MapReduce in 2004 for parallel processing of big data sets. Aster Data has coupled SQL with MapReduce and brought SQL-MapReduce to market, making it significantly easier for any organization to leverage the power of MapReduce. The Aster Developer Express IDE simplifies application development even further with an intuitive point-and-click development environment that speeds development of rich analytic applications. Applications can be validated locally on the desktop or ultimately within Aster Data nCluster, a massive parallel processing (MPP) database with a fully integrated analytics engine that is powered by MapReduce—known as a data-analytics server.

Rich analytic applications that can be easily built with Aster Data’s downloadable IDE include:

Iterative Analytics: Uncovering critical business patterns in your data requires hypothesis-driven, iterative analysis.  This class of applications is defined by the exploratory navigation of massive volumes of data in a top-down, deductive manner.  Aster Data’s IDE makes this easy to develop and to validate the algorithms and functions required to deliver these advanced analytic applications.

Prediction and Optimization: For this class of applications, the process is inductive. Rather than starting with a hypothesis, developers and analysts can easily build analytic applications that discover the trends, patterns, and outliers in data sets.  Examples include propensity to churn in telecommunications, proactive product and service recommendations in retail, and pricing and retention strategies in financial services.

Ad Hoc Analysis: Examples of ad hoc analysis that can be performed includes social network analysis, advanced click stream analysis, graph analysis, cluster analysis, and a wide variety of mathematical, trigonometry, and statistical functions.

“Aster Data’s IDE and SQL-MapReduce significantly eases development of advanced analytic applications on big data. We have now built over 350 analytic functions in SQL-MapReduce on Aster Data nCluster that are available for customers to purchase,” said Partha Sen, CEO and Founder of Fuzzy Logix. “Aster Data’s implementation of MapReduce with SQL-MapReduce goes beyond the capabilities of general analytic development APIs and provides us with the excellent control and flexibility needed to implement even the most complex analytic algorithms.”

Richer analytics on big data volumes is the new competitive frontier. Organizations have always generated reports to guide their decision-making. Although reports are important, they are historical sets of information generally arranged around predefined metrics and generated on a periodic basis.

Advanced analytics begins where reporting leaves off. Reporting often answers historical questions such as “what happened?” However, analytics addresses “why it happened” and, increasingly, “what will happen next?” To that end, solutions like Aster Data Developer Express ease the development of powerful ad hoc, predictive analytics and enables analysts to quickly and deeply explore terabytes to petabytes of data.
“We are in the midst of a new age in analytics. Organizations today can harness the power of big data regardless of scale or complexity”, said Don Watters, Chief Data Architect for MySpace. “Solutions like the Aster Data Developer Express visual development environment make it even easier by enabling us to automate aspects of development that currently take days, allowing us to build rich analytic applications significantly faster. Making Developer Express openly available for download opens the power of MapReduce to a broader audience, making big data analytics much faster and easier than ever before.”

“Our delivery of SQL coupled with MapReduce has clearly made it easier for customers to build highly advanced analytic applications that leverage the power of MapReduce. The visual IDE, Aster Data Developer Express, introduced earlier this year, made application development even easier and the great response we have had to it has driven us to make this open and freely available to any organization looking to build rich analytic applications,” said Tasso Argyros, Founder and CTO, Aster Data. “We are excited about today’s announcement as it allows companies of all sizes who need richer analytics to easily build powerful analytic applications and experience the power of MapReduce without having to learn any new skills.”

You can have a look here at http://www.asterdata.com/download_developer_express/

Advanced Analytics on Multi-Terabyte Datasets- Conferences

Some news on Data Mining 2009 by Aster Data –

SAS and Aster Data to Present “Advanced Analytics on Multi-Terabyte Datasets” at M2009 in Las Vegas – Oct. 26-27
Learn how the tight coupling of SQL and MapReduce provided by Aster Data creates new ‘big data’ analytics opportunities when combined with SAS. Aster Data will exhibit throughout the event.
More

And also a nice  webcast by Curt Monash on the same Big Data topic-

Mastering MapReduce Webinar Series, Session 1
“Big Data Reality: The Role of MapReduce in Big Data Management and Analysis”- Oct. 15
Industry analyst Curt Monash explains the basics of MapReduce, key uses cases, and which industries and applications are heavily using MapReduce. Topics include recommendations for integrating MapReduce in an enterprise business intelligence and data warehousing environment.
More

Also,

Here is a brief synopsis on the Aster Data ( http://www.facebook.com/pages/Aster-Data-Systems/5601042375) Sponsored Big Data Summit  ( http://www.facebook.com/pages/Big-Data-Summit/143312171156 )which I attended-

  • A Plan for Large Scale Data Analytics: How to Utilize Aster nCluster and Hadoop in a Symbiotic
    Relationship to Support Processing in Excess of 100 Billion Rows Per Month
    – Michael Brown and Will Duckworth
    (EVP, Software Engineering, comScore, Inc. and Director, Software Engineering, comScore, Inc.)

This talked of the special needs of Com Score in handling big data and why Map Reduce and Hadoop seem to be the cost effective solutions for big big data while RDBMS seems stuck in the middle of middle data. Broadly informative on the statistical challenges of the future given the explosion of data as well.

  • Making Sense of Hadoop – Its Fit With Data Warehouses – Colin White
    (President and Founder of BI Research)

Colin brought a nice perspective on the open source Hadoop vis a vis the Properietary packages and the traditional DBMS. His perspective on the solution is no software is perfect for all needs while all softwares that sell have their own good points while the converging solution could be a heterogeneous solution of the above.

  • MapReduce Inside a Database System – When and How Case Studies from ShareThis, Specific Media, and Other – Tasso Argyros (Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of Aster Data)

This was a more detailed look at the Big Product Launch ( the Hadoop Connector) by Tasso and an interesting look at time series analysis using nPath rather than SQL . Interesting given the ongoing convergence analytics and business intelligence.

Also Tasso lived up to his presenting charm with an excellent pitch on nPath (as his interview said ).

  • Large-Scale Analytics at LinkedIn – Jonathan Goldman
    (Former Principal Scientist at LinkedIn)

This was nice given Jonathan’s perscpective ( he has Phd In Physics) and now does consulting for LinkedIn while maintaining his interests in education- the special needs for social media websites, designing experiments on the fly with huge real time datasets as well as some interesting visualizations (like India and America have the second biggest cross country Li connections after USA- UK. Apparently Linkedin ( http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2211231478 ) does not sound so good when translated in Chinese ( AT Dinner I learnt from a fellow Chinese student that China censors Facebook – sigh!).

  • Networking Mixer: Beer, wine, hot hors d’oeuvres

I got interviewed ( AFTER) I had mixed some Beer and Wine for myself. The Video interview which was the first video interview I have given ( You know- I have taken SOME interviews by Email and plan to do some more while in Vegas for the Data Mining 2009  with SAS http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2227381262)

They are still editing that interview 😉

—That was all – you need to send me a Facebook invite to see the rest of the NY trip or better still just join the Facebook page of Decision Stats at

http://www.facebook.com/pages/DecisionStats/191421035186

After two weeks I hope to have some more coverage on Data Mining 2009 while at the same time enjoying my much needed Fall Break-  Life at University at Tennessee is looking up ( since we beat Georgia 45-19 🙂 )

r*xE5HeUJa(%

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