Cloudera founder Christophe Bisciglia launched a new company today called Odiago, whose WibiData product utilizes Hadoop and HBase to let businesses make the most of online user data. The details around investors (Eric Schmidt, Mike Olson and SV Angel) and Bisciglia’s history at Cloudera and Google (s goog) have made the rounds already, but what’s not as widely known is how WibiData actually works.
Database industry analyst Curt Monash delved into that issue on his DBMS2 blog, explaining how WibiData does what it does. Here’s how Monash describes the essence of WibiData:
WibiData is designed for management of, investigative analytics on, and operational analytics on consumer internet data, the main examples of which are web site traffic and personalization and their analogues for games and/or mobile devices. The core WibiData technology, built on HBase and Hadoop,* is a data management and analytic execution layer. That’s where the secret sauce resides. Also included are:
- REST APIs for interactive access.
- Import/export tools, including JDBC access.
- Management tools.
- Analytic libraries — data mining, predictive analytics, machine learning, and so on.
The whole thing is in beta, with about three (paying) beta customers.
*And Avro and so on.
Monash goes on to explain the pros and cons of Odiago’s enhanced version of HBase, the increasingly popular open source database built atop the Hadoop Distributed File System.
When you peel back the covers as Monash has done, you can see the future of Hadoop-based products. Whereas early adopters of Hadoop had to craft their own strategies to make Hadoop and its related projects work for their needs, future adopters will be able to license products that take care of that heavy lifting. Most likely, these new products will continue to come from guys like Bisciglia and Ben Werther (who just launched the Hadoop-based Platfora) who understand the nuts and bolts of the Hadoop and can tune it to address specific applications.
