AtScale Advances its BI and Hadoop Strategy

As it began to develop, the Big Data trend--sorting and sifting large data sets with new tools in pursuit of surfacing meaningful angles on stored information--remained an enterprise-only story, but now businesses of all sizes are evaluating tools that can help them glean meaningful insights from the data they store. As we've noted, the open source Hadoop project has been one of the big drivers of this trend, and has given rise to commercial companies that offer custom Hadoop distributions, support, training and more.

A few months ago, startup company AtScale came out of stealth mode, showing off its tools for making data stored in Hadoop's file system accessible within Business Intelligence (BI) applications. Then, the company has announced that it will offer a universal business interface to Hadoop for all BI tools. At this week's Strata + Hadoop World 2016 conference, the company is announcing the release of AtScale Intelligence Platform 4. It is targeted at enterprises looking to link their Hadoop clusters with their business intelligence (BI) tools.

"With the release of Version 4.0, AtScale offers the most comprehensive security controls available in the BI-on-Hadoop category,” said Josh Klahr, Vice President of Product Management, AtScale. “Enterprises attempting to turn Hadoop into a true analytical data warehouse face lagging query performance, security issues and a frustrating experience for business users. With this release, AtScale eradicates these issues and provides a seamless and secure experience that is second to none.”

AtScale leverages what are called True Delegation capabilities to ensure that every query executed on the Hadoop cluster is associated with the end-user who generated the query and satisfies data governance and access auditing policies.   The platform works with Apache Sentry, Apache Ranger and fully supports LDAP, Active Directory, and Kerberos.

According to AtScale, the average enterprise has 5 to 10 different Business Intelligence tools, from Tableau to Microsoft Excel to MicroStrategy.  Each tool requires its own query language: Tableau prefers SQL; Excel requires MDX.  This makes it complicated for IT to support the many use cases spread across a company’s departments and their tools of preference, should they require MDX or SQL.

"Our benchmark research shows that business intelligence tools are the most common technology for big data analytics,” said David Menninger, SVP & Research Director, Ventana Research.“Platforms that enable utilization of these tools with Hadoop, such as AtScale, allow organizations to operate in their preferred environment as they seek to extract value from their big data sources.”

To find out more about AtScale 4.0, its Hybrid Query Service and Universal Semantic Layer, you can go to www.atscale.com/try