Real-Time Analytics: Ready For Its Close-Up?

One of the knocks against Apache Hadoop has been that it was built as a batch processing system and hence is no good for real-time data analytics. Hadoop 2.0 promises a lot of improvement in this area, however. Its YARN resource management layer, for instance, offers better support for stream-processing platforms such as Storm, which recently became an Apache open-source project. Hadoop's shortcomings have also created an opportunity for stream-processing technology providers, which have been busy partnering up with Hadoop vendors.

A growing number of companies are entering the real-time, stream-processing space, including Vitria, a 20-year-old Silicon Valley firm. According to Vitria co-founder and chief technical officer Dr. Dale Skeen, the market for continuous, real-time analysis is quickly evolving from "visionary" early adopters to more mainstream use.

"We're seeing the transition into what I would call the early majority market of this new technique," Dr. Skeen said in a phone interview with InformationWeek.

Skeen knows the big-data market well. He cofounded Vitria with Dr. JoMei Chang in 1994, and has more than 20 years of experience in building large-scale distributed computing and database systems. Prior to starting Vitria, Skeen cofounded Tibco Software, an infrastructure software provider, and has held faculty positions at University of California, Berkeley, and Cornell University.

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