HStreaming for Hadoop and MapReduce

data processing HStreaming is an analytics platform build on top of Hadoop and MapReduce. It allows analyses on unstructured and structured data in real-time, adding a significant improvement to Hadoop and MapReduce, as these tools are built for batch-processing. Real-time information has a lot of advantages for organisations, as we discussed earlier. Therefore, creating a real-time version of Hadoop and MapReduce can become very interesting. Of course, HStreaming is not the only company focusing on real-time processing, for example Storm has also built a free and open source real-time distributed file system.

Thanks to Hadoop and MapReduce, HStreaming can process massive datasets within seconds; processing it, analysing it and creating the necessary dashboards for insights. Their patented solution provides high fault tolerance and availability even during hardware and software failures. The platform is built on top of Hadoop and is compatible with the most important Hadoop distribution solutions. It also integrates with some of the most important Apache Hadoop technologies like Pig or Zookeeper.

They have developed several products: an Enterprise edition that can be installed on premises or can be used via the cloud. The HStreaming Cloud is hosted on Amazon Web Services. In addition they have developed an open source version that can be downloaded for free. This Community edition does not come with consulting or integration services, but there is a forum for users. This forum however, does not (yet) contain any articles so it is not very helpful.

Volkmar Uhlig, a former researcher at IBM, and Jana Uhlig, former Director at Citigroup, founded HStreaming in 2010. In February 2013, they completed their first round of investor funding. They received a funding of $ 1 million by Atlas Ventures. Their technology has won several awards; among others Gartner named them “Cool Vendor” in 2012.

Real-time analytics will become more and more important in the coming years. When speed and accuracy counts, real-time insights are extremely valuable to organisations. Especially with the ‘Internet of Things’, real-time data from sensors need to be processed, stored, analysed, visualized and returned to the user in real-time. Being too late can make a big difference for organisations. Their dashboards are web-browser based, but unfortunately they do require customization from within the query language. For some organisations this does not pose any problems, but others might be deterred by the lack of a fully visualized plug-and-play dashboard. All in all, with their award wining and patented-technology, HStreaming does indeed have the potential to grow big in the coming years. Therefore we give them a 6 bits rating.

(Data processing / shutterstock)