Hortonworks stores and scores big data on Hadoop and supplies customers with a fully provisioned, cloud-enabled environment for analytics and data management.

Together, they have increased HDP among enterprises and developed IHAH which is available through IBM Cloud and integrated into Big SQL, DSX and HDP.

“The IBM and Hortonworks partnership provides customers with an integrated, open data platform to run big data and cognitive workloads. Combining Hortonworks connected data platforms, IBM data science experience, and the IBM machine learning platform helps customers achieve desired analytic results faster and at scale,” says Hortonworks blog post.

“Experience solution bundles that give customers a better way to manage their data. See the new IBM Hadoop platform that’s fully integrated with IBM’s data science and machine learning platform. In addition, with this platform, IBM power systems and spectrum scale storage customers also benefit from fast access to data and lower cost.”

IBM Power Systems AC922 solutions and servers have also, finally, achieved artificial intelligence (AI).

Written by Leah Alger

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Navdeep Sidhu, Senior Director, Integration & API Management Product Marketing for Software AG, noted: “Digital transformation cannot happen quickly enough. In 2016, we will continue to see this digital trend as consumer behaviour further drives change and puts a question mark on every business model. I believe there are eight key trends that we will see arise through the year.”

Everything will be hybrid
The complexity of cloud adoption and the need for increased innovation to build digital apps will force IT to explore different cloud options. Companies will want hybrid cloud, hybrid integration and even managed cloud. Companies will move away from just cloud solutions to real hybrid solutions. Instead of just focusing on public and private cloud options, IT will increasingly explore other models for flexibility and control.

APIs will get their swagger back
The Swagger API framework is becoming the de facto standard and initiatives like Open API are further standardising the role of Swagger in API development. We predict that Swagger will gain further traction and over time become the most widely used standard for APIs. Vendors will rally behind the Open API initiative and give Swagger a much-needed boost to become the dominating API standard and RAML (RESTful API modeling language) will fade over time.

APIs will enable ‘self-service’ integration
Imagine a world where everything is an API and all your data is immediately accessible to you and those you choose. That includes your customers, partners, suppliers, banks and just about everyone in your ecosystem. How will you manage this complicated world of data access? APIs will provide the answer and self-service style on-boarding for APIs will drive integration.

Bimodal goes mainstream
Citizen developers and citizen integrators will co-exist peacefully with IT teams to deliver new applications and interfaces to speed the overall innovation quotient of the organisation. Different integration models will come together under IT and thrive.

Integration will capture big data’s hidden value
Companies have been adopting Hadoop platforms for storing data sets without actualising the full value. Increased integration of existing systems with newly acquired Hadoop platforms will unlock the hidden value, enabling Big Data to finally be used to make smart decisions to improve customer satisfaction.

Microservices will demolish monolithic architectures
The microservices movement will gain strength and slowly keep drilling away at the foundation of monolithic architectures. As organisations speed up digital transformation, they will realise that the biggest roadblock to faster innovation is the legacy monolithic architectures – and will find ways to adopt more ‘DevOps’ friendly microservices-based architectures.

IoT will meet MDM
The expanding definition of Customer-360 means MDM will incorporate data about customer buying preferences, linking that data to standard MDM data quality processes, such as cleansing and matching. Synchronising and enriching the customer master record through device-generated sensor data will become a more common requirement for MDM’s customer consolidation process.

MDM will get prettier – and smarter
MDM solutions will continue to increase support for business data stewards by simplifying work views, creating more application-oriented interfaces, and integrating business intelligence tools and “dash-boarding” to understand the value and impact of superior data quality on business processes.

Edited from press release by Cecilia Rehn.

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“You can observe a lot by just watching” – Yogi Berra, Hall of Fame Baseball catcher, manager and coach. Well known for his malapropisms.

If you can learn a lot by watching, you can also learn a lot by asking. So when we wanted to find out the current thinking about use of containers with databases and other applications, we asked. And 200 IT professionals told us what they think.

Increase in spend on container-based technology

For one thing, the survey results prove beyond doubt that the move towards containerisation is nearly unstoppable. More than 4 out of 5 respondents expected their companies to increase their spend in container-based technology.

What may be a bit surprising to some is the use of containers for stateful or data-centric applications. Containers have gained an incredible level of mindshare among developers, and there is a near unanimity that technology such as Docker’s will soon become the standard way to pack and deploy stateless applications. Opinions, however, can be divided on how useful containers are for performance-sensitive data applications, such as databases. As someone who has spent his lifetime working with databases, I can vouch for how transformative a container-based platform can be for these applications, but we wanted to hear what data professionals and IT managers thought about it.

And this is where the survey results may hold a surprise or two. Three out of 4 respondents told us they are actively looking to run data applications within containers. The drivers cited for this trend were not surprising. Respondents pointed to the ability to consolidate workload (without losing performance or predictability) and to reduce performance ahead (as compared to hypervisors-based virtualisation) as leading factors prompting greater adoption of containers.

In fact container use is growing for all things data. Containers are emerging as the preferred platform for running databases, with approximately half the respondents doing so. About 40% of respondents indicated they have deployed Big Data applications such as Hadoop and Spark within containers.

Vibrant container technology landscape

The other surprising survey finding is the vibrant container technology landscape. While Docker is certainly getting its share of interest and adoption, system container technologies such as LXC and LXD remain as the preferred containerisation technology for running data-centric applications, with 60% citing their use. That is understandable because, unlike application containers technology such as Docker that are designed to run a single process or service, System Containers are essentially lightweight VMs that can run multiple services and applications, have their own host name and IP addresses that you can SSH into, and pretty much manage like VMs.

The use of System Containers with data applications therefore provides many of the benefits of a hypervisor-based virtualisation but with bare metal performance and much lower management overhead because of shared OS and binaries.

We tried to get a feeling for how far along the respondents’ organisations are in their adoption of containers, and a majority are using them to some degree. Containers are already used in production at 35% of respondents’ companies, and another 26% are experimenting with them.

So what do we make of all this? For one thing the findings are consistent with the approach we have taken with Robin’s containerisation platform. Performance-sensitive applications such as databases should demonstrate superior performance on a containers-based platform thanks to the ability to consolidate without compromising performance or predictability. Robin’s vision is to provide enterprises a high-performance and elastic platform for stateful and mission-critical applications. We think a containerised approach will prove the right one, and it would seem our survey respondents agree.

Edited for web by Cecilia Rehn.

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