Get big data out of the lab and into the business

Hadoop has revolutionized data storage and processing at massive scale. Over the last decade, it’s proved to be a highly cost-effective and scalable solution to the problem of dealing with the tremendous data volumes generated in the digital economy, and there’s no sign of its popularity waning. A recent Forrester report¹ predicted that firms will spend nearly $800 million on Hadoop and Hadoop-related services in 2017, and revealed that nearly half of firms using big data technologies have built Hadoop data lakes.

The challenge facing these organizations is transforming this potential data goldmine into real business value – whether that’s pursuing new revenue opportunities, gaining a competitive edge in their industry, or using advanced data analytics to delight their customers with better service or personalized offers. So how can you enable people across the business – from finance and HR to marketing and product development teams – to quickly and easily extract the insights they need from these ever-expanding enterprise data resources?

Cloud will be a key enabler in getting big data out of the lab and transforming it into an everyday business force. Forrester² identifies five key advantages of Hadoop cloud deployments: cost, speed, scalability, adoption, and simplicity. SAP Cloud Platform Big Data Services (formerly known as Altiscale) ticks all these boxes by solving the infrastructure, software, and people challenges for you with a fully managed, high performance big data cloud solution. Let’s take a look at each of these advantages in more detail.

First, cost. According to Forrester³, organizations deploying Hadoop in the cloud report saving 20% to 60% over on-premises infrastructure cost, since most of them overprovision their servers and storage, and then need to manage these environments. SAP’s own results underline this: SAP Cloud Platform Big Data Services offers an optimized infrastructure delivering high reliability and performance, with a return on investment of over 100% and a payback period of less than 90 days.

Next, faster processing. SAP Cloud Platform Big Data Services has a performance speed advantage over generic infrastructure clouds because its datacenters have been built from the ground up for big data speed and reliability. All hardware and networking are selected and tuned for big data jobs. This leads to an inherent performance advantage. That performance is further improved by the higher reliability that comes from offering all customers Hadoop operations services.

By having a team working for you to ensure that your jobs complete quickly and fully, SAP Cloud Platform Big Data Services enables data science and analytics teams to focus on analytics priorities, instead of worrying about Hadoop or Spark management and operations. As a result, SAP Cloud Platform Big Data Services has reduced job completion times by 46% and Hadoop job failures by 60%.⁴

Third, scalability on demand. Typical processing jobs like historical trend analysis, billing, or conducting marketing analytics can create significant spikes in workload demands. The flexibility, agility, and elasticity of cloud means that data engineers and analysts have the option to scale rapidly to thousands of nodes to cover these peak workloads. SAP Cloud Platform Big Data Services includes automated scaling so that advance planning or purchasing are not required. 

Fourth, providing a robust, secure, up-to-date platform. SAP provides a full Hadoop and Spark-based platform, including the core capabilities for conducting rapid analytics and data science exploration. SAP ensures that these services are always updated with the latest production-ready releases, so your users can take advantage of the latest innovations with no concerns about reliability, security, or performance. The platform also provides support for multiple versions of Apache Spark, so that you can continue to run your critical applications without concerns about version compatibility. 

Finally, simplifying deployment. Big data cloud enables you to be up and running in days instead of months without the hassle of procuring hardware, and testing and loading test beds. SAP Cloud Platform Big Data Services includes deployment, automated operations management, and proactive support in a complete managed service. Data scaling, compute bursting, and job monitoring are all included, and you only pay for the resources you use. The end result: you can focus on business priorities, your big data jobs get done quickly and reliably, and you end up paying less overall.

SAP Cloud Platform Big Data Services is an integral component of SAP’s modern data platform. Enterprise-ready, agile, and trusted, this platform provides the foundation for our digital business framework which enables you to modernize at the core and innovate at the edges.

If you would like to find out more about how SAP’s modern data platform provides insights across the enterprise, download the SAP Digital Business Framework or visit the Web site.

1, 2, 3: “The Cloudy Future of Hadoop” by Brian Hopkins and Mike Gualtieri, Forrester Research, Inc., March 1, 2017.

4. “The Total Economic Impact of Altiscale Hadoop-as-a-Service” by Forrester Research, Inc., December, 2014.