Managing the ever-growing pool of unstructured and unprotected data has become a challenge for businesses--and a huge opportunity for any company that can ease the pressure. Capgemini has made a play for this market by introducing a Big Data tool on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The service--called Elastic Analytics--is pitched as a platform for converting large datasets into a format usable by leading business intelligence (BI) software tools. Capabilities built in to AWS underpin the offering. Outsourcing business Capgemini has tapped AWS' Hadoop-based tool Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (EMR) to combine large sets of structured and unstructured data. The EMR output is extracted and entered into BI platforms to help businesses analyze their data.
An unnamed large life sciences company is among the early adopters of the service. Capgemini said the company used the system to create a competitive intelligence portal for its executives. The platform could be used anytime a company needs to analyze data quickly. "Organizations are continuously looking for optimized solutions that deliver shorter 'time-to-value' advanced analytics. AWS is a highly adaptable and extensible platform that rapidly offers organizations the ability to launch and sustain their advanced analytics initiatives," Capgemini's SVP of business information management Scott Schlesinger said.
As V3 notes, Capgemini faces competition in the Big Data sector. SAP offers similar analytics capabilities through its HANA platform, which it began providing as an enterprise cloud service in May. One month later, HP strengthened its offering by introducing its Haven platform. HP pitched the service as a way for businesses to analyze and protect their data pools. With life sciences companies and other industries amassing ever more data, the need for such services is set to intensify.
- read the Capgemini release
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