Constellation Insights

Cloudera unveils SDX for unified data management: Big data platform vendor Cloudera this week unveiled SDX, a software framework aimed at solving today's data management problems. Cloudera's Mark Donsky explains the underlying issues in a blog post:

Organizations now run diverse, multidisciplinary big data workloads that span analytic databases, operational databases, data engineering applications, and data science applications. Many of these workloads operate on the same underlying data.

Table definitions, access permissions, business glossary definitions, metadata classifications, and governance artifacts – collectively called “data context” – are difficult to keep consistent across a growing number of workloads.

Put even more concisely, here’s the challenge:

Compute is stateless and it exists inside the workload, whether it’s cloud-based or on-premises, and whether it’s transient or long-running. Data is stateful, and it’s often stored outside the workload, whether it’s in HDFS, Apache Kudu, Amazon S3, Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS), Isilon, etc.

Data context should be stateful and stored alongside the data it describes, yet much of it, such as the Hive Metastore and Apache Sentry, currently exists inside the workload. Consequently, this data context is not only lost if a transient cluster goes away, but also inaccessible to new application clusters.

Cloudera SDX, which is being released as part of version 5.13 of the company's enterprise Hadoop distribution, applies stateful data context across multiple deployment models. This will result in lower TCO, increased productivity, and better security and governance, Cloudera says.

POV: SDX is the type of innovation that isn't just nice to have, but which needs to be part of Cloudera's platform. "Big data, next-generation platforms are getting mature and need to be relied upon by enterprises for serious production work," says Constellation VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen. "That's why all the elements of data governance and data-lineage tracking have to be there. Cloudera is bringing advances in tracking of data lineage and governance, even involving empheral workloads in the cloud."

Facebook partners with ZipRecruiter for job ad placement: In another move against Microsoft's LinkedIn, Facebook is integrating with ZipRecruiter, a portal through which companies can post ads to many different job advertisement sites at once, as TechCrunch reports:

Before now, companies that wanted to use Facebook for recruiting, adding job ads to their Pages, would have had to do this directly through Facebook itself.

By partnering with ZipRecruiter and others like it, organizations will now be able to tick a box to broadcast the job add to Facebook among a wider mix of job boards that can be accessed through a one-stop shop — ZipRecruiter, as one example, covers hundreds of these boards.

The move is interesting because it’s a sign not just of how Facebook is looking for more volume and usage of its jobs feature, but also the realization that it may not be able to achieve this on its own steam, leading to a more friction-free, user-friendly approach.

POV: Facebook has a richer social experience compared to LinkedIn and hence can provide a better base to find candidates, in particular people who aren't necessarily looking for jobs, says Constellation VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller: "Sitting on the social exhause of Facebook can lead to a totally different level of talent acquisition than what we have seen before."

IKEA buys TaskRabbit in bid to ease customer pain: You might like IKEA's furniture. But you probably don't enjoy the process of putting it together very much. The Swedish giant has apparently gotten the message and to that end, has struck a deal to acquire TaskRabbit, a startup with a mobile app that connects consumers with "Taskers" who can provide moving and packing services, home improvement, and of course furniture assembly.

TaskRabbit has a presence in 40 cities in the U.S. and UK. IKEA had already run a pilot program in London with the company prior to the acquisition.

“As urbanisation and digital transformation continue to challenge retail concepts we need to develop the business faster and in a more flexible way, IKEA CEO Jesper Brodin said in a statement. An acquisition of TaskRabbit would be an exciting leap in this transformation and allows us to move forward with an even greater focus on innovation and development to meet changing customer needs."

POV: IKEA says it will run TaskRabbit as a standalone business and the platform will remain open to working with other retailers. Despite that pledge, one would expect IKEA to integrate TaskRabbit into its day-to-day retail operations, perhaps even to a greater extent than Lowe's and Home Depot do with their contract labor programs.

Overall, it's a smart move by IKEA given TaskRabbit's appeal to younger consumers, which represent a sizable part of its base. It's also a nice follow-up to IKEA's recent release of an augmented reality app for iOS, with which customers can shop for furniture in a 3-D virtual environment.