Cloud alliance takes on big data

The Open Data Centre Alliance (ODCA) – a coalition of end user organisations tasked with creating standards for cloud computing and datacentres, has announced the formation of a Data Services Workgroup to thrash out documenting big data usage model requirements.

The requirements, said the alliance, are needed to promote organisations’ ability to securely gather, organise and analyse large volumes of data in a competitive environment.

The main objectives of the workgroup will be to build enterprise IT’s competence to use database technologies for near-realtime insight into decision-making, and enhancing interoperability among big data frameworks and established business intelligence (BI) solutions.

As part of the new charter, the Alliance will collaborate with big data industry leaders Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR Technologies, which have announced membership in the organisation today, as well as leading data management solutions provider members, including Teradata and SAS, in matching industry delivery of open solutions with prioritised IT requirements. 

The Data Services Workgroup has multiple objectives. The workgroup will create usage models, targeted for release in the second half of 2012, to define requirements that address security, manageability and interoperability of emerging big data frameworks with traditional data management and data warehouse solutions. In part these usage models will be driven by addressing implementation within enterprise IT environments and the skill sets required to transform business intelligence solutions.

Based on the usage models, workgroup members will develop reference architectures and proofs of concept (POCs) for commercial distribution with independent software vendors (ISVs) and OEM partners to test deployments and establish solutions for the enterprise market. The Alliance will also collaborate with the open source community to drive benchmarking suites.

End user organisations said big data was a “huge opportunity” extending across geographies and industries.

“The ODCA’s work will help drive interoperable standards that enhance big data frameworks to be cloud ready - from manageability to security. This will benefit ODCA's members by accelerating solution delivery,” said Denis Curran, head of strategy and innovation at National Australia Bank (NAB), and a member of the ODCA’s Steering Committee.

“Collaboration with such an impressive group of solutions providers will ensure we help enterprise IT adopt cloud technologies that harness big data to make good business decisions and deliver great customer outcomes.,” he said.