Oracle today unveiled its strategy to help customers meet the challenges posed by Big Data and announced the availability of its Big Data Appliance in India. 

Oracle’s Big Data approach is focused on engineered systems and is aimed at making big data initiatives practical for the enterprise. 

But the problem is not the creation of the data, but how organizations can locate the relevant information to do deeper and more sophisticated analysis of this data and use it in real time.

To make the most of big data, organizations are now looking at evolving their IT infrastructures to handle the rapid rate of delivery of extreme volumes of data, with varying data types, which can then be integrated with an organization’s other enterprise data to be analyzed. In fact, the most recent annual survey on data warehousing by the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) found that approximately 48% of enterprises expect a significant or moderate increase in the unstructured data analysis over the next five years.

In continuation with its strategy to deliver pre-integrated, pre-tested engineered systems for data management requirements, Oracle has introduced a new engineered system – Oracle Big Data Appliance that combines optimized hardware with the most comprehensive software stack featuring specialized solutions developed by Oracle to deliver a complete, easy-to-deploy solution for acquiring, organizing and analyzing big data. It is designed to deliver extreme analytics on all data types, with enterprise-class performance, availability, manageability and security. 

Oracle Big Data Appliance incorporates Cloudera’s Distribution Including Apache Hadoop with Cloudera Manager, plus an open source distribution of R that has been enhanced to run the oracle database. Running on Oracle Linux, the system also features Oracle NoSQL Database  and Oracle HotSpot Java Virtual Machine.

This unique Big Data approach from Oracle relieves customers off the integration involved in assembling a suitable set of hardware and software components to create big data architecture. In addition, it allows customers to leverage commercial quality support with the entire system being supported by a single vendor.

The business insight generated through big data analysis is routed to the front desk through Oracle's Siebel CRM enabling executive to make informed decisions. Similarly, Oracle Spatial enables users to manage geographic and location-data forming an integrated part of Oracle’s Big Data solutions.

Oracle Big Data Appliance can be used for staging and ETL processes that need to occur upstream of the data warehouse. The included Oracle Loader for Hadoop can then be used to transfer the data in parallel into Oracle Exadata. Oracle Exadata can readily use data that comes from an Oracle Big Data Appliance in conjunction with data already in the data warehouse.  

Oracle Big Data Appliance, in conjunction with Oracle Exadata, and Oracle Exalytics offers the broadest, most integrated product portfolio to help customers acquire and organize diverse data types, and then analyze them alongside existing enterprise data to discover new insights and make the most informed decisions.