Talena Debuts Predictive Analytics Software For Big Data Management

In this era of exabyte-scale data stores, IT executives find themselves increasingly challenged to manage those burgeoning volumes of data -- let alone find the best ways to derive value from that data.

Big data management vendor Talena is wrapping up its development work on new predictive analytics software that incorporates machine-learning algorithms and data visualization to better administer big data management workloads and more accurately predict data availability.

The new Talena ActiveRx software also offers "active copy analytics" capabilities that businesses can use to turn idle backed-up data into useful assets.

[Related: Startup Talena Debuts Big Data Availability Management System]

"What we're doing is essentially making Telena into an integrated compute and analytics layer," said Chief Marketing Officer Sanjay Sarathy, speaking to CRN in an interview about the company's lineup of data availability management tools that can provide analytics across multiple data sources.

Telena's software is used to optimize data across test and development, backup and recovery, archive and compliance, and disaster recovery systems. The new ActiveRx combines a prescriptive platform with active copy management capabilities.

IT managers often wrestle with unpredictable changes in data flows for certain tasks and workloads -- finding the best time to run a backup job, for example. Through its machine learning technology and recommendation engine, according to the company, ActiveRx predicts the best time to run those jobs, helping to lower costs and improve service-level agreement compliance. The software can also help forecast the need for IT infrastructure expansions.

ActiveRx also performs active copy analytics, allowing businesses to take idle copied data, such as data stored for backup and recovery purposes, and apply visual analysis tools or run custom code against it. That means businesses can generate value from that data without the need to make multiple copies of it for other tasks.

While the prescriptive capabilities are specifically designed for IT system analytics, the active copy analytics portion can utilize third-party business analytics software for general-purpose business intelligence tasks.

Talena, based in San Jose, Calif., partners with Wipro, the giant systems integration, IT services and consulting company, which will resell the ActiveRx software to its customers, as well as use it as a tool to provide data management services.

"Our goal is to wrap our services around the Talena technology," said Sajjad Hussain, Wipro's chief architect and practice leader for high performance technologies, in an interview with CRN. Calling the new software a "unique differentiator" for Talena, Hussain said the vendor's products are "one of the arrows in our quiver to manage our customers' large and diverse data environments."

Wipro, based in Bangalore, India, is responsible for many of its customers' IT environments, including managing, monitoring and backing up mission-critical and test/development systems -- a task ActiveRx will help automate, Hussain said.

Talena is in the process of building out its channel operations, Sarathy said, including recently hiring Kevin Pardue, previously with DataStax, WANdisco and Acronis, as senior director of business development. Pardue reports to Bill Ribera, who was hired in February as vice president of worldwide sales.

"We think there's a big opportunity through the channel," Sarathy said.

Talena will begin offering ActiveRx to customers in the second quarter through an early access program and make the product generally available about three months later.