Diving In: Arcadia Data Offers Improved Toolset For Deriving Value From Massive Data Lakes

Big data technology developer Arcadia Data has unveiled a significant new release of its business analytics software that offers greater scalability in data volumes and concurrent users, can handle a wider variety of data formats, and provides new self-service and data governance capabilities.

For solution providers that work with the Arcadia Enterprise and Arcadia Instant products, the new release speeds up the process of helping businesses derive value from massive volumes of data, said Dale Kim, Arcadia Data's senior director of products and solutions, in an interview with CRN.

"With this newest release, organizations can get all the value out of their data lakes," Kim said.

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The new edition of Arcadia Data's software comes as businesses wrestle with analyzing and deriving value from growing volumes of data, often streaming in real time, from such disparate sources as operational applications, Internet of Things networks, cybersecurity systems and more.

Kim said the new release reinforces Arcadia's overall message of providing business users with better access to data and business analysis capabilities.

Arcadia Data, based in San Mateo, Calif., works with a number of reseller and systems integration partners, including big data and data science consulting companies Clarity Insights, Marionete and Big Data International. Kim said those partners work with Arcadia Data Enterprise to reduce the time it takes for their customers to derive value from data lake systems.

The company also has relationships with a number of big data technology developers including Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR Technologies, Confluent, Trifacta, Cazena, StreamSets and Waterline Data.

Arcadia Data's visual analytics and business intelligence software works natively with data lakes – massive repositories of raw data in original formats – to help business users derive insights and value from that data. Data lakes reside on a range of platforms including Hadoop, Apache Kafka, Apache Spark, NoSQL databases and public cloud systems such as Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure Data Lake Store (ADLS).

By running natively on such systems, Arcadia Enterprise eliminates the need to move data into separate business intelligence servers for analysis, according to the company.

The new release, officially Arcadia Enterprise 4.2, supports a number of new data types including maps, arrays and "structs" (composite data types). It also supports Microsoft ADLS for the first time.

The release enables real-time analytics and data visualization on streaming data through its integration with Confluent's KSQL processing engine for Apache Kafka. It also provides an AI-driven recommendation system that helps business analysts find the best way to visually represent live data.

The new software's improved performance can handle a wider variety of complex queries, according to Arcadia, eliminating the need for performance modeling. And the 4.2 release offers a number of new data governance features that the company said reduces administrative costs by enabling large-scale deployments that securely share business intelligence assets across multiple projects or work groups.

In addition to the Enterprise edition of its software Arcadia Data offers Arcadia Instant, a free data analysis tool.