CSC Updates Big Data Platform-as-a-Service

CSC said Thursday it has expanded its big data Platform-as-a-Service offering to include security, compliance, data infrastructure and cloud options as it continues its company integration transformation.

The platform takes the best open-source Web-scale technologies out there, such as the ones used by Facebook and Yahoo, to provide customers with batch, real-time, ad hoc and interactive analytics for their big data needs. The managed solution can be deployed in less than 30 days on public, hybrid or private clouds and is designed to give clients the analytics, development capabilities and performance that they need to raise revenue and take advantage of big data.

The cornerstone of the product is that CSC is working to make big data both easy to use and integrated well into customers' existing infrastructures, Jim Kaskade, vice president and general manager of big data and analytics, told CRN.

[Related: CSC Bolsters Cloud Portfolio With VMware Hybrid Cloud Brokering Solution Partnership ]

The average customer currently collects, stores and uses around 15 percent of their data, according to Kaskade, who added that CSC would like to see that percentage grow to 100 percent or 200 percent when using external data as well. When fully utilizing both internal and external data, customers are using a more "holistic view" of how their clients and businesses work, he said.

"I can go to them and say you’ve got unlimited capabilities, capacity and possibilities. Let's do one question at a time and let's grow your business in a new way," Kaskade said. "It is as good as we're telling you it is, not just because of CSC, but we stood on the shoulders of giants. What we did is we got smart and brought it all together."

The "most important piece" is leveraging the strength of CSC's services and consulting background around the platform he said, adding that while competitors such as Cloudera, Hortonworks and MongoDB also are building big data platforms, they are not in the "as-a-service" business as extensively as CSC is. CSC came in at No. 4 on CRN's 2014 Solution Provider 500 list, which ranks the top solution providers in North America by revenue.

"When you talk about big data, people talk about how few resources and people are out there to make it work. Because of that lack of supply, making it a managed service or an as-a-service model is quite attractive," Kaskade said. Customers don't have to hire or recruit people to take care of the data because "we do it for you," he said.

"Ultimately, I've wrapped a lot of services around it, a lot of consulting services and I help customers tie this to business problems. That’s probably the most important piece," Kaskade said.

The $13 billion solution provider has been building a strategy to integrate many of its capabilities over the past couple of years, Kaskade said, including big data, applications, cloud, cybersecurity and mobility. The big data PaaS is "really reflective of the progress in the transformation effort," Kaskade said.

"It’s a very simple story and yet very comprehensive. The whole business is aligned behind that now. CSC has gone through a major transformation and now we carry that simple view and help our customers understand the path that they need to be on to evolve their infrastructure to support those five key areas within the business," Kaskade said.

Big data technology ultimately will become commoditized as it continues to evolve, Kaskade said, and customers can expect CSC to move up the stack into analytics and applications once that happens.

"Those applications are, in my mind, holding the most value. As we become more effective at providing applications to our customers we'll be able to use and reuse and eventually become an applications business," Kaskade said.

"I'd love to see the technology get commoditized because then I know every one of our customers is consuming it. The customers that trust us to manage their infrastructure, we will be managing their big data. I see this Platform-as-a-Service as a natural evolution," Kaskade said.

PUBLISHED JUNE 26, 2014