HPCC, Now Available On Public, Private And Every Cloud In Between

LexisNexis Hadoop Alternative Wants To Be Your Big Data Solution

I have written in the past (here and here) about HPCC, the open source Hadoop alternative developed by LexisNexis.  HPCC  is the high-powered, super computer, big data solution which has powered LexisNexis's own needs for years.  The company has literally put millions of dollars into its development.  However, they realized that by open sourcing the software collaboration by the community could take the program to levels that they could not by just using it internally. Back in June they open sourced HPCC. 

They have announced that now you can run HPCC on the Amazon AWS public cloud. A large part of the development team for HPCC is based right here in Boca Raton, Fl near where I live, so I check in with them from time to time when they have some news.  Last week I met with LexisNexis CTO and GM of HPCC Systems Armando Escalante and his team to discuss the public cloud availability of HPCC.  Armando says that Amazon is just the first public cloud that HPCC will be available on.  They are committed to bringing HPCC to as many platforms as possible.  

Escalante envisions HPCC being available on both public and private cloud systems very soon.  He also thinks that a very viable deployment option will be a hybrid cloud solution where HPCC is hosted in a private data center but can expand to a public cloud on demand.  Armando and his team say that HPCC will be offered as a hosted solution by leading hosting and cloud providers (if you are a hosting or cloud provider you should contact them if you are interested in offering HPCC this way), as a pure OSS download via the community edition, as a commercial software license with premium support and training and even under an open core model with premium modules available to supplement the community edition.

A key difference between HPCC and other commercially supported open source software projects though is the goal of the LexisNexis team.  While it would be great if they recognized some revenue as a result of HPCC software, services and support sales, the real payoff for them is improving the functionality of HPCC.  For the foreseeable future LexisNexis themselves will be the biggest user of HPCC. So any improvements or innovations coming out of the open source community will benefit LexisNexis directly as well.  That is a different model than most commercial open source ventures.Make no mistake about it either, HPCC is already powering a multi-billion dollar business at LexisNexis.

All of the above being said, there are several large enterprises testing out HPCC now in the government, banking and other industries.Making it available via Amazon though opens up a whole other potential customer for Escalante and his team.

HPCC is also hosting a series of training events throughout the world for HPCC. You can click here to find out when one near you will take place.

While Hadoop continues to be white hot in the capital and media, Armando and his team believe that HPCC is superior because it already has all of the pieces in place.  There are no ancillary projects and products that are needed to make HPCC work.  It is self-contained and battle tested by LexisNexis themselves.  Many enterprises are now starting to look at big data solutions. Escalante believes when they do, despite all of the press on Hadoop, HPCC is much more mature, full feature and fully baked. It offers functionality today instead of the promise of things to come tomorrow. Enterprises don't have the luxury of experimenting, they want something that is tested and mature. That is where HPCC will shine according to the team at LexisNexis.

So if you are looking for a big data solution, you don't have to give up open source to look at a battle tested alternative to Hadoop.

• Applications
• Cloud Computing
• Alan Shimel
• big data
• Hadoop
• hpcc
• lexis nexis
• open source