Oracle Introduces the Oracle Big Data Appliance

Oracle (News - Alert) has announced the availability of Oracle Big Data Appliance to help customers integrate and maximize the value of Big Data.

The Oracle Big Data Appliance, in conjunction with Oracle Exadata Database Machine and the new Oracle Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine, delivers everything customers need to acquire, organize, analyze and maximize the value of Big Data within their enterprise, offering customers an end-to-end solution for Big Data, the company stated in a press release.

“With the explosion of data in the past decade, including more machine-generated data and social data, companies are faced with the challenge of acquiring, organizing and analyzing this data to make better business decisions. New technologies, such as Hadoop, offer some relief, but don’t provide a holistic solution for customers’ Big Data needs,” said Andrew Mendelsohn, senior vice president of Oracle Server Technologies. “With today’s announcement, Oracle becomes the first vendor to offer customers a complete and integrated set of products.”

The Oracle Big Data Appliance is a new engineered system that includes an open source distribution of Apache Hadoop, Oracle NoSQL Database, Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop, Oracle Loader for Hadoop, and an open source distribution of R.

Designed to deliver extreme analytics on all data types, with enterprise-class performance, availability, supportability and security, the Oracle Big Data Appliance is easily integrated with Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Exadata Database Machine, and Oracle Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine.

Recently, the company entered into an agreement to acquire InQuira (News - Alert), a provider of best-in-class service knowledge management software that supports Web self-service and agent-assisted service. Headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, InQuira is privately held, and boasts more than 85 blue-chip customers.

Commenting on the rationale of the acquisition, Oracle said that companies are searching for a solution that can provide them with a high-value, differentiated customer experience online and in the contact center.