Posted 01 October 2012

Software

Data analytics application available free for academic research

Datameer, Inc., a data analytics company providing applications that discover insights and trends in data, is offering free licenses of its data analytics application for qualifying academic research.

Academic researchers are particularly challenged by the massive amounts of data needed for their research. Collecting and analysing data requires enormous computational effort and this has typically been a slow and tedious process requiring a computer science background.

Datameer’s analytics range of applications can provide a speed boost to analysis and they do not assume the user will have a computer science background. The applications apparently provide users with a simple spread-sheet like interface for data input. This enables integration of large quantities of data to do complex analysis, and then visualise the results which can be easily understood, communicated and shared.

The Datameer approach is to offer an analytics solution built on Apache Hadoop that helps its users to access, analyse and use massive amounts of data. The company behind the range of Datameer applications was founded just a short while ago in 2009 by a group of Hadoop veterans. Being such a new product in the highly competitive analytics software world, the founders thought it would be both beneficial to their new company and to academics alike to make free licences available.

These analytics applications bring the power of Apache Hadoop directly to the desktop, with Hadoop natively embedded in two of three new editions of the application (Datameer Version2). The Personal version runs on a single desktop, and a Workgroup version has been engineered to run on a single server. There is also an Enterprise version which scales up to thousands of nodes and runs on any Hadoop distribution.

Built on HTML5, Datameer 2.0 runs on virtually any device, letting users work with and visualise their data on smart phones, tablets, desktop and laptop computers. It also supports all of the popular operating systems including Windows, Mac OS, Linux and VMWare. The fact that a new and powerful application like this is now available to academic users with a free licence agreement is a compelling reason to at least ‘try-out’ its analytics capabilities.

Datameer 2.0 also supports integration with Twitter and Facebook, Netezza and COBOL as well as Teradata export.  It also offers HIVE integration, including the ability to export to HIVE as well as the previously supported HIVE data import.