Continuum Analytics Extends Reach to AWS Cloud

At the Strata + Hadoop World 2015 Conference today Continuum Analytics unfurled extensions to its open source analytics application that serves to create a hybrid cloud computing platform that spans both on premise servers and the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

While most organizations are still reluctant to run analytics in the cloud given the sensitive nature of the data involved, Michele Chambers, chief marketing officer for Continuum Analytics, said Anaconda Cloud is designed to make it simpler for organizations to share analytics files via the cloud while the actual analytics continues to run on premise.

Access to the Anaconda Cloud portal is free, but as a private cloud service Continuum Analytics is also making available a $9 monthly subscription service. Anaconda Cloud also provides a download for creating a cluster for prototyping an analytics application that organizations can later scale as needed.

Written in Python, the open source Anaconda analytics application has been gaining a fair amount of traction as an alternative to commercial analytics applications that are by comparison are fairly expensive. At present, Continuum Analytics, which provides multiple tiers of support for Anaconda, claims to have include more than 200 of the Fortune 500 as customers, 19 of the Fortune 25 and 8,000 universities around the world. Specific customers include Boeing, Procter & Gamble, Pepsi, Schlumberger, the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Designed to be accessed via a browser, Chambers said the primary goal is to make Big Data analytics more accessible via integration with platforms such as Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark. To that end, Continuum Analytics built an analytics application that can invoke both multiple processor cores alongside graphics processing units (GPUs).

With this release, Continuum Analytics also let it be known that Anaconda is now freely available under the BSD license, which allows Anaconda to be fully redistributed without attribution as part of the modern open data science stack. Continuum Analytics has also improved that overall performance of the Anaconda application in a way that takes better advantage of scale-out infrastructure and parallelization across multiple cores.

Clearly, analytics represents one of the hottest application categories around these days. The challenge is that many organizations are overwhelmed by the costs associated with simply getting started with analytics. For that reason an open source approach enables solution providers and their customers to have a conversation about more broadly applying analytics in a way that not only doesn’t break the bank, but also leaves a bigger percentage of that budget to be applied to services versus paying for commercial software licenses.