IBM spent $16 billion on Big Data acquisitions to assemble what Wikibon analyst Jeff Kelly calls the “broadest and deepest Big Data product and services portfolio in the industry.”  The sheer scope of the vendor’s line-up enabled it to outsell everybody else in this market for the last several years, but Kelly stresses that diversity alone won’t be enough to sustain this competitive edge in the long run.

 In his latest article, the Wikibon analyst writes that the sheer scale of IBM’s Big Data portfolio has made it difficult for the company to unify it and come out with “distinct, compelling offerings”. Difficult, but as the vendor proved this morning, anything but impossible.

Big Blue just announced PureData System for Hadoop, a mid-range analytics appliance that can be deployed in less than two hours after arriving at a client site. The solution has four major components:

·          A columnular data processing engine that moves information to flash when it’s being used, and puts it back on disk when it’s no longer needed.

·          An architecture that automatically taps into multiple cores to process individual instructions.

·         A compression technique that stores data in a form that doesn’t have to be decompressed before analysis.

·         Embedded intelligence that skips processing data deemed irrelevant to the task at hand.

PureData System for Hadoop also includes an Excel-like data visualization tool called BigSheets.  It also ships with Application Analytic Accelerator, an all-in-one tool for analyzing social media, text and machine data, and a new version of IBM Infosphere Streams. These solutions are supplemented by the 2.1 release of BigSQL, the  SQL-over-Hadoop interface the vendor developed for its BigInsights distribution.

Will IBM’s new solution lure Oracle customers away?

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PureData represents a big step forward for IBM, which has become a leader in both the traditional database space and in the emerging Big Data market. The competition, namely Oracle, lacks a solid presence in the latter.

SiliconAngle founder John Furrier says that PureData  “demonstrates the trend where we see the database market splitting into two worlds — operational databases (big infrastructure DW BI like NoSQL and SQL) and analytical databases (feeding fast applications for managing and getting insights out of data).”

Oracle should be worried

The fact that the market is evolving in this direction is good news for IBM, but it only gives Oracle more reasons to worry.  Wikibon chief analyst Dave Vellante says that PureData’s value prop does not justify a full rip-and-replace for  large enterprises that are dependent (and locked into) Oracle software, but it may put a dent in the database vendor’s earnings a few quarters down the road.

“My feeling via Oracle is that IBM has great technology here, really a major step forward. And of course it is backed by IBM consulting, that goes without saying. But it is not enough to get people to move from Oracle because that is such a huge job to do. However, going forward this could be one more big threat to new sales, along with EMC’s aggressive moves.”