When it comes to managing big data, there’s an emerging number of ways to go about things, depending on your needs for structured data, unstructured data, volume, speed and accessibility.  NoSQL in particular is gaining a lot of attention in recent months, namely as more companies look to this language for refined ways of analyzing unstructured data.  InfiniteGraph is the latest to throw an offering into the pot, launching a new tool for NoSQL quadrants of databases.

It’s an enabling technology really.  A data repository tool for the NoSQL market, graphing databases across relationships, with a service that’s massively distributed and can grow to scale.  In other words, InfiniteGraph is the “Hadoop for graph databases.”   InfiniteGraph is looking to provide components for next generation analytics, whether it’s enterprise 3.0 or government 2.0, to drive better decision support through graph quadrants.

InfiniteGraph isn’t about the data itself, but the relationships between data points.  This is where the company differs from services like Couchbase or Mongo, which store document-type data.  It’s all about the relationships for InfiniteGraph, creating new ways of managing that data for analysis purposes.  InfiniteGraph does so by playing nice with distributed file systems, whether they’re from Hadoop, Dynamo, Couchbase or Voldamort.  There’s not really a single database that fits all instances, but what InfiniteGraph does is suck in data from across the mass of big data fields to do high level relationship analysis.  InfiniteGraph can take any type of data source and do an aggregate connection between all sorts of data, and it does so at “lightening fast” speeds.

It’s because of InfiniteGraph’s existing peer-to-peer, cloud-ready architecture that they’re able to run so many data types, quickly and at scale.  They’re working on an architecture that’s been developing for the past 20 years, inherited from parent company Objectivity.  With powerful, legacy architetecture behind it, and a wide network of portals to popular database store systems, InfiniteGraph is positioning itself as a leveler within the cloud community.  As more cloud services become prevalent in today’s business structures, a unifying, cross-platform product will be a bridge amongst the myriad of current offerings.  Several companies are answering that call of duty in their own ways, including Couchbase’s recently launched UnQL programming language for dealing with unstructured data and HotLinks, a startup that’s launched with an experienced team, and designed with the enterprise in mind.

For Objectivity, the new launch from InfiniteGraph is the birth of a new generation, breathing life into a cloud-ready architecture that’s witnessed two decades of evolution and growth.  After building a handful of custom graph databases for various clients, Objectivity saw an opportunity to create something that the entire industry could use.  InfiniteGraph is leveraging its unique market position for broad market appeal, finding new use cases to which its services and areas of strength can be applied.

“The parent product is massively distributed and scalable from the beginning, and we have success in traditional enterprise and government telecommunications apps, process control automation and real-time management solutions,” says Mark Maagdenberg, Sales Engineer of Objectivity.

“We had the ‘aha!’ moment when building the graph API for our Objectivity/db customers and saw the NoSQL movement getting sexy.  It’s en vogue to not only be a relational databases.  social networks got this out there–select the right tool for the right database.  So we decided to bring out this massively scaled graph database.  It connects relationships and those are the things companies want to analyze.”

The ultimate goal is to be an influential leader in this space, with a string of commercial clients already taking advantage of InfiniteGraph’s services.  Location-based online advertising companies, government customers–these are just a couple areas InfiniteGraph will be focusing its efforts, with an aim to be a top commercial product across the board.  For government clients in particular, InfiniteGraph presents itself as a compliment platform for their needs, when they can’t use some of the open source offerings currently on the market.

InfiniteGraph will have to continue playing nice with data stores, as they don’t limit clients to use their own databases, but do serve a purpose in organizations like Cassandra to offload data management.  In this way InfiniteGraph works closely with companies to build connections between products, now putting their efforts into enhancing the franchise of data that’s already there.