Cloudant Introduces Integrated Search Engine for Big Data

Online, July 14, 2011 (Newswire.com) - Cloudant, a leading Big Data hosting & analytics company, announced today the immediate availability of Cloudant Search: a real-time, in-database, distributed search engine that scales with your data.

Building on Cloudant's expertise in data hosting & analytics at scale, Cloudant Search immediately enables corporations & stakeholders to leverage more of their data, more efficiently. Full-text Search, Ad-hoc Querying, Analytics & Reporting, Complex Business Intelligence & Data-mining are now achievable in real time, on top of Cloudant's leading distributed database.

"Cloudant Search is the next step up in Big Data analytics," said Cloudant founder and CEO Alan Hoffman. "Not only does this new technology dramatically improve the availability of relevant information to stakeholders, but it also allows companies to reach uncharted heights in their quest to store - and leverage - ever-expanding amounts of data."

Instead of having to schedule Map/Reduce jobs, learn complex languages or rely on expensive third-party indexing solutions, Developers, Analysts & Decision-makers can type queries in a simple Google-style search box, using an intuitive, natural language. No longer will users & stakeholders have wait to get answers & insights from their data: with Cloudant Search, results appear instantly, and new data is processed in real time.

Since Cloudant Search is deeply integrated into Cloudant's proven, Apache CouchDB & Dynamo-based architecture, Cloudant customers' Search capacities will scale as naturally & flawlessly as the rest of their data operations. This integration into a leading, unified distributed system also means that, compared to external Search & Analytics solutions, Cloudant Search affords customers and IT departments greater flexibility to address ever changing use-cases and a drastically reduced operational complexity, which all adds up to a very competitive Total Cost of Ownership.

"We've worked hard to make the experience as smooth & powerful as possible as customers grow", says Cloudant Search lead engineer David Hardtke. "Our unified architecture, lightening fast indexing & easy-to-use syntax have proven to be popular with both IT personnel & Analysts, as Cloudant Search allows both groups to get up & running in no time. I think that what we're really doing here, is help companies grappling with Big Data cut their time-to-insight down to zero."

Features & Benefits

Use-cases
• Full-Text Search ("documents that contain the words 'justin bieber'")
• Ad-hoc Querying, Analytics & Reporting ("artists that have an album called 'My World' and a birth date between February 1st and June 1st, 1994")
• Complex Business Intelligence & Data-mining ("give users a 1-10 score, according to how often they mention @justinbieber on Twitter every month, how many times they've seen 'Never say Never', and whether or not they've ever used the word 'JBiebz'")

Ease of use

• Simple, natural, easy-to-learn query language based on the Lucene Query Syntax
•Instantaneous results
• Immediate indexing of new data as it is added to the database

Ease of maintenance

• Horizontal scaling of the capacities: simply add (or remove) servers, as required
• All the performance & reliability of the Cloudant platform
• Industry-leading support by the Cloudant team
Business considerations
• A single distributed architecture to maintain means a lower operational budget
Little to no Analyst training required, compared to other leading Search & Analytics solutions
• Instantaneous results & updates means less time waiting around to serve end-users or extract insights from your data

Availability

Cloudant Search is immediately available as a Public Beta feature to all hosted Cloudant customers, including users of Heroku, Cloudbees or AppHarbor who have signed up for the Cloudant add-on.
Cloudant Search is also available as licensed software, for new & existing "Private Cloud" customers.

More Resources

Cloudant
https://cloudant.com/
CouchDB
http://couchdb.apache.org/

About Cloudant's Products

Cloudant's leading hosting & analytics platform is available to customers in two forms: either as Database-as-a-Service, served from the public cloud of their choice (EC2, Rackspace, Joyent, SoftLayer) , or a-la-carte licensed software for internal or "private cloud" deployments. Cloudant's platform includes BigCouch, a distributed, Dynamo-style document database based on Apache CouchDB, a graphical data input & querying interface for users & analysts, a fully-featured monitoring system and now Cloudant Search, an integrated Search & Analytics platform.

About Cloudant, Inc.
Founded in 2008 in Cambridge, MA by three MIT PhDs, Cloudant provides a hosted distributed database and data analytics for the cloud. Cloudant's data platform is based on the open source Apache CouchDB project and designed from the ground up for distributed environments and cloud computing. The Cloudant team has over two decades experience solving "Big Data" problems and led the MIT team that interacted with multi-petabyte data sets from experiments including the renowned Large Hadron Collider. Cloudant was born out of the founders' collective frustration with the tools available at the time and was seeded by the noted Silicon Valley incubator program YCombinator. For more information about the company, Cloudant's technology or to sign up for Cloudant's hosting service, visit https://cloudant.com.