This week, the tech giant IBM made a commitment for more than 3,500 researchers and developers to the Apache Spark project. IBM invested hundreds of millions of dollars for the funding and resources. The central part of IBM's commitment, is to make Spark an integral part of industry's leading Analytics and Commerce platforms - and will present Apache Spark as a service on IBM Cloud.
In a press release, Beth Smith - IBM Analytics general manager, stated, "We believe strongly in the power of open source as the basis to build value for clients, and are fully committed to Spark as a foundational technology platform for accelerating innovation and driving analytics across every business in a fundamental way," Beth Smith also said, "Our clients will benefit as we help them embrace Spark to advance their own data strategies to drive business transformation and competitive differentiation."
The increasingly popular in-memory data processing framework of IBM will be improved by the Apache Spark project. The Apache Spark can definitely power up the system and can even compete with the big data power of the better-known Apache Hadoop.
The Apache Spark started as a project at UC Berkeley in California, where at a veryfast speed it can process an in-memory performance as much as 100 times of the MapReduce framework, which was supported by the Apache Hadoop in the beginning.
The Spark project became advanced and moved forward, as it's disk-based performance got powered up increasingly with in-memory strength. The Spark established itself as a heavy competitor - for use particularly in machine learning tasks.
In 2013, the Apache Software Foundation absorbed Spark, and became their top level project in 2014.
Mike Gualtieri, an analyst of Forrester Research, said: "IBM makes its money higher up, building solutions for customers," Mike Gualtieri also stated: "That's ultimately why this makes sense for IBM."
