Last year, Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, told a crowd gathered at the Techonomy Conference in Lake Tahoe, CA that we now create as much information in two days as we did from the dawn of civilization through 2003. While Roger J. Moore would disagree and amend that estimation slightly, the fact of the matter is that today we’re seeing a ridiculous (and exponential) telescoping in data production and consumption — which will only continue to increase.
Thus, in today’s world, data is becoming a valuable commodity. Many companies strive to collect as much data about their customer’s habits and interactions as possible to better serve them with ads, recommendations, discovery tools, and personalized product or service experiences (and so on). But, the fact of the matter is, big data management and analysis is still clunky and without being able to understand what that big data means — without being able to identify the important relationships, connections, and patterns within the data — it’s just a big pile of numbers and symbols.
What’s more, as more and more datapoints are pulled in by social networks (and as those networks scale) with servers often scattered across large geographical zones, it becomes tougher and tougher on backend systems to process the complex connections between data.
InfiniteGraph, the year-old product and brainchild of Sunnyvale-based enterprise database company Objectivity, is coming out of beta today to help developers and companies identify and utilize deep connections between nodes and edges in large, distributed data sets. InfiniteGraph seeks to reduce the amount of time it takes to make these connections to a matter of seconds, processing large graph datasets, in areas like government intelligence, social networks and social media CRM, location-based services, and financial analytics.
Working with these kind of large enterprises requires support for billions of data points, and so InfiniteGraph has built a system to enable scaling and big data capacity, with realtime functionality. Today, InfiniteGraph is expanding its reach to businesses and developers looking to mine their data stores for complex relationships, be they enterprise apps targeting SMBs, SMEs themselves, or Fortune 500 companies.
But the important thing to point out about InfiniteGraph’s commercial release (the system has been being developed in beta over the last year) is that it doesn’t require developers to re-engineer their databases from scratch to benefit from the technology. Developers can simply use the platform’s dedicated graph API to leverage InfiniteGraph’s relationshop mining on top of their existing data. It also offers a high-scale database management system, which is a nice bonus.
Other features of note in InfiniteGraph’s commercial release include parallel data loading and accelerated ingest, meaning that developers can import and continuously feed apps with data from multiple input streams more speedily. The graph database also allows developers to choose from different indexing options that suit their company’s specific needs (from automatic to manual), as well as enabling devs to view, verify, and test data models in customizable approaches.
As InfiniteGraph aims to help companies leverage social network analysis and business intelligence to increase efficiency and gain competitive advantage in crowded markets, the graph database will now be available in both free and licensed versions. (Check out licensed options here.) As to compatibility, InfiniteGraph’s database is written in Java (with a C++ core), is interoperable across Linux, Windows and Mac OS/X platforms, and “can also be deployed in most virtualized cloud environments”, according to its website.
The platform is also licensed on a “pay as you scale” or usage-based model that allows companies to expand their storage capacity (and aims at being a more cost effective way to use).
InfiniteGraph is also announcing a contest for developers, which will offer up to $12,000 in prizes, in addition to helping developers promote their apps. The contest launches today and will be accepting submissions through September 30th. According to an InfiniteGraph spokesperson, “developers can build any type of software application, web or mobile service around social, game and/or location-based networks, any type of process or knowledge management, or anything else which seeks to find and leverage complex relationships between objects or things”. For more on the contest, check it out here.