The explosion of unstructured data represents over 75 percent of the world’s information. The increasing demand for actionable intelligence from this information requires innovative solutions to make timely, accurate judgments on large quantities of information. It saves lives in the intelligence community, and it saves time and money in the enterprise. The ability to distribute analytical capabilities is changing how information is used. Riptano and Digital Reasoning Systems are teaming up to promote and simplify the evolution to these cloud-scale analytic intelligence solutions.

Riptano is the authority on Apache™ Cassandra and delivers software, services and training to help businesses and organizations build their applications on Cassandra. Digital Reasoning’s flagship product Synthesys^® is deployed over the largest Cassandra instance in the government intelligence infrastructure. Riptano and Digital Reasoning are working to promote both commercial and government scalable Cassandra solutions and will be involved in the analytic and data storage layers of a 400-node Cassandra architecture. The database is designed to allow for the analysis of hundreds of millions of intelligence documents.

“We are excited to be working with Riptano,” said Tim Estes, CEO of Digital Reasoning Systems. “Riptano is clearly the leading expert on Apache Cassandra, a technology we depend upon to achieve our extraordinary scalability advantages.”

One of the first results of this partnership will be the deployment and support of an open source Cassandra management solution – called “PyStratus” – used by Digital Reasoning to dramatically simplify creating, configuring, and managing a Cassandra, Hadoop, or hybrid-Cassandra/Hadoop clusters in Amazon EC2. This package is available on http://www.github.com/digitalreasoning/PyStratus. This partnership will deliver similar scripting solutions for Rackspace and other cloud providers in the near future.

“Apache Cassandra is the database for big data,” said Matt Pfeil, CEO and co-founder and of Riptano. “Digital Reasoning is doing interesting work within the intelligence community that is resulting in a deployment of Cassandra across hundreds of nodes for millions of documents. We’re excited Digital Reasoning is giving back to the community by open sourcing their software to deploy Cassandra on Amazon EC2. This will save time and make it easier to run Cassandra in the cloud.”

Digital Reasoning Systems and Riptano are leaders among a growing group of companies that recognize the benefits that Cassandra brings to the challenges of extracting hidden value locked within “big data.”

About Riptano®

Riptano is the company for Apache Cassandra, the leading scalable and high performance open source database. Riptano offers software, support, and training for Cassandra. Capable of both online transactions and analytical workloads, Cassandra offers distribution of data across multiple data centers and incremental scalability with no single points of failure. Cassandra is the logical choice when you need reliability without compromising performance, and Riptano brings Cassandra to the enterprise. For information on Riptano visit www.riptano.com

About Digital Reasoning^™

Digital Reasoning solves the problem of information overload by providing the tools people need to understand relationships between entities in vast amounts of unstructured and structured data.

Digital Reasoning builds data analytic solutions based on a distinctive mathematical approach to understanding natural language. The value of Digital Reasoning is not only the ability to leverage an organization’s existing knowledge base, but also to reveal critical hidden information and relationships that may not have been apparent during manual or other automated analytic efforts. For more information on Digital Reasoning visit www.digitalreasoning.com

Contacts

Digital Reasoning Systems

Dave Danielson, 603-429-8866

dave.danielson@digitalreasoning.com

“For those who have not been to OSCON, it’s a great technical conference covering the whole spectrum of open source, including Linux, MySQL, the LAMP stack, Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails, middleware, applications, cloud computing, and more”, said Zack Urlocker from InfoWorld. “OSCON always has great keynotes, tutorials, and evening Birds-of-a-Feather sessions. As with many conferences, a lot of the meat takes place in hallway conversations and impromptu sessions”.

Matthew Russell, our VP of Engineering at Digital Reasoning, will be speaking at the conference again this year. Matt will be sharing his insights about Natural Language Processing, advanced analytics, and entity resolution on a massive scale. (See here for more details: http://www.oscon.com/oscon2010/public/schedule/detail/13988)

I recently sat down with Matthew, and asked him about open source, OSCON and his upcoming participation. The following is part of our discussion:

Jason Beck – So, how long have you been involved with OSCON?

Matthew Russell – I’ve attended and spoken at OSCON the last three years?

JB – You’ve worked within or supported the Intelligence Community the last several years. Have you seen a change in attitude towards open source?

MR – Absolutely. Whereas it was treated very skeptically years ago, it’s now practically a requirement for any project we do.

JB – Why is that? Aren’t there lingering issues or concerns for security?

MR – A few people still claim those issues. However, the reality is that open source is inherently more secure. Think about it, you have potentially thousands of eyes looking over code and quickly addressing issues. However, if you have a piece of proprietary software or code, you may look at that more infrequently, since fewer people would be looking at the code.

JB – Is there someone that inspired you within the open source community?

MR – Not really. The thing is, open source is by its nature more about the community than about any one person within that community. It is all about collaborating with others to make something useful.

JB – Why would someone want to attend OSCON?

MR – It has quickly become the preeminent conference on open source technologies, issues and ideas. Seriously, it is a place where you can meet other interesting people committed to doing interesting things.

For more information on OSCON, you can visit their website at www.oscon.com/oscon2010

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