RapidMiner, one of the predictive analytics market leaders, has today announced the release of a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) version of its RapidMiner Server solution. The company already boasts more than 35,000 deployments worldwide, including clients as diverse as Lufthansa, PayPal, Pepsi, and Volkswagen; they hope this latest release will help increase their market share further.
RapidMiner Server is widely considered to be one of the most powerful, comprehensive, and flexible data analysis solutions available. It uses the core RapidMiner Studio engine to provide powerful remote processing, an accessible web interface, and innovative design and collaboration options. It allows to users to run processes on enterprise hardware, schedule and run analysis, and get real-time results from anywhere.
The software was a surprise frontrunner in Gartner’s ‘Advanced Analytics Platforms Magic Quadrant’. Released in February, it ranked alongside SAS, IBM and Knime in the ‘Leaders’ quadrant. It is good timing from RapidMiner’s point of view, with Gartner estimating that advanced analytics is now a $2 billion market that spans a broad array of industries globally. The research firm predicts business intelligence and analytics will remain a top focus for Chief Information Officers until at least 2017.
RapidMiner already includes a vast number of methods for data integration, data transformation, data modelling, and data visualisation — with the ability to access data sources such as Excel, Access, Oracle, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL, Sybase, Ingres, MySQL, Postgres, SPSS, dBase, and Text files. Additional benefits of the new RapidMiner Server PaaS include a deployment time that can be measured in minutes, a high-throughput access to Amazon Relational Database Service, and programmable options such as scheduling, triggers and APIs.
Clients will also benefit from a cost reduction thanks to the removal of the need to develop server management expertise internally; the new RapidMiner Server PaaS is managed by a team of RapidMiner experts who are responsible for all aspects of operating the software, including installations, configurations, backups, maintenance, monitoring, and updates.
RapidMiner offer multiple pricing options. Their free offering only includes 1 GB of RAM, is only compatible with CSV and Excel file-based data sources, and does not support any database systems. The package they recommend to most users is the ‘Professional’ bundle. This includes 8 GB of RAM, supports all common types of file-based data, and is compatible with all database systems. It costs $9,999 per year.
The company hopes that the release of their PaaS offering will help eliminate the need for organisations to dedicate internal resources to purchasing, installing and managing hardware and software, and instead they can now focus on getting the most out of their data.
By Daniel Price
