Cask Delivers Significant Enhancements to the Cask Data Application Platform

PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwired - May 5, 2015) - Cask, the company that brings Hadoop to developers, announced today that the latest version of its flagship Cask Data Application Platform (CDAP) is available for download. CDAP Version 3.0 contains significant enhancements enabling developers to more quickly and easily build powerful applications for Apache Hadoop. These include a new role-based user interface, support for multi-tenancy and a collection of Application Templates to accelerate and simplify common Hadoop use cases. One of the first templates supports ETL (extract, transform, load), enabling common data movement and simple data transformation tasks, directly from the user interface. Both Cask and its developer community will deliver many more templates.

Since its first release, CDAP has been a powerful platform for advanced Hadoop users. The latest release not only delivers greater capability, but also includes ease-of-use functions that address a larger number of customers who have less Hadoop experience. Big data projects are increasingly a priority for the highest levels of leadership in many organizations. However, many projects are stalled due to a scarcity of skills, significant time spent on simple data integration tasks and difficulty integrating into existing environments. The latest version of CDAP addresses these challenges.

"Since our founding, Cask has been on the leading edge of big data innovation," said Jonathan Gray, co-founder and CEO of Cask. "With the 3.0 release, we see two things happening. First, adoption of more advanced Hadoop technologies to drive real-time solutions is accelerating dramatically, driving a great need for CDAP. Second, we've enhanced the platform with easy-to-use basic functionality for common data tasks, addressing the needs of relative newcomers to Hadoop and removing major bottlenecks of Hadoop adoption. I'm confident that the combination of these factors will drive explosive growth of CDAP adoption in the coming months."

The release of CDAP version 3.0 comes just seven months after the platform was contributed by Cask to the open source community. In that time, momentum for CDAP has grown both in terms of commercial adoption and community participation. Thousands of developers have downloaded CDAP and several organizations are contributing to the CDAP project. At this week's HBaseCon, Salesforce.com will present a talk with Cask describing how CDAP is enabling the Salesforce Marketing Cloud to deliver enhanced capabilities to Salesforce customers.

To further extend the reach of CDAP, Cask has formed a strategic partnership with Kogentix, an experienced big data solutions organization with expertise in retail, healthcare, and insurance markets. Kogentix will build applications and solution offerings based on CDAP, as well as make contributions to the open source project. "Our team has been building big data solutions based on Hadoop for several years, so we have direct experience with the challenges Hadoop creates for developers," said Krishna Nimmagadda, co-founder of Kogentix. "Building solutions on CDAP will enable greater reuse, enabling us to deliver function specific solutions to our customers faster and more cost-effectively."

The new release of CDAP builds on the strategic partnership announced with Cloudera in February of 2015. Cask and Cloudera have broadened the roadmap for joint innovation to include Apache Sentry, Cloudera Navigator, and Search integration with CDAP. The ease-of-use capabilities in CDAP will accelerate use cases incorporating Impala, and efforts around customer and developer engagement have already begun. "We're pleased with the progress of the Cask partnership," said Mike Olson, co-founder and chief strategy officer of Cloudera. "Our primary goal is to enable applications for Hadoop, and for that to happen, we need to hide the complexity of Hadoop from developers. The latest version of CDAP is a great leap forward toward that objective."

Finally, Cask is also pleased to announce it has been named to The Channel Company's 2015 CRN® Big Data 100. The annual list recognizes companies that bring innovative tools, technologies and services to market, helping organizations productively manage, process and analyze the increasing volume of information being generated today. The 2015 Big Data 100 list is featured online at www.CRN.com, and will be published in the June issue of CRN.

About Cask
Cask is an open source big data software company focused on developers. Cask's flagship offering, the Cask Data Application Platform, makes it possible to quickly and easily develop and deploy more powerful applications for Hadoop.