Cask Receives Strategic Investment From Ericsson

PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwired - June 23, 2016) - Cask (cask.co), the company that makes building and deploying big data applications easy, today announces a strategic investment by Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC). The strategic minority investment will help accelerate delivery of Cask's Apache Hadoop®-based solutions and services for a range of vertical industries.

Cask has developed the Cask Data Application Platform (CDAP), an open source framework for rapidly delivering enterprise solutions on Hadoop and Apache Spark. It integrates and abstracts underlying infrastructure technologies to provide a simple and consistent platform to build, deploy, and manage complex data analytics applications on-premises and in the cloud. The company was recently named a Gartner "Cool Vendor" for 2016.

"Data is a company's most valuable resource but complex frameworks and infrastructure have meant that its interpretation typically falls to data scientists," said Diomedes Kastanis, VP, and Head of Technology and Software Solutions for Ericsson. "Cask puts all stakeholders in the driver's seat, liberating enterprises from burdensome infrastructure demands. This includes everyone from business development to marketing to those needing to extract value from big data for faster, inclusive and scalable innovation."

CDAP supports the broad spectrum of big data use cases in vertical industries, from streaming and user-facing applications, internal enterprise data lakes, and network management, to Internet-of-Things (IoT). Simple API's, visual interfaces and conceptual integrity boost productivity across the entire big data lifecycle. Reusable building blocks -- such as datasets for call detail records and application templates for common telco patterns -- improve efficiencies even further when building and deploying multiple big data applications. Rich user interfaces enable data discovery and code-free data pipeline development, empowering data scientists with self-service usability on any Hadoop platform. CDAP has also been built to support portability within and across distributions, providing enterprises and developers with a standardized platform backed by a broad set of choices for production deployments on-premises and in the cloud. CDAP instantly integrates with new and existing data stores, and transparently supports all native and commercial Hadoop distributions; it has been certified by Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR.

"While use cases for Hadoop-based solutions have significantly grown over the past few years, so too, unfortunately, have the complexity of the underlying technologies and the frustration experienced by developers, data scientists and IT professionals alike that comes with building and deploying Hadoop applications into production," said Jonathan Gray, CEO of Cask. "For most enterprises, the amount of data collected is massive, the need to derive and act on insights from this data is critical, and the large organizational scale and data privacy concerns bring additional complexity. Cask has spent years working with customers to give them the ability to drive efficiencies at every step in the big data lifecycle, to expand access to data through self-service, and to provide portability of services across different production environments. The strategic investment from Ericsson strengthens our ability to accelerate penetration of CDAP as the de-facto standard when it comes to quickly and easily developing and deploying powerful big data applications that will change how the world conducts business."

About Cask
Cask provides the de-facto, open source big data application and integration platform that lets developers and data scientists accelerate the time to build, deploy and operate data-centric applications and data lakes; it also enables IT organizations to implement well-governed data-as-a-service environments designed to quickly unlock the value of data. Through standardized API's, configurable application templates and visual interfaces, Cask's flagship product -- the Cask Data Application Platform (CDAP) -- cuts down the average implementation time by 80%, while enabling enterprise-class governance, portability, security and transactional consistency in production Hadoop and Spark applications. Major customers and partners include AT&T, Cloudera, Lotame, Pet360 and Salesforce. Cask is headquartered in Palo Alto, California. To download the latest version of CDAP, please go to the Cask website, and to stay updated on product and company news, follow us @caskdata.