Google enters big data analytics fray
Google has officially entered the big data analytics arena, which is already competitive with offerings from IBM's Netezza and Hewlett-Packard's Vertica, by making its BigQuery cloud service available to the general public.
According to a blog post on Tuesday, the company stated that BigQuery enables businesses and developers to gain real-time business insights from massive amounts of data "without any upfront hardware or software investments".
The service was available in limited preview last November, noted Kwek Ju-kay, product manager of BigQuery at Google, in the blog post. Since then, companies such as Claritics, a social and mobile analytics company, have used the service to build a Web app for game developers to gain real-time insights into user behavior, he added.
The software-as-a-service offering from Google would also stand up well to other products in the market as it is cheaper and easier to set up, the executive said in a separate interview with tech news site Venture Beat.
He said: "On-premise options like Netezza and Vertica are fast and powerful, but they will cost you. And with Hadoop, you need more heads and you have to build out a custom Hadoop system."
Google stated that developers and businesses can now sign up for BigQuery online and analyze up to 100 gigabytes (GB) of data per month for free. The paid service involves a fee of US$0.12 per GB per month for up to two terabytes (TB), and US$0.35 for each GB of data processed up to a limit of 1,000 queries each day or 20TB of data processed.