Cray courts the big-data market
Supercomputer company Cray has created a new division that will sell big-data systems, the company has announced. The division will market its offerings to large enterprises, which will be a new kind of client for the company.
"All of our customers have been in the high-performance computing market. With big data, we wanted to set apart a division of the company really attuned to the enterprise customer," Cray President and CEO Peter Ungaro said. The new division, called YarcData, will be managed by former Informatica executive Arvind Parthasarathi. Parthasarathi, a new hire for Cray, led the master-data-management business unit for Informatica, which sells business intelligence software. Parthasarathi also worked at Oracle and i2 Technologies.
"There are numerous unmet segments of the big-data market. The approach we're taking is a completely different spin on the big-data problem," Parthasarathi said. Big data is a popular buzzword for the practice of analyzing vast stores of unstructured data, a practice favored by competitive Internet services such as Twitter and Yahoo. It's one that increasingly is being considered by enterprises as well.