Karmasphere, a Big Data Intelligence company, today announced its new Hadoop Virtual Appliance for developers building analytic jobs on IBM InfoSphere BigInsights. The free bundle incorporates IBM InfoSphere BigInsights, CentOS Linux, the Eclipse IDE and Karmasphere Studio Community, all in a convenient virtual appliance. With this virtual appliance developers can speed their ramp to MapReduce development to get Hadoop Big Data Analytics initiatives moving forward in their companies. Karmasphere is demonstrating the freely available environment this week at the IBM Information on Demand and Business Analytics Forum 2011, at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas.

"Businesses are looking for a straightforward, cost-effective path to gain insight from their massive volumes of unstructured and structured data in their organizations," said Martin Hall, co-founder and chairman, Karmasphere. "Our work with IBM provides developers with the power of a graphical environment to quickly learn MapReduce development in support of their data analysts who need to mine and analyze web, mobile, sensor and social media data in Hadoop and bring new value to their business."

The Karmasphere Studio Community Hadoop Developer Virtual Appliance for IBM InfoSphere BigInsights is easy to install and provides a graphical Eclipse environment that guides the developer through prototyping and testing MapReduce jobs. The developer can then test the jobs using the IBM InfoSphere BigInsights within the virtual appliance to assure they will function properly when deployed to a remote Hadoop cluster. It is a great way to learn MapReduce and get started with Hadoop, even without having an IBM InfoSphere BigInsights cluster installed.

InfoSphere BigInsights brings the power of Apache Hadoop to the enterprise, adding administrative, workflow, provisioning, and security features, along with best-in-class analytical capabilities from IBM Research. InfoSphere BigInsights allows enterprises of all sizes to manage and analyze cost effectively the massive volume, variety and velocity of data that consumers and businesses create every day.

The Karmasphere Big Data Intelligence product line includes Karmasphere Analyst, a complete visual workspace for data professionals to explore and analyze Big Data using familiar SQL and pre-packaged heuristics. Karmasphere also offers Studio Professional Edition, that has all the features of the Karmasphere Studio Community included in the virtual appliance, adding support for debugging, packaging and optimizing production Hadoop applications, even through a firewall.

"Karmasphere continues to deliver innovation and real value to IBM clients with products that get them mining and analyzing structured and unstructured data on Hadoop quickly," said Rob Thomas, Vice President of Business Development, IBM Information Management. "The Karmasphere virtual appliance for IBM InfoSphere BigInsights reduces the Big Data learning curve by providing an onramp for enterprises to get their Big Data Analytics projects up and running on Hadoop."

Karmasphere has already certified its Big Data Analytics products to interoperate seamlessly with the IBM Big Data Platform. The free Hadoop development environment from IBM and Karmasphere, can be downloaded at http://karmasphere.com/Download/karmasphere-studio-virtual-appliance-for-ibm.html.