Hadoop specialist Hortonworks is to buy Onyara, the creator of top-level open source project Apache Nifi, in a bid to simplify and secure automated data flows.

With the rate of data flow becoming the next critical issue for big data practitioners to deal with, it could become a hurdle on which some competitors may fall, according to market watchers.

Quicker access and insight

Access to Onyara’s tools will give users quicker and better insights into events as they happen on the Internet, the vendor claims. As a result of the acquisition, Hortonworks is introducing Hortonworks DataFlow powered by Apache NiFi as a complement to its open enterprise system Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP).

big data elephant cloud tightrope
– Thinkstock ximagination

The sale is expected to be completed by the end of September 2015.

Hortonworks claims that its system will help clients assess data from what it describes as the ‘Internet of Anything (IoAT)’, as companies strive for instant intelligence on their entire estate of machines and devices. Most IoAT applications need two way connections and security from the edge to the data center, which will create data protection, governance and provenance challenges for IT bosses, it says.

The new addition will enable HDP users to enjoy ‘full fidelity analytics’, according to Hortonworks’ CEO Rob Bearden. “Customer must transform their business through data-driven insights and actions,” said Bearden, “Onyara’s impressive security and simplicity makes a perfect addition to our technology team.”

According to one industry insider, however, companies like Hortonworks are being forced to change their modus operandum.

“Hortonworks had to make a big move here,” said Apurva Dave, marketing VP at data operations hub Jut, “Google has Cloud Dataflow, Cloudera is cozying up to Spark, Amazon has Kinesis. HortonWorks needed a strategy to get off batch-only data and into streaming.”

Hortonworks strived to position dataflow as a parallel to its existing Hadoop offering, but in reality data flow achieves both streaming and batch analysis. “So data flow has the potential to let HortonWorks disrupt its legacy business. It’s a smart move on that front,” said Dave.

Dave was unimpressed by the new IoAT acronym. “Hortonworks is positioning this as a play on Internet of things, but in reality we’ve already seen lots of interest from simple use cases, like understanding what’s happening inside applications and how users are interacting with a product,” said Dave. “It speaks to the flexibility of data flow - the concept can be applied to any big data problem where you need a real-time answer.