Intel’s Big Data Push

As its mainstay business of equipping personal computers slows down, the Intel Corporation is scrambling for new ways to kick-start semiconductor sales. The company has financed development of new kinds of laptops, an effort that has been unsuccessful so far, and invested in Internet-based television. Now the chip maker is eyeing the boom in Big Data.

On Tuesday Intel announced that it is releasing a new version of the Hadoop software system, which is an open source software product used to organize and crunch through much of the information used in Big Data analysis. Data relating to people’s activity on the Internet, information collected from sensors and other kinds of so-called unstructured data are commonly put through Hadoop.

While Hadoop is open source, several variants of its â€frameworks” have been created in the past several years. Intel hopes its version will be the easiest to use, with software and software development tools that will enable lots of nontechnical companies to do Big Data projects. If Intel can popularize data analysis initiatives at companies that do not have big, specialized teams of analysts, more computer servers will be dedicated to such analysis, and Intel can sell a lot more chips.

“Intel is committed to contributing its enhancements made to use all of the computing horsepower available to the open source community,” said Boyd Davis, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Data Center Software division, in an announcement. The product would be useful, he said, “in so many ways, from pinpoint accuracy in predicting severe weather to developing customized treatments for terminal diseases.”

Whether it is useful for Intel’s bottom line remains to be seen. Certainly, the company faces a lot of competition from purveyors o! f other versions of Hadoop.

Many of Intel’s competitors are also making announcements this week, because a large conference on Big Data is going on in Silicon Valley. On Monday EMC’s Greenplum data analysis division released its own version of Hadoop, which it said could process data queries 100 times faster than previous databases. Another Hadoop purveyor, Hortonworks, announced a version that works on Microsoft’s Windows operating system.