[mirkoadari]

We're trying out Apache Spark with Apache Zeppelin and it's been a pleasure so far. We faced the same problems that everyone else mentioned here -- data is not accessible to people who need it and every datasource requires different tools.

What we like about Apache Spark is that it can take any source and provide the same very fast and programmatic (code reuse!) interface for analysis. Think JSON data dumps from MixPanel, SQL databases, some Excel spreadsheet someone threw together etc.

Apache Zeppelin is a little bit limited in the visualization that comes out of the box, but the benefits of having a shared data language across the company is just such a huge plus. Also, super easy to add data visualization options and hopefully companies will start to contribute these back to the project.