Open Source Big Data platform seamlessly enables unified, multi-dimensional queries across multiple data stores.

Forest Hill, MD –26 August 2015– The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache™ Lens™ has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the project's community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.

Apache Lens is a Unified Analytics platform. It provides an optimal execution environment for analytical queries in the unified view. Apache Lens aims to cut the Data Analytics silos by providing a single view of data across multiple tiered data stores.

"Incubating Apache Lens has been an amazing experience at the ASF," said Amareshwari Sriramadasu, Vice President of Apache Lens. "Apache Lens solves a very critical problem in Big Data analytics space with respect to end users. It enables business users, analysts, data scientists, developers and other users to do complex analysis with ease, without knowing the underlying data layout."

"Apache Lens is a fantastic project that enables simplified access to Big Data analytics," said Sharad Agarwal, member of the Apache Lens PMC. "I am very proud and thrilled to see it graduate as a Top-Level Apache project, and, being involved with the project since its inception, it's exciting to see its community grow."

By providing an online analytical processing (OLAP) model on top of data, Lens seamlessly integrates Apache Hadoop with traditional data warehouses to appear as one. It also provides query history and statistics for queries running in the system along with query life cycle management.

"The query service for our data platform is built on top of Apache Lens," said Gaurav Bhalotia, Vice President of Data Platform at Flipkart. "Lens gives us a powerful and simple abstraction to query data consistently across tiers and storage stacks. We at Flipkart are very excited to see it added as a Top-Level Apache project."

"I am really thrilled to see Lens graduating so soon after getting incubated in ASF," said Mohit Saxena, Founder and CTO of InMobi. "Lens is really a perfect example how technology can be leveraged to remove complexity of traditional analytical platforms and provide a simple abstraction for end user. Earlier our reporting and data retrieval system were married to a compute and even storage engine and user had to juggle for results, Hence the need of something like Lens arises and I am so proud that lens has solved a big problem where user can simply use one query layer at the top while lens does all heavy lifting below it and I simply hope this is just the beginning and it will only thrive with the help of vibrant Apache community. God speed."

"Apache Lens has been a truly stellar example of what an incubating project should be," said Jakob Homan, ASF Member and Apache Lens Project Mentor. "It's grown very quickly and will be a tremendously useful part of the Apache Big Data ecosystem."

Catch Apache Lens in action at Apache: Big Data Europe on 29 September 2015 http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/apache-big-data-europe/

Availability and Oversight
Apache Lens software is released under the Apache License v2.0 and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. For downloads, documentation, and ways to become involved with Apache Lens, visit http://lens.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/ApacheLens

About the Apache Incubator
The Apache Incubator is the entry path for projects and codebases wishing to become part of the efforts at The Apache Software Foundation. All code donations from external organizations and existing external projects wishing to join the ASF enter through the Incubator to: 1) ensure all donations are in accordance with the ASF legal standards; and 2) develop new communities that adhere to our guiding principles. Incubation is required of all newly accepted projects until a further review indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision making process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful ASF projects. While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection of the completeness or stability of the code, it does indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF. For more information, visit http://incubator.apache.org/

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than 350 leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server --the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way," more than 550 individual Members and 4,700 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Cerner, Citrix, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, HP, IBM, InMotion Hosting, iSigma, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, Pivotal, Produban, WANdisco, and Yahoo. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.

© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "Hadoop", "Apache Hadoop", "Lens", "Apache Lens", and "ApacheCon" are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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