Chipmaker Intel (News - Alert) is targeting the big data sector with a new software platform. The company is reportedly releasing a version of Hadoop, which is open-source software that works successfully with solid-state drives.

This move is an attempt by the company to try to increase sales of Intel’s Xeon server processors, and speed up adoption of the big data platform, news reports said.

Many companies want to take advantage of the increasing interest in big data. There are currently large amounts of data generated by finance, social media and Web searches, Reuters reported.

“Our goal is to grow the market and bring it to a bigger footprint,” Boyd Davis, vice president of Intel's Architecture gGroup and general manager of the Data Center Software Division, was quoted by The Wall Street Journal.

“Intel is committed to contributing its enhancements made to use all of the computing horsepower available to the open source community  to provide the industry with a better foundation from which it can push the limits of innovation and realize the transformational opportunity of big data,” TMCnet reported in another statement from Davis.

“People and machines are producing valuable information that could enrich our lives in so many ways, from pinpoint accuracy in predicting severe weather to developing customized treatments for terminal diseases.” Such healthcare applications improve patient care “by helping caregivers make quicker and more accurate diagnoses, determine effectiveness of drugs, drug interactions, dosage recommendations and potential side effects through the analysis of millions of electronic medical records, public health data and claims records,” TMCnet added.

In addition, The New York Times said that Intel now sees competition from other versions of Hadoop. EMC’s (News - Alert) Greenplum has released a version of Hadoop. Hortonworks is also releasing a version that operates on Microsoft Windows, The Times said.

The company has even developed tools that are not open source technology including Intel Manager for Apache Hadoop (which is used for deployment and configuration) and Active Tuner for Apache Hadoop (which tunes cluster performance).