Today the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) announced the immediate availability of TPCx-HS Version 2, extending the original benchmark’s scope to include the Spark execution framework and cloud services. “Enterprise investment in Big Data analytics tools is growing exponentially, to keep pace with the rapid expansion of datasets,” said Tariq Magdon-Ismail, chairman of the TPCx-HS committee and staff engineer at VMware. “This is leading to an explosion in new hardware and software solutions for collecting and analyzing data. So there is enormous demand for robust, industry standard benchmarks to enable direct comparison of disparate Big Data systems across both hardware and software stacks, either on-premise or in the cloud. TPCx-HS Version 2 significantly enhances the original benchmark’s scope, and based on industry feedback, we expect immediate widespread interest.”