diff --git a/hyracks/hyracks-documentation/src/books/user-guide/sec-introduction-whatis.apt b/hyracks/hyracks-documentation/src/books/user-guide/sec-introduction-whatis.apt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e3a659e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/hyracks/hyracks-documentation/src/books/user-guide/sec-introduction-whatis.apt
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+What is Hyracks?
+
+  Hyracks is a partitioned-parallel platform for running data-intensive computation on a shared-nothing cluster of commodity machines.