The emergence of the big data phenomenon is fundamentally changing everything from the way companies operate to the way people interact to how the world deals with outbreaks of infectious diseases. Here we highlight 10 case studies illustrating how big data is changing the world. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The massive amount of data that is emerging from connected, digital systems, is fundamentally changing everything, from Internet search to entertainment, to disease management, to energy consumption. Here’s 10 case studies that highlight the power of big data. Read more »
Matt Howard of Norwest Venture Partners predicts that 2012 and 2013 will be Hadoop’s breakout years. Howard gives us insight into the five factors that will accelerate Hadoop’s mainstream adoption over the next 18 months. Read more »
Cisco and EMC have come up with a reference architecture featuring Cisco UCS server gear that’s designed to run the EMC Greenplum MR software, the company’s “enterprise-class” Hadoop distribution that features technology it OEMs from Hadoop startup MapR. Read more »
Rob Bearden, CEO of Hortonworks, the Hadoop startup that spun out of Yahoo in June 2011, knows a thing or two about making open source software profitable. And he thinks Hadoop has an opportunity to be bigger than the markets for JBoss, SpringSource and MySQL combined. Read more »
Hadoop features front and center in the discussion of how to implement a big data strategy, one of the biggest trends in IT. There’s just one problem that keeps cropping up: many people don’t seem to know exactly what it means when somebody says “Hadoop.” Read more »
DynamoDB, AWS’ latest effort to rock the technology establishment, has many implications for other players in the big data and cloud computing markets. A new GigaOM Pro research note examines just who is affected, and how. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Although the first couple years of commercial Hadoop attention have been characterized by an attitude of “Hadoop is great, but …”, the tone is changing as Hadoop vendors increase the platform’s palatableness with each new iteration. No longer is Hadoop necessarily an epic undertaking rife with pitfalls. Read more »
Continuing a yearlong trend, the fourth quarter in big IT was all about big data, and Hadoop in particular. Still, many are beginning to recognize the software framework’s shortcomings, which is why this quarter also saw more attention for startups claiming easy analytics and real-time processing. Elsewhere in infrastructure, SaaS startups made out well and valuations for these companies are getting higher, and naturally there was news from the AWS camp. This quarterly wrap-up examines these events and more, including the quarter’s dark spot, the hike in prices in the hard-drive manufacturing space due to the floods in Thailand. Companies mentioned in this report include Calxeda, Heroku, Rackspace, Salesforce.com and Tier3. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Oracle’s Big Data Appliance is now for sale, featuring Cloudera’s Hadoop distribution and management tools. Regardless of what anybody thinks about Oracle’s strategy, the deal is a coup for Cloudera as it tries to fend off competition from fellow Hadoop startups Hortonworks and MapR. Read more »
1010data says it now hosts more than 5 trillion records for its customers. If 1010data’s growth is a microcosm of the greater market, it’s no wonder there’s so much excitement around scalable data stores such as Hadoop, NoSQL databases and massively parallel analytic databases. Read more »
Money has turned the Hadoop community, once united under the Apache banner and the cuddly stuffed-toy-elephant logo, into something resembling a frat house: Everyone’s under the same roof, but there’s plenty of machismo to go around. If it’s not good business; it is good theater. Read more »
There has been a remarkable flowering of companies over the past year or two, all riding a wave of developer and investor enthusiasm for the loosely defined concept of “big data.” But given that the big data startup market is probably overvalued and headed for a ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Hadoop gets plenty of attention from investors and the IT press, but it’s very possible we haven’t seen anything yet. All the action of the last year has just been setting the stage for what should be a big year. Read more »
Accel Partners is trying to capitalize on the popularity of big data with a $100 million Big Data Fund. The VC firm’s office across the globe will invest in applications that help form an ecosystem around existing big data building blocks such as Hadoop and NoSQL. Read more »
Hadoop isn’t the only thing going in big data, but it’s driving the bus at this point and it seems to have a reverse Midas touch: everything that touches it turns to gold. The latest to experience this is Cloudera, which has raised another $40 million. Read more »
Targeting customers demanding more-reliable and efficient Hadoop clusters to power their big data efforts, NetApp has partnered with Cloudera to deliver a Hadoop storage system called the NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop. It combines Cloudera’s Hadoop distribution and management software with a NetApp-built RAID architecture. Read more »
Cloudera founder Christophe Bisciglia launched a new company today called Odiago, whose WibiData product utilizes Hadoop and HBase to let businesses make the most of online user data. Big-name investors aside, under the covers WibiData shows the future of how Hadoop-based products will look. Read more »
Hortonworks is getting into software after all with today’s release of the open-source Hortonworks Data Platform. This is a smart move by Hortonworks, which will need more than name recognition to displace Hadoop elder statesman Cloudera as well as mega-vendors EMC, Oracle and IBM. Read more »
Several of the young entrepreneurs at this week’s MIT Emtech 2011 conference were executives from established companies but many more were academic researchers who said the divide between “pure research” and commercialization is bigger than ever as the lengthy recession persists. Read more »
SGI and Cloudera have entered into a reseller agreement, but the most interesting part of the deal is that it’s yet another example of a vendor pushing Hadoop products at mainstream customers while keeping the custom stuff targeted at HPC. Read more »
Cloudera and Hortonworks have been playing a game of oneupsmanship over the past few weeks in an attempt to prove whose contributions to the Apache Hadoop project matter most. Reputation matters to both companies, but maybe not as much as fending off encroachments to their turf. Read more »
Hadoop is becoming a popular choice for large organizations needing to store and process large volumes of unstructured data, but is it merely the flavor of the day? An eBay exec recently questioned his continued use of the platform if the pace of development doesn’t improve. Read more »
To glimpse the future of the data stack, Oracle need look no further than its own backyard. Silicon Valley start-ups are embracing Hadoop, NoSQL data stores like MongoDB, and cloud platforms. Michael Driscoll of Metamarkets explains why Oracle should step up its game. Read more »
It looks like Oracle does indeed have a big data strategy in place, complete with plans for Hadoop, NoSQL and even an integration of the R statistical analysis software. Today, some of startups affected by Oracle’s impending moves weighed in with their takes on the situation. Read more »
Karmasphere, a Cupertino, Calif.-based startup focusing on helping analysts write better big data applications, has raised $6 million in a Series B round. That brings the announced VC investment in Hadoop to more than $30 million in the last 30 days. Read more »
Hadoop-based startup Platfora has raised $5.7 million from Andreessen Horowitz and military intelligence–focused strategic investor In-Q-Tel. Investors are excited because Platfora promises big things around making big data analytics obtainable by anyone needing to parse large volumes of unstructured data, not just data scientists. Read more »
MapR Technologies, the San Jose, Calif.-based startup that sells it own Hadoop distribution for analyzing large volumes of unstructured data, has raised a $20 million Series B round, which will helps its positioning as a worthy alternative in a space that Cloudera has dominated since 2009. Read more »
Alistair Croll’s post on O’Reilly Radar this week may have been titled “There’s no such thing as big data,” but Croll believes the exact opposite. Rather than just collecting data, he argues, you have to ask the right questions of it. Coincidentally, DJ Patil joined Greylock ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Greylock Partners, the VC firm backing companies such as Cloudera, Airbnb and ZipCar hired DJ Patil, formerly the chief product officer at Color, as a data scientist in residence. Greylock’s trying to help its companies monetize the rich vein of user data on the web. Read more »
The great things about open source software stacks is that they’re free and they work. The not-so-great thing is that — like many open source projects — they can be difficult to configure and manage. Luckily, hardware vendors are stepping in to fill the void. Read more »
Web companies like Google and Facebook gain business advantage by analyzing large volumes of rapidly changing data about their users, but they are far from alone. A recent infographic from Get Satisfaction charts the volume of data stored in 17 key industry sectors, illustrating that most ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Big data has the potential to cut operating costs by nearly 50% across all sectors of manufacturing. Get Satisfaction makes several interesting claims about opportunities for big data in an infographic released this month. Market segments such as manufacturing are generating far more data (966 petabytes […] Read more »
All the speculation about how Yahoo’s Hadoop spinoff company, Hortonworks, will affect Cloudera and other companies providing Hadoop-based products might have been overblown. The company is still figuring out its strategy around offering a Hadoop distribution, which could be good news for competitors such as Cloudera. Read more »
Big data and Platform-as-a-Service offerings highlighted the second quarter, suggesting that we can expect to see a shift in enterprise IT practices around application development and analytics very soon. On the PaaS front, we saw new projects like DotCloud and Cloud Foundry gain incredible momentum in just a few short months. The big-data activity ranged from major new Hadoop vendors to heavy investment in flash storage that will speed the serving of data to processing engines. In other areas, we saw an uptick in cloud-computing plans from large vendors, OpenStack continued to mature and pick up both contributors and users, and Facebook caught our eye by launching an open-source project around the designs for its specialized servers and data centers. Additional companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Salesforce.com, IBM, Heroku and Calxeda. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The size of Hadoop deployments appears to have tripled since October, according to statistics that Cloudera is sharing. If accurate, they help prove assumptions that Hadoop usage grows quickly once organizations wrap their heads around how it is used. Read more »
The fight for Hadoop dominance is officially on. While Hortonworks is busy answering questions about its product strategy, Cloudera and MapR will demonstrate new versions of their distributions overflowing with bells and whistles. And there are several other competitive products lurking in the background. Read more »
Yahoo will be spinning off a separate company focused on the development and commercialization of Apache Hadoop, called HortonWorks. The official announcement likely will come tomorrow or Wednesday to coincide with Yahoo’s annual Hadoop Summit, but rumors have been circulating for months. Read more »
Cloud computing has grown from a pie-in-the-sky vision to a major IT movement over the past few years. As its promise has grown, though, so too has its scope. This report covers six key sectors in cloud computing: commodity Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), enterprise IaaS, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), cloud storage and private clouds. We highlight the current state of each and provide informed insights into where they — and cloud computing in general — are headed. Much like any market in a still-evolving state, the infrastructure of the cloud-computing transition is still being built by startups, practitioners and even a big-name company or two. Companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Amazon, Nasuni, Terremark and Heroku. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
LexisNexis is releasing a set of open-source, data-processing tools it says outperforms Hadoop and even handles workloads that Hadoop presently cannot. There have been calls for a legitimate alternative to Hadoop, and this certainly looks like one. Read more »
