As Platfora, yet another Hadoop-powered startup, secures $5.7million from Andreessen-Horowitz, Bloomberg BusinessWeek offers the CEO Guide to Hadoop. The BusinessWeek articles illustrate some of the ways that companies from Wal-Mart to IBM are benefiting from big data, and provide some of the language that executives will need before they turn up in the data center and demand “a Hadoop.” Platfora’s release, on the other hand, suggests that big data technologies aren’t necessarily ready to be let loose on the wider world. Derrick Harris remarked that “It all sounds great on paper, but there is at least one catch to Platfora: Customers will still have to employ at least a few Hadoop-savvy folks to manage their Hadoop clusters.” Also discussing Platfora, Jeff Kelly noted that “Hadoop is still an immature and rapidly developing software framework and I think an iterative approach towards Big Data analytics is the more prudent model.” For most, the promise of big data insight with Excel-like simplicity is still a long way from being true. The benefits are there for the taking, but a lot of this stuff remains hard to get running.
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