Big data and analytics third quarter 2014: analysis and outlook

Table of Contents

  1. Summary
  2. Apache projects
  3. Incumbent vendors make big data push
  4. Data discovery vendors reach the next level
  5. NewSQL, NoSQL vendors realign, vertically
  6. Near-term outlook
  7. Key takeaways
  8. About Andrew Brust

1. Summary

The third quarter of 2014 brought forward much in the way of Hadoop’s maturation and the industry’s maturity in working with it. Whereas in the second quarter there were early signs of the rise of Hadoop 2.0’s YARN resource manager and the decline of MapReduce, this past quarter, that phenomenon was in full effect.

As open source data project momentum increases, the value add of commercial offerings that integrate with, abstract away, and simplify those underlying technologies has grown. Incumbent vendors are moving as quickly as they can to adjust to the changes. NewSQL and NoSQL vendors are carving out niches for themselves as they move beyond the market entry stage.

This report will examine the following areas of activity from the third quarter and their impact on the near term outlook in the analytics space:

  • The continued growth of YARN, combined with increased momentum for Spark, leads a banner quarter in new releases and shorter release cycles for numerous Apache Software Foundation projects.
  • Incumbent vendors made huge strides in the big data arena, with Teradata making acquisitions, Oracle announcing new technologies, new releases and new cloud services, and Microsoft coming to market with three important new releases of its own. Meanwhile, IBM has doubled-, nay tripled-down on Watson.
  • Several data discovery vendors, which Gigaom Research reviewed in a Sector Roadmap earlier this year, have come out with new releases and previews that range from evolutionary to innovative to game-changing.
  • Meanwhile, horizontal competitors in the NewSQL and NoSQL fields have started to go vertical, as standing out amongst the crowd starts to become a major imperative.

 

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