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Big Data: The 2012 Hadoop Vendor Race
And they’re off. 2012 is well underway and vendors are jockeying their Hadoop-based products for competition in the much-hyped space of Big Data.
While Big Data does not equate to Hadoop, Hadoop is has increasingly become the tool of choice around which many Big Data and data analytics projects are being built. Hadoop allows the processing of very large data sets to be distributed across clusters of computers. Hadoop is an an Open Source Apache-licensed tool and is highly scalable — data processing for a single job can be scaled up to be worked on by thousands of servers. And, Hadoop handles equally well the processing of both structured and unstructured data types.
Forrester’s 1Q analysis of the Hadoop market space is out and it attempts to rank the many contenders in this space. James G. Kobielus, author of the Forrester report, told InformationWeek that “It’s an apples and oranges collection of vendors. More than 100 vendors now offer products or services that are based on Hadoop. The report tried to identify those Hadoop market players which offer a wide breadth of products and services for both Hadoop and Big Data.
But Forrester’s approach drew complaints about the rankings. For example, in the report, both Amazon’s AWS and IBM both ranked extremely high. But InformtionWeek many disagreed that these two vendors rated so high. Mike Maxey, for example, senior director of product management EMC’s Greenplum division, commented that “Amazon doesn’t even offer a [Hadoop] distribution… and IBM tends to push for a full, professional-services-led engagement. There is value in services, but we find that many enterprises don’t want to have all their data locked into a services engagement.”
To counter the criticism, Kobelius emphasized that their report tried to identify full solutions based around Hadoop, and said that “In an immature market there may be no clear leader and the vendors might be differentiated quite widely into different segments. The term ‘solutions’ is intended to make it clear that it’s more than distributions and more than software; it’s vendors with cloud, vendors with appliances and vendors that might have all of that in their portfolios.”
