Cloudera News & Articles

The company that leverages data best will win the future. That’s the business credo of 2012. It’s easy to say, but not so easy to do, especially at the enterprise level.

IBM is the acquisition trail again despite disappointing results for Q1 released last week. The results fell around the European economy, not over IBM commercial strategy. The result is that it looks like it is to keep buying what it needs, this week’s Vivisimo acquisition being a case in point.

We have become a society of data hoarders, saving every transaction, social conversation and even movement in hopes that someday it might be useful. This has moved big data from being the almost exclusive concern of Internet giants and financial firms into almost popular conversation. Accel Partners believes the trend will continue and is willing to make a big commitment to make sure big data moves forward.

Cloudera (news, site), the current leader in the Apache Hadoop based commercial services market, has announced that Cloudera Enterprise 3.5 is available. Cloudera Enterprise 3.5 is a significant update to the subscription-based service; it includes several new features such as one-click security that makes it easier for organizations to leverage Hadoop. As data and competition in the Hadoop space grows, Cloudera will have to continue to innovate to remain a market leader.

Reports are circulating that Yahoo (news, site) will finally be announcing its commercial Hadoop spinoff company to compete with Cloudera (news, site). In a nod to the competition, Yahoo is supposed to call the new company HortonWorks, for the elephant in the Dr. Seuss classic, Horton Hears a Who.

There is another new entrant to the Hadoop market. Belgium-based Outerthought has announced its repository for big data and content management, Lily. The company is simultaneously launching its commercial services, but has decided to play nice by supporting Cloudera’s (news, site) Distribution including Hadoop (CDH).

Is big data darling Hadoop about to pack up its bags and leave home? Rumors and commentary are spinning around the web and traditional media that Yahoo! Is considering spinning off the entire software unit. Although the software originated with Yahoo!, Cloudera (news, site) has emerged as a leader in the paid support and value-added products for the platform. If Yahoo creates a Hadoop startup, Cloudera and "Yahoo spinoff" would compete head-to-head.

The exponential growth of data created by social media, location sensors and other Web 2.0-style interactions has driven the emergence and growth of solutions to manage “big data” efficiently. Uber-fast MapReduce-based tools, such as Apache’s Hadoop, have emerged as some of the most popular. Data enthusiasts will be excited that Cloudera (news, site), commercial provider of Hadoop products, services, support and training, has finally announced the general availability of its own Hadoop distribution: Cloudera’s Distribution including Apache Hadoop version 3 (CDH3) -- makes data processing short, but apparently product names, not so much.

In spite of the claims by NOSQL proponents, the Information Week’s 2010 State of Database Technology study says 44% of technology leaders have never heard of NOSQL databases like Hadoop.

Technology leaders don’t need to rush to understand Hadoop, but because the problems that NOSQL solves has many benefits for organizations, they should begin to acquire the mindset and skills to understand the potential of these tools.