Big Data Bits: It's a Hadoop Centered World

Hadoop sits at the center of big data. So does the news around the ecosystem, there’s a lot of it. And no time to digress …

Hortonworks Gets Big Bucks, Stays True to Apache Hadoop Roots

Hortonworks is reporting that it has raised $100 million to continue to innovate Enterprise Hadoop and drive the expansion of its ecosystem. It’s no great surprise given how committed the company is to the Apache project and how much work it still needs to realize its full potential.

Add to that that SAP, Microsoft, Teradata and many other newer vendors have chosen Hortonworks’ HDP as their big data partner. There’s no question why investors are willing to support their business strategy: the company is walking its talk and the VC’s like what they see.

And when it comes to investors, they’re probably salivating at a potential payout. Last week Hortonworks CEO Rob Bearden told a GigaOm Stucture audience that the Hadoop software market will grow to about $25 billion in the next few years and that he anticipates his company will own 50 percent of it (with revenues of $1 billion). Not just that, but that he also expects to lead his company toward an IPO in the not so distant future.

Let’s just hope that his financials look better than Box’s when they get there.

Cloudera Raises $160M for International Expansion

Though Cloudera and Hortonworks often get thrown in the same Hadoop boat, their approaches to the market have diverged. While Hortonworks’ approach is all about adding services and training around HDP, its free Enterprise Hadoop distribution, Cloudera does all of that (with CDP, its Hadoop distro), plus it sells software.

In the last quarter of last year at GigaOm Structure, the company announced its Enterprise Data Hub strategy which puts Hadoop at the center of the Enterprise, making it possible to technically store, manage, and make use of the tidal wave of data that businesses need to leverage to win business in today’s world.

Industry watchers expect that Cloudera will file for its IPO sometime soon, but we see no real signs of it. What we have seen is that the company’s Enterprise Data Hub strategy is gaining traction and that Cloudera’s big data sale is moving toward the business Vs. only IT. It may be a smart play in a world in which, according to some experts, CIO’s are losing their power.

A Gift for Big Data App Developers

Big Data App Development isn’t easy but if Continuuity CEO Jonathan Gray has his way, it won’t always be like that. It’s with this in mind that that the company introduced Loom last week. It’s an Open Source Dev Ops tool that makes provisioning large clusters as easy as pushing a button.

This is a big improvement over what Enterprise Hadoop developers experience today — instead of getting busy with the project at hand, they’re stuck submitting tickets to obtain Hadoop clusters or setting up software on a group of machines and then waiting for days, or even weeks before they can begin.

Gray says that with Loom, the IT department can codify reference architectures and maintain a centrally controlled catalog of cluster templates that can be provisioned directly by developers (with optional manual approval flows).

From there IT administrators can use Loom’s centralized dashboard to monitor and manage all of the multiple clusters developers have provisioned, concurrently across multiple clouds, both public and private.

According to Continuuity developers can spin up clusters from a web UI, rest APIs, or on the command-line. Additionally, clusters can be provisioned and decommissioned in an automated way by integrating into an enterprise's Continuous Integration (CI) workflow.

The bottom line is that Loom increases Developer and DevOps productivity, drastically reducing the time between development and test cycles, and enabling true self-service DevOps within the enterprise.

Platfora Eliminates the Need to Trust Your Gut

We live in a world that is awash in data, but according to Platfora CEO Ben Werther, 95 percent of business executives make decisions with their gut. Not a good way to operate, eh?

Why make choices based on using fiction, feelings and faith when a little number crunching can dramatically increase your odds of achieving a desired result?

Interesting question — and a good argument for big data analytics. Investors from Tenaya Capital, Citi Ventures, Cisco and Allegis Capital, certainly thought so, it’s why they invested $38 million in the company last week.

What does the data about a Box IPO suggest Mr. Werther? Which Hadoop vendor will IPO fist? We’re all ears and full of questions, so anytime you want to take on our questions, we’re game. We’ll even write about how you helped us get to the answer.

Title image by S-F / Shutterstock.