by Angela Guess
Jeff Carr recently wrote an article for VentureBeat about Big Data’s little secret: Hadoop isn’t the end-all-be-all. He writes, “Most observers would agree that the era of big data started around 2007, when Google’s MapReduce programming framework was integrated with Apache Hadoop, an open source project founded a couple of years earlier to help developers efficiently and cheaply process large amounts of data. Used together, Hadoop and MapReduce made it faster, easier and cheaper to process and analyze massive volumes ofdata than ever before. At this juncture companies started adopting various forms of Hadoop/MapReduce to capture and filter their data. Companies like Yahoo and later Facebook were some of the earliest to announce petabyte stores of data in Hadoop.”
He goes on, “Rapid commercialization of the Hadoop ecosystem, however, has only occurred in the last two or three years, as the revenue opportunity began to reveal itself. As with any big trend in technology, including the RDBMS/client server, internet, and web security trends that preceded it, big data has correspondingly evolved into the technological equivalent of a gold rush. Hundreds of companies have entered the fray with hopes to quickly cash in. The majority of these companies, which include pre-big data enterprise technology incumbents and a slew of data-focused technology startups, are positioning themselves as the suppliers to the miners of big data. Instead of picks, axes and gold pans, they supply the tools, technologies and services that will help companies monetize huge amounts of data. Needless to say, there is a lot of data to be mined and a lot of money to be made.”
photo credit: Hadoop
