Hadoop Distributions And Kids’ Soccer

The big players are moving in for a piece of the big data action.  IBM, EMC, and NetApp have stepped up their messaging, in part to prevent startup upstarts like Cloudera from cornering the Apache Hadoop distribution market. They are all elbowing one another to get closest to “pure Apache” while still “adding value.” Numerous other startups have emerged, with greater or lesser reliance on, and extensions or substitutions for, the core Apache distribution. Yahoo! has found a funding partner and spun its team out, forming a new firm called Hortonworks, whose claim to fame begins with an impressive roster responsible for most of the code in the core Hadoop projects. Think of the Doctor Seuss children’s book featuring that famous elephant, and you’ll understand the name.

While we’re talking about kids – ever watch young kids play soccer? Everyone surrounds the ball. It takes years to learn their position on the field and play accordingly. There are emerging alphas, a few stragglers on the sidelines hoping for a chance to play, community participants – and a clear need for governance. Tech markets can be like that, and with 1600 attendees packing late June’s Hadoop Summit event, all of those scenarios were playing out. Leaders, new entrants, and the big silents, like the absent Oracle and Microsoft.

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Cloudera Convenes Colleagues to Crunch Content (Make Mine Membase)

Over the past two years, Cloudera has demonstrated the power of surrounding emerging open source software with support services, expertise and its own IP. The firm has  racked up over 30 customers since its founding in late 2008, and emerged as the leading source of Apache Hadoop. Cloudera’s recent C round of financing brought its funding to $36 million, and it has been investing aggressively, with 45 employees, a very visible voice on the Big Data circuit and a stellar, experienced leadership team. It evangelizes through training, thought leadership, and increasingly through a growing sales and marketing team. Cloudera deserves a full post of its own; I hope to get to that before yearend.

One indicator of Cloudera’s precocity has been its prioritization of key alliances – higher than many firms its size – and that strategy is likely to have a big payoff if the partnerships are well executed and bring the marketplace momentum and the value they promise to fruition. Two key recent announcements involved Membase and Informatica. I’ll discuss the latter in another post – here I’ll talk about why the Membase deal makes so much sense. Read more of this post

Calpont’s InfiniDB – Another ADBMS Insurgent Arises

Calpont, rapidly emerging as yet another contender in the ADBMS sweepstakes, has announced version 2.0 of InfiniDB, its columnar MPP offering over shared storage. The value proposition hits now-familiar themes: high-performance query, fast data loading, data compression, and parallelized user defined functions (UDFs), all of which are becoming key checkoff capabilities. InfiniDB also hits hard on pricing, which it says dramatically undercuts that of its competitors. And a 30-day free trial of the enterprise edition sweetens the offer. For those comfortable with open source, the 2.0 release of the  community edition is available as well. Calpont says the community edition (which is limited to a single server but is otherwise database feature-complete) has had 15,000 downloads. But the company’s relationship with Oracle for its MySQL components must be considered a risk going forward.

InfiniDB, like Infobright, is built atop Oracle’s MySQL. (I posted about Infobright last year, and it also has made significant progress, drawing favorable comment in the open source community for its continuing maturation.)  Calpont’s relationship with Oracle must be seen as a risk factor..Oracle’s recent decisions about support raise questions about its interest in supporting anyone who is not an enterprise-class user of the Oracle-branded MySQL offering. Calpont has a deal through 2012 that includes an OEM license to integrate and use MySQL as the InfiniDB branded solution, and access to the MySQL channel. What will happen beyond that is clearly a concern. Read more of this post

EMC Buys Greenplum – Big Data Realignment Continues

EMC’s acquisition of Greenplum, announced today as a cash transaction, reaffirms the obvious: the Big Data tsunami upends conventional wisdom. It has already reshaped the market, spawning the most ferment in the RDBMS (and non-R DBMS via the noSQL players) space in years. When I first posted on Greenplum over a year ago, I said that

Open source + capital has created an intriguing new model of rapid innovation in “mature” markets, and the database space - like BI – is not a done deal. It is indeed possible to escape the gravity well, if you execute. Greenplum is getting it done, and is among the new stars to watch.”

Why the open source reference? Greenplum uses a parallelization layer atop PostgreSQL (like Aster, another of the new breed of ADBMS.)

Now EMC has written the next chapter in that story. In the process, it adds a new piece (after literally dozens of others in the past few years) to its own portfolio, which already includes unstructured data (via Documentum) and virtualization (via VMWare), layered in among the industry-leading storage and information management pieces. Disruptive? You bet. Is EMC finished? I doubt it. Candidates? BI tools, ETL, MDM, data integration come to mind. Losers? At least one big one. Read on. Read more of this post

VoltDB – DIY OLTP. Open Source. Win.

In a seemingly perfect marriage of product and target market, database pioneer Mike Stonebraker’s new in-memory database company VoltDB has emerged from stealth mode using the open source model, soon to be open core. Its first release, GPL licensed Community Edition will appeal to developers who need blindingly fast transaction processing and are willing to do a lot of work themselves to get there – the do it yourself (DIY) database. Who better than the Gluecon community? Gluecon was the perfect place to do the formal roll out, filled as it is with hands-on folks looking to work with NoSQL products (like Cassandra, CouchDB, MongoDB, Riak, Voldemort, etc.)

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Meanwhile, At The Low End, Infobright is in Transition

I’ve been busy with the big boys for the past few weeks, but open-source offerings are in the news and demand comment. Open source DW software provider  Infobright has a new CEO, Mark Burton  and though he’s an “interim,” he’s hands-on and has the pedigree to help get some traction. Read more of this post

Pentaho Goes “Open Core” With Lucidera OLAP Viewer

Open-source BI vendor Pentaho has purchased technology rights from failed BI SaaS vendor LucidEra, and plans to combine LucidEra’s Clearview, a reporting and analysis OLAP front end for non-technical users, with the Mondrian open source OLAP engine used by Pentaho Analysis,  in a new offering called Pentaho Analyzer Enterprise Edition, available both on-premise and on-demand. Clearview will not be available in the free community edition of Pentaho. Existing Pentaho Analysis Enterprise Edition and Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition customers will not be charged additional fees. Clearview adds substantial value to the priced portion of Pentaho’s portfolio – another example of the “open core” business model. Open core is not without its detractors, and a brief flurry of chatter erupted about it in the blogosphere. Read more of this post

Lively LinkedIn TDWI Discussions Exemplify Community IP Values

I’m not normally a fan of blog posts that do little more than talk about information available elsewhere. But I’m going to make an exception, because what TDWI has been able to do of late on LinkedIn has generated a good deal of conversation, information sharing and intriguing conclusions. Kudos to Wayne Eckerson for his efforts at getting this going as well as evangelizing it. Read more of this post

What’s An Eigenbase?

The open source community is remarkable in many ways. For me, one of the most significant aspects of it is exactly that: it IS a community. It’s composed of people who communicate and share in deep and productive ways. One of the most interesting manifestations of that spirit I’ve run across is the Eigenbase project, an extensible platform being used by some very creative folks for the creation and continuing development of databases for data warehousing (the LucidDB DBMS) and stream processing (the SQLstream continuous query engine). I haven’t posted about either of those yet but will, and I’m watching their continuing evolution with great interest.

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HP Scores Big Win

Perhaps I should have called this piece “Blogger Eats Words.” Hewlett-Packard has landed (pun intended) precisely the kind of strategic partnership win I recently suggested it is not positioned for, based on its recent description of its portfolio in a quarterly earnings call. The victory comes exactly where I suggested it needed to: with a services-led approach, leveraging the formidable assets of EDS. In an-industry-shaking coup, HP has landed a contract to replace Sabre as the proverbial “airline reservation system” – traditionally, a synonym for “really hard IT stuff” – for American Airlines (more precisely, AMR, the parent company). Read more of this post

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