Early Signs Of Big Data Going Mainstream

Today, Cloudera announced a new $40m funding round to scale their sales and marketing efforts and a partnership with NetApp where NetApp will resell Cloudera's Hadoop as part of their solution portfolio. These both announcements are critical to where the cloud and Big Data are headed.

Big Data going mainstream: Hadoop and MapReduce are not only meant for Google, Yahoo, and fancy Silicon Valley start-ups. People have recognized that there's a wider market for Hadoop for consumer as well as enterprise software applications. As I have argued before Hadoop and Cloud is a match made in heaven. I blogged about Cloudera and the rising demand of data-centric massive parallel processing almost 2.5 years back, Obviously, we have come a long way. The latest Hadoop conference is completely sold out. It's good to see the early signs of Hadoop going mainstream. I am expecting to see similar success for companies such as Datastax (previously Riptano) which is a "Cloudera for Cassandra."

Storage is a mega-growth category: We are barely scratching the surface when it comes to the growth in the storage category. Big data combined with the cloud growth is going to drive storage demand through the roof and the established storage vendors are in the best shape to take advantage of this opportunity. I wrote a cloud research report and predictions this year with a luminary analyst Ray Wang where I mentioned that cloud storage will be a hot cake and NoSQL will skyrocket. It's true this year and it's even more true next year.

Making PaaS even more exciting: PaaS is the future and Hadoop and Cassandra are not easy to deploy and program. Availability of such frameworks at lower layers makes PaaS even more exciting. I don't expect the PaaS developers to solve these problems. I expect them to work on providing a layer that exposes the underlying functionality in a declarative as well as a programmatic way to let application developers pick their choice of PaaS platform and build killer applications.

Push to the private cloud: Like it or not, availability of Hadoop from an "enterprise" vendor is going to help the private cloud vendors. NetApp has a fairly large customer base and their products are omnipresent in large private data centers. I know many companies that are interested in exploring Hadoop for a variety of their needs but are somewhat hesitant to go out to a public cloud since it requires them to move their large volume of on-premise data to the cloud. They're more likely to use a solution that comes to their data as opposed to moving their data to where a solution resides.