Hadoop is a great platform for storing and processing data, but it needs applications to make it truly valuable. Wednesdayy at Structure:Data, Cloudera CEO Mike Olson discussed the dearth of professional analytics applications that leverage Hadoop, and invited the startups building them to come to him if they want money.
(c) 2012 Pinar Ozger. pinar@pinarozger.com
The major obstacle to mass adoption of Hadoop among mainstream companies, Olson said, is that there aren’t enough applications out there that make it easy to do analytics atop Hadoop. We’re starting to see them pop up now, but it’s still early days and, presumably, the killer application is still to come.
Right now, those adopting Hadoop are enterprises which have resources and engineers to throw at the problem, but there are plenty of businesses that want to adopt Hadoop if it were easier. In addition large companies aren’t going to get rid of their existing infrastructure, such as Oracle, Informatica and SAP databases, so Olsen said that another avenue startups should pursue is letting companies move data stored on other platforms over to Hadoop. Figuring out the “middleware” products that will do this are also an opportunity.
“Call me, I’ll connect you with funding,” Olson said. “The money is out there.”
Watch the livestream of Structure:Data here.
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