Despite the significant progress made by the Apache community and start-up contributors like Cloudera, Hadoop is still in its infancy. Like most young open source technologies, Hadoop is and will continue to be for some time a moving target. Development of Hadoop is highly iterative and experimental in nature, so end-users should carefully consider the following four recommendations before embarking on a Hadoop deployment.

First, success with Hadoop in the enterprise depends highly on end-users aligning themselves closely with the open source community in order to take advantage of the Apache Hadoop project’s latest contributions and developments. End-users should get engaged with the project, experimenting with community member contributions and contributing back to the project when possible.

Second, as for Hadoop distributions, Wikibon believes enterprises that wish to experiment with Hadoop in the near-term should use Cloudera’s Hadoop distribution, which is quickly becoming the de facto standard.

Third, let EMC earn its spurs. As stated in this note, EMC has a lot of work to do before we would consider the Greenplum HD appliance enterprise-ready. Further, with its all-in-one appliance model, users that adopt the Greenplum HD appliance now risk vendor lock-in. While often the benefits of lock-in outweigh the risks, with an unproven platform in a very green market users must exercise caution here to limit exposures.

Fourth, consider EMC’s Greenplum HD appliance and Hadoop distribution when its solutions framework as a whole has matured to production ready. At that point, EMC’s integrated appliance approach may indeed bring significant value to enterprise end-users. In the meantime, it is worth noting there is no reason end-users can’t run Hadoop distributions in conjunction with Greenplum’s MPP data warehouse on their own, without investing in the new Greenplum HD appliance. This type of activity appears limited today in the market raising questions about the requirement for a bundled appliance approach in the Hadoop market.

(Read Wikibon’s full EMC Greenplum Hadoop appliance analysis here.)

The bottom line is there’s a Hadoop gold rush going on and EMC is staking its claim. It doesn’t want to let Cloudera capture the lion’s share of the value chain and directly leveraging its Greenplum acquisition is the logical path to market.

Action Item: Leveraging data is increasingly becoming the source of competitive value for organizations and Hadoop is at the center of at industry trend. EMC’s aggressive entry into the commercial Hadoop market is good news for end-users as the more vendors working on commercial Hadoop distributions, the more technological innovation will occur. However this has the effect of increasing market clutter. Enterprise users should rapidly gain experience with Hadoop and identify where and how the technology can be applied and data value can be monetized.