Big data is booming, says Cloudera CEO Mike Olson. Hortonworks is “doing great work along with us and many others in driving the Hadoop platform forward,” he said in an interview webcast live in the Cube from hBaseCon2012 over at SiliconAngle.tv (see full video below). And one indication of that is the entry of major vendors – IBM with Big Insights, Oracle with Big Data Plan, and EMC as well.

“We’re seeing a real focus on big data as a business issue, not merely by wild-eyed visionaries in Silicon Valley, but by some of the biggest, business-focused vendors on the planet. And that’s because customers … recognize they have big data problems, and they need a big data solution.”

Despite the entry of these big players, the market is growing faster than the competition. CloudEra is seeing growth on every metric – total size of the clusters its existing customers are running, the pipeline of new business, the size of the investment that customers are making in the infrastructure are all sharply up. “Certainly our last year was tremendous, and we’re looking forward to an even bigger 2012.”

The big data market is moving forward rapidly in technology focus as well. For the first two years that CloudEra was in business, “we were trying to convince people that this platform was important.” Today Hadoop is the “anointed winner in the big data platform is space. So the question in big data now is what are you going to do with it? How are you going to get at it? What kinds of applications are going to make it available?”

That is where the commercial vendors are working, building those applications on top of Hadoop and hBase. “IBM’s Big Insights offering is very powerful, very interesting.”

Another product Olson cites as particularly interesting is the new version of Informatica PowerCenter/PowerExchange.  “It supports Hadoop natively, so you can integrate data from Hadoop with all your other infrastructure.”


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