And the Oscar goes to…Hadoop!  The promising technology behind Big Data’s unwavering buzz was in the spotlight for an entire week during the Strata Conference last month, and now that we’ve had time to wind down from the festivities, we can reflect on Hadoop’s starring role in the enterprise. Abhishek Mehta, the founder of Tresata, recapped the best of Big Data this morning on the SiliconAngle NewsDesk show with Kristin Feledy (full video below).

Mehta names Strata Hadoop’s “Oscar moment,” explaining that the gathering featured an unexpectedly high amount of activity in certain segments that have stopped making headlines some time ago.  Among these categories, the incessant release of Hadoop distributions stood out the most.

“You would have thought that between Cloudera and HortonWorks having pretty markedly different strategies, both from product to market as well as go-to market, that you are kinda covered and you would have the industry coalesce around those two vendors,” Mehta says. “But Intel came out with a distribution, EMC made a big announcement, you had some smaller players launching their own distributions, and Hortonworks announced new versions of theirs.”

Metha says that this flood of announcements came as a “pleasant surprise”, largely because each solution offers a new take on how analytics should be done with Hadoop.

Intel’s distribution is built from the ground up to be secure. “We’re building the silicon into Hadoop, rather than building Hadoop into the silicon,” in the words of Boyd Davis, the chipmaker’s vice president of marketing. Cloudera and Hortonworks in turn focused on making their offerings more applicable in enterprise environments, while EMC put its weight behind performance with a near real-time data crunching engine. Mehta gives the “award for best press” to the latter, but notes that Cloudera’s Impala – with which EMC’s distro competes – is the definite leader in terms of popularity.

Surprisingly, Mehta gives the security edge to Hortonworks. He points out that the startup’s recently announced Hadoop authentication solution is open-source, which puts it at an advantage because the community can take an active role in the project.

The big data guru wraps up the interview by praising EMC. He says that the vendor is the only big player that truly gets big data.  See Mehta’s full analysis below.