Despite playing an instrumental role in the development of Hadoop and making numerous other major contributions to the validation of the broader Big Data movement, Google has fallen behind in the cloud analytics race, allowing arch-nemesis AWS to fill the gap left by its absence. The search giant is now determined to make up for lost time.

Three weeks after slashing the prices on its on-demand BigQuery rapid data analysis service by an unprecedented 85 percent, a move that promptly and predictably drew a response from Amazon, Google is rolling out new connectors designed to allow users to manage their Big Data environments more effectively.

The freshly announced Google Cloud Datastore and Google BigQuery connectors, currently in preview, are installed automatically and make it possible to access data stored in the company’s cloud platform directly from Hadoop without the need to keep any duplicate files. That kills two birds in one stone, making information more accessible for analysis while reducing storage requirements; two benefits that also happen to be among the most compelling reasons to use the batch processing framework.

Hadoop has gained significant traction in the enterprise over the years as the Apache community, together with the leading commercial distributors, added more features and pioneered new enterprise use cases. Today, there are almost as many applications for the platform as there are users, which Cloudera marketing head Alan Saldich told SiliconANGLE generally fall into one of four categories.

On one end there are large technology-driven organizations like Google that don’t need any outside help with their deployments and, more often than not, also take an active role in the development of Hadoop. And on the other are smaller firms in traditional industries that do require professional services but only focus on one particular goal such as driving cost savings. The majority of organizations are somewhere in between. They are usually “larger companies who get the power of the Hadoop and the concept of bringing your workloads to the data, multi-structured data and they want to build what we’re now calling the Enterprise Data Hub,” according to Saldich. That’s the segment Cloudera and its rivals are going after.

The accelerating adoption of Hadoop is putting wind in the sails of distributors as well as the rest of the ecosystem, including cloud analytics providers. Google in particular has made some big gains recently, with the new connectors representing the latest milestone in its efforts. The firm launched two availability zones in Singapore and Taiwan just a few days ago, and two weeks prior it had entered a partnership with Red Hat to let joint customers move their existing RHEL subscriptions to Google Compute Engine.

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