Companies moving beyond the pilot phase of their Big Data projects need to evaluate the partnership strategies of the Hadoop suppliers when picking a vendor, writes Wikibon.org Principal Research Contributor Jeff Kelly. Hadoop is a foundational technology for the modern data architecture due to its ability to support analytics on data of any structure and to scale out efficiently and affordably. But, Kelly cautions, it must integrate tightly with the data management technologies already in place in the company architecture to deliver maximum value and avoid becoming another data silo. This makes the vendor’s partnership strategy important.

Kelly suggests five criteria for evaluating the partnership strategy of the various Hadoop suppliers:

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1. State of partnerships with strategic technology suppliers: Do they have partnerships today, and if so with which vendors?
2. Depth of partnerships: Do these partnerships extend beyond the ”Barney” stage (I love you, you love me)? Specifically, do they include certification of interoperability, and what joint engineering are they doing, and what kind of joint support do they offer?
3. Length of partnerships: While length does not always equate to substance, integrating data management technologies takes time.
4. Platform vision alignment: What is the Hadoop vendor’s long-term platform vision relative to the traditional data development stack?
5. Maturity of partnership mechanisms: Does the Hadoop vendor have the internal infrastructure to nurture development of deep partnerships?

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The right answers to these questions depend on the customer’s respective strategy. For instance, a Hadoop vendor with ambitions to move up the stack and therefore displace some of its partnerships may be a good match for a customer that hopes to replace parts of its existing data architecture with Big Data technologies over time. On the other hand, a company that wants to plug Hadoop into its existing data structure would be better served by a Hadoop supplier that is committed to its partnerships for the long term.

The full analysis, “Evaluating Hadoop Vendor Partnership Strategies”, is available without charge on the Wikbon Web site. IT professionals are invited to register for free membership in the Wikibon community. This allows them to influence the direction of Wikibon research and contribute to that research as well as posting comments, questions and their own research on the site.

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