Everyone will be watching the big names at HadoopWorld, particularly Cloudera and HortonWorks. Oracle is sort of the elephant in the room, as it tries to hijack the NoSQL and Hadoop conversations. But there are many companies here doing interesting things. Here are a few to keep your eye on during the event.

We’ll be blogging from the event, and you can watch the event with our special guests and commentary on theCube.

Arista

Arista is a networking company at a software show, but with projects like OpenFlow and the increasing use of network virtualization, the network and software layers have never been closer. Arista is pushing network hardware specificall designed for Hadoop clusters. Watch for a guest from Arista on theCube tomorrow.

Aster Data

HadoopWorld hasn’t even started yet and Aster Data’s booth is already busy. Aster Data is positioning itself as both a Hadoop alternative with its SQL-MapReduce solution and as a complimentary solution with its Hadoop connector. Aster Data SQL-MapReduce is more accessible to traditional business intelligence users, and using the connector it can be used to analyze data from Hadoop clusters and feed it back into Hadoop. Watch for a guest from Aster Data this afternoon on theCube.

KarmaSphere

Many companies are working on making Hadoop accessible to traditional business users, and KarmaSphere was one of the first vendors to the party. The company announced a certification partnership with Cloudera this morning and last week it announced its availability through Amazon Web Services. It’s a company making real waves in the data analyst area.

Revolution Analytics

Revolution Analytics, a company commercializing the open source statistical programming language R, announced Hadoop integration recently. R is huge in the data science world, and the ability to use R to analyze Hadoop data is a big deal. This could be one of the most important data science stacks in the next few years. Watch for a guest from Revolution tomorrow on theCube.

Tableau

Data visualization is a hot topic in the business world, but data visualization companies are thin on the ground at this event. Tableau is one of the few, along with companies like Cetas. The company is We expect some big news out of the company at HadoopWorld. Stay tuned.

Services Angle

By no means is this an exhaustive list of all the interesting companies at HadoopWorld. There are many companies here, either as sponsors or participants, that are doing great work with Hadoop. We’ll be talking to people from many companies on theCube.