Since I first blogged about Hadoop way back in May of 2009 the furvor for Hadoop and companies in any way related to Big Data has been hitting new highs. There have been more articles and blog posts about Big Data including popular press such as the The Economist’s (Big) Data Deluge ; specialized sold out conferences and events such as GigaOM’s Big Data conference in NYC being streamed live; and numerous data growth reports such as the one by Cisco about mobile data growth . In fact the interest in Big Data is rapidly trending up to the topic of Cloud, although the two are not mutually exclusive as I’ve previously pointed out.
This translates into Big Money as evidenced by numerous mega-vendor acquisitions of companies that can analyze Big Data over the last year: EMC acquiring Greenplum, IBM acquiring Netezza, HP acquiring Vertica, and most recently Teradata acquiring Aster Data. This has significantly benefited the forward looking VCs that have seen their investments pay off handsomely. With all this activity, it could be argued that the company with the highest media profile of them all, Cloudera could be very high on the list of desired acquisition targets. Last year after the EMC acquisition of Greenplum, I ran a small poll which speculated who would be next to be acquired, Vertica and Aster Data lead the votes with Paraccel and Cloudera lagging. But that’s another topic for another time.
Cloudera, for those of you unfamiliar with the company offers enterprises a platform built on the popular Apache Hadoop open-source software package and are at the forefront of the Big Data transformation and analytics wave. Mike Olson, the charasmatic CEO who previously founded BerkeleyDB and sold Sleepycat Software to Oracle appeared on Bloomberg TV yesterday to talk about the Big Data opportunity, Hadoop and the outlook as it applies to businesses. In the interview, Mike clearly articulated the need for a new breed of technologies to handle the burgening data volumes, skillfully responding to the interviewers question “why wouldn’t Oracle just get into this business?” To watch the full interview (6 minutes long) click here.
IMHO, Mike’s excellent interview on Bloomberg raises the profile of Big Data up several notches to Wall Street. Big Data has come a long way, from tech only pubs to more mainstream articles such as the Economist and now a Big Interview one of the two most popular Money programs on Wall Street. All of this can only serve to throw gasoline on the fire of interest around Big Data.
From all of us in the business of providing technologies to handle Big Data, whether is be for analytics or retention (See here for the difference between the two), thanks Mike!
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