Big Data is Drawing Big Investments, with Hadoop at the Center

If you had any doubts that the Big Data trend--and particularly the use of the Hadoop platform--is here to stay, the events of the past couple of weeks should correct that. First, Hortonworks announced that it has raised a whopping $100 million to scale its Hadoop business.  Then, Cloudera announced that it has pulled in a staggering $900 million investment from Intel and other powerful partners. And, platform advancement is continuing, too. Hortonworks and Pivotal have just announced new Big Data advancements.

Pivotal, which was originally spun out of VMware and EMC, has announced the Pivotal Big Data Suite, a subscription-based software, support, and maintenance offering that bundles Pivotal Greenplum Database, Pivotal GemFire, Pivotal SQLFire, Pivotal GemFire XD, Pivotal HAWQ, and Pivotal HD. The package supports Apache Hadoop and HDFS, and according to Forbes:

"Pivotal is making a big bet on they key drivers and requirements that the enterprise of the future will have – they’re delivering a compelling solution that puts solutions, rather than specific technologies, first."

Indeed, Pivotal is making the smart bet that support and services will be important to enterprises leveraging Hadoop and other Big Data tools.

Meanwhile, Hortonworks has announced the 2.1 release of Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP), which offers fully realized Hive interactive query capabilities for both tWindows and Linux. As ZDNet notes:

"What we did not know was that HDP would include a slew of other new components. These include Solr for search-based operations; Storm, for steaming data processing; a preview of integrated Spark for distributed in-memory processing; the Knox security component, which provides cluster-level authentication and authorization services as well as GRANT and REVOKE functionality in Hive; and Apache Falcon for data set replication, retention, audit and lineage."

The complete release of Hortonworks' new platform will arrive on April 22nd, but a preview is available now.

It's safe to say that the investments we are seeing in Hadoop-centric data crunching tools and services will usher in a new era for data analytics, and Hadoop now qualifies as one of the most influential open source projects ever launched.