Cloudera Announces Hadoop World, and Hadoop Marches On
We've written before several times about Hadoop, an open source software framework for highly scalable queries and data-intensive distributed applications. The ecosystem of companies and organizations using Hadoop has grown dramatically in recent years, and we've also written about Cloudera, a well-funded company that is focusing on providing support and services for Hadoop, in addition to offering its own Hadoop distribution.
Today, Cloudera announced the first ever Hadoop World conference, to take place at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City on October 2nd, with registration available here. A look at the companies and institutions organizing and participating in the event shows just how far Hadoop has come, and how it has extended well beyond just search applications.
Hadoop has been behind many news headlines in the world of open source recently. Although Apache sponsors the Hadoop project, Yahoo has been the largest contributor to it, and even offers its own Hadoop distribution. Hadoop also underlies the Powerset-based search in Microsoft's Bing search engine, so, in light of the long-term search partnership that Microsoft and Yahoo have just formed, both companies have a strong vested interest in advancing Hadoop.
Meanwhile, the primary Hadoop guru at Yahoo for many years, Doug Cutting, recently left Yahoo for Cloudera. There, he joins executives from Google and Facebook in running a company focused on supporting Hadoop for many companies and organizations.
With that as background, consider the companies and institutions that will be explaining what they've done with Hadoop at the Cloudera-organized Hadoop World conference: Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, eBay, Visa, China Mobile, Intel, IBM, The New York Times, RackSpace,JPMC, Yale University, and many more. That kind of roster of users is part of why the venture capital community has shown so much interest in Cloudera itself. The executives who run Cloudera come from several of the top companies using and contributing to Hadoop, including Yahoo, Google, and Facebook.
It's also true that Hadoop is advancing well beyond the applications it was initially aimed at, which typically focused on execution of fast, distributed searches done on clustered systems. For example, Yahoo uses Hadoop to track the behavior of people who use its site--the whole site, not just search. That helps Yahoo's efforts in targeted advertising. Facebook uses Hadoop for management of the tens of billions of photos on its site. And, Hadoop is used by many companies for data mining applications.
It's wise for Cloudera and companies that rely on Hadoop to inaugurate a New York-based conference where everyone can gather and share their Hadoop applications. (Hadoop Summit already takes place annually on the West Coast.) Hadoop is emerging as one of the most influential of all open source software platforms.