Big Push for Big Data

Re-blogged from the Morning Download: CIO Journal – WSJ. The Morning Download comes from the editors of CIO Journal and cues up the most important news in business technology every weekday morning.

The Morning Download: Big Push for Big Data

Good morning. Big Data is in danger of becoming a buzzword as meaningless as “cloud” became in 2009, when the National Institute of Standards and Technology had to step in with an official definition. We’re not quite there yet, but the hype is getting so hot and heavy that you could be forgiven for believing there isn’t any there, there.

That hasn’t stopped the venture capital community from pouring millions into the field — including into startups like Hortonworks Inc. and Cloudera Inc., which are in the business of smoothing out the rough edges of the open source Hadoop analytic framework. Traditional technology vendors are just as convinced that there’s fire along with all the hot air — witness Intel Corp.’s undisclosed but significant investment in Cloudera, announced last week.

This week, Hortonworks will introduce an update to its commercial version Hadoop that is intended to make the technology easier to manage. Hortonworks CEO Rob Bearden tells CIO Journal that he hopes CIOs will come to view Hadoop as the “enterprise data platform where the vast majority of all data lands and is managed.” For all its promise, and a large number of trials in progress, Hadoop is still in actual use by just around 1,000 businesses, according to Gartner Inc. analyst Merv Adrian.