David Menninger's Analyst Perspectives

IBM Chooses Hadoop Unity, Not Shipping the Elephant

Posted by David Menninger on May 18, 2011 8:06:57 AM

Last week I attended the IBM Big Data Symposium at the Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. The event was held in the auditorium where the recent Jeopardy shows featuring the computer called Watson took place and which still features the set used for the show – a fitting environment for IBM to put on another sort of “show” involving fast processing of lots of data. The same technology featured prominently in IBM’s big-data message, and the event was an orchestrated presentation more like a TV show than a news conference. Although it announced very little news at the event, IBM did make one very important statement: The company will not produce its own distribution of Hadoop, the open source distributed computing technology that enables organizations to process very large amounts of data quickly. Instead it will rely on and throw its weight behind the Apache Hadoop project – a stark contrast to EMC’s decision to do exactly that, announced earlier in the week. As an indication of IBM’s approach, Anant Jhingran, vice president and CTO for information management, commented, “We have got to avoid forking. It’s a death knell for emerging capabilities.”

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Topics: Big Data, EMC, Analytics, Business Analytics, Business Intelligence, Cloud Computing, Cloudera, Customer & Contact Center, Greenplum, IBM, Information Applications, Information Management, InfoSphere, Location Intelligence, Operational Intelligence, IT Performance Management (ITPM), Strata+Hadoop

EMC Enters Elephant Race with Hadoop

Posted by David Menninger on May 12, 2011 4:29:33 PM

Earlier this week EMC announced it will create its own distribution for Apache Hadoop.  Hadoop provides distributed computing capabilities that enable organizations to process very large amounts of data quickly. As I have written previously, the Hadoop market continues to grow and evolve. In fact, the rate of change may be accelerating. Let’s start with what EMC announced and then I’ll address what the announcement means for the market.

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Topics: Big Data, EMC, Social Media, Teradata, Business Analytics, Business Collaboration, Business Intelligence, Cloud Computing, Cloudera, Customer & Contact Center, Greenplum, Information Management, Strata+Hadoop