An expert in big data solutions says Hadoop is good enough for the task of handling big data. However, Hadoop projects onerous complications onto users, much like Enterprise JavaBeans did for enterprise Java developers.
However, Hadoop is the big dog in
the big data world. Attendance at Hadoop-related events continues to grow.
Cloudera, a leading Hadoop distributor and service provider, has hosted annual
Hadoop World conferences to ever-increasing sold out crowds in New York. The
event has outgrown two different venues.
And at the last Hadoop World last
November, Accel Partners announced a $100 million fund to invest in big data
companies. At the show, Ping Li, a partner at Accel, announced its Big Data Fund,
calling it "incredibly important given the explosion of big data."
The new initiative's goal is to fund transformative early-stage and growth companies
throughout the big data ecosystem, from next-generation storage and data
management platforms to a wide range of revolutionary software applications and
servicesi.e., data analytics, business intelligence, collaboration, mobile,
vertical applications and many more, Accel said.
As organizations increasingly
struggle to extract value from an ever-expanding sea of data, more and more of
them are turning to Hadoop, said Stephen O'Grady, an analyst with RedMonk.
Yet despite its popularity,
implementers and analysts alike agree that Hadoop needs help to become more
palatable for the enterprise.
Weve been working with customers
to help them use Hadoop to solve various problems, said Mike Olson, CEO of
Cloudera. Hadoop on its own is not enough to tackle the big data analysis
problems and other problems they face.
In other words, it takes a village,
Olson said.
Big data will require a big
ecosystem to make its way into the enterprise, said Tony Baer, principal
analyst at Ovum. Enterprises demand a marketplace of tools, skills and
services to take advantage of Hadoop. Cloudera is leveraging its early
jumpstart in the Hadoop market with an effective partnering program that is
showing true results.
As interest in Hadoop expands from
early adopters to mainstream enterprise and government users, we are
increasingly seeing the focus shift from development and testing to
understanding potential use cases for the core distribution to the value-added
tools and services that will enable and accelerate enterprise adoption, said
Matt Aslett, senior analyst at 451 Research.
Theres a lot of talk in the
industry about making Apache Hadoop deployments easier; however, Clouderas
approach encompasses the entire lifespan of systems, not just the initial setup,
Olson said. Workloads shift, teams change and the types of questions you want
to ask change over time. You should be able to easily manage your systems while
your usage of Hadoop evolves and grows.
I also work for a company betting
on Hadoop, and we are helping clients be successful with it, Wampler said. I
believe it is a good, but not great, first-generation technology that is
meeting needs today. It's fair to say Hadoop is the only game in town. However,
I also believe it will be replaced over time with technologies that are more
modular, scalable and flexible to address the growing variety of big data
applications, just as Spring eventually replaced EJB.
Wampler reiterated that Hadoop
reminds him of EJB in almost every way. And just as the Spring Framework
brought an essential rethinking to Enterprise Java, there is an essential rethink
that needs to happen in big data, he said. Wampler, an aficionado of the Scala
functional programming language, said the Scala community is well-positioned to
create change in the big data world.
I think we should stop using Java,
he said. The object-oriented model is not really the right approach for data.
We can take our existing Java code and we can start writing Clojure or Scala or
JRuby. Im not slamming the JVM [Java Virtual Machine], Im slamming the
language.
Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.
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