Will a Red Hat for Hadoop, that is a single commercial entity that represents the Hadoop ecosystem and sets direction for it, emerge? That is a question that Wikibon Chief Analyst and Co-Founder David Vellante raised during a discussion with Big Data analyst and Wikibon Chief Contributor Jeff Kelly in the SilionAngle Cube during a recent visit to Atlas Ventures in Boston.

A year ago, when EMC announced its partnership with MapR, the speculation at Wikibon and SiliconAngle was that EMC was vying to become that company.  But at EMCworld 2012, EMC Information Infrastructure Products President and COO Pat Gelsinger said in an interview on The Cube that there would be no “Red Hat of Hadoop.” Answering his own question, Vellante said in part the answer depends on your definition of what you mean by a “Red Hat”. “Red Hat had a $10 billion market cap,” he said. “I’ll make a prediction right now that somebody will emerge in this Big Data space with a $10 billion plus market cap.”

The questions are, will that company become synonymous with the Hadoop ecosystem the way Red Hat is for Linux, or will it even survive as a separate entity when the big RDBMS-based companies such as Oracle, SAP, Teradata, and the BI vendors, as well possibly as IBM and HP and other large IT vendors, start buying up the Hadoop startups and move aggressively into the NoSQL/unstructured data marketplace.

Kelly, a leading analyst of the Big Data market, agrees with Gelsinger.“It’s a different market. Hadoop is bringing to bear a technology that allows you to do things you could never do before,” he said. “Linux was making something better – more efficient, cheaper, perhaps – but it was the reinvention of the operating system, not the invention of something new.”

Also, he said, he sees limits to the growth to Hadoop distribution companies. If a Hadoop Red Hat does emerge, he predicts that it will be higher up the stack – perhaps an analytics software vendor or even SaaS provider offering Big Data analysis. And, it may not even be focused exclusively on Hadoop. “Hadoop is not the only game in town when it comes to big data,” he said. “There are other approaches, and I’m not a Hadoop-only guy. Whatever platform gets the job done, whatever platform reduces the cost and makes it practical financially and from a time perspective to process Big Data, I’m all for.”

And is this even the right question, at least where investors are concerned? Certainly VCs like Atlas Ventures see money to be made in investment in Big Data startups, and they are right. But the real money may be in investments in early adapters of Big Data analysis. Peter Goldmacher, managing director of Cowen Group and the unofficial top Wall Street analyst on Big Data, also spoke at the one-day event at Atlas Ventures and, said Vellanate, brought an interesting insight.

“He put forth the premise that if you had tried to pick winners in the ERP market 15 years ago from the supply side you never would have picked SAP,” Vellante said. “And you probably would have lost a lot of money. However, if you invested in companies that adopted ERP, you would have made a ton of money. Their operating margins when through the roof because they got competitive advantage from the technology.”

The implication for investors, at least, is that the best strategy is to identify companies that are putting Big Data analysis to effective use – for instance to improve operations and customer service, find efficiencies, or identify new markets – and invest in those rather than in the vendors. And Goldmacher argues that investors should sell their investments in the big IT companies – he has a sell on SAP for instance – and reinvest that money in those Big Data early adapters.

That doesn’t mean that he thinks the IT software giants are necessarily facing losses – as David Floyer argues no technology every goes away, mainframes are still running in many data centers and companies like IBM and Oracle aren’t going anywhere. But, he predicts, they will not provide the growth of the Big Data early adapters. Kelly agrees. “I think that’s spot on. As we’ve been saying, the real value is in the application of Big Data, and who is doing that? The practitioners.”