Kicking off the first day of Strata Conference in Santa Clara, California, the SiliconAngle CEO John Furrier and Wikibon CEO David Vellante, theCUBE regular co-hosts, talked with Jeff Kelly, Principal Research Contributor with Wikibon, discussing the new Wikibon’s 2013 Big Data Vendor Review and Market Forecast report that was released yesterday.

“The report and the research are telling us that the market is growing,” stated Kelly. “The Big Data market reached $18.6 billion in 2013. That’s a 58 percent growth rate over the previous year.”

“There’s a lot of the IT heavy weights leading the markets, mostly on the hardware and services (IBM, HP, Dell) but there’s also a great ecosystem of startups – we still call them start-ups despite having been around for a couple of years now – (Hortonworks, Cloudera, MapR). It’s an interesting mix and we’re finally seeing some of these companies starting to grow up,” Kelly went on.

Where’s the innovation? Where’s the revenue?

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Vellante then asked  Kelly where he sees the innovations in software, as far as the start-up companies are concerned. Kelly mentioned: Hadoop, Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR. “We’ve seen companies like Cloudera hitting $70 million+ revenue last year, Hortonworks hitting $50 million, and MapR $30 million. These companies are starting to grow and accrue some significant revenue,” said Kelly. “That’s where the software is starting to catch up with the hardware.”

In Cloudera’s case, for instance, they had a lot of users and a lot of downloads, but they were free. Now people are actually moving into production deployments – or thinking about it – engaging companies like Cloudera and Hortonworks for support contracts, and finally they are starting to generate some significant revenue.

In the NoSQL space, companies like MongoDB are doing well, DataStax, and they are starting to catch up on the revenue perspective.  Vellante went on to mention Pivotal’s $300 million in revenue. “Where is that coming from?” he asked. “Are these numbers real?”

“Most of the revenue is coming from the Greenplum line and from the GemFire line,” explained Kelly. “Pivotal has a grand vision of building up this three-layered platform: infrastructure, path and the data fabric. They have a long way before they make that enterprise-ready, and they have to do a lot of work with partners, mostly cloud partners, to realize their vision. They have a long way to go there,” believes Kelly.

It seems to Vellante that the guys who are going to win the endgame are the guys who manage to win the developer community.

The top cluster for audience, in Furrier’s view, comprises data science and the database app. It’s a new, emerging school of applications, a new modern era of thinking (BI, data warehousing), paradigm shifts and disruptive approaches that will impact anything – from the Internet of Things to software.

“That’s what we should expect and watch at this event, Big Data influences all aspects of the computing software fabric,” predicted Furrier.

The impact of the Industrial Internet, Hadoop ecosystem

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Picking up on the idea of “Industrial internet”,  Kelly said that “this whole idea of connecting physical devices and objects through data, and building applications that are actually helping those devices perform more efficiently and orchestrate processes across operational environments so that they are more efficient and helping people in their everyday lives – that’s an interesting area from my perspective.”

From the market perspective, another thing that struck Kelly in 2013 was that Hadoop and some other Big Data application frameworks and open source components continued to mature, focusing on things like YARN, and making Hadoop a multi-application framework. Complementary to that, equally impressive was all the integration work from the larger legacy vendors to bring Hadoop into the fold.

“Last year was an important one for Hadoop specifically and Big Data generally,” concluded Kelly. The most important thing last year was that the platform continued to mature towards a multi-application framework. “These technologies are going to find their way into the enterprise, eventually.”

“You talked about cloud and Big Data continuing their love fest, ” joked Vellante, “Amazon has announced things like Kinesis, so it seems like it’s a place for a lot of people to park their Big Data projects. What do you see going on with Amazon and Big Data?” he asked  Kelly.

Keeping the romance theme and stretching the metaphor, Kelly specified that it is still a courtship, and love hasn’t been consummated yet.

“Cloud is a good place for a lot of this test and dev. You can go to Amazon and spin up a Hadoop cluster, you can use Kinesis for streaming data, you can have a pretty comprehensive portfolio of services around different types of data workloads. But you are not seeing a lot of enterprise workloads being moved to the cloud, AWS specifically” noted Kelly. “That can be due to a number of reasons, data integration challenges, security concerns, internal compliance policies.”

Kelly acknowledges that things are starting to move into the the right direction, but warns that it’s going to take some time before the cloud becomes the place where you are bringing your enterprise workloads.