One of the biggest talking points at this year’s Hadoop Summit is the race between its two high profile competitors, Cloudera and Hortonworks. The competition is heating up as the market matures, particularly in light of Cloudera’s recent funding round led by Intel. But is this destined to be a fight to the death? Or is there enough room in the Hadoop market for both of these Big Data giants?

These were just some of the questions pondered by Wikibon analyst Jeff Kelly, who appeared on theCUBE alongside SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier during day one of the Hadoop Summit. Furrier kicked off by noting “there’s no love lost between these two companies.” He pointed to Hortonworks’ recent acquisition of Hadoop security specialist XA Secure as evidence. Not surprisingly, Cloudera responded in kind, announcing yesterday it had snapped up Gazzang, another company that’s focused on Hadoop security.

“That says a lot about where the focus is on Hadoop,” said Kelly. “That is, making it enterprise grade. Companies like Hortonworks and Cloudera are really putting their money where their mouth is, and focusing on security and data governance – two critical components if you’re going to run Hadoop in production with sensitive data.”

Cloudera and Hortonworks are obviously keen to ensure the other doesn’t develop any significant advantage other them, but Kelly said it’s interesting they’re following quite different business models. Hortonworks is sticking rigidly to its guns, focused on core Hadoop that’s wholly open-source, whereas Cloudera has its own Hadoop distro surrounded with proprietary tech, with some open-source components sprinkled on top to extend the functionality.

Giddy up, the race is on!

We’re at an interesting cross-roads right now, with both companies on the verge of making a serious amount of money from Hadoop. As Kelly notes, Wikibon recently sized the Big Data market and estimates it’ll be worth in the region of $50 billion by 2017 – that’s just three years away.

“Make no mistake this is a cut-throat market,” said Kelly. “When you’ve got this much money in the market, such as Cloudera having raised $900 million, $740 million of that from Intel, and you’ve got Hortonworks with$200 million of its own, there is no love lost between these two companies. That’s the reality and it’s really fun to watch.”

Cloudera’s decision to cozy up with Intel could turn out to be critical, especially if its battle with Hortonworks comes down to acquisitions. “Cloudera is not afraid to throw its dough around in answer to Hortonworks’ advantage,” said Kelly. “If it becomes an arms race, Cloudera has a war chest, which means the folks at Hortonworks will have to sharpen their pencils to hit the market for another round of funding.”

Furrier suggested that there’s room for both Cloudera and Hortonworks to succeed in Hadoop, citing Wikibon’s recent and aforementioned research. He noted that if you factor in the Internet of Things, both companies can be billion dollar plays, at least from a revenue standpoint.

“One company will come ahead of the other, and they both want that top spot, but there is enough room in this market,” admitted Kelly. “You’ll have a winner, a second place, and maybe even a third a little way back.”

“A huge opportunity for Hadoop”

But if the Hadoop market is big enough for two elephants in the room, this begs another question – are Hortonworks and Cloudera spending too much time competing with each other when they should be focused on the market itself?

There’s certainly enough opportunity for them to consider. Kelly took the chance to divulge a few tidbits from Wikibon’s latest survey of Hadoop practitioners, and it’s clear that this space is about to become big, to the point it could begin to threaten data warehouse vendors.

“We’ve done some recent survey work and found that over 60 percent of people who’ve adopted Hadoop have shipped workloads from their traditional data warehouse or mainframes to Hadoop,” revealed Kelly. “There’s definitely going to be a shift of the workloads, and with that goes some of the revenues from those data warehouse vendors.”

That’s not to say that everyone who’s using Hadoop is paying for the privilege, at least not right now. In fact, most practitioners are taking the freebie option and using ‘roll their own’ or free Hadoop distros, with just *20 percent of organizations actually paying for subscriptions support – a reminder perhaps, that we’re still in the early phase of Hadoop adoption. When Hadoop users are ready to move on from the proof of concept stage, that’s the time they’ll look to providers like Hortonworks and others to support production workloads – and that’s when we’ll see who ends up in pole position.

“We’re still seeing a lot of proof of concepts and the experimentation phases, but there will be a huge opportunity when those projects move to production,” said Kelly.

*Editor’s note: the numbers cited by Jeff Kelly in the embedded video were incorrect. The written “20 percent” is the correct statistic.

photo credits: Bob Jagendorf via photopin cc; peasap via photopin cc