Hadoop has always been seen the “poster child” for Big Data, and indeed the vast majority of Big Data customers use it in at least some variation. But, recently, there have been some changes within the Hadoop ecosystem, as well as some outside competition, and it is creating permanent changes to the Big Data landscape.

As day two of the BigDataNYC 2016 event kicked off at the Mercantile Annex in New York, NY, Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, sat down to discuss highlights from the event, the big changes to the Hadoop ecosystem and the evolving Big Data landscape.

Big changes for Hadoop

One of the big themes from BigDataNYC is how many users are starting to find alternatives to the standard Hadoop ecosystem. The various Hadoop distributions, Cloudera, MapR and Hortonworks, have always been at the heart of Hadoop, but recently developers have been looking for other solutions for Big Data, both inside the Hadoop ecosystem and outside of it. The complexity and long learning curve to being functional with Hadoop are just a few of the driving reasons developers are seeking other alternatives.

“This whole Hadoop ecosystem is really shifting,” said Vellante. “We used to spend all the time talking about Cloudera, MapR and Hortonworks, [but now] those guys are sort of like infrastructure plumbing.”

The push for Hadoop alternatives

Instead of waiting for another Hadoop distribution to address developer issues, some developers are already creating their own solutions.

“[There was a] big discussion yesterday about the cloud guys trying to create an abstraction layer above their sets of services, and in many ways creating threats to guys like Cloudera,” said Vellante.

And while several competitors are beginning to be seen as legitimate alternatives to Hadoop, companies already supporting Hadoop, such as Hortonworks and Cloudera, are not sitting idle and are beginning to offer solutions within their respective platforms.

“A lot of the Hortonworks guys are doing ‘on-prem’ stuff,” said Vellante. “They’re betting on hybrid cloud, and pure cloud is going to be an interesting dynamic for those guys to compete, specifically, with Amazon and Microsoft.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of BigDataNYC 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE