Services is going to play a huge role in the ultimate success (or failure) of wide-spread adoption of Hadoop and related Big Data technologies by “mainstream” enterprises.

The question is: Will Big Data services be delivered by commercial Hadoop vendors like Cloudera and Hortonworks as part of their value-add to the open source framework, or will a separate market of third-party services providers and consultants develop to do so?

If Cloudera has its way, the answer is the latter.

I recently spoke with Cloudera’s Vice President of Product Charles Zedlewski about the company’s plans around services. He told me currently less than half of Cloudera’s revenue comes from services (the rest comes from training and the Cloudera Enterprise distribution of Hadoop/management suite), and he expects – and the company wants – that percentage to fall further.

Cloudera sees itself as a technology company, not a services provider. Zedlewski said Cloudera wants to continue putting the majority of its focus into making Hadoop enterprise-ready and leave services to outside parties.

While the ranks of Hadoop services vendors and consultants are still thin, one company I hear being mentioned a lot is Think Big Analytics. Just last week, for example, I was chatting with Karmasphere CMO Rich Guth and asked him what advice he had for CIO’s at non-Web 2.0 companies that want to take advantage of Hadoop and other Big Data technologies but don’t know where to start. Guth’s answer was to contact Think Big Analytics.

Thinking Big Data With Think Big Analytics
The Los Altos-based services provider was founded by Rod Bodkin about a year ago. Bodkin was previously Vice President of Engineering at Quantcast, which relies heavily on Hadoop to process and analyze billions of Web events each day.

Think Big Analytics provides its customers a one-week “brainstorming” session to both educate them as to what Hadoop can and cannot do, and to identify the areas of the business that would most benefit from the use of Hadoop. The brainstorming session is followed by a six-week implementation process that the company says results in “a robust platform for launching a real time data architecture and the new business solutions that rely on its data.”

Though the company is just a year old, it already boasts a number of Fortune 500 customers,  as well as Bodkin’s alma mater Quantcast.

Services Providers Lets Vendors Focus on the Technology
I think Cloudera’s approach to Hadoop services is the right one. Though Hadoop has proven itself in a number of production and non-production environments, there is still a lot of development to be done — both on the core technology and on related management/monitoring tools — to make the open source framework accessible and reliable enough for mainstream adoption. And Cloudera has no shortage of talent to do the job (see the two videos below.)

Vendors like Cloudera are better served by focusing on this task rather than getting side-tracked by long, involved consulting jobs. That means, though, that we need more third-party services providers like Think Big Analytics to tackle the services side of the Big Data equation. It is only a matter of time until we see services vendors coming to market, IMO, as Hadoop and Big Data analytics has the potential to grow to a multi-billion dollar market. A large chunk of those dollars will go to services, a significant enticement to would-be service providers.

Services like those provided by Think Big Analytics are particularly important now as the Hadoop conversation is leaving the “what-is-it?” phase and moving into the “what-can-it-do-for-me?” phase. CIOs are people too and they can become enamored with a “hot” new technology just like anybody else. But they are also a calculating bunch. Before they make any significant investments in Hadoop, CIOs want a compelling business case for the technology.

So just how will Hadoop deliver value to mainstream enterprises? That’s a question that CIOs demand answers to, answers that consultants and services providers can provide.