Big data is getting bigger, and Hadoop is becoming the tool that will allow companies to make full use of their growing amounts of data, says Peter Fenton of Benchmark Capita. Fenton is a partner at the venture capital firm which owns the majority stake of HortonWorks, a startup that separated from Yahoo’s Hadoop dev team, and is offering services around the open-source big data analytics platform.

In an interview with WSJ, he discussed the big data revolution, something that he compared with SQL, and continued to elaborate on why he thinks HortonWorks is unique compared to  other companies trying to monetize Hadoop.

“In open source you really have to be near the watershed to have an impact on the source code. Customers want to be near the key contributors to the code, not a level removed. Since this team has contributed over 70% of the code they have the legitimacy of core contributors.”

Further into the interview, Fenton revealed that it wasn’t only Benchmark that was interested in HortonWorks. In fact, Yahoo was approached by several venture firms and companies that sought to buy their share of the team.

Hadoop is becoming a major trend that is gaining momentum on a daily basis. Don DeLoach, CEO at Infobright  has been observing this, and noted in a piece published Computerworld  that the reason behind this is that when companies need to analyze petabytes worth of data, the old school, and rather pricey approach is no longer sufficient. Instead, the software approach comes into the play, and the right answer may be a combination of technologies, such as storing cookie-level data in Hadoop and extract the summary into  an analytic database.

The software approach for managing big data is seeing wider and wider adoption, which means that solution providers are also changing their game plan. Amazon is one of them – the company just cut the prices on some its AWS services, again. With this move, inbound data transfer became completely free for users, and pricing on outbound bandwidth has gone down to 12 cents per gigabyte from 15 cents per gigabyte.  There’s no telling where the industry will go from here, but it’s certainly in the continued favor of efficient pricing and solutions.