I sat down with James Kobleius at the IBM Information on Demand conference  several weeks ago and listened almost open-mouthed as he described the Hadoop universe. I kept thinking “someone needs to make a chart,” about the markets, the companies, the technologies – everything, really.

Well, Ramon Chen has something that begins to show the scope of the growing big data universe.

In a recent blog post, Chen published a graphic he created to help better see the scope of the latest rounds in funding,  mergers and acquisitions and partnerships that relate to big data and Hadoop.

It’s not a perfect visual. As he notes, there are categories that have a mix of companies and technologies.  More so, it’s a work in progress.

From this graphic, patterns emerge. As Chen notes, Cloudera has more partnerships than almost any of the companies on the chart. And Hortonworks scope is expanding.

Many of the venture-financed companies in the graphic are those that we mentioned in our post earlier this month about the $350 million in funding being given out to big data startups.

The acquisitions will jog your memory and help better understand some of the partner relationships. For example, EMC bought Greenplum for more than $300 million. MapR, which has $20 million in funding is a partner now with EMC.

This is a good start and may help me be a bit less wide-eyed the next time I get the chance to talk with James.

(Click image for larger view)