Big data and Hadoop were big in 2011, and will likely be bigger in the coming year. O’Reilly’s Audrey Watters looked at the direction this trend took in the past year, and rounded up some key points.

VC Interest

One of the main indicators of growth is the mounting VC interest in big data companies. New startups such as Hortonworks and MapR emerged in a market currently led by companies like Cloudera, and as a collective, managed to raise about $104.5 million in funding between May and November.   Accel Partners announced a $100 million fund dedicated to big data on November 8.  All these new players managed to do more than just catch VCs’ eyes though: they’ve managed to make good gains in an increasingly competitive market.

Startups

Hortonworks is one of the more notable Hadoop startups. Yahoo’s spun off engineering team changed from being just a service provider to a market challenger, thanks to a number of victories such as an agreement to work on Microsoft’s Hadoop initiative. The latter’s involvement in the ecosystem represents yet another big data trend that emerged in 2011: traditional vendors jumping on the analytics bandwagon.

Big Players

Microsoft is collaborating with the firm on an integration of its Azure platform with Hadoop, which will become generally available in the near future. EMC also jumped in with a recently unveiled platform that combines a number of its solutions, including the Hadoop distribution it licensed from MapR, to create a structured and unstructured data muncher. And even Oracle got more involved with the launch of Exadata and Oracle NoSQL  at Oracle World 2011 – though Klint Finley believes the company is not turning its back on its core business just yet.