Hadoop has come a long way this year. At first Cloudera had something that resembled a by-default monopoly as one of the only high profile providers of commercial Hadoop distribution, but now MapR, Hortonworks and others are looking to change that. The rest of the ecosystem changed as well, with the introduction of new code and integration options, among other key developments.

SiliconANGLE and Wikibon covered the transformation of this ecosystem and growing adoption among vendors and organizations throughout the year. As we approach 2012, it’s a good time to reflect on some of the milestone  updates from this industry.

Jeff Kelly plucked out the top five Hadoop highlights this year in a post on the Wikibon Blog.

The first highlight was an interview with Amr Awadallah  in the Cube during the Strata conference, where he said that Cloudera has no competition. That’s clearly no longer the case. Just this month the company made its Hadoop management console freely available, addressing pressure from the direction of HortonWorks – which also offers its tools for free.

The second most notable Hadoop transformation this year according to Kelly is the VC interest, including the many funding rounds and Accel’s dedicated big data fund. The third is the interest from big vendors such as Microsoft that are starting to invest in their own Hadoop initiative. The most recent one is EMC, with its Hadoop-based unstructured and structured data muncher.

Coming in fourth is the growing demand for data scientists. That demand has evolved just as rapidly as the Hadoop ecosystem, and many enterprises are now on the lookout for new talent fit to handle their new tools. The final bulletin in our  of momentous Hadoop milestones is the growing number of applications that are designed to work with Hadoop in order to provide valuable insight.