The now EMC-owned Greenplum, maker of analytics software, is facing the same challenges as everyone else in the Hadoop ecosystem. One of the latest tidbits of commentary by TechWorld’s Chris Kanaracus sheds some new light on where the company is standing from an overall perspective, and what it is they’re doing different in an effort to address at least some of those issues.

The current job market and cloud integration are two of the biggest hold-backs in enterprise-ready Hadoop services.  The lack of data scientists to put the components together limits organizations without massive budgets, all while the managed side of PaaS becomes a big disadvantage for large analytics jobs.

On the technical side however, some improvements are being made by vendors such as Greenplum.

“Meanwhile, EMC’s Greenplum division is “building a platform for the future of big data,” said George Radford, field CTO. That includes both row-based and columnar stores, integrated Hadoop storage, and integration with the Gemfire in-memory data grid for in-memory analytics, he said. This integration is crucial, according to Radford. “One of the problems with point solutions is with big data, the last thing you want to do it move it. You want to ingest it and analyse it in place.”

The company’s been busy fleshing out its Hadoop portfolio as of late. After integrating an upgraded Hadoop distro with Isilon to create a new big data appliance, Greenplum added Cisco support to the MapR-based MR edition. The software – previously known as Greenplum HD – has been certified to run on Cisco’s UCS C-Series rack servers as of February 14.

In acknowledgment of Greenplum’s R&D efforts, Forrester named it a Leader in a recent paper entitled “The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Hadoop Solutions Q1 2012.” The research firm cited reasons such as the fact it has been the first vendor to roll out a complete Hadoop appliance, and the way it fits in with EMC’s portfolio.