If anyone had any doubts that the Hadoop market is a blooming money tree, the back-to-back Hadoop distribution announcements by Greenplum on February 25 and Intel the following morning ended them, writes Wikibon Analyst Jeff Kelly in “Intel Validates Hadoop Market”.

The Intel announcement is particularly interesting, even in an increasingly crowded market that includes Hortonworks, WANdisco, MapR, Cloudera, and EMC, both for its special features and the real motivation behind it. Intel has embedded its distribution, and associated security features, into the silicon. That means that its security is rock hard and enterprises don’t have to worry about adding software security to protect their data. And it says its hardware enhancements significantly increase the performance of Hive, the favorite complex query engine for Hadoop. The distribution also includes tools for automatic cluster tuning.

These features and the vendor’s presence in the larger market make it an instant contender to take take the top spot in the Hadoop distro market. However, Kelly writes, its real motivation is to push the other vendors and the market in general. The seventh largest software vendor in the world market, Intel actually sells $4 in hardware for each $1 in software. And its chips provide the computer power behind Hadoop, regardless of the distribution.

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