It’s been an interesting couple of weeks in the world of enterprise IT, with two of the industry’s hottest trends each passing multiple milestones on the backdrop of increased competition among the top market contenders. Wikibon analysts Stu Miniman and Jeff Kelly discussed the landmark developments during the latest episode of SiliconANGLE’s Cube Conversations series.

The cloud battle is joined

In the cloud, Google announced a new on-demand stream processing feature for its BigQuery analytics tool that allows developers to incorporate real-time data into their applications. Kelly sees the launch as a response to Amazon Kinesis, which made its debut at re:Invent last November and provides similar functionality under the same utility model.

The ability to consume technology as a service, only paying for the resources that have been used, eliminates the need to make the large upfront capital investments that would be necessary to deliver comparable capabilities in-house. That makes analytics accessible for non-enterprise users while enabling big organizations to get their feet wet without committing to purchasing new hardware, but the pay-as-you-go-model becomes a lot less compelling at large scale.

“There are questions about the TCO [total cost of ownership] of cloud deployments, especially when you’re talking about Big Data over a long period of time. Whether it really is less expensive to do these Big Data projects – especially when you’re talking about persisting large volumes over time – in the cloud versus in-house,” Kelly explained.

Hoping to change that, Google on Wednesday slashed the price on BigQuery by a massive 85 percent and made smaller double-digit cuts across the rest of the GCE line up. The move marks a possible step closer to economics of scale in cloud analytics, according to Kelly. “It will be interesting to see how this announcement impacts these calculations, and if it spurs some enterprises to rethink what the cloud is useful for vis-à-vis Big Data,” he said.

Watch the entire segment below:

Miniman highlights that the price reductions also put new pressure on Amazon, which has historically set the pace in the so-called race to zero. The retail turned cloud giant commands such a massive lead that it should have no trouble regaining its lost momentum, but Google still represents a major threat, especially as the ecosystem continues to work on addressing the growing demand for vendor choice.

“If you look at the PaaS vendors out there, most of them want to be independent of the infrastructure layer,” Miniman details. “If you take Pivotal for example, it has a partnership with AWS but you can also work that on Google Cloud and in private environments. Most of the PaaS providers want to give you that flexibility, and many of them see Google as a good opponent to Amazon to help ensure there is flexibility and openness.”

Cisco has emerged as the newest contender in the public arena this week after announcing that it will spend $1 billion over the next two years on building out Intercloud, a platform for interoperable managed services that supports multiple hypervisors and workloads with a particular emphasis on hybrid environments. The networking giant boasts a broad range of solutions and an equally formidable list of launch partners, but Miniman doesn’t see it overthrowing AWS any time soon.

Big Data heating up

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Over in the Big Data space, two of the industry’s largest pure-play Hadoop distributors announced 9-digit funding rounds less than one week apart. Cloudera fired the opening shot last Wednesday with the closing of a $160 million round led by mutual funds giant T. Rowe Price, and Hortonworks followed suit six days later by bagging $100 million from BlackRock, Passport Capital and existing investors.

“The race is on for an IPO in this market,” Kelly says. “Both companies stated publicly that’s their goal, so they will presumably use this money to shore up their internal operations, get their ship in order and what you need to do before you can go public.”

Hortonworks CEO Rob Bearden stated that he intends to take his firm public in the second half of this year or early 2015, whereas Cloudera is at least a year away from an IPO. That’s how long Kelly estimates it will take the company to meet the prerequisites for its public offering, namely achieving $100 million in annual revenue and, at the very minimum, neutral cash flow.

While they may dominate the headlines, analytics vendors aren’t the the only ones riding the Big Data wave. The explosion in unstructured information is also driving business growth in the lower layers of the stack, where companies like Actifio are making big gains of their own. The firm announced this week that it has netted $100 million from Tiger Global Management and exiting investors to accelerate the development of its flagship data virtualization offering, which eliminates much of the redundancy in traditional storage environments. Miniman hails the funding as a “good proof point that there is a lot of excitement going in the storage world.”

“They’re a primarily a software-based solution fitting primarily into the software-defined data center discussion,” he adds. “I’m sure they’re driving that towards an IPO.” Cisco rival Arista Networks is following the same trajectory, with insiders claiming that the company could go public as soon as this year.

All in all, it’s an exciting time for the IT industry. Watch the segment for the full analysis from Wikibon’s Stu Miniman and Jeff Kelly.

photo: Ares Nguyen via photopin cc