“I don’t know what we are going to do next year,” said Cloudera President Mike Olson in The Cube. “This is the largest venue in New York unless you go to the Javetts Center, which holds 50,000.”

The 2012 O’Reilly Strata Conference + Hadoop World conference has filled the Sheraton New York with 2,500 attendees, nearly twice last year’s 1,400 turnout, and like last year the organizers had to turn people away at the door. “Four years ago, when we started Hadoop World, 500 people showed up, and we were ecstatic that that many people on the East Coast knew what Hadoop was,” Olson said. “The enthusiasm at that show convinced us that Hadoop was real.”

After the 2011 conference Cloudera decided to partner with O’Reilly Media, which runs several other conferences in the IT, publishing, and related industries, in part because “we thought we could attract a much broader audience with the partnership.” Obviously he was right.

Numbers are one thing, quality is another, and Olson is very happy with the latter as well. “We could only accept one paper for every 10 that were submitted, and they were all very high quality. So the quality of what we have is tremendous.”

Mike Dauber, of venture capital firm Battery Ventures, agrees. The show this year, he says, seems much more crowded than last year and more than double the size. And the character of the attendees has changed. This year, he said, most are business and company IT people rather than VCs shopping for investments.

The biggest thing I see is that Hadoop has hit the mainstream. F1000 companies are using it. That is a big deal. And the show is a proxy of that. This show is packed with quality people.”

He sees this as a sign that the fundamental IT infrastructure is changing. “The question is what are the big disruptions that Hadoop creates, and I would argue that BI is at the top of that list.” Tableau, he said, is “a great company and a great tool”, but it was built in an earlier era, a decade before Hadoop appeared. “I think that visualization tools that run natively on Hadoop will win in the market over time.”

The direction of application development is also on the crux of a shift. “Today everybody is trying to get the ‘One Ring to Rule Them All’. But what we need are very specific solutions for very specific markets. The big thing in Big Data will be more verticalized applications. Everything doesn’t have to be soup to nuts. You can have a successful company servicing a vertical market.”