UPDATED 12:00 EDT / MARCH 01 2013

Prime Time Tour – Strata 2013 with theCube

SiliconAngle and Wikibon attended this week’s O’Reilly Strata conference, an event that explores the Big Data market, and how companies are making it work. Earlier, SiliconANGLE founding CEO John Furrier and Wikibon’s Dave Vellante and Jeff Kelly recapped on the news from Day 1 of the Santa Clara event.

Vellante starts by describing the current state of the big data market. “It’s a land grab,” he says, adding that the analytics industry has ballooned to over $11 billion in 2012. It’s a big ecosystem and there’s a lot of money to be had, so naturally everybody wants a stake.

The most important highlight from Day 1 was Greenplum’s product update: the EMC subsidiary debuted a new Hadoop distribution, its fourth to date, which delivers the same functionality as Cloudera’s Impala – the open-source, near real time analytics engine that the rivaling firm introduced late last year.

Vellante says that because EMC is late to the market with its offering, the real-time aspect is a key differentiator. But while Pivotal HD may be a strong product, Cloudera is still the undisputed leader of the Hadoop and NoSQL market: Wikibon estimates that the company raked in over $50 million in 2012, making it one of the top three vendors in this space (the other two being MarkLogic and 10gen, the developer MongoDB.)

Furrier agrees with Vellante and deems the announcement “solid” – it got the blogosphere’s attention, after all. But he stresses that there are still a lot of questions that need to be answered, such as how Greenplum plans on supporting Pivotal users.

Jeff Kelly expands on this point:

“I like the vision put forth by Greenplum. I think the idea of bringing SQL tools and databases into of Hadoop is really the future of big data – a single comprehensive platform rather than tying things together with connector. From a vision perspective it’s the right perspective to go; in terms of how functional it will be in its early iteration it remains to be seen.”

Kelly notes that Pivotal HD is one of several Greenplum Hadoop distributions, which may be confusing for customers.  He also points out that the underlying database technology is not optimized to run on the networked clusters that are typically used for big data analytics.

For the full analysis, including a market forecast and an interview with Cloudera’s head of products, check out the full video below.


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SiliconANGLE Media is a recognized leader in digital media innovation, uniting breakthrough technology, strategic insights and real-time audience engagement. As the parent company of SiliconANGLE, theCUBE Network, theCUBE Research, CUBE365, theCUBE AI and theCUBE SuperStudios — with flagship locations in Silicon Valley and the New York Stock Exchange — SiliconANGLE Media operates at the intersection of media, technology and AI.

Founded by tech visionaries John Furrier and Dave Vellante, SiliconANGLE Media has built a dynamic ecosystem of industry-leading digital media brands that reach 15+ million elite tech professionals. Our new proprietary theCUBE AI Video Cloud is breaking ground in audience interaction, leveraging theCUBEai.com neural network to help technology companies make data-driven decisions and stay at the forefront of industry conversations.