Yesterday at the Accel Partners Symposium, theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier (Founder, SiliconANGLE) and Jeff Kelly (Principle Research Contributor, Wikibon) engaged in a very good conversation with Mike Olson CEO, Cloudera. As one of the first companies to dive into Big Data, Cloudera made big news yesterday announcing the general availability of Impala 1.0, the first “production-hardened and customer validated” version of its real-time SQL-on-Hadoop solution. The firm boasts that over 40 enterprises have deployed the engine in their environments including 37signals, Expedia, Six3 Systems, Stripe, and Trion Worlds.

As reported by SiliconANGLE’s own Maria Deutscher yesterday, the open-source platform was just as well-received in the vendor’s ecosystem: IBM, SAP, Tableau Software over half a dozen other partners certified the platform for integration with their software. Hadoop as a platform has seen some significant changes over the last few iterations. The biggest change has been the variety of engines brought to the data. What was once just MapReduce has now grown to scale out computation, analytics using the SaaS engine, Impala, HBase; multiple ways to get at the data on the platform.

There is a no-brainer Big Data opportunity by playing this card: all your data from all those sources all in one place. MORE than one way of getting at the data. Olson doesn’t stop there with his excitement either, offering up a multitude of predictions:

“I’ll predict you’ll see this platform get more interesting still. More engines added, to attack more problems.”

Cloudera growth continues as Big Data market evolves.

Outside of the Impala 1.0 general availbility news was some growth news about Cloudera altogether. The company is beginning to expand the partner base even more, north of 600 partners, 200 ISV’s building applications to run on the platform. In the interview, Olson predicted Cloudera to be the next generation data management platform, its evolving the way relational databases did in the 80’s. Which leads into the ‘Internet of Things’ (or Industrial Internet). When data is being generated by human activity, it can only grow so fast. Now that data is being generated by machines talking to machines, Usain Bolt with unlimited stamina couldn’t keep up.

Whether its your refrigerator or an engine on a plane, these machines we interact with everyday are instrumented extensively. “Sensors that are streaming data continually back to the mother ship,” in Olson’s terms. Well, data is going to proliferate exactly the same way. In his third prediction, Olson believes that most of the data in the future is going to be machine generated data from this trend of Internet of Things. Let’s tie this evolution of Big Data up in an even pretty bow. As you are most likely aware, GE recently invested $105M into Pivotal, the EMC/VMware spinout. Yes GE, the world’s leader in industrial technology (aka Internet of Things technology).

Cloudera’s pipeline: Industrial Internet

Our own Dave Vellante (co-founder of Wikibon) says that the GE investment in Pivotal represents the next wave in Big Data applications and a huge boon (and possible disruption) to Big Data valuations. As an excerpt from that post:

Not only is GE allowing a zillion smart-machine flowers to bloom, but it’s vision is to use the data from these machines, not in isolation, but in aggregate to create value for its customers and improve the lives of individuals, corporations, governments and humankind in general. That’s big. Supply chains. Health. Instrumenting infrastructure. Supporting the build out of massive cities in growth regions. It’s mind boggling big.

An from the interview, you can’t help but begin to immediately qualify all of those predictions and theories when you find out two sides of a very big table are sounding like audible twinzies. Olson identifies that what Cloudera needs is good software solutions. So ordinary mortals can buy apps to solve big social problems. Whether public or private cloud, Cloudera isn’t favoriting one or the other. “Our point of view is: we’re a software vendor and we want you to use our software wherever it makes sense for you to do that,” said Olson. Cloudera’s goals for this year and moving forward are to take application vendors and drive them to ubiquity. It wants really important business and socially meaningful problems to be solved on its platform.

Do you see the underlying theme in both examples? From GE’s investment in the EMC/VMware spinout Pivotal , to Cloudera…all of the chips are on the table. The connected consumer. Connected devices. Connected refrigerators. Connected jet engines. Connected toilets. Everything is going to be improved my machine learning and sharing of data. I for one, while admittedly scared at the thought of being Tom Cruise in Minority Report, think that all the signs point to some amazing innovations in the next 30 years.

I love the idea of people helping people, and using machines to do things we simply never could. An open network of IT professionals. Speaking of open, I can’t help but think OpenStack would help the Hadoop side of this equation progress even faster.