“Hadoop is going to find potential markets in any industry where there are large data sets that need complex analysis,” Mike Olson, chief executive officer and one of the four co-founders of Cloudera, the startup that’s commercializing the open-source software framework Hadoop, told me earlier today. I spoke with Olson after the Burlingame, Calif.-based company said it had raised $6 million in new Series B funding from Greylock Partners and Accel Partners.
From the analysis of point-of-sale data to genomics data, the opportunities for Hadoop are plentiful, Olson said. Bioinformatics and pharmaceuticals are emerging as big opportunities for Hadoop, which first found favor with Web 2.0 and social networking applications looking to optimize advertising. Mike’s comments echo what we heard at the GigaOM Hadoop Meet-up held in our office last year. Eric Baldeschwieler, VP of grid computing at Yahoo (s yhoo), for example, had pointed out that, “Seismology and many other kinds of data collection-intensive pursuits are prime areas where people can get good use from Hadoop.”
Olson said that interest in Hadoop has grown so much since Cloudera released an easier-to-use version, the company had to raise more cash in order to accelerate its growth. Cloudera is going to release another new version of its software relatively soon. But Cloudera, which currently has some 20 customers, isn’t the only one offering Hadoop’s services; numerous hosted service providers are offering them as well — among them, Amazon (s amzn).
Check out this comment from one of our readers, who points out the reasons why Hadoop is important and the role being played by the Cloudera team. And note this, from our from our sister site Ostatic:
Apache Hadoop is a Free Java software framework that supports data intensive distributed applications running on large clusters of commodity computers. It enables applications to easily scale out to thousands of nodes and petabytes of data. Hadoop was inspired by Google’s MapReduce and Google File System papers. It’s a top-level Apache project, being built and used by a community of contributors from all over the world. Yahoo has been the largest contributor to the project and uses Hadoop extensively in its Web Search and Advertising businesses. Hadoop was named after its creator’s (Doug Cutting, now a Yahoo employee) child’s stuffed elephant.
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Sounds exciting, but what does this mean for companies like SAS?
It’s worth noting that more mainstream organization are looking to harness the power of MapReduce for data-intensive applications, but also want to leverage their existing IT ecosystem and skill-sets (given budget constraints). Aster Data is focusing on this by integrating MapReduce into their relational database (which provides enterprise-class features IT organizations expect), as as well as enabling developers to write applications in any language they choose — the latest just announced being Microsoft .NET.