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After almost two years in development, Platfora is generally available today. Since we started, the Hadoop ecosystem has grown bigger and become stronger. In early 2011 one could argue that it was unclear whether Hadoop would be a major success in the enterprise. Today it would be impossible to make the same point. Almost every Global 2000 CIO is investigating how Hadoop can impact their business, and many of them have already put Hadoop into production in their infrastructure. The state of the commercial market is strong, led by a pack of trail-blazing Hadoop distributions, and getting stronger with each …

It’s not common in the world of enterprise software to build something that is truly innovative. Most of the things that get called innovative in our business are simply incremental changes to existing technology. You can’t blame the companies that make the claims. Everyone claims innovation for advancing their version numbers, so they have to too. However, over the past few years, three positive factors in enterprise computing have created the perfect environment for real innovation in the market of business analytics. First, the exponential growth of data that is generated by our digital world, or “big data.” Second, the …

We just finished the second day of Hadoop Summit 2012. By all accounts it was a commercial success. It continued the trend of “even bigger than last year” by a growth rate that would make any bean counter blush. Over 2200 attendees reported this year and about half that many in 2011. This was the second major Hadoop conference in a row where the local fire marshal was cited as the reason popular sessions couldn’t be expanded. For me, the most striking change was the shift in discussion of Hadoop as infrastructure (and the community, projects, and roadmap to advance …