Interest from the leading players continues to drive investment in the Hadoop marketplace. This week Teradata made two acquisitions – Revelytix and Hadapt – that enrich its already sophisticated big data portfolio, while HP made a $50M investment in, and joined the board of, Hortonworks. These moves continue the ongoing effort by leading players. 4 of the top 5 DBMS players (Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, SAP and Teradata) and 3 of the top 7 IT companies (Samsung, Apple, Foxconn, HP, IBM, Hitachi, Microsoft) have now made direct moves into the Hadoop space. Oracle’s recent Big Data Appliance and Big Data SQL, and Microsoft’s HDInsight represent substantial moves to target Hadoop opportunities, and these Teradata and HP moves mean they don’t want to be left behind.
Teradata begins its moves with Revelytix. Andrew White noted in Gartner’s 2013 Cool Vendors in Information Infrastructure and Big Data that Revelytix’ “Loom, which runs in Hadoop, classifies objects in the Hadoop Distributed File System and applies a predefined transformation so that objects become structured and more usable for data scientists.” In our discussions of the Logical Data Warehouse, Gartner has targeted the capabilities Revelytix was designed to provide as being on the critical path to creating a coherent, optimized metadata architecture that will incorporate both traditional Enterprse DWs and Hadoop – a direction or research shows the advanced users are heading in.
In the 2012 edition of Cool Vendors, I described Teradata’s other acquisition, Hadapt, defining its vision as a Postgres-based “RDBMS instance on every node in the cluster in order to improve performance of queries over the structured part of the data, and … data partitioning techniques to eliminate unnecessary data movement.” Admirable as it was, this vision had not generated much business, and the window for additional SQL-on-Hadoop offerings may be closing – but Teradata has acquired technology and engineering talent that it will put to use supplementing its continuing optimization of Teradata SQL and SQL-H across complex logical data fabrics. The Hadapt team joins Teradata, though the brand will disappear.
HP chose to make a direct investment in Hortonworks, which extended its last funding round, closed months ago, to accept an additional $50M. The oddity of these mechanics aside, HP gets significant impact for its money: Martin Fink, its CTO, joins the board. HP will integrate the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) into its HAVEn offering, invest resources to certify its Vertica column-store analytic DBMS with HDP, and provide 1st line support. Hortonworks gets access to the global HP channel which could provide a major boost to its sales capabilities. HP was already a reseller, but, HP has been partnering with MapR as well for some time, and this relationship does not end that one. HP gets access to a leader in the continuing development of Apache Hadoop, and it’s likely that the relationship will expand as the two decide what their roadmap will be.
Increasingly, the players are marshaling their forces for global competition, global sales and support, and increased integration with enterprise-class architectures. These moves will hardly close this round of the maneuvering – it will be interesting to see what comes next.
