Table of Contents
- Summary
- Cloud
- Cloud infrastructure M&A and funding
- CloudStack-OpenStack battle begins
- Big data
- Big data grows up
- Hadoop turns a corner, becomes mainstream
- Big data M&A and IPOs
- Companies to watch
- Near-term outlook
- Key takeaways
- About Jo Maitland
- Temporary Report Title
- About GigaOm
- Copyright
1. Summary
Cloud and big data providers spent the first quarter of 2012 adding services to their product lines that they hope will appeal to the enterprise market.
Averse to public clouds by default, most enterprises have said they will start with a private-cloud deployment and are looking for architectures that support a hybrid model, where some resources stay in-house and some move to the public cloud. This message finally stirred the 800-pound gorilla in cloud computing, Amazon Web Services, to relax its rigid public-cloud-only stance and launch at least two services that support hybrid-cloud deployments.
On the big data front, the Hadoop players realized very few companies have teams of systems engineers sitting around with time to learn MapReduce. In order to sell their platforms to the enterprise they must be operable by mainstream BI analysts and database administrators. This has meant adding support for SQL and integrating Hadoop with existing data-management tools and systems. Over the next few months we will see more integration among big data systems, existing business intelligence (BI) and data-warehousing tools, and users will more easily be able to select the right tool for the right job.