Third-Party Services Providers To Play Important Role in Hadoop Adoption

Services is going to play a huge role in the ultimate success (or failure) of wide-spread adoption of Hadoop and related Big Data technologies by “mainstream” enterprises.

The question is: Will Big Data services be delivered by commercial Hadoop vendors like Cloudera and Hortonworks as part of their value-add to the open source framework, or will a separate market of third-party services providers and consultants develop to do so?

If Cloudera has its way, the answer is the latter.

I recently spoke with Cloudera’s Vice President of Product Charles Zedlewski about the company’s plans around services. He told me currently less than half of Cloudera’s revenue comes from services (the rest comes from training and the Cloudera Enterprise distribution of Hadoop/management suite), and he expects – and the company wants – that percentage to fall further.

Cloudera sees itself as a technology company, not a services provider. Zedlewski said Cloudera wants to continue putting the majority of its focus into making Hadoop enterprise-ready and leave services to outside parties.

While the ranks of Hadoop services vendors and consultants are still thin, one company I hear being mentioned a lot is Think Big Analytics. Just last week, for example, I was chatting with Karmasphere CMO Rich Guth and asked him what advice he had for CIO’s at non-Web 2.0 companies that want to take advantage of Hadoop and other Big Data technologies but don’t know where to start. Guth’s answer was to contact Think Big Analytics.

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