Analyst Group Crowns Hadoop Distro King

February 13, 2012

Analyst Group Crowns Hadoop Distro King

Robert Gelber

Cloudera received some rather public recognition as a top of the line Hadoop ecosystem player last week as firm Forrester Research named Cloudera as the leader in Enterprise Hadoop Vendors.

While the research outfit might have named them the most widely adopted, Cloudera is definitely not the only elephant in the Hadoop circus. Hortonworks and MapR are, among others, vital to keeping the ecosystem alive, even if it’s not quite clear what their stake will be as the distro wars continue to be fought.

Forrester was rather complimentary about the open source developer and had this to say about the Palo Alto group:

“Cloudera is a well-established startup among pure-play vendors in the emerging Hadoop solution market. Its core open source product, Cloudera's Distribution Including Apache Hadoop (CDH), has strong uptake among many early adopters and is popular with cloud/SaaS providers that have built Hadoop-based services. Cloudera has software, cloud/SaaS, and appliance offerings, and a substantial and growing professional services force focused on Hadoop training and consulting”

Charles Zedlewski, VP of Product at Cloudera reaffirmed the company’s commitment to the open source community:

"Cloudera continues to be a clear and consistent leader in Apache Hadoop-based software and services. Our integrated, tested, completely open source distribution of Apache Hadoop, comprehensive suite of management applications and full range of support and services, provide enterprises with the means to quickly and easily deploy and maintain Hadoop in production,"

He continued "We remain deeply committed to the Apache Hadoop open source community and an avid participant in the evolution and advancement of the project. Every component within CDH is 100% open source, and Cloudera employs leading contributors and committers across the Hadoop ecosystem and has incubated prominent projects such as Apache Flume, Sqoop and Oozie. We're pleased to be recognized by Forrester as a leading vendor in the Enterprise Hadoop market."

The Forrester report is not completely unfounded as Hadoop’s creator works for Cloudera and they tout a partner list, which includes industry players Dell, HP, Pentaho, Supermicro and Teradata.

On that note, it seemed worthwhile to go back and revisit a lecture series from UC Berkeley during which Cloudera CEO, Mike Olson, shed light on some of the reasons why Forrester cited them as a top performer in the Hadoop camp.