Last week I had the privilege to go to the TDWI World Conference in San Diego. I went to talk about our Hadoop solution that we announced last week, meet with press analysts and get a good feel for what is going on in this space.
Tuesday I spent the better part of the day at Dell’s booth joined by my distinguished colleagues from Dell Services, Dell Boomi and Dell BI Factory. Wednesday was another busy day meeting with industry analysts, researchers, customers and partners. During lunch break I did a brief vblog (definitely NOT my best performance!), and then I had the opportunity to meet more people while working the booth. Late in the afternoon I went to TDWI’s Data Modeling class.
It’s worth noting that almost every single vendor in the exhibit had some kind of Big Data element in their marketing materials, designs or demos. Or maybe all of them did, I’m just not sure about a few I didn’t have time to see because we were so busy at the booth!
I thought that our message was well received, which is actually confirmed by the very large number of leads that we generated.
Last week’s announcement of the Dell | Cloudera partnership (www.dell.com/hadoop) created good buzz. Just to recap, Dell’s Hadoop solution provides a bundled hardware, software, support, and services solution. The idea is quite simple:
- Low-risk – built on Cloudera’s distribution of Hadoop with Dell’s performance-based PowerEdge C hardware in a known, tested configuration on proven architecture
- Streamlined deployment – whether you deploy a small cluster, expand an existing cluster or simply re-provision machines in an existing cluster, the final configuration is always consistent. Did I mention that it’s fast? How about 6-30 nodes in one hour?
- Top to bottom support – call Dell, we can handle it all, or warm transfer you to Cloudera. Because this is open source (including the Dell Crowbar deployment framework), community support is also widely available.
But the Dell | Cloudera partnership wasn’t the only reason people wanted to talk to us! Interoperability with Hadoop was another reason. Almost every single vendor, including Microsoft (please check out their latest Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) release) claimed support for Big Data by providing interfaces for integration with Hadoop. This being the BI/DW crowd, quite a few wanted to know “why would I want to integrate Hadoop with the Data Warehouse?”. I’ve seen the presentations and I actually thought that each vendor has done a great job articulating the integration piece. Apparently there is still room for improvement! I think there are several reasons and I’ll talk about it in a separate blog post.
Thanks for your time!