Amazon and IBM vs. Open Source Hadoop

Forrester Research: Hadoop vendor chart

This interesting editorial from ReadWrite comments on the current state of Apache's Hadoop, which is an open source software framework for analyzing and storing large data sets. Hadoop has filled a niche in enterprise grade data analysis, and has more or less become a "cornerstone of any flexible future data management platform". It is attractive to businesses because of its low cost, high efficiency, and open source nature.

A report from Forrester Research on Hadoop vendors shows the bigger companies like IBM and Amazon as having the long term strategic advantage. This is presumably because they have more resources to research, develop, produce, and sell Hadoop related software and services.

As the author of this editorial points out, these large companies have taken advantage of the Hadoop trend without contributing to the development of the framework. As a result, the ones who actually have a strategic edge is the developers because they shape the direction that the project will go in. The companies that contribute to the collaborative project will ultimately gain the strategic edge as vendors because they will be able to influence the future of Hadoop.