By Tony Baer, Principal Analyst, Ovum IT Enterprise Solutions

Because (or in spite) of the hype, sentiment about Big Data vendors was generally bullish in 2012. The attention spilled over from IT to the business media. These were among the findings reported by DataSift, which conducted a retrospective analysis of vendor mentions on Twitter during 2012 for Ovum.

To some extent, the results were surprising: while Hadoop garners much of the spotlight as a Big Data platform, the vendor 10gen, which develops MongoDB, came in second in mentions to Apache, which hosts the Hadoop project. Although only peripherally a Big Data story, HP and Autonomy was the biggest negative story of the year.

The data provided by DataSift provides a good example of how social media mining provides a useful snapshot of popular thinking that supplements – or replaces – the traditional role of marketing focus groups.

Mining Twitter for insights

Traditionally …