Is there an emerging market for OEM-ed Hadoop? Altoros Founder and CEO Renat Khasanshyn (pitured below) saw initial evidence of this recently, at a meetup he organized in San Ramon, CA.The meetup was ostensibly about Cloud Foundry and Docker, and featured speakers discussing the use of Hadoop with Docker Containers, and “Dockerizing” enterprise IT.
“The nature of questions about multi-tenant deployments these folks were asking brought me to a conclusion: many of them are in the early stages of building stuff not so much for internal use but for sale to external customers,” Renat says.
He adds that “I know what internal Hadoop deployments in Fortune 500 look like; but (now I’m seeing) offerings that do not look like Hadoop in the first place. (It seems that) many F500 are in a huge rush to OEM-ing Hadoop technology so they can start selling ‘derivatives.’”
Aberration or Trend?
The meetup was attended by “a highly unusual” group of people compared to previous events, he says. He notes that there were more than 40 people in attendance from large, non-tech companies, including 20 attendees from GE (which hosted the event), as well as attendees from AT&T and other Fortune 500 companies.
San Ramon lies on the edge of Silicon Valley and the SF Bay Area, and is home to many large corporations, including Chevron, 24-Hour Fitness. It also serves as the western headquarters of AT&T (having been Pacific Bell’s headquarters location prior to its acquisition by AT&T). Other non-techs such as Safeway, Clorox, and Macy’s are highly visible in this general area.
It’s Asymptotic, Dude
My experience in serving as Conference Chair for Cloud Expo and ThingsExpo last year was that enterprises are indeed moving at an unprecedented pace to gain expertise in the underlying technologies and overarching strategies that are emerging in this era.
The normal, steady growth curve I’ve seen with so many technologies—dating to the original LANs and PCs through the early days of the Worldwide Web—is being replaced today by a seemingly asymptotic expansion. Companies want not only to know “what” and “why” but “how” and most important, “when” they can deploy cloud and integrate their Big Data and their IoT potential into the mix. Renat’s anecdote seems to reflect this phenomenon.