Big Data Impressions from Strata Summit NYC

There were over two-dozen vendors at Strata in New York City this week and I managed to sit down and talk with executives from just about each one. While I'm still in the process of digesting all the data they provided me for a Wikibon piece next week, I wanted to share some of my impressions with you now while they're fresh in my mind.

... Most of the younger players in the market, particularly the smallish, open source start-ups focused specifically around Hadoop, tend to want to discuss the technical aspects of their products. Companies like Datameer and MapR are focused on how their products improve the performance, speed and manageability of the Big Data stack.

Others, particularly the more well-established vendors like EMC Greenplum and LexisNexis HPCC Systems, believe we've moved past the "What is Big Data?" stage and on to the "How can Big Data help my business?" stage. These vendors are less interested in talking about the ins-and-outs of the technology and more interested in explaining to business people how Big Data can address specific business problems and bring immediate business value.

Then there are a few vendors that are straddling the line. Cloudera, in particular, is slowly transitioning its messaging away from highlighting the technical features that set its Hadoop distribution apart to identifying and communicating real-world Big Data use cases for traditional enterprises (i.e. enterprises other than the Facebook's, Google's and LinkedIn's of the world.)

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