Cloudera, Hadoop and the changing role of data in business
We’ve all heard about the explosion of data in business. While this is true, the most impactful trend is the changing role of data in same businesses.
Most of the key database systems developed over the last two decades were built with financial data in mind. Invoice and inventory data being the most obvious.
While that type of financial and operations data is still crucial. New age firms like Uber & Airbnb are collecting data in totally new areas and on a much bigger scale.
This richer data is often customer centric, like website navigation data, purchasing habits, app location data, social media, etc.
The traditional hardware, software and the methodologies are too expensive and inefficient when approaching this new data set, especially at large scale.
What has evolved is a second tier of data. For this very granular data that by itself isn’t valuable but when summarised up is crucial to customer experience and business planning.
Cloudera is a software and services vendor that focuses on big data systems. They’re orientated around the Hadoop opensource technology.
Hadoop is an eco-system of big data technologies with a very scalable database at its heart. The technology came out of Yahoo around a decade ago. Beyond just being more scalable and cost effective than traditional database technologies, it’s enabling totally new types of queries in record times.
Cloudera’s Founder & CTO Amr Awadallah previously worked at Yahoo.
