You can’t have a conference about the transformative power of data without talking at least a little bit about Hadoop. So, I’m proud to say that this year’s Structure Data conference (which takes place March 19-20 in New York) will feature Hortonworks CEO Rob Bearden, Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly and Pivotal CEO Paul Maritz.
If there is a group of people from which to learn how Hadoop and its releated technologies will affect IT budgets, technological capabilities, and, indeed, the entire market around data storage and analysis, this is it. Bearden and Reilly are leading the two most-promiment companies in Hadoop market, which is driving a big data market that IDC just predicted will be worth $32 billion by 2017. Pivotal — a spinoff of various former EMC and VMware properties — is about much more than Hadoop, but the technology is a key part of the company’s enterprise data platform strategy.
Maritz, of course, was the former CEO of VMware and a high-ranking Microsoft executive for many years before that.
Although Hadoop isn’t the hot new technology it was a few years ago, it’s still underpinning the majority of the biggest and most-novel data environments around and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Actually, as it evolves into a full-on data platform of its own capable of everything from SQL queries to stream processing, Hadoop will become even more capable as it also becomes more commonplace.
What’s great about our lineup for this year’s show, however, is that once we hear from the people driving the business of big data, we’ll also get to hear from the users — small ones like Premise Data and big ones like Ford Motor Co. — that are using new tools to build better products and solve challenging problems in new ways. I’ll be excited to announce new speakers over the coming weeks; some more big names and lots of interesting individuals to be sure.
Anyone attending this year’s show hoping to learn where the big data market is headed, and how data can power businesses in ways far beyond traditional analytics, will not be disappointed.
