Independent Research Firm Forecasts SQL-on-Hadoop

PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwired - Apr 24, 2013) -   Cloudera, the category leader that sets the standard for Apache Hadoop in the enterprise, today announced that it has been positioned as the future SQL-on-Hadoop market leader by GigaOM Research in its recent Sector RoadMap™ report: "SQL-on-Hadoop Platforms in 2013," written by research analyst Joseph Turian, Ph.D. The report evaluates current market offerings from leading vendors and startups against four competitive areas, or "disruption vectors," namely, read performance for interactive analytics, operational Hadoop, flexibility and compatibility and market mindshare. The report gives the company high marks in all four categories as the market frontrunner, noting that its open source approach is likely to prevail over closed source offerings from vendors like EMC and Teradata: "Cloudera will ultimately lead the SQL-on-Hadoop market, even though it is currently playing catch-up and has a lot of code to write and test. Its open-source solution, Impala, has strong mind share and emphasis on flexibility."

SQL-on-Hadoop: Eliminating Accessibility and Manageability Limitations  The report emphasized that today's most successful companies are those that capture and analyze all available data to improve their market decisions and gain competitive advantage. According to GigaOM Research: "Successful and efficient use of big data, after all, can allow improved decision making across the spectrum, from huge strategic questions like 'Should we enter this new market?' to fine-grained, execution-oriented questions like 'What should this SKU be priced?'"

While Hadoop has rapidly emerged as the solution of choice for organizations looking to more efficiently store and analyze big data, the platform has posed significant data accessibility and manageability challenges until now. SQL-on-Hadoop solutions promise to bridge those gaps by optimizing the usability of the platform, and increasing read performance and compatibility with existing business intelligence solutions.

GigaOM Research's analysis ultimately concludes that with Impala, Cloudera is well positioned to take advantage of the sector's Disruption Vectors: "Cloudera's Impala is perhaps the most widely known SQL-on-Hadoop solution. Cloudera has chosen to build its system from the ground up. This will allow it to optimize every part of the solution. It believes that by avoiding legacy, it can actually make a better architecture that is superior, both for end users and the ops staff. This means that Cloudera has a lot of code to write and test and is therefore playing catch-up with companies that use mature technology, and it will be for a while. However, its substantial mind share will allow it to mature quickly."

Cloudera Impala: A Quantum Leap In the Evolution of Hadoop Cloudera released a public beta offering of its purpose-built Impala framework, which offers native integration with Apache Hadoop, to open source in October 2012, after more than two years of intensive internal research and development. Cloudera Impala is an Apache-licensed, real-time query engine for data stored in HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) and HBase, and is optimized for use with CDH (Cloudera's Distribution Including Apache Hadoop), its 100-percent open source distribution of Hadoop and related applications.

With Impala, Cloudera has effectively taken the Hadoop platform "beyond batch" for the first time, enabling sophisticated, real-time analysis of unstructured or structured data, by combining the massive scalability of Hadoop with the familiarity and responsiveness of SQL.

"For Hadoop to achieve mainstream adoption in the enterprise, the need for SQL-based solutions like Impala will increase to overcome the inherent latency of MapReduce, enable interactive data analysis and provide straightforward connectivity from Hadoop to standard BI tools," said Amr Awadallah, chief technology officer at Cloudera. "This recognition further validates our vision, leadership and innovation in the SQL-on-Hadoop category and we believe that solving business challenges with open source solutions is the way forward. Cloudera continues to lead the industry in Big Data innovation."

To download a complimentary copy of the GigaOM Research Sector RoadMap report, SQL-on-Hadoop Platforms in 2013 , visit: http://cloudera.com/content/cloudera/en/resou...-2013.html .

About GigaO M GigaOM Research provides timely, in-depth analysis of disruptive technologies and emerging markets for individual and corporate subscribers. Our network of 200+ independent analysts provides new content daily that bridges the gap between breaking news and longtail research.

About Cloudera Founded in 2008, Cloudera pioneered the business case for Hadoop with CDH, the world's most comprehensive, tested and widely deployed distribution of Apache Hadoop in both commercial and non-commercial environments. Now, the company is redefining data management with its Platform for Big Data, Cloudera Enterprise, empowering enterprises to Ask Bigger Questions™ and gain rich, actionable insights from all their data, to quickly and easily derive real business value that translates into competitive advantage. As the top contributor to the Apache open source community and a leading educator of data professionals, with tens of thousands of nodes under management and hundreds of customers across diverse markets, Cloudera is the category leader that has set the standard for Hadoop in the enterprise. www.cloudera.com  

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