Cloudera, the company offering commercial support to Hadoop (our previous coverage here), received 6 Million dollars Series B funding from Greylock Partners and Accel Partners. Om Malik further points out to the potential of Hadoop beyond the Web 2.0 applications.
From the analysis of point-of-sale data to genomics data, the
opportunities for Hadoop are plentiful, Olson said. Bioinformatics and
pharmaceuticals are emerging as big opportunities for Hadoop, which
first found favor with Web 2.0 and social networking applications
looking to optimize advertising. Mike’s comments echo what we heard at the GigaOM Hadoop Meet-up
held in our office last year. Eric Baldeschwieler, VP of grid computing
at Yahoo, for example, had pointed out that, “Seismology and many other
kinds of data collection-intensive pursuits are prime areas where
people can get good use from Hadoop.”
In fact, Hadoop is definitely well beyond web 2.0 startup scale. It is even beyond enterprise scale. It is ready for science scale. If we look at the use of computing resources by scientific research projects, the requirements for enterprises fades in comparison. Scientific community has been using huge computing resources ever since they started using modern day computers for research. Be it Quantum Monte Carlo simulations or some difficult dark matter related calculations or some statistical modelling of superconductivity, scientists are always in need of powerful computers, often tapping from a grid or some other distributed system of computers. With the advent of Cloud Computing and the maturation of technologies like Hadoop, which can handle huge data sets, the scientific community is well positioned to tap into the clouds for research in wide ranging subjects like cosmology, bioinformatics, climate change, seismology, etc..
Hadoop is poised to play a major role at science scales and beyond. With the US federal government pushing strongly for Cloud Computing at all levels, it is just a matter of time before the power of Hadoop is tapped to handle civilian government, military and intelligence community data. By establishing itself as the defacto company ready to provide support services, Cloudera is positioning itself to reap the benefits of science scale adoption of Hadoop. It will be interesting to see if the potential for eventual success of Cloudera will spur contributions of more cloud related technologies in the open source realm.
