E-guide Top 10 information management stories of 2019 Top 10 information management stories of 2019 In this e-guide In this e-guide: MapR collapse into HPE Consolidation and acquisition marked the supplier side of the harbinger of big data tech IT industry in respect of information management in 2019. trough of despair? Hadoop distributors Cloudera and Hortonworks sealed their marriage, announced in 2018, while on the business Tableau sticking to data intelligence (BI) and analytics side of the market, Tableau was mission under Salesforce sold to Salesforce, and the sale of Looker to Google was also Google buys Looker to announced. And MapR, the third of the most prominent deepen enterprise software distributors of big data storage system Hadoop, collapsed into arsenal HPE. Silicon Valley startups look to On the user side of the market, we saw the continued search for plug gaps in data value chain business value from the big data revolution that has been proceeding since at least the birth of Hadoop in 2006. Computer Alternative databases set for mainstream adoption? Weekly was represented on a springtime visit to Silicon Valley, where we discovered a group of companies attempting address How modern business gaps in the value chain from data sources to business insight. intelligence shapes up to big data That visit also provoked the question: what is the balance, for enterprise IT, between complementing and replacing traditional Page 1 of 72 Top 10 information management stories of 2019 databases? An article by Lindsay Clark assayed an answer to In this e-guide that question later in the year. MapR collapse into HPE The question of how modern BI and analytics software – harbinger of big data tech trough of despair? roughly speaking, software that post-dates the heyday of traditional BI software in the early 2000s – shapes up to non- Tableau sticking to data relational big data is addressed and suggests that data mission under Salesforce integration is the enduring, difficult problem for CIOs to solve. Google buys Looker to Here are Computer Weekly’s top 10 information management deepen enterprise software stories of 2019. arsenal Brian McKenna, business applications editor Silicon Valley startups look to plug gaps in data value chain Alternative databases set for mainstream adoption? How modern business intelligence shapes up to big data Page 2 of 72 Top 10 information management stories of 2019 In this e-guide MapR collapse into HPE harbinger of big MapR collapse into HPE data tech trough of despair? harbinger of big data tech trough of despair? Brian McKenna, Business Applications Editor The final collapse of big data firm MapR into HPE could be read as a particular Tableau sticking to data mission under Salesforce fate. But might it also be a sign of things to come for those suppliers that sprang into life around the Hadoop family of big data storage technologies around a decade ago? Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software Hadoop was, and is an open source distributed processing framework that arsenal manages data processing and storage for big data applications running in clustered systems, on commodity servers. Silicon Valley startups look to plug gaps in data value chain It was created by Doug Cutting and Mike Cafarella, initially to support processing in the Nutch open source search engine. After Google published Alternative databases set for technical papers detailing its Google File System (GFS) and the MapReduce mainstream adoption? programming framework in 2003 and 2004, Cutting and Cafarella developed a Java-based MapReduce implementation and a file system modeled on How modern business Google's. This they called Hadoop, famously after Cutting’s son’s toy elephant. intelligence shapes up to big data Page 3 of 72 Top 10 information management stories of 2019 MapR, the company, was commonly seen as the third horse – or should that be In this e-guide elephant? – in a race with Cloudera and Hortonworks. The latter two have merged, while MapR has, essentially, gone out of business. MapR collapse into HPE harbinger of big data tech It was announced on Monday 5 August that Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) trough of despair? has acquired all MapR assets for an undisclosed sum. HPE has said it will use MapR’s technology for its own Intelligent Data Platform, which is a basis for Tableau sticking to data artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning applications. mission under Salesforce “MapR’s file system technology enables HPE to offer a complete portfolio of products to drive artificial intelligence and analytics applications and strengthens Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software our ability to help customers manage their data assets end to end, from edge to arsenal cloud,” said Antonio Neri, president and CEO of HPE. MapR’s distinction – as against the other two main Hadoop distributors – was Silicon Valley startups look to that it eschewed the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) in favour of its plug gaps in data value chain own, and had, more widely, more defensible intellectual property in its armoury. It wasn’t only based on open source, which was and is the case with Alternative databases set for Hortonworks – entirely open source – and Cloudera – less so than the company mainstream adoption? it has merged with, but more so than MapR. How modern business MapR’s distinction was that it eschewed the Hadoop Distributed File System in favour intelligence shapes up to big of its own, and had more defensible intellectual property in its armoury data Page 4 of 72 Top 10 information management stories of 2019 It seemed a plausible case, often ably articulated by Ted Dunning, chief In this e-guide application architect at MapR. MapR collapse into HPE But for most of this year, MapR has teetered on the verge of collapse. In a letter harbinger of big data tech to employees and a notice MapR filed on 13 May with California’s Employment trough of despair? Development Department, the company said it would shut down its headquarters in Santa Clara and terminate 122 employees there if necessary Tableau sticking to data funding wasn’t obtained by 14 June. mission under Salesforce It has now submerged into HPE. Google buys Looker to James Curtis, senior analyst, data, AI & analytics, 451 Research, says “it makes deepen enterprise software a lot of sense for MapR to land at HPE, particular given that MapR has its data arsenal fabric offering based on its proprietary file system, making it a good match for a storage vendor. The MapR technology has been solid, so it comes down to HPE Silicon Valley startups look to pulling off the right execution strategy to make this work. plug gaps in data value chain “Customers are likely glad that MapR found a buyer first and foremost. Next Alternative databases set for there would be concern about the roadmap and future updates, which HPE has mainstream adoption? indicated they will continue to deliver”. How modern business Moving beyond Hadoop intelligence shapes up to big data Meanwhile, the merged Cloudera/Hortonworks outfit has not experienced plain sailing in 2019. CEO Tom Reilly and Cloudera co-founder and chief strategy officer Mike Olson have left the company, with first quarter revenue of Page 5 of 72 Top 10 information management stories of 2019 $187m only slightly up on the $182m combined revenues of Cloudera and In this e-guide Hortonworks for the same year-ago quarter, as noted by The Register in June. Reilly conceded, in a financial analyst call, that the merger had created MapR collapse into HPE uncertainty among both sets of customers. harbinger of big data tech trough of despair? Cutting, chief technology officer of Cloudera, and co-inventor of Hadoop, in an interview with Computer Weekly earlier this year, expressed confidence that the Tableau sticking to data new Cloudera would ultimately find a path to growth, because it was not fatally mission under Salesforce wedded to any one data storage or database technology. He said the company was a data technology company that had moved on from Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software Hadoop. He also expressed no sympathy for open source-based database or arsenal data storage suppliers, which would be prone to cry “foul” when and if the public cloud providers – Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft – package up Silicon Valley startups look to their capabilities into cloud services. MongoDB did this earlier in 2019. plug gaps in data value chain “If something is freely licensed, and someone uses it without paying, that is things working out as designed. If you are angry about that, then that is a form Alternative databases set for of lunacy,” said Cutting. mainstream adoption? As for Hadoop’s seeming eclipse, he said: “People saw the open source model How modern business was successful and built things around Hadoop to the degree that while it is not intelligence shapes up to big quite obsolete, it is getting there over time. MapReduce is mostly inferior to data Spark, for example. HDFS is still a great file system, but as we see more of a shift to cloud, and spinning up clusters on demand, you might be building on S3 Page 6 of 72 Top 10 information management stories of 2019 as your storage. And Yarn is needed much less as you are using public or In this e-guide private cloud, because you are no longer time sharing on the cluster, but bringing up dedicated clusters that are short-lived per application, so the need MapR collapse into HPE for a scheduler is lessened. harbinger of big data tech trough of despair? “With our model, we are happy to move and adopt new technologies, since the customers are not paying for the technologies themselves, and so there is no Tableau sticking to data need for us, as a vendor, to keep them trapped in a licence.” mission under Salesforce And while Cutting did not mention MapR by name, he said it was hard to see companies such as Mongo, Databricks, Elastic or Confluent apart from their Google buys Looker to deepen enterprise software particular technologies.