Hadoop: Bigger Than SpringSource, JBoss and MySQL Combined?

Rob Bearden, new CEO of Hortonworks, the Hadoop startup that spun out of Yahoo in June 2011 , knows a thing or two about making open source software profitable. He was COO at both JBoss and SpringSource leading up to their acquisitions by Red Hat and VMware, respectively, for a combined total of $770 million. And he thinks Hadoop — the Apache Software Foundation project for storing and processing big, unstructured data — has an opportunity to be bigger than those two companies, as well as open source database MySQL, combined.

Bearden told me during a recent call he thinks the Hadoop market will be bigger than the open source application-platform and database markets because of how much value — and net new value — Hadoop brings to companies as they begin blazing their big data trails. Analytics is big business and only getting bigger as companies start trying to analyze data from entirely new sources such as sensors, social media and web pages, and Hadoop is at the core of most such efforts. He thinks Hadoop will be a billion-dollar market in two or three years...